Peter James - Dead Simple

'You have your appointment with your dressmaker, dear. You should keep it. The show must go on. Michael will turn up, you do believe that, don't you?'

After a brief hesitation, Ashley said, 'Of course I do.'

'Let's speak later.'

Ashley stood up, walked over to her future mother-in-law, and hugged her hard. 'It's all going to be OK.'

'You're the best thing that ever happened to him. You are a wonderful person, Ashley. I was so happy when Michael told me that -that--' She was struggling now, emotion choking her words. 'That you-the two of you--'

Ashley kissed her on the forehead.

28

Grace sat, tight-lipped, in the blue Ford, holding the edges of his seat, watching the unfolding country road ahead nervously through the wipers and the heavy rain. Oblivious to his passenger's fear, Glenn Branson swept tidily through a series of bends, proudly demonstrating the skill he had recently acquired from a high-speed police driving course. The radio, tuned to a rap station, was far too loud for Grace.

'Doing it right, aren't I?'

'Uh - yep,' Grace said, deciding the less conversation, the less distraction to Branson, which in turn meant longer life expectancy for both of them. He reached forward and turned the volume down.

'Jay-Z,' Branson said. 'Magic, isn't he?'

'Magic'

They entered a long right-hander. 'They tell you to keep hard to the left, to open up the view; that's a good tip, isn't it.'

A left-hander was coming up and in Grace's view they were going too fast to get round it. 'Great tip,' he said, from somewhere deep in his gullet.

They got round it, then down into a dip.

'Am I scaring you?'

'Only slightly.'

'You're a wuss. Guess it's your age. Do you remember BullittV

'Steve McQueen? You like him, don't you?'

'Brilliant! Best car chase ever in a movie.'

'It ended in a bad car smash.'

'Brilliant, that film,' Branson said, missing his point - or more likely, Grace thought, deliberately ignoring it.

Sandy used to drive fast too. That was part of her natural recklessness. He used to be so scared that Sandy would have a bad accident one day, because she never seemed to be able to get her head around the natural laws of physics that determined when a car

would make it around a corner and when it would not. Yet in all the seven years they were together she never once crashed, or even scratched, her car.

Ahead of them, to his relief, he saw the sign - 'bolney car pound' - fixed to tall sheet-metal fencing, topped with barbed wire. Branson braked hard and turned in, past a guard dogs warning sign, into the forecourt of a large modern warehouse building.

Grabbing an umbrella from the boot, and huddling beneath it, they rang the bell on the entryphone beside a grey door. Moments later it was opened by a plump, greasy-haired man of about thirty, wearing a blue boiler suit over a filthy T-shirt, and holding a half eaten sandwich in a tattooed hand.

'Detective Sergeant Branson and Detective Superintendent Grace,' Branson said. 'I rang earlier.'

Chewing a mouthful, the guy looked blank for a moment. Behind him, several badly wrecked cars and vans sat in the warehouse. His eyes rolled pensively. 'The Transit, yeah?'

'Yup', Branson said.

'White? Came in Tuesday from Wheeler's?'

'That's the one.'

'It's outside.'

They signed in, then followed him across the warehouse floor and out through a side door, into an enclosure that was a good acre in size, Grace estimated, filled with wrecked vehicles as far as the eye could see. A few were under tarpaulins, but most were exposed to the elements.

Holding the umbrella high, just clearing the top of Branson's head, he looked at a Rentokil van that was burnt out after a bad frontal collision - it was hard to imagine anyone had survived in it. Then he noticed a Porsche sports car, compacted to little more than ten feet in length. And a Toyota saloon with its roof cut off.

The place always gave him the heebie-jeebies. Grace had never worked in the Traffic Division, but in his days as a beat copper he'd attended his share of traffic accidents and it was impossible not to be affected by them. It could always happen to anyone. You could set out on a journey, happy, full of plans, and moments later, in the blink of an eye, maybe through no fault of your own, your car was turned into a monster that smashed you to pieces, cut your limbs off and maybe even broiled you alive.

He shuddered. The vehicles that ended up in this place, under ecure lock and key, were the ones in the region that had been Involved in serious or fatal accidents. They were kept here until the Crash Investigation Unit and sometimes Crime Scene Investigators had obtained all the information they required, before going to a breaker's yard.

The fat man in the boiler suit pointed at a twisted mass of white, with part of its roof cut away, the cab, with the windscreen gone, sheared jaggedly away from the rest of the van, and much of the interior was covered in white plastic sheeting. 'That's the one.'

Both Grace and Branson stared at it in silence. Grace couldn't help his mind dwelling for several uncomfortable moments on the sheer horror of the image. The two of them walked around the van. Grace noticed mud caked on the wheel hubs, and more, heavy mud on the sills and splashes of it up the paintwork, slowly dissolving in the rain.

Handing the umbrella to his colleague, he wrenched open the buckled driver's door, and immediately was hit by the cloying, heavy stench of putrefying blood. It didn't matter how many times he experienced it, each new occasion was just as bad. It was the smell of death itself.

Holding his breath to try to block it out he pulled back the sheeting. The steering wheel had been hacked off and the driver's part of the front bench seat was bent right back. There were blood stains all over the front seat, the floor and the dash.

Covering them with the sheeting, he climbed in. It felt dark and unnaturally silent. It gave him the creeps. Part of the engine had come through the flooring and the pedals were raised in an unnatural position. Reaching across, he opened the glove compartment, then pulled out an owner's manual, a pack of parking vouchers, some fuel receipts and a couple of unlabelled tape cassettes. He handed the cassettes to Glenn.

'Better have a listen to these.'

Branson pocketed them.

Ducking under the jagged cut in the roof, Grace climbed into the

back of the van, his shoes echoing on the buckled floor. Branson pulled open the rear doors, letting more light in. Roy stared down at a plastic fuel can, a spare tyre, a wheel-wrench and a parking ticket in a plastic bag. He took the ticket out, and saw it was dated several days before the accident. He handed it to Branson for bagging. There was a solitary, left-foot Adidas trainer which he also passed to Branson, and a nylon bomber jacket. He felt in the pockets, pulling out a pack of cigarettes, a plastic lighter and a dry-cleaning ticket stub with an address in Brighton. Branson bagged each item.

Grace scanned the interior carefully, checking he had missed nothing, thinking hard. Then climbing back out and sheltering under the umbrella, he asked Branson, 'So who owns this vehicle?'

'Houlihan's - the undertakers in Brighton. One of the boys who died worked there - it was his uncle's firm.'

'Four funerals. Should get a nice quantity discount,' Grace said grimly.

'You're a real sick bastard sometimes, you know that?'

Ignoring him, Grace was pensive for a moment. 'Have you spoken to anyone at Houlihan's?'

'Interviewed Mr Sean Houlihan, the owner, himself yesterday afternoon. He's pretty upset as you can imagine. Told me his nephew was a hard-working lad, eager to please.'

'Aren't they all? And he gave him permission to take the van?'