Peter James - Not Dead Enough

She was rapidly heading for the wrong side of thirty. Enjoying her career but worrying about it at the same time. She wanted to have children before she was too old. Yet each time she thought she had found Mr Right, he would spring something on her from left field. Roy was such a lovely man. But just when she thought everything was perfect, his missing wife popped up like a bloody jack-in-the-box.

She set the alarm, stepped outside and locked the front door, with just one thought in her mind – to get home and see if there was a message from Roy. Then, walking across the tarmac drive to her blue MG, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Somebody had slashed the black canvas roof open. All the way from the windscreen to the rear window.

64

The woman behind the wooden counter and glass window handed him a buff-coloured rectangular form. ‘Please put your name and address and other details on this,’ she asked him in a weary voice. She looked as if she had been sitting there for too long, reminding him of an exhibit in a museum showcase that someone had neglected to dust. Her face had an indoors pallor and her shapeless brown hair hung around her face and shoulders like curtains that had become detached from some of their rings.

Above the reception desk of the Accident and Emergency Unit of the Royal Sussex County Hospital was a large LCD display of yellow letters on a black background, currently reading WAITING TIME 3 HOURS.

He considered the form carefully. A name, address, date of birth and next of kin were required. There was also a space for allergies.

‘Everything all right?’ the woman asked.

He raised his swollen right hand. ‘Difficult to write,’ he said.

‘Would you like me to fill it in for you?’

‘I can manage.’

Then, leaning on the counter, he stared at the form for some moments, his brain, muzzed by the pain, really not functioning that well at all. He was trying to think quickly, but the thoughts that he wanted didn’t come in the right sequence. He felt a little dizzy suddenly.

‘You can sit down and fill it in,’ she said.

Snapping back at her, he shouted, ‘I SAID I CAN MANAGE!’

People all around looked up from their hard grey plastic seats, startled. Not smart , he thought. Not smart to draw attention. Hastily he filled out the form and then, as if to make amends, beside Allergies he wrote, wittily, he thought, ‘Pain.’

But she didn’t appear to notice as she took the form back. ‘Please take a seat and a nurse will come and see you shortly.’

‘Three hours?’ he said.

‘I’ll tell them it’s urgent,’ she said flatly, then watched warily as the strange man with long, straggly brown hair, a heavy moustache and beard, and large, tinted glasses, wearing a baggy white shirt over a string vest, grey slacks and sandals, walked over to an empty seat, between a man with a bleeding arm and an elderly woman with a bandaged head, and sat down. Then she picked up her phone.

The Time Billionaire unclipped the BlackBerry from its holster, which was attached to his belt, but before he had time to do anything, a shadow fell in front of him. A pleasant-looking, dark-haired woman in her late forties, in nursing uniform, was standing over him. The badge on her lapel read Barbara Leach – A&E Nurse.

‘Hello!’ she said breezily. ‘Would you come with me?’

She led him into a small booth and asked him to sit down.

‘What seems to be the problem?’

He raised his hand. ‘I hurt it working on a car.’

‘How long ago?’

Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘Thursday afternoon.’

She examined it carefully, turning it over, then comparing it to his left hand. ‘It looks infected,’ she said. ‘Have you had a tetanus injection recently?’

‘I don’t remember.’

She studied it again for a while thoughtfully. ‘Working on a car?’ she said.

‘An old car. I’m restoring it.’

‘I’ll get the doctor to see you as soon as possible.’

He went back to his chair in the waiting room and turned his attention back to his BlackBerry. He logged on to the web and then clicked on his bookmark for Google.

When that came up, he entered a search command for MG TF.

That was the car Cleo Morey drove.

Despite his pain, despite his muzzy thoughts, a plan was forming. Really quite a good plan.

‘Fucking brilliant!’ he said out loud, unable to control his excitement. Then immediately he shrank back into his shell.

He was shaking.

Always a sign that the Lord approved.

65

Reluctantly cutting short his precious hours in Munich, Grace managed to board an earlier flight. The weather in England had changed dramatically during the day, and shortly after six o’clock in the evening, as he went to get his car from the short-stay multi-storey car park at Heathrow, the sky was an ominous grey and a cold wind was blowing, flecking the windscreen with rain.

It was the kind of wind that you forgot even existed during the long, summer days they’d had recently, he reflected. It was like a stern reminder from Mother Nature that summer was not going to last much longer. The days were already getting shorter. In little over a month it would be autumn. Then winter. Another year.

Feeling flat and tired, he wondered what he had achieved today, apart from earning another black mark in Alison Vosper’s book. Anything at all?

He pushed his ticket into the machine and the barrier rose. Even the rorty sound of the engine as he accelerated, which ordinarily he liked listening to, seemed off-key tonight. Definitely not firing on all cylinders. Like its owner.

Sort yourself out in Munich. Call me when you get back home.

As he headed towards the roundabout, taking the direction for the M25, he stuck his phone in the hands-free cradle and dialled Cleo’s mobile. It started ringing. Then he heard her voice, a little slurred, and hard to decipher above a raucous din of jazz music in the background.

‘Yo! Detective Shhuperintendent Roy Grace! Where are you?’

‘Just left Heathrow. You?’

‘I’m getting smashed with my little sister, we’re on our third Sea Breezes – no – sorry – correct that! We’re on our fifth Sea Breezes, down by the Arches. It’s blowing a hooley, but there’s a great band. Come and join us!’

‘I have to go to a crime scene. Later?’

‘Don’t think we’ll be conscious much longer!’

‘So you’re not on call today?’

‘Day off!’

‘Can I swing by later?’

‘Can’t guarantee I’ll be awake. But you can try!’

When he was a kid, Church Road, Hove, was the dull backwater that Brighton’s busy, buzzy, shopping street, Western Road, morphed into, somewhere west of the Waitrose supermarket. It had perked up considerably in recent years, with trendy restaurants, delis and shops displaying stuff that people under ninety might actually want to buy.

Like most of this city, many of the familiar names from his past along Church Road, such as the grocer’s Cullens, the chemist’s Paris and Greening, the department stores Hills of Hove and Plummer Roddis, had now gone. Just a few still remained. One was Forfars the baker’s. He turned right shortly past them, drove up a one-way street, made a right at the top, then another right into Newman Villas.

As with most lower-rent residential areas of this transient city, the street was a riot of letting-agency boards. Number 17 was no exception. A Rand & Co. sign, prominently displayed, advertised a two-bedroom flat to let. Just inches below it, a burly uniformed police constable, holding a clipboard, stood in front of a barrier of blue and white crime-scene tape that was cordoning off some of the pavement. Parked along the street were a number of familiar vehicles. Grace saw the square hulk of a Major Incident Vehicle, several other police vehicles double-parked, making the narrow street even narrower, and a cluster of media reporters, with good old Kevin Spinella, he noted, among them.