Peter James - Not Dead Enough

When that hadn’t worked, Richard had stalked her fervently, relentlessly, bombarding her alternately with love and then hate.

Then Roy Grace, a man she had long considered a truly decent human being, as well as extremely attractive, had suddenly, this summer, become a part of her life. She even had, perhaps naïvely, started to believe that they were true soul mates. Until this morning, when she had realized that she was nothing more than a temporary substitute for a ghost. That was all she could ever be in this relationship.

All the sections of today’s Times and Guardian lay spread out on the sofa beside her, mostly unread. She kept trying to settle down to work on her Open University course, but was unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into her new book, a Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid’s Tale , which she had wanted to read for years and had finally bought this afternoon from her favourite bookshop in Hove, City Books. She had read and re-read the first page four times, but could not engage with the words.

Reluctantly, because she hated squandering time – and considered most television just that – she picked up the remote and began to surf through the Sky channels. She checked out the Discovery channel, hoping there was maybe a wildlife documentary, but some fossilized-looking professor was pontificating on the Earth’s strata. Interesting, but not tonight, Josephine.

Now her phone was ringing again. She looked at the caller display. The number was withheld. Almost certainly business. She answered it.

It was an operator at the police call centre in Brighton. A body had been washed up on the beach, near the West Pier. She was required to accompany it to the mortuary.

Hanging up, she did a quick calculation. When had she opened that bottle of wine? About six o’clock. Four and a half hours ago. Two units of alcohol would put the average woman at the limit for driving. A bottle of wine contained six average units. You burned off one per hour. She should be OK to drive, just about.

Five minutes later she left her house, walked up the street and unlocked the door of her MG sports car.

As she climbed in and fumbled with her seat belt, a figure emerged from the shadows of a shop doorway, just a short distance down the street, and took the few short steps to his own car. She started the MG, revved the engine and pulled into the street. The small black Toyota Prius, running on just its electric motor, glided silently through the darkness behind her.

53

So far no one had said a word about her dress. Not Suzanne-Marie, not Mandy, not Cat, not a single one of the girlfriends she had bumped into at the party tonight had even seemed to notice it. Which was very unusual. Four hundred and fifty quid and not one comment. Maybe they were just jealous.

Or maybe it looked a disaster on her.

Sod them. Bitches! Wandering through into another room, which was pulsing with coloured lights, crammed with people, music pounding, the sharp, rubbery smell of hashish heavy in the air, Holly downed the last dregs of her third peach martini and realized she was starting to feel decidedly tipsy.

At least men were noticing her.

The black, diamanté-edged dress seemed even skimpier when she had put it on tonight than it had in the shop. It was so open at the front that there was no possibility of wearing a bra – and hell, she had great boobs, so why not flaunt them, the same the way the dress – or rather the lack of it – enabled her to flaunt her legs, almost every inch of them, most of the way up to her navel? And she did feel good in this, wickedly good!

‘Cool dresshh. Where you from?’

The man, slurring his words through sharp, pointy little teeth that reminded her of a piranha’s, swayed in her path, smoke from his cigarette curling in her eye. He was dressed in black leather trousers, a skin-tight black T-shirt, a rhinestone belt, and sported a large gold earring. He had one of the stupidest haircuts she had ever seen.

‘Mars,’ she said, sidestepping past him, looking around, increasingly anxiously, for Sophie.

‘North or south?’ he slurred, but she barely heard him. Sophie had not returned the two messages she had left about meeting for a drink before this party and sharing a taxi. It was now half past ten. Surely she should be here by now?

Pushing her way through the crowd, looking everywhere for her friend, she reached open French windows and stepped outside on to a relatively quiet terrace. One couple sat on a bench, locked in serious tonsil hockey. A very spaced-out man with long, fair hair was staring at the beach and sniffing, repeatedly. Holly dug her mobile phone out of her bag and checked for a text she might have missed, but there was nothing. Then she dialled Sophie’s mobile phone.

Again it went straight to voicemail.

She tried Sophie’s home number. That went to voicemail too.

‘Ah – here you are! Losht shight of you!’ His sharp incisors glinted demonically in the flash of a strobe. ‘You come out for air?’

‘And now I’m going in again,’ she said, walking back into the mêlée. She was worried, because Sophie was reliable. This simply wasn’t like her.

But not so worried it was going to stop her from enjoying herself tonight.

54

Because of a problem with a baggage door, the plane took off half an hour late. Roy Grace spent the entire journey bolt upright in his seat, which he didn’t even think about reclining, staring out through the window at the rivets on the bulbous grey metal of the starboard engine casing.

For two interminable hours in the air he had been unable to concentrate on anything for very long, to pass the time, other than memorizing part of the street map of Munich city centre. The cardboard box containing the plastic wrap and empty box of the unpleasant cheese roll he had eaten out of sheer hunger, and the dregs of the second bitter coffee he had drunk, wobbled on his tray as the plane bumped through clouds, finally starting its descent.

He was frustrated about the loss of those precious thirty minutes, eating into the very short time he had ahead of him today. He barely noticed the hands of the stewardess reaching down in front of him and removing the detritus of his breakfast as he stared at the landscape now opening up below him.

At the vastness of it.

Butterflies swarmed in his stomach as he absorbed his first-ever sights of German soil. The patchwork of brown, yellow and green rectangles of flat farmland spread out over a seemingly endless, horizonless plain. He saw small clusters of white houses with red and brown roofs, copses, the trees an emerald green so vivid they looked like they had been spray-painted. Then a small town. More clusters of houses and buildings.

A great, yammering panic was building up inside him. Would he even recognize Sandy if he saw her? There were days when he could no longer recall her face without looking at her photograph, as if time, whether he liked it or not, was slowly erasing her from his memory.

And if she was down there, somewhere in that vast landscape, where was she? In the city that he couldn’t yet see? In one of these remote villages beneath them that they were slowly passing? Was Sandy living her life somewhere in this vast open landscape below him? An anonymous German hausfrau whose background no one had ever questioned?

The stewardess’s hand appeared again in front of him, pushing up the grey table and rotating the peg to secure it. The ground was getting closer, the buildings bigger. He could see cars travelling along roads. He heard the captain’s voice on the intercom, ordering the cabin crew to take their seats for landing.

The captain then thanked them for flying British Airways and wished them a pleasant day in Munich. To Grace, until these past few days, Munich had just been a name on a map. A name in newspaper headlines in the deepest recesses of his mind. A name in television documentaries. A name in history lessons when he had been at school. A name where distant relatives of Sandy, whom she had never met, in a past she had been disconnected from, still lived.