Peter James: Dead Simple

Only the crackle of static came back to him.

He was desperate for water, his mouth arid and furry. Had they left him any water? He lifted his neck up just the few inches that were available before his head struck the lid, saw the glint of the bottle, reached down. Famous Grouse whisky.

Disappointed, he broke the seal, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. For a moment just the sensation of liquid felt like balm in his mouth; then it turned to fire, burning his mouth, then his gullet. But almost instantly after that he felt a little better. He took another swig. Felt a little better still, and took a third, long swig before he replaced the cap.

He closed his eyes. His headache felt a tiny bit better now. The desire to pee was receding.

'Bastards ...' he murmured.

8

Ashley looked like a ghost. Her long brown hair framed a face that was as colourless as the patients' in the forest of drip lines, ventilators and monitors in the beds in the ward behind her. She was leaning against the reception counter of the nursing station in the Intensive Care Unit of the Sussex County Hospital. Her vulnerability made her seem even more beautiful than ever, to Mark.

Muzzy from a sleepless night, in a sharp suit and immaculate black Gucci loafers, he walked up to her, put his arms around her, and held her tight. He stared at a vending machine, a drinking water fountain, and a payphone in a perspex dome. Hospitals always gave him the heebie-jeebies. Ever since he'd come to visit his dad after his near fatal heart attack and saw this man who had once been so strong now looking so frail, so damned pathetic and useless - and scared. He squeezed Ashley as much for himself as for her. Close to her head, a cursor blinked on a green computer screen.

She clung to him as if he were a lone spar in a storm-tossed ocean. 'Oh, Christ, Mark, thank God you're here.'

One nurse was busy on the phone; it sounded like she was talking to a relative of someone in the unit, the other one behind the counter, close to them, was tapping out something on a keyboard.

'This is terrible,' Mark said. 'Unbelievable.'

Ashley nodded, swallowing hard. 'If it wasn't for your meeting, you would have been--'

'I know. I can't stop thinking about it. How's Josh?'

Ashley's hair smelled freshly washed, and there was a trace of garlic on her breath, which he barely noticed. The girls had had a hen party last night, arranged in some Italian restaurant.

'Not good. Zoe's with him.' She pointed and Mark followed the line of her finger, across several beds, across the hiss-clunk of ventilators, and the blinking of digital displays, to the far end of the ward, where he could see Josh's wife sitting on a chair. She was dressed in

a white T-shirt, tracksuit top and baggy trousers, body stooped, her straggly blonde ringlets covering her face.

'Michael still hasn't turned up. Where is he, Mark? Surely to God you must know?'

As the nurse finished her call, the phone beeped and she started talking again.

'I've no idea/ he said. 'I have absolutely no idea.'

She looked at him hard. 'But you guys have been planning this for weeks - Lucy said you were going to get even with Michael for all the practical jokes he played on the others before they got married.' As she took a step back from him, tossing hair from her forehead, Mark could see her mascara had run. She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

'Maybe the guys had a last-minute change of mind,' he said. 'Sure, they'd come up with all kinds of ideas, like lacing his drink and putting him on a plane to some place, but I managed to talk them out of it - at least I thought I had.'

She gave a wan smile of appreciation.

He shrugged. 'I knew how worried you were, you know, that we'd do something dumb.'

'I was, desperately worried.' She glanced at the nurse, then sniffed. 'So where is he?'

'He definitely wasn't in the car?'

'Absolutely not. I've rung the police - they say that - they say they--' She began sobbing.

'What did they say?'

In a burst of anger she blurted, 'They won't do anything.'

She sobbed some more, struggling to contain herself. 'They say they've checked all around at the scene of the accident and there's no sign of him, and that he's probably just sleeping off a mighty hangover somewhere.'

Mark waited for her to calm down, but she carried on crying. 'Maybe that's true.'

She shook her head. 'He promised me he wasn't going to get drunk.' Mark gave her a look. After a moment, she nodded. 'It was his stag night, right? That's what you guys do on stag nights, isn't it? You get smashed.'

Mark stared down at grey carpet tiles. 'Let's go and see Zoe,' he said.

Ashley followed him across the ward, trailing a few yards behind him. Zoe was a slender beauty, and today she seemed even more slender to Mark, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, feeling the hard bone beneath the soft fabric of her designer tracksuit top.

'Jeez, Zoe, I'm sorry'

She acknowledged him with a faint shrug.

'How is he?' Mark hoped the anxiety in his voice sounded genuine.

Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, her eyes raw, her cheeks, almost translucent without make-up, tracked with tears. 'They can't do anything,' she said. 'They operated on him, now we just have to wait.'

Mark stood still, staring down at Josh, whose eyes were closed, his face a mess of bruises and lacerations, the bed surrounded by racks of machinery. There was a drip line cannulated into his hand, and another opaque line was forked into his nostrils. A thick breathing tube, fed by black bellows, distended his mouth. Wires ran out from the sheets and from his head, feeding digital displays and spiky graphs. What flesh Mark could see was the colour of alabaster. His friend looked like a laboratory experiment.

But Mark was barely looking at Josh. He was looking at the displays, trying to read them, to calculate what they were saying. He was trying to remember, from when he had stood in this same room beside his dying father, which were the ECG, the blood oxygen, the blood pressure readings, and what they all meant.

And he was thinking. Josh had always had it made. Smooth good looks, rich parents. The insurance loss adjuster, always calculating, mapping out his life, forever talking about five-year plans, ten-year plans, life goals. He was the first of the gang to get married, as he wanted to have kids early, so he would still be young enough to enjoy his life after they'd grown up. Marrying the perfect wife, darling little rich girl Zoe, totally fertile, allowed him to fulfil his plan. She'd delivered him two equally perfect babies in rapid succession.

Mark shot a glance around the ward, taking in the nurses, the doctors, marking their positions, then his eyes dropped to the drip lines into the back of Josh's hand, just behind the plastic tag bearing his name. Then they moved across to the ventilator. Then up to the ECG. Warning buzzers would sound if the heart rate dropped too low. Or the blood oxygen level.

Josh surviving would be a problem - he'd lain awake most of the night thinking about that, and had come to the reluctant conclusion it wasn't an option he could entertain.

Courtroom One at Lewes Crown Court always felt to Roy Grace as if it had been deliberately designed to intimidate and impress. It didn't carry any higher status than the rest of the courtrooms in this buildIng, but it felt as if it did. Georgian, it had a high, vaulted ceiling, a public gallery up in the gods, oak-panelled walls, dark oak benches and dock, and a balustraded witness stand. At this moment it was presided over by a bewigged Judge Driscoll, way past his sell-by date, who sat, looking half asleep, in a vivid red-backed chair beneath the coat of arms bearing the legend. 'Dieu et mon droit'. The place looked like a theatre set and smelled like an old school classroom.