Peter James - Not Dead Enough

He grinned back. ‘Now you don’t need to.’

She looked at him quizzically, shifted herself around and propped her chin up on one hand. ‘No?’

‘I missed you all week.’

‘I missed you too,’ she said.

‘How much?’

‘Not going to tell you – I don’t want it going to your head!’

‘Bitch!’

She raised her free left hand in the air and curled the index finger, provocatively mimicking a limp dick.

‘Not for long,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘You are totally wicked.’

‘You make me feel wicked.’ She kissed him, then moved back a few inches, studying his face carefully. ‘I like your hair.’

‘You do?’

‘Uh huh. Suits you. I do, I really like it!

He blushed slightly at the compliment. ‘I’m glad. Thank you.’

Glenn Branson had been going on about his hair for as long as he could remember, telling him it needed a makeover, and had finally booked him an appointment with a very hip guy called Ian Habbin, at a salon in Brighton’s most fashionable quarter. For years Grace had just had his hair clipped to a short fuzz by a mournful, elderly Italian in an old-fashioned barber’s shop. It had been a new experience to have his hair shampooed by a chatty young girl in a room hung with art and pounding with rock music.

Then Cleo asked, ‘So, Sunday lunch with your sister – Jodie , right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me about her? Is she protective of you? Am I going to get the third-degree interrogation? Like, Is this old slapper good enough for my brother? ’ She grinned at him quizzically.

Grace took a large gulp of whisky, trying to buy time to compose his thoughts and his response. Then he took another gulp. Finally he said, ‘I’ve got a problem.’

‘Go on.’

‘I have to go to Munich on Sunday.’

‘Munich? I’ve always wanted to go there. My friend Anna-Lisa, who’s an air hostess, says it’s the best place in the world to buy clothes. Hey, I could come with you! Check out some cheap tickets on easyJet or something?’

He cradled the glass. Took another sip, wondering whether to tell her a white lie or the truth. He didn’t want to lie to her, but at this moment it seemed to be less hurtful than telling her the truth. ‘It’s an official police visit – I’m going with a colleague.’

‘Oh – who?’ she was staring at him hard.

‘It’s a DI from another division. We’re meeting to discuss a six-month exchange of officers. It’s an EU initiative thing,’ he said.

Cleo shook her head. ‘I thought we’d made a pact never to lie to each other, Roy.’

He stared back at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes, feeling his face flushing.

‘I can read you, Roy. I know how to read you. I can read your eyes. You taught me – remember? About that right and left stuff. Memory and construct.’

Grace felt something drop deep inside his heart. After some moments’ hesitation, he told her about Dick Pope’s possible sighting of Sandy.

Cleo’s response was to pull away sharply from him. And suddenly he felt a chasm between them as large as the one separating Earth from the moon.

‘Fine,’ she said. She sounded like she had just bitten into a lemon.

‘Cleo, I have to go there.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘I don’t mean it like that.’

‘No?’

‘Cleo, please. I—’

‘What happens if you find her?’

He raised his hands hopelessly. ‘I doubt that I will.’

‘And if you do?’ she insisted.

‘I don’t know. At least I’ll have found out what happened to her.’

‘And if she wants you back? Is that why you lied to me?’

‘After nine years?’

She rolled away from him and lay facing the far wall.

‘Even if it is her, which I doubt.’

Cleo was silent.

He stroked her back and she shrank further from him.

‘Cleo, please!’

‘What am I – something to tide you over until you find your missing wife?’

‘No way.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Totally and utterly.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

44

There was software on the Time Billionaire’s computer screen which he had written himself. It brought up analogue clock faces for cities in every time zone in the world. He was staring at it now. ‘Taking stock,’ he suddenly said aloud, then grinned at his joke.

Through the window he could see the dawn sky slowly lightening over the city of Brighton and Hove. It was coming up to five here in England. Six in Paris. Eight a.m. in St Petersburg. Eleven in Bangladesh. One in the afternoon in Kuala Lumpur. Three in the afternoon in Sydney.

People would be getting up here soon. And going to bed in Peru. Everyone in the world was subservient to the sun, except for himself. He had been liberated. It made no difference any more to him whether it was day or night, whether the stock exchanges of the world were open or shut, or the banks, or anything else.

There was one man he had to thank for that.

But he was no longer bitter. That was all packed away in another box that was his past. You needed to be positive in life, have goals. He’d found a site on the internet which was all about living longer. People who had goals lived longer, simple as that. And those people who achieved their goals – well, their life expectancy hit the jackpot! And now he had achieved two goals! He owned even more time, to lavish on whatever he liked.

Steam curled from the cup of tea beside him. English Breakfast tea with a little milk. He picked the spoon up and stirred the tea seven times. It was very important to him always to stir tea exactly seven times.

Turning his attention back to the computer, he tapped the command for another piece of software he had created for himself. He had never been happy with any of the internet search engines – none of them were precise enough for him. All of them delivered information in the sequence they wanted. This one of his own, which linked and trawled all the major search engines, obtained quickly for him everything that he wanted.

And at this moment he wanted an original workshop manual for a 1966 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.

Then he sucked the back of his right hand. The pain was getting worse, the stinging sensation deepening, which was what had woken him and prevented him from going back to sleep. Not that he was much of a sleeper anyway. He could see a slight swelling around it, which seemed to be affecting the movement of his thumb, although he might be imagining that. And his chest was still stinging.

‘Bitch,’ he said aloud.

He walked into the bathroom, switched on the light, unbuttoned his shirt and opened up the front, then peeled back the strip of Elastoplast. The fresh scratch, over an inch long, crusted with congealed blood, had been gouged from his chest some hours back by a long toenail.

45

Shortly after five a.m. Roy Grace left Cleo’s house, in a trendy, gated development in the centre of Brighton, closing the front door as quietly as he could behind him, feeling terrible. The breaking dawn sky, a dark, marbled grey streaked with smudgy, crimson veins, was the colour of a frozen human cadaver. A few birds were beginning a tentative dawn chorus, firing off solitary tweets, briefly piercing the morning stillness. Signals to other birds, like radio signals beamed into space.

He shivered, as he pressed the red exit button on the wrought-iron gates, and let himself out of the courtyard into the street. The air was already warming up and it promised to be another blistering summer day. But it was raining in his soul.

He hadn’t slept a wink.

During the past two months of their relationship, he and Cleo had never exchanged a solitary cross word. They hadn’t really tonight either. Yet tossing and turning during these past few hours, he sensed that something had changed between them.