Dead Simple

  Where the hell was he? Where were Josh, Luke, Pete, Robbo? Standing around, giggling? Had the bastards really gone off to a club?

  Then his panic subsided as the alcohol kicked back in again. His thoughts became leaden, muddled. His eyes closed and he was almost suckered into sleep.

  Opening his eyes, the satin blurred into soft focus, as a roller wave of nausea suddenly swelled up inside him, threw him up in the air then dropped him down. Up again. Down again. He swallowed, closed his eye again, giddily, feeling the coffin drifting, swaying from side to side, floating. The need to pee was receding. Suddenly the nausea wasn't so bad any more. It was snug in here. Floating. Like being in a big bed!

  His eyes closed and he sank like a stone into sleep.

  10

 

  Roy Grace sat in the dark, in his ageing Alfa Romeo in the line of stationary traffic, rain drumming the roof, his fingers drumming the wlmel, barely listening to the Dido CD that was playing. He felt tense. Impatient. Gloomy. He felt like shit. Tomorrow he was due to appear in court, and he knew he was in (rouble. He took a swig of bottled Evian water, replaced the cap and jammed the bottle back in the door pocket. 'Come on, come on!' he said, fingers tapping again, harder now. He was already forty minutes late for his date. He hated being late, always felt it was a sign of rudeness, as if you were making the statement, my time's more important than yours, so I can keep you waiting... If he had left the office just one minute sooner he wouldn't have been late: someone else would have taken the call and the ram-raid on a jewellery shop in Brighton, by two punks who were high on (iod-knows-what, would have been a colleague's problem, not his. That was one of the occupational hazards of police work - villains didn't have the courtesy to keep to office hours. He should not be going out tonight, he knew. Should have stayed home, preparing himself for tomorrow. Tugging out the bottle, he drank some more water. His mouth was dry, parched. Leaden butterflies flip-flopped in his belly. Friends had pushed him into a handful of blind dates over the past few years, and each time he'd been a bag of nerves before he'd shown up. The nerves were even worse tonight, and, not having had a chance to shower and change, he felt uncomfortable about his appearance. All his detailed planning about what he was going to wear had gone out of the window, thanks to the two punks. One of them had fired a sawn-off shotgun at an off-duty cop who had come too close to the jewellery shop - but luckily not quite close enough. Roy had seen, more times than he had needed, the effects of a 12-bore fired from a few feet at a human being. It could shear off a limb or punch a hole the size of a football through their chest. This cop, a detective called Bill Green who Grace knew - they had played rugger on the same team a few times - had been peppered from about thirty yards. At this distance the pellets could just about have brought down a pheasant or a rabbit, but not a fifteen-stone scrum prop in a leather jacket. Bill Green was relatively lucky - his jacket had shielded his body but he had several pellets embedded in his face, including one in his left eye.

  By the time Grace had got to the scene, the punks were already in custody, after crashing and rolling their getaway Jeep. He was determined to stick them with an attempted murder charge on top of armed robbery. He hated the way more and more criminals were using guns in the UK - and forcing more and more police to have firearms to hand. In his father's day armed cops would have been unheard of. Now in some cities forces kept guns in the boots of their cars as routine. Grace wasn't naturally a vengeful person, but so far as he was concerned, anyone who fired a gun at a police officer - or at any innocent person - should be hanged.

  The traffic still wasn't moving. He looked at the dash clock, at the rain falling, at the clock again, at the burning red tail lights of the car in front - the prat had his fogs on, almost dazzling him. Then he checked his watch, hoping the car clock might be wrong. But it wasn't. Ten whole minutes had passed and they hadn't moved an inch. Nor had any traffic come past from the opposite direction.

  Shards of blue light flitted across his interior mirror and wing mirror. Then he heard a siren. A patrol car screamed past. Then an ambulance. Another patrol car, flat out, followed by two fire engines.

  Shit. There had been road works when he'd come this way a couple of days ago, and he'd figured that was the reason for the delay. But now he realized it must be an accident, and fire engines meant it was a bad one.

  Another fire engine went past. Then another ambulance, twosandblues full on. Followed by a rescue truck.

  He looked at the clock again: 9.15 p.m. He should have picked her up three-quarters of an hour ago, in Tunbridge Wells, which was still a good twenty minutes away without this holdup.

  Terry Miller, a newly divorced Detective Inspector in Grace's division, had been regaling him with boasts about his conquests from a couple of internet dating sites and urging Grace to sign up. Boy had resisted, then, when he started finding suggestive emails in his inbox from different women, found out to his fury that Terry Miller had signed him up to a site called U-Date without telling him.

  He still had no idea what had prompted him to actually respond (o one of the emails. Loneliness? Curiosity? Lust? He wasn't sure. For the past eight years he had got through life just by going steadily from day to day. Some days he tried to forget, other days he felt guilty for not remembering.

  Sandy.

  Now he was suddenly feeling guilty for going on this date.

  She looked gorgeous - from her photo, at any rate. He liked her name, too. Claudine. French-sounding, it had something exotic. Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers.

  They'd had just one phone conversation, in which she had practically seduced him down the line. A bunch of flowers he'd bought at a petrol station lay on the passenger seat beside him. Red roses corny, he knew, but that was the old-fashioned romantic in him. People were right, he did need to move on, somehow. He could count the dates he'd had in the past eight and three-quarter years on just one hand. He simply could not accept there might be another Miss Right out there. That there could ever be anyone who matched up to Sandy.

  Maybe tonight that feeling would change?

  Claudine Lamont. Nice name, nice voice.

  Turn those sodding fog lamps off!

  He smelled the sweet scent of the flowers. Hoped he smelled OK, too.

  In the ambient glow from the Alfa's dash and the tail lights of the

  car in front, he stared up at the mirror, unsure what he expected to see. Sadness stared back at him.

  You have to move on.

  He swallowed more water. Yup.

  In just over two months he would be thirty-nine. In just over two months also another anniversary loomed. On 26 July Sandy would have been gone for nine years. Vanished into thin air, on his thirtieth birthday. No note. All her belongings still in the house except for her handbag.

  After seven years you could have someone declared legally dead. His mother, in her hospice bed, days before she passed away from cancer, his sister, his closest friends, his shrink, all of them told him he should do that.

  No way.

  John Lennon had said, 'life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.' That sure as hell was true.

  By thirty-six he had always assumed Sandy and he would have had a family. Three kids had always been his dream, ideally two boys and a girl, and his weekends would be spent doing stuff with them. Family holidays. Going to the beach. Out on day trips to fun places. Playing ball games. Fixing things. Helping them at nights with homework. Bathing them. All the comfortable stuff he'd done with his own parents.

  Instead he was consumed with an inner turbulence that rarely left him, even when it allowed him to sleep. Was she alive or dead? He'd spent eight years and ten months trying to find out and was still no nearer to the truth than when he had started.

  Outside of work, life
was a void. He'd been unable - or unwilling - to attempt another relationship. Every date he'd been on was a disaster. It seemed at times that his only constant companion in his life was his goldfish, Marlon. He'd won the fish by target shooting at a fairground, nine years ago, and it had eaten all his subsequent attempts to provide it with a companion. Marlon was a surly, antisocial creature. Probably why they liked each other, Roy reflected. They were two of a kind.

  Sometimes he wished he wasn't a policeman, that he did some less demanding job where he could switch off at five o'clock, go to

  the pub and then home, put his feet up in front of the telly. Normal iUfe. But he couldn't help it. There was some stubbornness or deter lation gene - or bunch of genes - inside him - and his father before him - that had driven him relentlessly throughout his life to |jHirsue facts, to pursue the truth. It was those genes that had brought

  him up through the ranks, to his relatively early promotion to Detecjftlve Superintendent. But they hadn't brought him any peace of mind.

  His face stared back at him again from the mirror. Grace grimced at his reflection, at his hair cropped short, to little more than a light fuzz, at his nose, squashed and kinked after being broken In a scrap when he'd been a beat copper, which gave him the appearance of a retired prize fighter.

  On their first date, Sandy had told him he had eyes like Paul Newman. He'd liked that a lot. It was one of a million things he had liked about her. The fact that she had loved everything about him, unconditionally.

  Roy Grace knew that he was physically fairly unimpressive. At five foot, ten inches, he had been just two inches over the minimum height restriction when he'd joined the police, nineteen years back. But despite his love of booze, and an on-off battle with cigarettes, through hard work at the police gym he had developed a powerful physique, and had kept in shape, running twenty miles a week, and still playing the occasional game of rugger - usually on the wing.

  Nine-twenty.

  Bloody hell.

  He seriously did not want a late night. Did not need one. Could not afford one. He was in court tomorrow, and needed to bank a full night's sleep. The whole thought of the cross-examination that awaited him pressed all kinds of bad buttons inside him.

  A pool of light suddenly flooded down from above him, and he heard the clattering din of a helicopter. After a moment the light moved forward, and he saw the helicopter descending.

  He dialled a number on his mobile. It was answered almost immediately.

  'Hi, it's Detective Superintendent Grace speaking. I'm sitting in a traffic jam on the A26 south of Crowborough, there seems to be an accident somewhere ahead - can you give me any information?'

  He was put through to the headquarters operations room. A male voice said, 'Hello, Detective Superintendent, there's a major accident. We have reports of fatalities and people trapped. The road's going to be blocked for a while - you'd be best turning around and using another route.'

  Roy Grace thanked him and disconnected. Then he pulled his Blackberry from his shirt pocket, looked up Claudine's number and texted her.

  She texted back almost instantly, telling him not to worry, just to get there when he could.

  This made him warm to her even more.

  And it helped him forget about tomorrow.

  Drives like this didn't happen very often, but when they did, boy, did Davey enjoy them! He sat strapped in the passenger seat next to his dad, as the police car escort raced on in front of them, blue lights flashing, siren whup, whup, whupping, on the wrong side of the road, overtaking mile after mile of stationary traffic. Boy, this was as good as any fairground ride his dad had taken him on, even the ones at Alton Towers, and they were about as good as it gets!

  'Yeeeha!' he cried out, exuberantly. Davey was addicted to American cop shows on television, which was why he liked to talk with an American accent. Sometimes he was from New York. Sometimes from Missouri. Sometimes Miami. But mostly from LA.

  Phil Wheeler, a hulk of a man, with a massive beer belly, dressed in his work uniform of brown dungarees, scuffed boots and black beanie hat, smiled at his son, riding along beside him. Years back his wife had cracked and left from the strain of caring for Davey. For the past seventeen years he had brought him up on his own.

  The cop car was slowing now, passing a line of heavy, earth moving plant. The tow-truck had 'wheeler's auto recovery' emblazoned on both sides and amber strobes on the cab roof. Ahead through the windscreen, the battery of headlights and spotlights picked up first the mangled front end of the Transit van, still partially embedded beneath the front bumper of the cement truck, then the rest of the van, crushed like a Coke can, lying on its side in a demolished section of hedgerow.

  Slivers of blue flashing light skidded across the wet tarmac and shiny grass verge. Fire tenders, police cars and one ambulance were still on the scene, and a whole bunch of people, firemen and cops, mostly in reflective jackets, stood around. One cop was sweeping glass from the road with a broom,

  A police photographer's camera flashed. Two crash investigators were laying out a measuring tape. Metal and glass litter glinted

  everywhere. Phil Wheeler saw a wheel-wrench, a trainer, a rug, a jacket.

  'Sure looks a goddamn bad mess, Dad!' Missouri tonight.

  'Very bad.'

  Phil Wheeler had become hardened over the years, and nothing much shocked him any more. He'd seen just about every tragedy one could possibly have in a motor car. A headless businessman, still in a suit jacket, shirt and tie, strapped into the driver's seat in the remains of his Ferrari, was among the images he remembered most vividly.

  Davey, just turned twenty-six, was dressed in his uniform New York Yankees baseball cap the wrong way around, fleece jacket over lumberjack shirt, jeans, heavy-duty boots. Davey liked to dress the way he saw Americans dress, on television. The boy had a mental age of about six, and that would never change. But he had a superhuman physical strength that often came in handy on call-outs. Davey could bend sheet metal with his bare hands. Once, he had lifted the front end of a car off a trapped motorcycle by himself.

  'Very bad,' he agreed. 'Reckon there are dead people here, Dad?'

  'Hope not, Davey.'

  'Reckon there might be?'

  A traffic cop, with a peaked cap and yellow fluorescent waistcoat, came up to the driver's window. Phil wound it down and recognized the officer.

  'Evening, Brian. This looks a mess.'

  'There's a vehicle with lifting gear on its way for the lorry. Can you handle the van?'

  'No worries. What happened?'

  'Head-on, Transit and the lorry. We need the van in the AI compound.' 'Consider it sorted.'

  Davey took his flashlight and climbed down from the cab. While his dad talked to the cop, he shone the beam around, down at slicks of oil and foam across the road. Then he peered inquisitively at the tall, square ambulance, its interior light shining behind drawn curtains across the rear window, wondering what might be happening in there.

  It was almost two hours before they had all the pieces of the Transit loaded and chained onto the flatbed. His dad and the traffic cop, Brian, walked off a short distance. Phil lit a cigarette with his Itorm-proof lighter. Davey followed them, making a one-handed roll-up and lighting it with his Zippo. The ambulance and most of the Other emergency vehicles had gone, and a massive crane truck was Winching the front end of the cement lorry up, until its front wheels - the driver's-side one flat and buckled - were clear of the ground.

  The rain had eased off and a badger moon shone through a break In the clouds. His dad and Brian were now talking about fishing - the best bait for carp at this time of year. Bored now and in need of a pee, Davey wandered off down the road, sucking on his roll-up, looking up in the sky for bats. He liked bats, mice, rats, voles, all those kinds of creatures. In fact he liked all animals. Animals never laughed at him the way humans used to, when he was at school. Maybe he'd go out to the badger sett when they got home. He liked to sit out there In the
moonlight and watch them play.

  Jigging the flashlight beam, he walked a short distance into the bushes, unzipped his fly and emptied his bladder onto a clump of nettles. Just as he finished, a voice called out, right in front of him, startling the hell out of him.

  'Hey, hello?'

  A crackly, disembodied voice.

  Davey jumped.

  Then he heard the voice again.

  'Hello?'

  'Shite!' He shone the beam ahead into the undergrowth but couldn't see anyone. 'Hello?' he called back. Moments later he heard the voice again.

  'Hello? Hey, hello? Josh? Luke? Pete? Robbo?'

  Davey swung the beam left, right, then further ahead. There was a rustling sound and a rabbit tail bobbed, for an instant, in the beam then was gone. 'Hello, who's that?'

  Silence.

  A hiss of static. A crackle. Then, only a few feet to his right, he heard the voice again. 'Hello? Hello? Hello?'

  Something glinted in a bush. He knelt down. It was a radio, with

  tmn smmuw

  an aerial. Inspecting it closer, with some excitement he realized it was a walkietalkie.

  He held the beam on it, studying it for a little while, almost nervous of touching it. Then he picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, cold, wet. Beneath a large green button he could see the word talk.

  He pressed it and said, 'Hello!'

  A voice jumped straight back at him. 'Who's that?'

  Then another voice called out, from some distance away. 'Davey!'

  His dad.

  'OK, coming!' he yelled back.

  Walking on to the road he pressed the green button again. 'This is Davey!' he said. 'Who are you?'

  'DAVWEEEEEYYYY!'

  His dad again.

  In his panic, Davey dropped the radio. It hit the road hard, the casing cracked and the batteries spilled out.

  'COMING!' he shouted. He knelt, picked up the walkie-talkie and crammed it furtively into his jacket pocket. Then he scooped up the batteries and put them in another pocket.