Before Grace had a chance to prepare himself, the dog head-butted him in the balls.
He staggered back, winded.
‘HUMPHREY!’ Cleo yelled at the labrador and border collie-cross.
Humphrey ran back into the devastation that had been the living room and returned with a length of knotted pink rope in his mouth.
Grace, getting his breath back and wincing from the stabbing pain in his groin, stared around the normally immaculate, open-plan room. Potted plants were lying on their sides. Cushions had been dragged off the two red sofas and several were ripped open, spilling foam and feathers everywhere across the polished oak floor. Partially chewed candles lay on their sides. Pages of newspaper were strewn all around, and a copy of Sussex Life magazine lay with its front cover half torn off.
‘BAD BOY!’ Cleo scolded. ‘BAD, BAD BOY!’
The dog wagged his tail.
‘I AM NOT HAPPY WITH YOU! I AM VERY, VERY ANGRY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’
The dog continued to wag his tail. Then he jumped up at Cleo once more.
She gripped his face in her hands, knelt and bellowed at him. ‘BAD BOY!’
Grace laughed. He couldn’t help it.
‘Fuck!’ Cleo said. She shook her head. ‘BAD BOY!’
The dog wriggled himself free and launched himself at Grace again. This time the Detective Superintendent was prepared and grabbed his paws. ‘Not pleased with you!’ he said.
The dog wagged his tail, looking as pleased as hell with himself.
‘Oh fuck!’ Cleo said again. ‘Clear this up later. Whisky?’
‘Good plan,’ Grace said, pushing the dog away. It came straight back at him, trying to lick him to death.
Cleo dragged Humphrey out into the backyard by the scruff of his neck and shut the door on him. Then they went into the kitchen. Out in the yard, Humphrey began howling.
‘They need two hours’ exercise a day,’ Cleo said. ‘But not until they are a year old. Otherwise it’s bad for their hips.’
‘And your furniture.’
‘Very funny.’ She chinked ice cubes into two glass tumblers from the dispenser in the front of her fridge, then poured several fingers of Glenfiddich into one and tonic water into the other. ‘I don’t think I should be drinking anything,’ she said. ‘How virtuous is that?’
Grace felt badly in need of a cigarette and checked his pockets, but he remembered he had deliberately not brought any with him. ‘I’m sure the baby won’t mind a wee dram or two. Might as well get him or her used to the stuff at an early age!’
Cleo handed him a tumbler. ‘Cheers, big ears,’ she said.
Grace raised his glass. ‘Here goes, nose.’
‘Up your bum, chum!’ she completed the toast.
He drained his glass. Then they stared at each other. Outside, Humphrey was still howling. Him or her. He hadn’t thought about that. Was it a boy or a girl? He didn’t mind. He would worship that child. Cleo would be a wonderful mother, he knew that, unquestionably. But would he be a good father? Then he followed Cleo’s gaze across at the mess.
‘Want me to clear up?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. Then she kissed him very slowly and very sensually on the lips. ‘I’m badly in need of an orgasm. Do you think you might be up for that?’
‘Just one? Could do that with my eyes shut.’
‘Bastard.’
23
Vlad Cosmescu chewed his gum, his eyes following the ivory ball skittering across the trivets of the roulette wheel. It made a steady rattling sound at first, then clack-clack-clacked as the wheel slowed, followed by sudden silence as it dropped into a slot.
24. Black.
Adjusting his aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose, he stared with a satisfied smile at his stack of £5 chips straddling the line between 23 and 24, then watched the croupier scoop away the losing chips from other numbers and combinations, including several of his own. Shooting his cuff, he glanced at his watch and observed that it was ten past twelve. So far it was not going well; he was down £1,800, close to his self-imposed limit for a night’s outlay. But maybe, with this win on his Tier strategy, his second in two consecutive spins, his luck was turning.
Cosmescu stacked half his winnings with the rest of his remaining chips, then joined in with the other players at the table – the reckless Chinese woman who had been playing all the time he had been there, and several others who had recently arrived – in laying out their new bets. By the time the wheel had been spinning for several seconds and the croupier had called out ‘No more bets’, almost every number was covered in chips.
Cosmescu always used the same two systems. For safety he played the Tier, betting on the numbers which made up a one-third arc of the wheel opposite zero. You would not win a lot with this system, but normally you didn’t lose a lot either. It was a strategy that enabled him to stay at the table for hours, while he worked on refining his own system, which he had been developing patiently over some years. Cosmescu was a very patient man. And he always planned everything with extreme care, which was why the phone call he was about to get would upset him so much.
His system was based on a combination of mathematics and probability. On a European roulette table there were thirty-seven numbers. But Cosmescu knew that the odds against all thirty-seven of those numbers coming up on thirty-seven consecutive spins of the wheel were millions to one against. Some numbers would come up twice, or three, or even four times within a few spins, and sometimes even more than that, while others would not come up at all. His strategy, therefore, was only to bet on numbers, and combinations of numbers, that had already come up, as some of those, for sure, would be coming up again.
Looking at the number 24 again, he pressed his big toe down twice on the pressure pad inside his right boot, then he pressed six times inside his left boot. Later, when he got home, he would download the data from the memory chip in his pocket into his computer.
The system was still a long way from perfect and he continued to lose on plenty of occasions, but the losses were getting smaller, in general, and less frequent. He was sure he was close to cracking it. Then, if he did, he would make his fortune. And then . . . well, he would not need to be anyone’s hired lackey. Besides, hey, if he didn’t, it all helped to pass the time. He had plenty of that on his hands. Too much.
He lived a lonely life in this city. He worked from his apartment, a big glass and steel place, high up, central, and he kept himself to himself, deliberately not mixing with others. He waited for his orders from his overlord, then, when he carried them out, he would wash some of the cash here in the casino, as instructed. It was a good arrangement. His sef, or boss, needed someone he could trust, someone who was tough enough to do the jobs but would not try to rip him off. And they both spoke the same language.
Two languages, in fact. Romanian and Money.
Vlad Cosmescu had few interests outside money. He never read books or magazines. Occasionally he’d watch an action film on television. He thought the Bourne films were OK, and he liked The Transporter series too, because he identified with Jason Statham’s loner character in those. He watched the occasional sex film too, if he was with one of his girls. And he worked out, two hours a day, in a large gym. But everything else bored him, even eating. Food was simply fuel, so he ate when he needed to, and just sufficient, never more. He had no interest in the taste of food and did not understand the British obsession with cookery shows on television.
He liked casinos because of the money. You could see it in casinos, you could breathe it, smell it, hear it, touch it, and you could even taste it in the air. That taste was more delicious than any food he had ever eaten. Money brought you freedom, power. The ability to do something about your life and your family’s life.
It had given Cosmescu the ability to take his handicapped sister, Lenuta, out of a camin spital, a state home-hospital tucked away in the village of Plataresti, twenty-five miles north-east of Bucharest, and into a beautiful home
in hills above Montreux in Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva.
When he had first seen her, ten years ago, after a lot of enquiries and a lot of bribes to find her, she was classed as an irrecupable. She was lying in an old, caged cot, eleven years old, eating only milk and crushed grain. With her skeletal figure and pot belly from starvation, and ragged strip of cloth as a nappy, she looked like a victim in a concentration camp.
There were thirty cots in that cramped room, with vertical bars, side by side and jammed next to each other, like animal cages in a laboratory. The stench of vomit and diarrhoea was overpowering. He watched stronger children, all retarded in some way, all still on the same bottled milk with crushed grain, despite the fact that some were in their mid-teens, if not older, swigging their liquid food then sticking their arms through the bars of their cages and taking the bottles from the younger, weaker ones – and being ignored by the solitary carer, who sat in her office, unqualified and unable to cope.
As the ball rattled over the metal slots of the wheel again, Cosmescu’s mobile phone, on silent, vibrated. He slipped it out of his pocket, at the same time clocking the winning number, 19. Shit. That was a bad number for him, a total loss on that one. He moved a short distance from the table, entering the number with his toes, and looked at the display. It was a text from the sef.
Want to speak right now.
Cosmescu slipped out of the casino and crossed the car park, making his way towards the Wetherspoon’s pub, where he knew there was a payphone downstairs. When he reached it, he texted its number on his mobile phone, then waited. Less than a minute later, it rang. It was noisy in the packed pub and he had to hold the phone close to his ear.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘You’ve screwed up,’ the voice at the other end said. ‘Big time.’
Cosmescu talked for several minutes before returning to his table at the casino. When he did so, his concentration was gone. His losses increased, passing his limit, growing to £2,300 and then £2,500. But instead of stopping, anger drove him. Anger and gambler’s folly.
By twenty past three in the morning, when he finally decided to call it quits, he was just over £5,000 down. His worst loss ever on a single night.
Despite that, he still tipped the coat-check girl and the valet-parking guy their regular, crisp, fresh £10 note each.
24
Roy Grace, dressed in his tracksuit, baseball cap and jogging shoes, let himself out of Cleo’s front door just before half past five. In the glow of the street lights, the pre-dawn darkness was an amber mist and a cold wind blew salty drizzle on to his face.
He was burning with excitement and had barely slept, thinking about Cleo and the baby growing inside her. It was an incredible feeling. If he had been asked to put it into words he could not, at this moment, have done so. He felt a strange sense of empowerment, or responsibility, and, for the first time in his career, a shift in his priorities.
He walked across the yard and let himself out of the gate, glancing up and down the street, checking for anything that might look wrong. Every police officer he had ever met was the same. After a few years of being in the force you automatically clocked everything around you, constantly, whether you were in a street, a shop or a restaurant. Grace jokingly called it a healthy culture of suspicion, and there were plenty of times in his career when that had served him well.
As he set off on this late November Thursday morning, feeling more protective of Cleo than ever, nothing he saw on the deserted streets of Brighton aroused any suspicion in him. Ignoring the pain in his back and ribs from his car roll-over, he ran along the narrow pedestrianized cobbles of Kensington Gardens, past its cafés and boutiques, a second-hand furniture store and an antiques and bric-à-brac market, then along Gardner Street, past Luigi’s, one of the shops where Glenn Branson, his self-appointed style guru, insisted on taking him from time to time to spruce up his wardrobe.
As he reached deserted North Street, he saw headlights and heard the roar of a powerful engine. Moments later a black Mercedes SL sports coupé flashed past, its driver barely visible through the darkened windows. A tall, lean male figure was the sense of him that Grace got, but that was all. He wondered what the man was doing out at this hour. Returning from a party? Rushing to a ferry port or airport? You didn’t see many expensive cars this early in the morning. Mostly it was the cheaper cars and vans of manual workers. There were, of course, any number of legitimate reasons why the Mercedes would be on the road, but all the same he memorized the number: GX57 CKL.
Crossing over, he ran on through the narrow streets and alleys of the Lanes and then finally reached the seafront promenade. It was deserted except for a solitary man walking an elderly, plump dachshund. Limping less as he warmed up, he ran down the ramp, past the front of a large nightclub, the Honey Club, which was dark and silent, then stopped for some moments and touched his toes several times. Then he stood still, breathing in the tangs of the beach, of salt, oil, putrid fish, boat varnish and rotting weed, listening to the roar and sucking of the sea. The drizzle felt like cooling spray against his face.
This was one of the places he loved most in the city, down at sea level. Especially now, early morning, when it was deserted. The sea had a hold on him. He loved all of its sounds, smells, colours and changing moods; and especially the mysteries it contained, the secrets it sometimes yielded, such as the body last night. He could never imagine living somewhere landlocked, miles away from the sea.
The Palace Pier, one of the great landmarks of the city, was still lit up. New owners had changed its name to Brighton Pier a few years back, but to him and to thousands in the city it would always be the Palace Pier. Tens of thousands of bulbs burned along its length, along the rooftops of its structures, making the helter-skelter look like a beacon rising into the sky, and he wondered, suddenly, how long it would be before the pier was obliged to switch everything off at night to save energy.
He turned left and ran towards it, and then into the shadows beneath its dark, girdered mass – the place where, twenty years ago, he and Sandy had had their first kiss. Would his child one day kiss his – or her – first date here too, he wondered, as he emerged on the far side. He covered a further half-mile, then headed back to Cleo’s house. A short circuit today, just over twenty minutes, but it left him feeling refreshed and energized.
Cleo and Humphrey were still asleep. He had a quick shower, microwaved the bowl of porridge Cleo had left out for him, gulped it down while flicking through the pages of yesterday’s Argus, then headed off to the office, pulling into his parking space at the front of Sussex House, the CID headquarters, at a quarter to seven.
If he didn’t get interrupted, he would have a clear hour and a half to deal with his overnight emails and the most urgent of the paperwork before heading to the mortuary for the post-mortem on the Unknown Male, as the body hauled up by the dredger was named at this moment.
First he logged on to the computer and ran his eye over the overnight serials. It had been a quiet night. Among the highlights were a street robbery on a male in Eastern Road, an office break-in, a drunken brawl at a wake at a council estate in Moulescoomb, a trailer overturned on the A27, and six cars broken into in Tidy Street. He paused to read that item thoroughly, as it was just around the corner from Cleo’s home, but the report did not say much. He moved on to a fight at a bus stop on the London Road in the early hours, then the reported theft of a moped.
All minor stuff, he noted as he continued, scanning the entire list. Moments later he heard his door open, followed by an all-too-familiar voice.
‘Yo, old-timer! You come in early, or are you just leaving for the night?’
‘Very funny,’ Grace said, looking up at his friend – and now permanent lodger – Glenn Branson, who looked, like he always did, as if he was all suited and booted to go partying. Tall, black, his shaved head shiny as a snooker ball, the Detective Sergeant was a sharp dresser. Today he wore a shiny grey three-piece suit, a grey and wh
ite striped shirt, black loafers and a crimson silk tie. He was holding a mug of coffee in his hand.
‘Heard you were bigging it up with the new CC last night,’ Branson said. ‘Or should I say brown-nosing?’
Grace smiled. He’d been so excited by Cleo’s news that he had struggled to think of anything intelligent to say to the Chief Constable when he’d finally had a few moments with him at the party, and he knew he had failed to make the impression on him that he had hoped for. But that didn’t matter. Cleo was pregnant! Carrying their child. Did anything else really matter? He would have loved to tell Glenn the news, but he and Cleo had agreed last night to keep it quiet. Six weeks was too soon; a lot could happen. So instead he said, ‘Yep, and he’s very concerned about you.’
‘Me?’ Glenn said, looking worried suddenly. ‘Why? What did he say?’
‘It was something about your music. He said that anyone with your taste in music would make a crap police officer.’
For a moment, the DS frowned again. Then he jabbed a finger towards Grace. ‘You bastard!’ he said. ‘You’re winding me up, right?’
Grace grinned. ‘So, what news? When do I get my house back?’
Branson’s face fell. ‘You throwing me out?’
‘I could murder a coffee. You could make me a coffee in lieu of the next month’s rent. Deal?’
‘Bargain. Could have this one but it’s got sugar in it.’
Grace wrinkled his face in disapproval. ‘Kills you, that stuff.’
‘Yeah, well, sooner the better,’ Branson said bleakly, and disappeared.
Five minutes later Branson was sitting on one of the chairs in front of the Detective Superintendent’s desk, cradling his mug of coffee. Grace peered dubiously at his. ‘Did you put sugar in this?’
‘Oh shit! I’ll make you another.’
‘No, it’s OK. I won’t stir it.’ Grace stared at his friend, who looked terrible. ‘Did you remember to feed Marlon?’