Peter James: Dead Simple

And made him the luckiest man in the world.

The torch beam dimmed, noticeably. He switched it off again to

conserve the battery and lay still in the darkness again. He could hear his breathing getting faster. What if?

If they never came back?

It was nearly 11.30. He waited, listening for a gaggle of voices that would tell him his friends were back.

Jesus, when he got out of there they weren't half going to regret this. He looked at his watch again. Twenty-five to midnight. They would be along soon, any minute now.

They had to be.

11

ldy stood over him, grinning, blocking the sunlight, deliberately tickling him. Her blonde hair swung down either side of her face, brushing his cheeks.

'Hey! I have to read - this report -1--'

'You're so boring, Grace, you always have to read!' She kissed his ' forehead. 'Read, read, read, work, work, work!' She kissed his forehead again. 'Don't you still fancy me?'

She was wearing a skimpy sun dress, her breasts almost falling Out the top; he caught a glimpse of her long, tanned legs, her hem riding up her thighs, and suddenly he felt very horny.

He reached up his arms to cup her face, pulling her down to him, Staring into those trusting blue eyes, feeling so incredibly - intensely - deeply - in love with her.

'I adore you,' he said.

'Do you, Grace?' Flirting. 'Do you really adore me more than your work?' She pulled her head back, pouted her lips quizzically.

'I love you more than anything in--'

Darkness suddenly. As if someone had pulled out a plug.

Grace heard the echo of his voice in cold, empty air.

'Sandy!' he shouted, but the sound stayed trapped in his throat.

The sunlight faded into a weak orange glow; street lighting leaking in around the bedroom curtains.

The display on the digital clock said 3.02 a.m.

He was sweating, eyes wide open, his heart tossing around in his chest like a buoy in a storm. He heard the clatter of a dustbin - a scavenging cat or a fox. Moments later it was followed by the rattle of a diesel - probably his neighbour three doors down, who drove a taxi and kept late hours.

For some moments he lay still. Closed his eyes, calmed his breathing, tried to return to the dream, clinging as hard as he could to the memory. like all the recurring dreams he had about Sandy it felt so real. As if they were still together but in a different dimension. If he could just find some way of locating the portal, crossing the divide, they really would be together again, they'd be fine, they'd be happy.

So damned happy.

A huge swell of sadness rolled through him. Then it turned to dread as he started to remember. The newspaper. That damned headline in the Argus last night. It was all coming back. Christ, oh Christ. What the hell were the morning papers going to say? Criticism he could cope with. Ridicule was harder. He already got stick from a number of officers for dabbling in the supernatural. He'd been warned by the previous Chief Constable, who was genuinely intrigued by the paranormal himself, that to let his interests be known openly could harm his promotion prospects.

'Everyone knows you're a special case, Roy - having lost Sandy. No one's going to criticize you for turning over every stone on the damned planet. We'd all do the same in your shoes. But you have to keep that in your box, you can't bring it to work.'

There were times when he thought he was getting over her, when he was getting strong again. Then there were moments like now when he realized he had barely progressed at all. He just wished so desperately he could have put an arm around her, cuddled up against her, talked through the problem. She was a glass-half-full person, always positive, and so savvy. She'd helped steer him through a disciplinary tribunal in his early days in the Force which could have ended his career, when he'd been accused by the Police Complaints Authority of using excessive force against a mugger he'd arrested. He'd been exonerated then, largely through following Sandy's advice. She would have known exactly what he should do now.

He wondered sometimes if these dreams were attempts by Sandy to communicate with him. From wherever she was.

Jodie, his sister, told him it was time to move on, that he needed to accept that Sandy was dead, to replace her voice on the answering machine, to remove her clothes from the bedroom and her things from the bathroom, in short - and Jodie could be very short - to stop living in some kind of a shrine to Sandy, and start all over again.

But how could he move on? What if Sandy was alive, being held

captive by some maniac? He had to keep searching, to keep the file open, to keep updating the photographs showing how she might look now, to keep scanning every face he passed in the street or saw i a crowd. He would go on until--

Until.

Closure.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Sandy had woken him iWith a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of �Champagne and a very rude birthday card. He'd opened the presents the had given him, then they had made love. He'd left the house later than usual, at 9.15, and reached his office in Brighton shortly after half past, late for a briefing on a murder case. He'd promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple his best friend at the time, Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife, Leslie, who Sandy got on well with - but it had been a hectic day and he'd arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.

At first he'd thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, there was no sign of a struggle.

Then, twenty-four hours later, her car was found in a bay of the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for 7 pounds 50 penceat Boots, and 16 pounds 42 pencefor petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.

His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday, and on the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 3.45 a.m., he could hear an American cop drama through the party wall between their semi-detached houses. Guns banged, tyres squealed, sirens whupwhupped. She'd seen nothing.

Noreen Grinstead, who lived opposite, was the one person he might have expected to have noticed something. A hawk-eyed, jumpy woman in her sixties, she knew everyone's business in the

street. When she wasn't tending to her husband, Lance, who was steadily going downhill with Alzheimer's, she was forever out front in yellow rubber gloves, washing her silver Nissan car, or hosing and scrubbing the driveway, or the windows of the house, or anything else that did or did not need washing. She even brought stuff out of the house to clean it in the driveway.

Very little escaped her eye. But, somehow, Sandy's disappearance had.

He switched the light on and got out of bed, pausing to stare at the photograph of himself and Sandy on the dressing table. It had been taken in a hotel in Oxford during a conference on DNA fingerprinting, a few months before she disappeared. He was lounging back in a suit and tie, on a chaise longue. Sandy, in an evening dress, was lying back against him, hair up in blonde ringlets, beaming her constant irrepressible grin at a waiter they had sequestered to take the picture.

He went over, picked up the frame, kissed the photo then set it down again, and went into the bathroom to urinate. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee was a recent affliction, a result of the health fad he was on, drinking the recommended minimum eight glasses of water a day. Then he padded, clad only in the T-shirt he slept in, downstairs.