Peter James - Dead Simple

Harrison's phone with blue pins. The other four with him have different colours.'

Grace followed her finger as she talked. 'We can see all five pins remained together from seven in the evening until nine.' She pointed to three different locations. 'There is a pub in each of these places,' she said. 'But this is where it gets interesting.' She pointed to a location some miles north of Brighton. 'All five pins close together here. Then we only have four. Here.'

Branson said, 'Green, purple, yellow and white. No blue.'

'Exactly,' she said.

'What movement on the blue pin after that?'

'None,' she said, emphatically.

'So they parted company,' Grace said, 'at - about - eight forty five?'

'Unless he dropped his phone somewhere.'

'Of course.'

'So we're talking about a radius of five miles, about fifteen miles north of Brighton?' Glenn Branson said.

'Is his phone still giving off signals?' Grace said, distracted by Bella's combination of smart mind and good looks. He'd met her before but had never really noticed her before. She had a really pretty face, and unless she was wearing rocks inside her bra, she had seriously large breasts - something that had always turned him on. He switched his mind off her and back to business. Then he shot a glance at her hand to see if she was wearing any rings. One sapphire band, but not on the marriage finger. He filed it away.

'The last signal was at eight forty-five Tuesday night. Nothing since.'

'So what's your view, Bella?' Grace asked.

Bella thought for a moment, fixing him with alert blue eyes. But her expression bore nothing more than businesslike deference to a superior. 'I spoke to a technician at the phone company. He says his mobile is either switched off, and has been since Tuesday night, or it is in an area of no signal.'

Grace nodded. 'This Michael Harrison is an ambitious and busy businessman. He's due to get married tomorrow morning to a very beautiful woman, by all accounts. Twenty minutes before a fatal car

smash that killed four of his best friends, his phone went dead. During the past year he has been stealthily transferring money from his company to a Cayman Islands bank account - at least one million pounds that we know about. And his business partner, who should have been on that fatal stag night, for some reason was not there. Are my facts right so far?'

'Yes,' Glenn Branson said.

'So he could be dead. Or he could have pulled a smart vanishing act.'

'We need to check out the area Bella has ring-fenced. Go to all the pubs he might have visited. Talk to everyone who knows him.'

'And then?'

'Facts,' Glenn. 'Let's get all the facts first. If they don't lead us to him, then we can start to speculate.'

The phone on Bella's desk rang. She answered it, and almost instantly her expression conveyed that it was significant.

'You're certain?' she said. 'Since Tuesday? You can't be sure it was Tuesday? No one else could have taken it?' After a few moments, she said, 'No, I agree. Thank you, that could be very significant. May I take your number?'

Grace watched while she wrote down on a pad 'Sean Houlihan', followed by a number. 'Thank you, Mr Houlihan, thank you very much, we'll get back to you.'

She hung up and looked at Grace then Branson. 'That was Mr Houlihan, the owner of the undertakers where Robert Houlihan, his nephew, worked. They've just discovered that they are missing a coffin.'

30

'Missing a coffin?' Glenn Branson said.

'Not something people ordinarily steal, is it?' Bella Moy said.

Grace was silent for a moment, distracted by a bluebottle that buzzed noisily around the room for a moment, then batted against a window. Forensics was on the floor below. Bloodstained clothes and artefacts were a magnet for bluebottles. Grace hated them. Bluebottles - or blowflies - were the vultures of the insect world. 'This character, Robert Houlihan, borrowed the undertaker's van without permission. Seems possible he might have borrowed a coffin without permission too.' He looked quizzically at Branson then Bella, then at Nick Nicholl. 'Do we have one very sick prank on our hands?'

'Are you suggesting his mates might have put him in a coffin?' Glenn Branson said.

'Do you have a better theory?'

Branson smiled, edgily. 'Work on the facts. Right?'

Looking at Bella, subconsciously thinking how attractive she was, Grace said, 'How sure is this Houlihan fellow that his coffin has been taken and they haven't just misplaced it?'

'People misplace their front door keys -1 don't think people misplace coffins,' Branson said, a tad facetiously.

Bella interrupted, 'He's very sure. It was the most expensive coffin in his range, Indian teak, says it would last for hundreds of years - but this one had a flaw - the wood had warped or something - wasn't sealing tight at the bottom - he was having a ding-dong with the manufacturers in India about it.'

'I can't believe we have to import coffins from Indial Don't we have carpenters in England?' Branson said.

Grace was staring at the map. He traced a circle with his finger. 'This is a pretty big area.'

'How long could someone survive in a coffin?' Bella asked.

'If the lid was on properly it would depend on if they had air, water, food. Without air, not long. A few hours, maybe a day,' Grace replied.

'It's now three days,' Branson said.

Grace remembered reading about a victim who had been pulled out alive from the ruins of his home twelve days after an earthquake in Turkey. 'With air, at least a week, maybe longer,' he said. 'We'd have to assume if they have done some damned stupid prank on him they would have left him with air. If they didn't, then we're looking for a body'

He looked at the team. 'Presumably you've talked to Mark Warren, the business partner?'

'He's also his best man,' Nicholl said. 'Says he has no idea what happened. They were going on a stag-night pub crawl and he was stuck out of town and missed it.'

Grace frowned, then glanced at his watch, acutely aware of time slipping away. 'There's one thing going on a stag-night pub crawl, there's another thing taking a coffin with you. You don't decide to take a coffin with you on the spur of the moment - do you?' He stared pointedly at each of them in turn.

All three shook their heads.

'Someone's talked to all the girlfriends, wives?'

'I did,' Bella said. 'It's hard because they're in shock, but one of them was very angry - Zoe . . .' She picked up her notepad and flipped over some pages. 'Zoe Walker - widow of Josh Walker. She said that Michael was always playing stupid pranks, and she was certain they had been planning revenge.'

'And the best man didn't know anything about it? I don't buy that,' Grace said.

'I'm pretty convinced he didn't know anything. Why would he have any reason to lie?' Nicholl said.

Grace was worried by the young detective's naivety. But he always believed in giving juniors opportunities to show their abilities. He let it ride for the moment, but logged it firmly in his mind to come back to later today.

'This is one hell of an area to search,' Branson said. 'It's heavily wooded; it could take a hundred people days to comb this.'

'We have to try to narrow it down,' Grace responded. He picked up a marker pen from Bella's desk, and drew a blue circle on the map, then turned to DC Nicholl. 'Nick, we need a list of every pub in this circle. This is where we need to start.' He turned to Branson. 'Do you have photographs of the lads in the van?'

'Yes.'

'Good boy. Two sets?'

'I have a dozen sets.'

'We'll divide in two, DS Branson and I will take one half of the pubs, you two take the other. I'll see if we can get the helicopter to cover the area - although it's very wooded, they've a better chance of seeing something from the air.'