Peter James: Dead Simple

He dropped half his sandwich in the bin. No appetite. He sipped his mug of coffee, checked the latest emails, then logged back on to the Sussex Police site and stared at the list of files he had inherited as part of his promotion.

Each file contained the details of an unsolved murder. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files, maybe even more, stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of cupboards, or locked up, gatherIng mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder happened. The files contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, court transcripts, separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his new brief, to dig back into the county's unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.

He knew most of their contents by heart - the benefit of his near photographic memory which had propelled him through exams both at school and in the Force. To him each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken - and a killer who was still free - it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest, because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had.

Richard Ventnor, a gay vet battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago. Susan Downey, a beautiful girl raped and strangled and left in a churchyard fifteen years back. Pamela Chisholm, a rich widow found dead in her wrecked car - but with the wrong kind of injuries for a car accident. The skeletal remains of Pratap Gokhale, a nine-year-old Indian boy found under floorboards at the flat of a suspected paedophile - long vanished. These were just a few of the many cases Grace remembered.

Although they were interred, or their ashes had been scattered a long time ago, circumstances changed for them too. Technology had brought in DNA testing, which threw up new evidence and new suspects. The internet had brought new means of communication. Loyalties had changed. New witnesses had emerged from the woodwork. People had divorced. Fallen out with their friends. Someone who wouldn't testify against a mate twenty years ago now hated him. Murder files never closed. Slow time, they called it.

The phone rang. It was the management support assistant he shared with his immediate boss, the Assistant Chief Constable, asking if he wanted to take a call from a detective. The whole political correctness thing irritated him more and more, and it was particularly strong in the Police Force. It hadn't been so long ago when they called them secretaries, not bloody management support assistants.

He told her to put him through, and moments later heard a familiar voice. Glenn Branson, a bright Detective Sergeant he'd worked with several times in the past, fiercely ambitious and razor sharp as well as being a walking encyclopedia on movies. He liked Glenn Branson a lot. He was probably the closest friend he had.

'Roy? How you doing? Seen you in the papers today.'

'Yup, well you can fuck off. What do you want?'

'Are you OK?'

'No, I'm not OK.'

'Are you busy right now?'

'How do you define busy.'

'Ever given an answer in your life that isn't a question?'

Grace smiled. 'Have you?'

'Listen, I'm being pestered by a woman - about her fiance". Seems like some stag-night prank has gone seriously wrong, and he's been missing since Tuesday night.'

Grace had to do a mental check on the date. It was Thursday afternoon now. 'Tell me?'

'Thought you'd be in court today. Tried your mobile, but it's off.'

'I'm having lunch. Got a break from court - Judge Driscoll's having a day in chambers dealing with submissions from the defence.'

One of the major drawbacks of bringing a prosecution to trial was the time it consumed. Grace, as the senior officer, had to be either in court or in close touch during the whole trial. This one was likely to last a good three months - and much of that time was just hanging around.

'I don't feel this is a normal missing persons enquiry - I'd like to pick your brains. You free this afternoon by any chance?' Glenn Branson asked.

To anyone else, Grace would have said no, but he knew Glenn Branson wasn't a time waster - and hell, right now he was pleased to have an excuse to get out of the office, even into this shitty weather. 'Sure, I can make some time.'

'Cool.' There was a moment's pause, then Glenn Branson said, 'Look, could we meet at this guy's flat - I think it would be helpful if you saw it for yourself - I can get the key and meet you there.' Branson gave him the address.

Grace glanced at his watch, then at the diary on his Blackberry. 'How about meeting there at half five? We could go on for a drink.'

'It won't take you three hours to get - oh -1 guess a man of your age has to start taking it slowly. See you later.'

Grace winced. He didn't like reminders of his looming big four-0 birthday. He didn't like the idea of being forty - it was an age when people took stock of their lives. He'd read somewhere that when you reached forty you'd reached the shape your life was going to be for good. Somehow, being thirty-eight was OK. But thirty-nine meant you were very definitely nudging forty. And it wasn't so long ago that he'd considered people who were forty to be old. Shit.

He looked again at the list of files on the screen. Sometimes he felt closer to these people than to anyone else. Twenty murder victims who were dependent on him to bring their killers to justice. Twenty ghosts who haunted most of his waking thoughts - and sometimes his dreams, as well.

14

He had the use of a pool car, but he chose to drive his own Alfa Romeo 147 saloon. Grace liked the car; he liked the hard seats, the firm ride, the almost spartan functionality of the interior, the fruity noise the exhaust made, the feeling of precision, the bright, sporty dials on the dash. There was a sense of exactness about the vehicle that suited his nature.

The big, meaty wipers swung across the screen, clopping the rain from the glass, the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, a wild Elvis Costello song playing on the stereo. The bypass swept up over a ridge and down into the valley. Through the mist of rain he could see the buildings of the coastal resort of Brighton and Have sprawling ahead, and beyond the single remaining landmark chimney from the old Shoreham power station, the shimmering strip of grey, barely distinguishable from the sky, that was the English Channel.

He'd grown up here among its streets and its villains. His dad used to reel off their names to him, the families that ran the drugs, the massage parlours, the posh crooked antique dealers who fenced stolen jewels, furniture, the fences who handled televisions and CD players.

It had been a smugglers' village, once. Then George IV had built a palace just a few hundred yards from his mistress's house. Brighton had somehow never managed to shake off its criminal antecedents nor its reputation as a place for dirty weekends. But these gave the city of Brighton and Have its edge over any other provincial resort in England, he thought, flicking his indicator and turning off the bypass.

Grassmere Court was a red-brick block of flats about thirty years old, in an upmarket area of Have, the city's genteel district. It fronted onto a main road and overlooked a tennis club at the rear. The residents were a mixture of ages, mostly twenty- and thirty-something career singles and comfortably off elderly people. On an estate agent's brochure it would probably have rated highly des res.