Looking Good Dead

  ‘Don’t tell the police about this film, darling. Just do exactly what they tell you. Otherwise it will be Max’s turn next. Then Jessica’s. Don’t try to be heroic. Please do what they tell you. It’s . . .’ Her voice faltered. ‘It’s the only chance you and I have of ever seeing each other again. Please, please don’t tell the police. They will know. These people know everything.’

  Kellie’s voice ripped through his soul like barbed wire.

  The screen went pitch black. Then he heard a sound. It started as a low whine, then steadily got louder and higher, more and more piercing. It was Kellie, he realized. She was screaming.

  Then silence.

  The film was at an end. The attachment closed.

  Tom vomited onto the carpet.

  62

  Nick Nicholl drove the unmarked Vauxhall out of the security gates of Sussex House and floored the accelerator. Emma-Jane, on the radio, gave instructions to the Control Centre operator.

  ‘This is Golf Tango Juliet Echo. We need uniform backup in the vicinity of Freshfield Road. The incident is at Number 138, but I don’t want anyone there to see or hear the car until I say so – that is very important. Understood?’ She was shaking with nerves. This was the first serious incident she had been in control of, and she was conscious that she might be exceeding her authority. But what choice did she have? ‘Can you confirm?’

  ‘Golf Tango Juliet Echo, dispatching uniform backup to vicinity of Freshfield Road. Requesting total silence and invisibility until further instructions. ETA four minutes.’

  They were racing down a long, steep hill. Emma-Jane glanced at the speedometer. Over 70 mph. She dialled the number that Mr Seiler had given her. Moments later he answered.

  ‘Mr Seiler? It’s Detective Constable Boutwood; we are on our way. Is the van still outside?’

  ‘Still outside,’ he confirmed. ‘Would you like that I go and speak with the driver?’

  ‘No,’ she implored. ‘No, please don’t do that. Please just stay indoors and watch him. I will stay on the line. Tell me what you can see.’

  The flash of a Gatso speed camera behind them streaked around the car. Still maintaining his speed, DC Nicholl continued down the hill, accelerating even harder as he saw a green light ahead of them. The bloody thing changed to red.

  ‘Run it!’ she said to him. She held her breath as he edged over the line and made a sharp right turn, cutting dangerously in front of a car, which hooted furiously at them.

  ‘I am still seeing the white van,’ Mr Seiler said. ‘A man inside it.’

  ‘Just one man?’

  They were driving along a dual carriageway, a 40 mph limit, the speedometer nudging ninety.

  ‘I only see one man.’

  ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘He has a laptop computer open.’

  A second Gatso flashed.

  ‘You’d better be right about this,’ Nick Nicholl whispered. ‘Otherwise my licence is toast.’

  Street lights sped past them. Tail lights appeared like in a DVD on fast-forward. More lights flashed at them, angry drivers.

  Ignoring her colleague, she was totally focused on the informant. ‘We’re only a couple of minutes away,’ she said.

  ‘So you want me outside now?’

  ‘NO!’ Her voice came out as a shriek. ‘Please stay inside.’

  Nick Nicholl braked, ran another red light, then made a sharp left up Elm Grove, a steep, wide hill with houses and shops on either side. The sign harmony carpets above a shopfront flashed past.

  ‘What can you see now, Mr Seiler?’

  ‘Nothing has changed.’

  Suddenly the radio crackled. ‘Golf Tango Juliet Echo, this is PC Godfrey. Uniform Delta Zebra Bravo. We are approaching Freshfield Road. ETA thirty seconds.’

  ‘Stop where you are,’ she said, suddenly feeling incredibly important – and very nervous of fouling up.

  They passed the gloomy buildings of Brighton General Hospital, where her grandmother had died of cancer last year, then made a lurching, tyre-squealing dog-leg right into Freshfield Road.

  Emma-Jane glanced at the street numbers – 256 . . . 254 . . .248 . . . Turning to Nick Nicholl, she said, ‘OK, slow down; there’s a mini-roundabout ahead. It’ll be the other side of that.’

  As they drove on she suddenly saw the white Ford Transit about 200 yards ahead of them, its tail lights glowing red. And now her heart really began to race. Within a few seconds she could read the number plate.

  GU03OAG

  She hit the radio button. ‘Uniform Delta Zebra Bravo. There is a white Ford Transit outside Number 138 Freshfield Road. Please intercept.’

  Then she turned to Nick Nicholl. ‘Go for it! Pull up in front! Block it!’ She unclipped her seat belt.

  Within seconds they were sliding to a halt, angled in front of the van, and Emma-Jane had her door open before they had even stopped moving. She clambered out and grabbed the driver’s door of the Transit.

  It was locked.

  She heard a siren. Saw blue flashing light skidding across the black tarmac. Heard the Transit’s starter motor and the revving of its engine. Her arm was yanked almost out of its socket as the van jerked backwards. She heard the splintering crunch of metal on metal and glass. Then her arm was jerked forwards as the van accelerated, ramming the Vauxhall. The air was filled with the howling sound of an engine over-revving, the acrid reek of burning tyres, then a shriek of metal as the Vauxhall lurched sideways. She heard Nick shout, ‘Stop! Police!’

  Then another scream of bending metal. She hung on for grim life.

  Suddenly her feet were swept away. The van was accelerating clear; it swerved sharply to the left and her legs trailed in the air, then to the right. Towards a line of parked cars.

  She felt a moment of blind terror.

  Then all the air was shot out of her. She felt a terrible pressure, then heard a dull crunching sound like breaking glass and metal. In the seconds of agony before she passed into oblivion, her hands giving up their grip, her body rolling into the gutter, she realized it wasn’t glass and metal that had made that sound. It was her own bones.

  Nick saw her lying in the road and hesitated for a moment. Glancing in his mirror, he saw the marked police car a long way back. Ahead of him, the Transit’s tail lights were disappearing down the hill. In a split-second decision he accelerated after it, shouting into his radio, ‘Man down! We need an ambulance!’

  Within seconds he was gaining on the vehicle. He jolted over a speed hump. There were red traffic lights at the bottom of the hill, the junction with Eastern Road. The Transit would have to stop, or at least slow down.

  It did neither.

  As the van ran the junction Nick saw the glare of headlights, and moments later a Skoda taxi strike the driver’s door broadside. He heard a loud, dull metallic bang, like two giant dustbins swung together.

  The Transit spun, and came to a halt, spewing steam, oil and water, its horn blaring, shards of glass and metal lying all around, one wheel buckled and at a skewed angle, almost parallel with the ground, the tyre flat.

  The Skoda, slewing, carried on for some yards, making a high-pitched metallic grinding sound, steam pouring from its bonnet, then it mounted the pavement, hit the wall of a house and bounced a few feet back.

  Nicholl halted his car, radioing for the emergency services, then jumped out and sprinted to the van. But as he reached it he realized there had been no need to hurry. The windscreen was cracked and stained with blood. The driver was slumped sideways, his body partially draped over the steering wheel, his neck twisted, his face, gashed open in several places, tilted up at the cracked windscreen, his eyes closed.

  Steam continued rising and there was a stink of diesel. Nick Nicholl tried to open the buckled door but it was still locked. He pulled hard, nervous the van might catch fire, then harder, wrenching at it with all his strength. Finally it opened a few inches.

  He was conscious of vehicles stopping; out of the corner of his
eye he saw two people at the taxi, pulling the driver’s door open, and another person struggling with the rear passenger door. Nick yanked harder still on the Transit door; it yielded a little more. And as it did so, he caught sight of a glow coming from the passenger footwell.

  A laptop computer, he realized.

  Squeezing through the door, Nick peered at the man’s face closely. He was breathing. One of the principal lessons he had learned in first aid was never to move the victim of an accident unless it was to get them out of danger. He reached past the man and turned the ignition off. There was no smell of burning. He decided to wait, then went round to the other side of the van and removed the laptop – with presence of mind, only touching the machine through his handkerchief.

  Then, desperately worried about Emma-Jane, he radioed to ask the status of the emergency vehicles. As he did so, he could already hear sirens.

  And on top of his concern about the young Detective Constable, he had another worry. Roy Grace was not going to be a happy bunny when he heard about this crash.

  63

  At half past eleven, Roy Grace parked his Alfa Romeo on a single yellow line outside the unlit shop window of a dealer specializing in retro twentieth-century furniture.

  He climbed out, locked the door and stood, in the orange sodium glow of the street lighting, in front of the wrought-iron gates of the converted warehouse where Cleo lived. For some moments he stared at the entryphone panel, feeling a confusion of emotions. Part of him was angry, part of him nervous about what she was going to say. And part of him was just plain low.

  For the first time since Sandy had vanished he felt something for another woman. During brief moments when he had been awake last night and not thinking about Janie Stretton’s murder, he had actually dared allow himself to think that it might be possible to start a new life. And that it could, maybe, have been with Cleo Morey.

  Then her text had arrived.

  Fiancé.

  Just what the hell was all that about? Who was this man? Some dribbling chinless wonder from her posh background who Mummy and Daddy approved of? With a Porsche and a country estate?

  How on earth could she have failed to mention that she was engaged? And why did she want to see him now? To apologize for last night, and tell him that the snog in the back of the taxi had been a terrible, drunken mistake, and they needed to be grown up about it as they had to work together?

  And why had he come? He shouldn’t be here. He should either be back at his desk in the Major Incident Suite or, at this late hour on a Sunday night, heading home to bed, to be fresh for the morning’s briefing and all the follow-ups he needed to do on Janie Stretton. As well as keeping on top of the progress of the Suresh Hossain trial.

  In his mind he was turning over the interview he had just come from with Tom Bryce. As part of Grace’s training in recent years he had attended several psychological profiling courses, but he had never found them that helpful. They could give you useful clues if you were having to pick between three different suspects, perhaps, but nothing he had learned was helping him at this moment assess whether Tom Bryce was acting his grief and concern or whether it was real.

  But the man had very definitely told one lie.

  Have you noticed any change in Mrs Bryce’s behaviour in recent months?

  No, not at all.

  What was that all about? Bryce was covering up something. Did he suspect she might be with a lover? Or have left him? And despite all his sympathy for the man, it was this moment of hesitation, this lie, that had sowed sufficient doubt in Grace’s mind to prevent him from pushing all the buttons tonight for a full-scale hunt for Kellie Bryce. He would suggest to Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, in the morning, that Cassian Pewe be put in charge of the woman’s disappearance.

  And, with luck, the smug little shit would end up with a lot of bright yellow yolk all over his face on his very first job. How sweet that would be.

  He stared at the entryphone panel and felt butterflies in his stomach. Get a grip, man! Standing here on a doorstep like a pathetic teenager! At half past bloody eleven on a Sunday night!

  He felt tired suddenly. Drained. For a moment anger flared up inside him – anger at Cleo and at himself for being so weak in coming here – and he was tempted to go back to his car and drive home. He turned, felt in his pocket for his keys, and was in the process of pulling them out when he heard her voice, sounding strangely distorted through the speakerphone. ‘Hi!’

  And that voice did something to him. It totally energized him. ‘Pizza!’ he said in a bad Italian accent. ‘You have-a-order-a pizza?’

  She laughed. ‘Come into the courtyard and turn right. Number six, far end on the left! I hope you didn’t forget the extra anchovies!’

  The lock opened with a sharp click. He pushed the heavy gate open, digging in his pocket, suddenly remembering his chewing gum, and popped a stick in his mouth, as he walked across the spotless cobblestones illuminated by a row of lights inside glass domes. As he reached her door he put the gum back in its foil wrapper and balled it into his pocket.

  The door opened before he had even pressed the bell, and Cleo stood there, barefoot, in tight jeans and a loose blue sweatshirt, some of her hair clipped up, the rest loose. Her face was pale, she was wearing hardly any make-up, yet she looked more beautiful than ever.

  She greeted him with a meek smile, and a round-eyed guilty sort of look, like a child who has done something just a little bit naughty. ‘Hi!’ she said, and gave a little shrug.

  Grace shrugged back. ‘Hi.’

  There was an awkward silence, as if each of them was waiting for the other to offer a kiss. Neither did. She stepped aside for him to come in, then closed the door behind him.

  He entered a large, open-plan living room, softly lit with a dozen or more small white candles and some hip, ultra-modern lights; there was a strong scent in the room, faintly sweet, musky, feminine and very seductive.

  The room had a good vibe; he felt instantly relaxed, could feel it was every inch Cleo. Cream walls and throw rugs on a polished oak floor, two red sofas, black-lacquered furniture, funky abstract paintings, an expensive-looking television and a Latino song from El Divo playing quietly, but assertively, from four seriously cool-looking black speakers.

  There were several lush green plants, and in a square glass fish tank on the coffee table, a solitary goldfish was swimming around through the remains of a submerged miniature Greek temple.

  ‘Still up for a whisky?’ Cleo asked.

  ‘I think I need one.’

  ‘Ice?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Just a splash.’

  He walked over to the tank.

  ‘That’s Fish,’ she said. ‘Fish, meet Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.’

  ‘Hi, Fish,’ he said, then turning to Cleo, added, ‘I have a goldfish, too.’

  ‘I remember, you told me. Marlon, right?’

  ‘Good memory.’

  ‘Uh huh. It’s better than a goldfish’s. I read that they can only remember things for twelve seconds. I can sometimes remember things for a whole day.’

  Grace laughed. But it was forced laughter. The atmosphere between them was strained, like two boxers in a ring, waiting for the bell for the first round to clang.

  Cleo went out of the room, and Grace took the opportunity to take a closer look round. He walked over to a framed photograph which shared a small side table with a rubber plant. It showed a handsome, distinguished-looking man in his early fifties, dressed in top hat and tails, next to a fine-looking woman in her mid to late forties, who bore a striking resemblance to Cleo, in a stunningly elegant outfit and a large hat; there were dozens of people similarly attired in the background. Grace wondered if it was the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, although he had never been there.

  Then he wandered over to a floor-to-ceiling stack of crammed bookshelves. He picked out a row of Graham Greene novels, a set of Samuel Pepys diaries,
several crime novels, from Val McDermid, Simon Brett, Ian Rankin and Mark Timlin, a Jeanette Winterson, two James Herbert novels, an Alice Seebold, a Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, a row of Tom Wolfe, bios of Maggie Thatcher and Clinton, a eclectic mixture of chick lit, an ancient copy of Gray’s Anatomy and, to his surprise, a copy of Colin Wilson’s The Occult.

  Cleo came back into the room, holding two glasses, ice cubes clinking.

  ‘You read a lot?’ he asked.

  ‘Not enough, but I’m a compulsive book buyer. Do you?’

  He loved books and bought several every time he went into a bookshop, but he rarely ended up reading them. ‘I wish I had the time; I mostly end up reading reports.’

  She handed him a hefty glass tumbler filled with whisky on the rocks, and they sat down together on a sofa, keeping a space between them. She raised her glass, of white wine. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  He shrugged, wondering what bombshell she was going to hit him with.

  Instead, she said, ‘Cheers, big ears.’

  ‘Big ears?’

  ‘Here goes, nose!’

  He frowned.

  ‘You don’t know this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cheers, big ears,’ she said. ‘Here goes, nose. Up your bum, chum!’ She raised her glass and took a long swig.

  Shaking his head in bewilderment, he took a swig of the whisky; it was dangerously good. ‘What does that mean? “Cheers, big ears”?’

  ‘Here goes, nose! Up your bum, chum!’

  Grace shook his head, not getting it.

  ‘Just a saying – I’ll have to teach it to you.’

  He looked at Cleo, then down at his drink, and sipped some more, changing the subject. ‘So, do you want to tell me about, um – Mr Right? Your fiancé?’

  Cleo took another gulp of wine. He watched her, loving the way she drank, no delicate prissy little sip but a proper mouthful. ‘Richard?’

  ‘Is that his name?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you his name?’ She sounded astonished.

  ‘Actually, no. It sort of escaped your mind last night. And on our previous date.’