Dead Simple

  'I'm not sure I agree; it could backfire.'

  'How?'

  'Well - they might think you're insensitive, insisting on going ahead - that you're not respecting Pete, Luke, Josh and Robbo. We both need to be seen to be acting as if we care about them.'

  'You and I have been in touch with their families. We've both written them all letters, we're doing all the right things there. But we've been discussing the wedding for the past three days. We are going aheacU'We have to pay the bloody caterers whatever we do, so we might as well look after those people who make the effort to turn up. It probably won't be many - but surely that's the least we can do?'

  Mark took the cigarette from her and drew hard, inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs. 'Ashley, people would understand. You've battered me with your logic for three days and you haven't listened to me. I think this is a huge mistake.'

  'Trust me,' Ashley said. She gave him a fierce look. 'Don't start wimping out on me now.'

  'Christ, I'm not wimping out -1 just--'

  'Want to bottle out?'

  'This is not about bottling out. Come on, partner, be strong!'

  'I am being strong.'

  She wormed her way down his body, nuzzling her face in his pubic hairs, his penis limp against her cheek. 'This is not what I call trong,' she said mischievously.

  Grace started his weekend the way he liked, with an early-Saturday morning six-mile run along Brighton and Have seafront. Today it was again raining hard, but that did not matter; he wore a baseball cap with the peak pulled down low to shield his face, a lightweight tracksuit and brand new Nike running shoes. Powering along at a good, fast pace, he soon forgot the rain, forgot all his cares, just breathed deep, went from cushioned stride to cushioned stride, a Stevie Wonder song, 'Signed, Sealed, Delivered', playing over in his head, for some reason.

  He mouthed the words as he ran past an old man in a trenchcoat walking a poodle on a leash, and then was passed by two Lycra-clad cyclists on mountain bikes. It was low tide. Out on the mudflats a couple of fishermen were digging lugworms for bait.

  With the tang of salt on his lips, he ran alongside the promenade railings, on past the burnt-out skeleton of the West Pier, then down a ramp to the edge of the beach itself, where the local fishermen left their day boats dragged up far enough to be safe from the highest of tides. He clocked some of their names - Daisy Lee, Belle of Brighton, Sammy- smelled bursts of paint, tarred rope, putrefying fish as he ran on past the still-closed cafes, amusement arcades and art galleries of the Arches, past a windsurfing club, a boating pond behind a low concrete wall, a paddling pool, then underneath the girdered mass of the Palace Pier - where seventeen years back he and Sandy had had their first kiss, and on, starting to tire a little now, but determined to get to the cliffs of Black Rock before he turned round.

  Then his mobile phone beeped with the message signal.

  He stopped, pulled it from his zipped pocket and looked at the screen.

  You can't tease a girl like this, Big Boy. Claudine XX

  Jesus! Leave me alone. You spent the whole evening attacking me for being a cop, nowyou're driving me nuts. So far his only experience at internet dating wasn't working out too well. Were they all like Claudine? Aggressive, lonely women with a screw loose? Surely not, there had to be some normal women out there. Didn't there?

  He pocketed the phone and ran on, knowing he owed her a reply, but wondering if it was better to just continue ignoring her. What could he say? Sod off and stop bothering me? It was nice meeting you but I've decided I'm gay?

  Eventually he decided he would send her a text when he got back. He would take the coward's route: Sorry, I've decided I'm not ready for a relationship.

  His relaxing mind turned to work, to the paper mountain that seemed to be forever building and building. The Nigerian trafficking of young women; the trial of Suresh Hossain; the cold case of little Thomas Lytle; and now the disappearance of Michael Harrison.

  This really bugged him. And one thought in particular had woken him during the night and stayed with him. He reached the under-cliff walk, ran along below the white chalk bluffs, high above the Marina with its rows of pontoons and forest of masts, its hotels and shops and restaurants, and on for two more miles.

  Then he turned, feeling the burn in his lungs, his legs high from the exertion, and ran back until he reached the point where he was near the Van Allen building. He ran up the ramp onto the promenade, waited for a gap in the busy traffic of Marine Parade and crossed over. He made his way down the narrow street along the side of the building, and stopped by the entrance to the underground car park.

  His luck was in. Within moments, the gates swung open and a dark blue Porsche Boxter drove out, a predatory-looking blonde in dark glasses - despite the dull, wet day - at the wheel. He slipped in before the gates closed. It was good to be out of the rain.

  He breathed in the dry, engine-oil-laced air as he ran down the hard concrete, past a red Ferrari he remembered from before, and several other cars he recalled, and then stopped in front of the gleaming, mint-clean BMWX5 offroader.

  He stared at the number plate. W 796 LDY. Then he looked around, scanning the area. It was deserted. He walked up closer, knelt beside the front nearside wheel, then lay down on his back, wormed himself under the sill and peered up at the inside of the wheel arch. It was covered in mud.

  He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, opened it out in the palm of his left hand, then with his right hand scraped at the dry mud until several pieces of it fell into his handkerchief.

  Carefully he closed it, knotted it and replaced it in his pocket. Then he hauled himself back up, walked to the garage entrance and waved his hand across the infra-red beam. Moments later, with a loud clank and a busy whirr, the doors opened for him.

  He walked out, checked the street in both directions, then resumed his homeward run.

  43

  At 9.30, showered and after a relaxed breakfast of scrambled eggs and grilled organic tomatoes - organic was a current fad he was going through at home, to counteract all the junk food he often had to eat when working, along with drinking quantities of mineral water - he enjoyed a leisurely read of the Daily Mail, followed by a drool over a road test of the latest Aston Martin in Autocar. Then Grace went into the study he had created in a small back room of the house overlooking his tiny, increasingly overgrown garden, and the almost embarrassingly neat gardens of his neighbours on either side, sat down at his desk in front of his computer screen and rang Glenn Branson's home phone number. His handkerchief, containing the soil he had scraped from Mark Warren's car, lay on the desk inside a small plastic bag.

  Ari, Branson's wife, answered. Although he had clicked with Glenn from the day he had met him, Grace found Ari quite hard to get on with. She was often brittle with him, almost as if she suspected that, because he was single, he might be trying to lead her husband astray.

  Over the years Grace had worked hard to charm her, always remembering their kids' birthdays with cards and generous presents, and taking her flowers on the few occasions he had been invited round for a meal. There were moments when he thought he was making progress with her, but this morning was not one of them. She sounded less than pleased to hear him. 'Hi, Roy', she said curtly, 'you want to speak to Glenn?'

  No, actually, I want to speak to the Man in the Moon, he nearly said, but didn't. Instead, a tad lamely, he asked, 'Is he around?'

  'We're in rather a hurry,' she said. In the background he heard the sound of a kid screaming. Then Ari shouting, 'Sammy! Give it to her, you've had your turn, now give it to your sister!' Then the screaming got louder. Finally Branson came on the line.

  'Yo, ole wise man, you're up early.'

  'Very funny. What was it you said you were doing today?'

  'Ari's sister's thirtieth birthday party - in Solihull. Seems I have the choice - find Michael Harrison or save my marriage. What would you do?'

  'Save your marriage. Be grateful for your sad-old-g
it friends who have no life and can spend their weekends doing your work for you.'

  'I'm grateful. What are you doing?'

  'I'm going to a wedding.'

  'You're such a sentimentalist. 'Top hat? Tails? All cleaned and pressed?'

  'Anyone ever tell you what a bitch you are?'

  'The wife I nearly don't have any more.'

  Grace felt a twinge of pain. He knew that Glenn did not mean any malice, but the words stung. Every night, even if it was late, and even if it meant hassle, Glenn at least went home to loving kids and to a beautiful warm woman in his bed. People who had that were incapable of understanding what it meant to live alone.

  Solitude.

  Solitude could be crap.

  Was crap.

  Grace was tiring of it - but did not know what to do about it. What if he found someone? Fell in love with a woman, big time? And then Sandy turned up? What then?

  He knew in his mind she wasn't ever going to turn up, but there was a part of his heart that refused to go there, as if it was stuck like some old-fashioned record needle, in an eternal groove. Once or twice every year, when he was low, he would go to a medium, trying to make contact with her, or at least trying to eke out some clue about what might have happened to her. But Sandy remained elusive, a photographic negative that lay for ever black and featureless in the hypo fluid of the developing tray.

  He wished Branson a good weekend, envying him his life, his demanding wife, his gorgeous kids, his damned normality. He washed up his breakfast things, staring out of his kitchen window at Noreen Grinstead across the street, in a brown polyester trouser suit, apron and yellow rubber gloves, a plastic hat over her head to shield her from the rain, busily soaping her silver Nissan on the driveway. i A black and white cat darted across the road. On the radio the prei tenter, on Home Truths, was interviewing a woman whose parents I had not spoken one word to each other throughout her childhood.

  Nineteen years in the police had taught him never to underestimate the weirdness of the human species. Yet barely a day went by when it didn't seem to be getting even weirder.

  He went back into the study, dialled Brighton police station and asked if any of the Crime Scene Investigators were in. Moments later he was put through to Joe Tindall, a man he rated highly.

  Tindall was meticulous, hard-working and endlessly resourceful. A short, thin, bespectacled, man, with thinning wiry hair, he could have been a mad professor drawn straight from Central Casting. Before joining the police, Tindall had worked for several years for the British Museum as a forensic archaeologist. Joe was the man he was working with on the Tommy Lytle cold case.

  'Hey, Joe!' Grace said. 'No weekend off?'

  'Ha! I'm having to do the ballistics testing on the jewellery shop raid - everyone else has buggered off. And I've got the stabbing on Wednesday to deal with, thank you very much.'

  Grace remembered there had been a man stabbed to death in Brighton late on Wednesday night. No one knew yet whether it was a mugging or a tiff between two gay lovers.

  'Joe, I need some help. I have a sample of soil I've taken from a suspect vehicle. How can I find out, very quickly, what part of Sussex this soil is from? How specific could anyone get for me?'

  'How specific do you need?'

  'Within a few square feet.'

  'Very funny, Roy'

  'I'm not smiling.' 'Do you have a sample from the suspect area? I could get tests run and see if they match. We have chalk, clay, gravel and sand in Sussex.'

  'The suspect area is Ashdown Forest.'

  'The soil there is predominantly sand and clay. We can get matches from pollen, fossils, seeds, animal droppings, grasses, water, all kinds of stuff. How specific can you get?'

  'Within a few square miles.'

  'You'd have to do a lot better than that. There are areas all over England that would match Ashdown Forest.'

  'How long would it take you to get a match without a sample from the specific area?'

  'We're talking weeks - and I'd need a huge team - and one hell of a budget.' 'But you could do it?'

  'Given unlimited resources and enough time, I could give you a match in a small area.'

  'How small?'

  'That would depend. A few hundred square feet, perhaps.'

  'OK, thanks. I have something I want to bring over to you - are you in the office for a while?'

  'All day, Roy'

  44

  An hour later, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and a bright tie, Grace drove onto the sprawling, hilly Hollingbury industrial estate on the outskirts of Brighton, past an ASDA store, an ugly 1950s low rise, and then slowed as he reached the long, low Art Deco Sussex House, headquarters of Sussex CID.

  Originally built as a factory, it had been bought by the police a few years back and transformed. If it wasn't for the dominant police insignia on the facade, a passer-by could have mistaken it for a swanky, hip hotel. Painted gleaming white, with a long, neat lawn running its full length, it wasn't until you passed the security guard and drove through the high, railed gates into the rear car park, filled with police vehicles, skips and with a formidable cell block beyond, that it became less glamorous.

  Grace parked between a police off-roader and a police van, walked up to the rear entrance, held his ID card against the electronic panel to open the door and entered the building. He flashed his card at the security officer behind the front desk and made his way up the plushly carpeted stairs, past ancient truncheons in patterns mounted on blue boards and two more large blue boards halfway up the stairs on which were pinned photographs of some of the key police personnel working in this section of the building.

  He knew all the faces. Ian Steel and Verity Smart, of the Specialist Investigations Branch, David Davison of the Crime Policy and Review Branch, Will Graham and Christopher Derricott in the Scientific Support Branch, James Simpson in the Operations and Intelligence Branch, Terrina Clifton-Moore of the Family Liaison Unit, and a couple of dozen more.

  Then he walked through a wide open-plan area filled with desks, few of them attended today, and offices on either side labelled with their occupants' names and the Sussex Police badge.

  He passed the large office of Detective Chief Superintendent

  Gary Weston, who was the Head of Sussex CID. Reaching another door, he held his card up against the security panel and entered a long, cream-painted corridor lined with red noticeboards on either side, to which were pinned serious crime detection procedures. One was labelled 'Diagram - Common Possible Motives', another, 'Murder Investigation Model', another, 'Crime Scene Assessment'.

  The place had a modern, cutting-edge feel, which he liked. He had spent much of his career in old, inefficient buildings that were like rabbit warrens; it was refreshing to feel that his beloved Police Force, to which he had dedicated his life, was truly embracing the twenty-first century. Although it was marred with one flaw that everyone here moaned about - there was no canteen.

  He walked further along, past door after door flagged with abbreviations. The first was the Major Incident Suite, which housed the incident room for serious crimes. It was followed by the Disclosure Officers Room, the CCTV Viewing Room, the Intelligence Office Room, the Outside Enquiry Team Office, and then the stench hit him, slowly at first, but more powerful with every step.

  The dense, cloying, stomach-churning reek of human putrefaction, which had become too familiar to him over the years. Much too familiar. There was no other stench like it; it enveloped you like an invisible fog, seeping into the pores of your skin, deep into your nostrils and your lungs and your stomach, and the fibres of your hair and clothes, so that you carried it away with you and continued on smelling it for hours.

  As he pushed open the door of the small, pristine Scene of Crimes Office, he saw the cause: the Crime Scene Investigators' photographic studio was in action. A Hawaiian shirt, torn and heavily bloodstained, lay under the glare of bright lights, on a table, on a sheet of brown background paper. Nearby, in plast
ic bags, he could see trousers and a pair of camel loafers.

  Peering further into the room, Grace saw a man, dressed in white overalls, who he did not recognize for a moment, staring intently into the lens of a Hasselblad mounted on a tripod. Then he realized Joe Tindall had had a makeover since he'd last seen him a few months back. The mad-professor hairstyle and large tortoiseshell glasses had gone. He now had a completely shaven head, a narrow strip of hair

  running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin and hip rectangular glasses with blue-tinged lenses. He looked more like a media trendy than a scientific boffin.

  'New woman in your life?' Grace asked, by way of a greeting.

  Tindall looked up at him in surprise. 'Roy, good to see you! Yes, as a matter of fact - who told you that?'

  Grace grinned, looking at him more closely, almost expecting to spot an earring as well. 'Young, is she?'

  'Actually - yes - how do you know?'

  Grace grinned again, staring at his newly shaven pate, his trendy glasses. 'Keeping you young, isn't she?'

  Then Tindall understood and grinned sheepishly. 'She's going to kill me, Roy. Three times a night every night.'

  'You try three times a night or succeed?'

  'Oh, fuck off!' He stared Grace up and down. 'You're looking sharp, for a Saturday. Hot date yourself?'

  'A wedding, actually.'

  'Congratulations - who's the lucky girl?'

  'I have a feeling she's not that lucky,' Grace retorted, placing a small plastic bag containing the earth he had retrieved from Mark Warren's BMW down on the table, next to the shirt. 'I need you to pull out some stops.'

  'You always need me to pull out some stops. Everyone does.'

  'Not true, Joe. I gave you the Tommy Lytle material and told you there was all the time you need. This is different. I have a missing person - how fast you get this analysed might determine whether he lives or dies.'

  Joe Tindall held the bag up and peered at it. He shook it gently, peering at it all the time. 'Quite sandy/ he said.

  'What does that tell you?'