by Peter James
‘Hey! I have to read – this CPS report – I—’
‘You’re so boring, Grace. You always have to read! We’re in Paris! Having a romantic weekend! Don’t you fancy me any more?’ She kissed his forehead. ‘Read, read, read! Work, work, work!’ She kissed his forehead again. ‘So boring, boring, boring!’
She danced back, away from his outstretched arms, taunting him. She was wearing a skimpy sundress, her breasts almost falling out of the top. He caught a glimpse of her long, tanned legs as the hem rode up her thighs and suddenly he felt very horny.
She stood over him, moving closer, taking him in her hand. ‘Is that all for me, Grace? I love it! That’s what I call a real hard!’
The brilliance of sunlight was suddenly making her face difficult to see. Then all her features were gone completely and he was staring at a blank, black oval that was framed with flowing gold hair, like a moon eclipse of the sun. He felt a stab of panic, unable for a split second even to recall what she looked like.
Then he could see her clearly again.
He grinned. ‘I love you more than anything in—’
Then it felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. The temperature dropped. The colour faded from her face, as if she was sick, dying.
He threw his arms around her neck, holding her tightly to him. ‘Sandy!’ he said urgently. ‘Sandy, darling!’
She smelled strange. Her skin was hard, suddenly, not Sandy’s soft skin. She smelled rancid. Of decay and soil and bitter oranges.
Then the light went completely, as if someone had pulled out a plug.
Roy heard the echo of his voice in cold, empty air.
‘Sandy!’ he shouted, but the sound stayed trapped in his throat.
Then the light came back on. The stark light of the postmortem room. He stared into her eyes again. And screamed.
He was staring into the eyes of a skull. Holding a skeleton in his arms. A skull with perfect teeth that was grinning at him.
‘SANDY!’ he screamed. ‘SANDY!’
Then the light changed. Soft yellow. A bedspring creaked. He heard a voice.
‘Roy?’
Cleo’s voice.
‘Roy? You awake?’
He stared at the ceiling, confused, blinking, in a river of sweat.
‘Roy?’
He was shaking. ‘I – I—’
‘You were shouting so loudly.’
‘Sorry. I’m sorry.’
Cleo sat up, her long blonde hair tumbling all around her face, which was pale with sleep and shock. Leaning on one arm, she looked at him with a strange expression, as if he had hurt her. He knew what she was going to say even before she spoke again.
‘Sandy.’ Her voice full of reproach. ‘Again.’
He stared up at her. The same hair colouring as Sandy, the same eye colour – perhaps a touch more grey in the blue than Sandy. A touch more steel. He’d read that people who were bereaved or divorced often fell in love with someone who looked like their wife. That thought had never struck him until now. But they didn’t look the same, not at all. Sandy was pretty but softer, not classically beautiful in the way that Cleo was.
He stared at the white ceiling and white walls of Cleo’s bedroom. Stared at the black lacquered-wood dressing table that was badly cracked. She didn’t like coming to his house, because she felt too much of Sandy’s presence there, preferring them to spend their time together here, in her place.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a bad dream. A nightmare.’
She stroked his cheek tenderly. ‘Maybe you should go back to that shrink you used to see.’
He just nodded, and eventually fell back into an uneasy, restless sleep, scared that he might dream again.
12
OCTOBER 2007
The spasms were getting worse – more and more painful, and they were happening at increasingly frequent intervals. Every few minutes now. Maybe this was what giving birth was like.
Her watch said 3.08 a.m. Abby had been in this lift for nearly nine hours now. Maybe she would be here until Monday, if it didn’t break free and plunge to the ground first.
Oh, fucking great. How was your weekend? I spent mine in a lift. It was cool. It had a mirror and a panel of buttons and a dirty glass roof with light bulbs and a scratch on the wall that looked like someone had started out carving a swastika but changed their mind – and a printed sign by some dumb fuckwit who couldn’t spell – and clearly couldn’t maintain the fucking thing properly either.
WHEN BROKE DOWN
CALL 013 228 7828
OR DIAL 999
She was shaking with anger and her throat was parched, raw from shouting, her voice gone almost completely. After a rest she hauled herself to her feet once more. She was beyond caring about shaking the thing and dislodging it – she had to get out, rather than just wait for the cable to snap or the shackles to shear, or whatever else might cause her to plunge to her death.
‘I’m trying, you stupid bastards,’ she croaked, staring at the sign, feeling the walls closing in around her again, another panic attack coming on.
The lift’s phone was still dead. She held her mobile close to her face, breathing deeply, trying to calm herself down, willing a signal to appear, cursing her service provider, cursing everything. Her scalp was so tight around her skull it was blurring her vision and the damn urge to pee was coming again now. Coming like a train, hurtling through her insides.
Pressing her knees together, she sucked in air. Her thighs, locked against each other, were quivering. She felt an agonizing pain in her belly, as if a hot knife blade had been pushed deep inside her and was now being twisted. She whimpered, gulping down air, her whole body shaking, doubling up into a foetal ball against the wall. She wasn’t going to be able to hold out much longer, she knew.
But she persevered, clenching – mind over matter – fighting her own body, determined not to succumb to anything it wanted to do that her brain did not. She thought about her mother, who had been incontinent with multiple sclerosis from her late fifties.
‘I am not bloody incontinent. Just get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here.’ She hissed it under her breath like a mantra until the urge peaked and then slowly, so damned slowly, began to recede.
Finally, blissfully, it had passed and she slid back down on to the floor exhausted, wondering how long you could stop yourself from peeing before your bladder ruptured.
People survived in the desert sometimes by drinking their urine. Maybe she could urinate into one of her boots, she thought wildly. Use it as a container. Emergency drinking supply? How long could you last without water? She seemed to remember having read somewhere that a human could last weeks without food but only a few days without water.
Steadying herself on the swaying floor, she removed her right boot, then jumped up as high as she could, striking the roof panel with the Cuban heel. But it did no good. The lift just swayed crazily, banging and booming off the shaft again, throwing her sideways. She held her breath. This time – surely this time something was going to break. The last frayed strand of wire that stood between her and oblivion …
There were moments now when she actually wanted it to break. To drop however many floors were left. It would be a solution to everything. An inelegant one, sure, but a solution all the same. And how ironic would that be?
As if in answer to her question, the lights went out.
13
11 SEPTEMBER 2001
A house burned down one night in the street where Ronnie Wilson grew up, in Coldean in Brighton. He remembered the smell, the noise, the pandemonium, the fire engines, standing out in the darkness in his dressing gown and slippers, watching. He remembered being fascinated and afraid at the same time. But most of all he remembered the smell.
A horrible stench of destruction and despair.
There was the same smell in the air now. Not the pleasant, sweet aroma of wood smoke, or the snug cindery smell of coal, but a sharp, pungent stench o
f burning paint, charring paper, singeing rubber and acrid gases from melting vinyl and plastics. A choking reek that stung his eyes, that made him want to cover his nose, back off, get away, retrace his steps to the deli he had just left.
But instead he stood still.
Like everyone else.
A surreal moment of silence in the Manhattan morning, as if someone had hit the freeze-frame button on all the people in the street. Just the cars kept moving, then a red light stopped them too.
People stared. It took him some moments to see what they were staring at. At first he looked at ground level along the street, past a fire hydrant and trestle tables outside a store that were stacked with magazines and tourist guides, past the awning of a shop where a sign advertised BUTTER AND EGGS. He looked beyond an illuminated DON’T CROSS! red hand a little further on, and the gantry supporting a stop light suspended over the junction with Warren Street, and the row of backed-up traffic and glowing tail lights.
Then he realized that they were all gazing up.
Following their line of sight, at first all he saw, rising above the skyscrapers just a few blocks ahead of him, was a dense plume of black smoke, as thick as if it was coming from the chimney of a petrochemical refinery.
A building was on fire, he realized. Then, through his shock and horror, his heart sank as he realized which building. The World Trade Center.
Shit, shit, shit.
Chilled and confused like everyone else, he stood rooted to the spot, still not able to believe his eyes or comprehend what he was seeing.
The stop light turned green and, when the cars and vans and a truck started moving forward, he wondered if maybe the drivers hadn’t noticed, that perhaps they could not see up above the tops of their windscreens.
Then the plume thinned for a few moments, the smoke fanning out. Through it, standing tall and proud against the brilliant blue of the sky, was the black and white radio mast. The North Tower, he recognized, from a previous visit. He felt a flash of relief. Donald Hatcook’s office was in the South Tower. Good. OK. He would still be able to have his meeting.
He heard the wail of a siren. Then a whup-whup-whup, getting louder, deafeningly louder, echoing all around in the silence. He turned and saw a blue and white NYPD patrol car with three occupants, the guy in the back leaning forward, craning his neck upwards. It hurtled urgently past on the wrong side of the road, roof spinners showering red sparks on the doors of three yellow cabs in a row. Then, braking hard, tyres squealing, its nose dipping, it wormed its way through the intersection, between a bakery delivery truck, a halted Porsche and another yellow cab.
‘Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus! Oh, my God!’ a woman somewhere close behind him was saying. ‘Oh, my God, it hit the tower! Oh, my God!’
The siren receded into the distance, just audible above another long silence. Chambers Street had fallen quiet. It was empty, suddenly. Ronnie watched a man walk across. He was wearing a baseball cap, lightweight anorak and workman’s boots, and carrying a plastic bag which might have contained his lunch. He could hear the man’s footsteps. The man stared warily down the empty street, as if worried he might get run over by a second cop car.
But there was no second cop car. Just the silence. As if the one that had gone past was enough and could deal with the situation like it was some minor incident.
‘Did you see it?’ the woman behind him said.
Ronnie turned. ‘What happened?’
She had long brown hair and eyes that were bulging. Two bags of shopping lay on the sidewalk either side of her, cartons and tins of stuff spilled out.
Her voice was quivering. ‘A plane! Oh, Jesus, it was a fucking plane! It hit the fucking tower. I can’t believe what I saw. It was a plane. It hit the fucking tower!’
‘A plane?’
‘It hit the tower. It hit the fucking tower.’
She was obviously in shock.
There was another siren now. Different from the cop car, a deep honking sound. A fire tender.
This is great! he thought. Oh, this is just so bloody great! The morning I have my meeting with Donald, some fucking jerk crashes his plane into the fucking World Trade Center!
He looked at his watch. Shit! It was almost 8.55! He’d left the deli just after a quarter to – giving him plenty of time. Had he really stood here for ten minutes? Donald Hatcook’s snotty secretary told him he needed to be punctual, that Donald only had an hour before he needed to leave for the airport to catch a plane to somewhere – Wichita, he thought she’d said. Or maybe it was Washington. Just one hour. Just a one-hour window to pitch to him and save his business!
He heard another siren. Shit. There was going to be fucking chaos, for sure. The bloody emergency services might seal the whole area off. He had to get there before they did. Had to get to that meeting.
Have to.
There was no way he was letting some fucking jerk who crashed his plane bugger up his meeting!
Towing his bags behind him, Ronnie broke into a run.
14
OCTOBER 2007
There was an unpleasant smell in the storm drain that had not been here yesterday. A putrefying animal, probably a rodent. Roy had noticed it when he first arrived, shortly before 9 a.m., and now, an hour later, he wrinkled his nose as he re-entered the drain, holding two bulging carrier bags of hot drinks foraged from a nearby Costa by a young, eager-to-please Police Community Support Officer.
The rain drummed down relentlessly, turning the ground outside into more and more of a quagmire, but, Grace realized, there was still no rise in the water level here. He wondered how much rain that would take. From his memory of the body of a young man found in the Brighton sewer network some years ago, he knew that all the drains connected into a trunk sewer that flowed out into the sea at Portobello near Peacehaven. If this drain had flooded, then it was likely that much of the evidence, in particular the victim’s clothes, would have been washed away long back.
Ignoring a couple of sarcastic comments about his new role as tea boy, his nerves ragged from his disturbed night and troubled thoughts about the skeleton, Roy began distributing the teas and coffees to the team, as if by way of apology – or atonement – for ruining their weekend.
The storm drain was a hive of activity. Ned Morgan, the POLSA, several search-trained officers and SOCOs, all in white suits, were dispersed along the tunnel. They were searching inch by inch through the mulch for shoes, clothes, items of jewellery, any shred or scrap, however small, that might have been on the victim when she had been put down here. Leather and synthetics would have the best chance of surviving in this damp environment.
On their hands and knees in the gloomy brick drain, in the chiaroscuro of shadows and brightness thrown by the lights that had been rigged up at intervals, the team made an eerie sight.
Joan Major, the forensic archaeologist, who was also encased from head to foot in a white suit, was working in silent concentration. If this ever came to trial, she would have to present to the court an accurate 3-D model of the skeleton in situ. She had just finished darting in and out, struggling with the lack of signal for the hand-held GPS device she was using to pinpoint and log the coordinates of the remains, and was now sketching the exact position of the skeleton in relation to the drain and the silt. Every few moments the flash from a SOCO photographer’s camera strobed.
‘Thanks, Roy,’ she said almost absently, taking the large latte he handed her and setting it down on a wooden box full of her equipment that she had placed on a tripod structure to keep dry.
Grace had decided he would make do with a light team over the weekend and then gear up on Monday morning. To Glenn Branson’s immense relief, Grace had given him the weekend off. They were working in ‘slow time’; there wasn’t the urgency that would apply if the death had been more recent – days, weeks, months or even a couple of years. Monday morning would be soon enough for the first press conference.
Maybe he and Cleo could still make their dinner reservation
in London tonight and salvage something of the romantic weekend he had planned if – and it was a huge if – Joan got through her mapping and recovery process and the Home Office pathologist was able to do his post-mortem quickly. Some hope, he knew, with Frazer Theobald – and actually, where the hell was he? He should have been here an hour ago.
As if on cue, clad in white like everyone else in the drain, Dr Frazer Theobald made his entrance, warily, furtively, like a mouse scenting cheese. A stocky little man just under five feet two, he sported an untidy threadbare thatch of wiry hair and a thick Adolf Hitler moustache beneath a Concorde-shaped hooter of a nose. Glenn Branson had once said that all he needed was a fat cigar to be a dead ringer for Groucho Marx.
Muttering apologies about his wife’s car not starting and having had to take his daughter to a clarinet lesson, the pathologist scurried around the skeleton, giving it a wide berth and a suspicious glare, as if challenging it to declare itself friend or foe.
‘Yes,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Ah, right.’ Then he turned to Roy and pointed at the skeleton. ‘This is the body?’
Grace had always found Theobald a little peculiar, but never more so than at this moment. ‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat dumbfounded by the question.
‘You’re looking brown, Roy,’ the pathologist remarked, then took a step closer to the skeleton, so close he could have been asking it the question. ‘Been away?’
‘New Orleans,’ Grace replied, levering the top off his own latte and wishing he was still there now. ‘I was at the International Homicide Investigators’ Association Symposium.’
‘How’s the rebuilding going there?’ Theobald asked.