Dead Man's Footsteps

by Peter James

  ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ finished and they sat in silence for a while.

  Glenn broke it. ‘You know we haven’t had sex, right?’

  ‘Not since you went back to her?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not once?’

  ‘Not once. It’s like she’s trying to punish me.’

  ‘For what?’

  Branson drained his pint, blinked at the empty glass and stood up. ‘N’other?’

  ‘Just a single,’ he said, mindful that he had to drive.

  ‘Usual? Glenfiddich on the rocks. Tiniest bit of water?’

  ‘So your memory hasn’t gone?’

  ‘Fuck off, old-timer!’

  Grace thought hard for a few moments, his mind back on his work. Chewing over the 6.30 briefing meeting they’d just had. Joanna Wilson. Ronnie Wilson. He knew Ronnie from a long time back. One of Brighton’s rogues. So Ronnie had died in 9/11. Events like that were so random. Had Ronnie killed his wife? His team were on the case. Tomorrow they would start checking into the man’s background, and his wife’s.

  Branson returned and sat back down.

  ‘What do you mean, Glenn, that Ari’s trying to punish you?’

  ‘When Ari and me met, we shagged all day. You know? We’d wake up and shag. Go out somewhere, get an ice cream maybe, and we’d fool around. Shag again in the evening. Kind of like it wasn’t the real world.’ He drank some more of his beer, almost half the glass, straight down. ‘OK, I know you can’t maintain that for ever.’

  ‘It was the real world,’ Roy said. ‘But the real world doesn’t stay the same. My mother used to say that life is like a series of chapters in a book. Different things happen at different times. Life changes constantly. You know one of the secrets of a happy marriage?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t be a police officer.’

  ‘Funny. Ironic, isn’t it, that’s what she wanted me to be.’ He shook his head. ‘What I don’t get is why she’s angry all the time. At me. You know what she said this morning?’

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘She said that I deliberately keep her awake, right? Like, when I get up in the night to go to the toilet, you know, have a piss, that I deliberately aim into the water so it makes a splashing sound. She said that if I really loved her, I would pee on the side of the bowl.’

  Grace tipped the contents of the new glass into his existing one. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I’m serious, man. There’s nothing I can do right. She’s, like, told me she needs her space, and screw my career as a policeman. She’s gonna go out in the evenings, she’s not prepared to be tied to the kids, and it’s my responsibility. If I have to work lates, then I have to find babysitters.’

  Grace sipped his drink and wondered if perhaps Ari was having an affair. But he didn’t want to upset his friend further by suggesting it.

  ‘You can’t live like this,’ he said.

  Branson picked up his packet of crisps and turned it over and over in his hands. ‘I love my kids,’ he said. ‘I can’t go through some divorce shit and, like, see them for a few hours once a month.’

  ‘How long has it been like this?’

  ‘Ever since she got this bug in her head about self-improvement. Mondays she does evening classes in English literature, Thursdays she does architecture. And all kinds of other shit in between. I don’t know her any more – I can’t reach her.’

  They sat in silence for a while before Branson mustered a cheerful smile and said, ‘Anyhow my shit to deal with, right?’

  ‘No,’ Roy replied, even though he knew that if Ari threw Glenn out again, he’d be lumbered once more with the lodger from hell. He’d had Glenn to stay a couple of months ago and the house would have been tidier if he’d had an elephant high on magic mushrooms come to stay. ‘I sort of feel we are in this together.’

  For the first time that evening, Glenn smiled. Then he finally ripped open his packet of crisps, peering inside with a faint look of disappointment, as if he had been expecting it to be filled with something else.

  ‘So, what’s happening with Cassian Pewe – sorry, Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe?’

  Grace shrugged.

  ‘Is he eating your lunch?’

  Grace smiled. ‘I think that was his game plan. But we’ve put him back in his box.’

  50

  OCTOBER 2007

  Cassian Pewe took another tentative sip of his tea, wincing as the hot liquid touched his teeth. Last night he had slept with whitening gel on them and today they were sensitive to extremes of temperature.

  Putting the cup down in the saucer, he said to Sandy’s parents, ‘I do want to make one thing clear. Detective Superintendent Grace is a well-respected police officer. I have no agenda other than to discover the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.’

  ‘We need to know,’ Derek Balkwill said.

  His wife nodded. ‘That’s the only thing that matters to us.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s very reassuring to know we are all on the same page.’ He smiled at them. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘without wanting to cast any aspersions, there are a number of senor officers in the Sussex CID who feel that a proper investigation has never been carried out. This is one of the main reasons I have been drafted in.’

  Pausing, he was satisfied by their receptive nods, and a little emboldened. ‘I’ve been studying the case file all day today and there are many unanswered questions. I think, if I was in your shoes, I would be feeling less than satisfied with the work of the police to date.’

  They both nodded again.

  ‘I really don’t understand why Roy was allowed to review the investigation himself, when he was so personally involved.’

  ‘We understand there was an independent team appointed a few days after our daughter disappeared,’ Margot Balkwill said.

  ‘And who was it who reported their findings to you?’ Cassian Pewe asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was Roy.’

  Pewe opened his arms. ‘There, you see, is the problem. Normally when a wife goes missing, her husband is instantly the prime suspect, until cleared. From what I have read and heard, it doesn’t seem to me that your son-in-law was ever formally regarded as a suspect.’

  ‘Are you saying that you regard him as a suspect now?’ Derek asked.

  He picked up his teacup and again Pewe noticed the tremor. He wondered whether the man was nervous or it was the onset of Parkinson’s.

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, at this stage.’ Pewe smiled smugly. ‘But I’m certainly going to take radical steps to eliminate him from suspicion – which is something that has clearly not yet been done.’

  Margot Balkwill was nodding. ‘That would be good.’

  Her husband nodded, also.

  ‘Can I ask you both a very personal question? Has either of you ever, for a moment, suspected that Roy might be hiding something from you?’

  There was a long silence. Margot furrowed her eyebrows, pursed her lips, then clenched and opened her hands several times. They were coarse hands, Pewe noticed, a gardener’s hands. Her husband sat still, his shoulders hunched, as if being slowly crushed by a huge, unseen weight.

  ‘I think you should understand,’ Margot Balkwill said, ‘that we don’t have any animosity towards Roy.’ She spoke like a schoolmistress delivering a report to a parent.

  ‘None,’ Derek said emphatically.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘a little bit of you can’t help wondering … Human nature. How well do any of us really know anyone. Isn’t that right, Officer?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Pewe agreed silkily.

  In the silence that followed Margot Balkwill picked up her spoon and stirred her tea. Pewe noticed that although she didn’t take sugar, this was the third time now she had stirred it. ‘Was there ever anything you noticed in the way Roy treated your daughter,’ he asked. ‘Anything that bothered you? I mean, would you say they had a happy marriage?’

 
‘Well, I don’t think it’s easy for anyone being married to a police officer. Particularly an ambitious one like Roy.’ She looked at her husband, who shrugged assent. ‘She had to put up with being on her own a lot. And being disappointed at the last minute when he got called out.’

  ‘Did she have her own career?’

  ‘She worked for a travel agent in Brighton for a few years. But they were trying for a child and nothing was happening. The doctor told her she should do something less stressful. So she left, got a part-time job as a receptionist at a medical centre. She was between jobs when she …’ Her voice tailed off.

  ‘Disappeared?’ Pewe prompted.

  She nodded, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘It’s been hard on us,’ Derek said. ‘Particularly hard on Margot. She and Sandy were very close.’

  ‘Of course.’ Pewe pulled out his notebook and made some jottings. ‘How long were they trying for a child?’

  ‘Several years,’ Margot replied, her voice choked.

  ‘I understand that’s hard on a marriage,’ Pewe said.

  ‘Everything’s hard in a marriage,’ Derek said.

  There was a long silence.

  Margot sipped her tea, then asked, ‘Are you implying there is more behind this than we’ve been told?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t want to speculate at this stage. I simply have to say that the methodology underpinning the investigation of your daughter’s disappearance is, in my view as an officer of some nineteen years’ experience in the top police force in the UK, wanting. That’s all.’

  ‘We don’t suspect Roy,’ Margot Balkwill said. ‘Just so you don’t jump to the wrong conclusions.’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. Perhaps I should make one thing clear from the outset. My investigation is not a witch hunt. It is merely about closure. Enabling you and your husband to move on.’

  ‘That will depend, won’t it, on whether our daughter is alive or dead?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Cassian Pewe said. He drank some more of his tea, then cleaned his teeth with his tongue. He pulled his card from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘If there is anything, at any time, you think of that might be helpful for me to know, call me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Margot Balkwill said. ‘You are a good man. I can feel it.’

  Pewe smiled.

  51

  OCTOBER 2007

  Abby blinked, waking up from a confusing dream to a strange whirring sound. Her stomach was hurting. Her face felt numb. She was freezing cold. Shivering. Staring at cream wall tiles. For a moment she thought she was in a plane, or was it a cabin on a ship?

  Then the steady, slow realization that something was very wrong. She couldn’t move. She smelled plastic, grout, tile cement, disinfectant.

  Now it was coming back. And with an explosion of swirling darkness inside her, she remembered.

  Fear shimmied through her. She tried to raise her right arm to touch her face. And that was when she realized she couldn’t move.

  Or open her mouth.

  Her head was pulled back so much her neck was hurting and something hard was sticking into her back. It was the cistern, she realized. She was seated on the lavatory. It was hard to see anything except straight ahead and she had to strain her eyes to look down. When she did, she became aware she was naked, bound with grey gaffer tape around her midriff, her breasts, her wrists and ankles, her mouth and, she assumed, because that was what it felt like, her forehead.

  She was in the guest shower room of her flat. Staring at the walk-in shower cabinet, with a packet of expensive soap, never unwrapped, in the dish, a sink and a few towel rails, and the beautifully tiled walls, in cream with Romanesque tiles and a dado rail. There was a door to her right, through to the tiny utility room, in which were crammed a washing machine and tumble dryer, and at the back of which was a fire escape door out on to the stairwell. The main door out on to the hallway, to her left, was ajar.

  She began to shake, then nearly vomited with fear. She didn’t know for how long she had been imprisoned in here, in this small, windowless room. She tried to shift her position, but the bindings were too secure.

  Had he gone? Taken everything and just left her here like this?

  Her stomach was hurting. The tape had been put on so tightly, she was losing feeling in some parts, and had pins and needles in her right hand. The hard seat was digging into her bum and thighs.

  She was trying to remember what was behind the toilet, so that she could work out what the tape was fixed to behind her. But she couldn’t picture it.

  The light was on, which kept the extractor fan running, she realized, making that steady, gloomy whirr.

  Her fear turned to despair. He had gone. After all that she’d been through, and now this. How had she let this happen? How had she been so stupid? How? How? How?

  Her despair turned to anger.

  Then back to fear again as she saw a shadow moving.

  52

  11 SEPTEMBER 2001

  Seated on the edge of the L-shaped sofa in the living room, Lorraine unscrewed the cap of a miniature vodka bottle and tipped the contents over the ice cubes and lime slice in her glass. Her sister had come round earlier with an entire plastic bag full of miniatures. Mo seemed to have a never-ending supply and Lorraine assumed she snaffled them from the bar of whatever flight she was on.

  It was 9 o’clock. Almost dark outside. The news was still on. Lorraine had been watching it, through her tears, all day. The repeat images of the horror, repeat statements of the politicians. Now there was a group of people in a studio in Pakistan: a doctor, an IT consultant, a lawyer, a vociferous woman television documentary maker, a company director. Lorraine could not believe her ears. They were saying what had happened today in America was a good thing.

  She leaned forward and crushed out her cigarette into an ashtray that was overflowing with butts. Mo was in the kitchen making a salad and heating up some pasta. Lorraine looked at these people, listening to them, bewildered. They were intelligent people. One of them was laughing. There was joy on his face.

  ‘It’s about time the United States of America realized they need to stop beating up on the rest of the world. We don’t want their values. Today they’ve learned that lesson. Today it was their turn to have a bloody nose!’

  The woman documentary maker nodded and expanded his argument forcefully.

  Lorraine looked at the phone handset beside her. Ronnie had not called. Thousands of people were dead. These people were happy? People jumping out of skyscrapers. A bloody nose?

  She picked up the phone handset, pressed it to her sodden cheeks. Call, Ronnie darling, call. Please call. Please call.

  Mo had always been protective towards Lorraine. Although only three years older, she treated her as if there was a whole generation between them.

  They were actually very different people. Not just their hair colouring – Mo’s was almost jet black – and appearance, but their their attitude to life and their luck. Mo had a shapely, rounded, naturally voluptuous figure. She was gentle. Life fell into her lap. Lorraine suffered five years of humiliating, cripplingly expensive – and ultimately unsuccessful – in vitro fertilization treatment. Mo could get pregnant by just thinking about her husband’s dick.

  Mo’d had three children, one after the other, who were all growing up into nice people. She was happy with her quiet, unassuming draughtsman husband and her small, pleasant home. Sometimes Lorraine wished she could be like her. Content. Instead of the yearnings – cravings – she had for a better lifestyle.

  ‘Lori!’ Mo shouted excitedly from the kitchen.

  She came running into the room and, for a moment, Lorraine’s hopes soared. Had she glimpsed Ronnie on the news?

  But Mo’s face was a mask of shock as she appeared. ‘Quick! Someone’s stealing your car!’

  Lorraine leaped off the sofa, jammed her feet into her loafers, ran to the front door and pulled it open. There was a low-loader truck with amber flashing light
s on the roof, parked just past her short driveway. Two men, rough-looking types, were winching her convertible BMW up metal ramps on to the truck.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted, running down towards them, livid. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  They carried on winching up the car, which moved steadily forward, jerking along the ramp. As Lorraine approached, the taller one stuffed a grimy hand into his front pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. ‘Are you Mrs Wilson?’

  Uneasy, suddenly, her confidence eroding, she replied, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your husband is Mr Ronald Wilson?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’ Her defiance was returning.

  He showed her the documents. Then, his tone softening, almost apologetic, he said, ‘Inter-Alliance Autofinance. I’m afraid we are repossessing this vehicle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No payments have been made for six months. Mr Wilson’s in breach of the terms.’

  ‘There must be a mistake.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Your husband’s ignored three warning letters that have been sent to him. Under the terms of the hire purchase, the company is legally entitled to repossess this vehicle.’

  Lorraine burst into tears as the rear wheels of the blue BMW went over the top of the ramp and on to the flatbed. ‘Please – you’ve seen the news today. My husband is there. He’s in – in New York. I’m trying to get hold of him. I’m sure we can sort this out.’

  ‘He’ll have to speak to the company tomorrow, madam.’ There was some sympathy in the man’s voice, but he was firm.

  ‘Look – I – please leave the car here tonight.’

  ‘I’ll give you a number you can call tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘But – but – I’m won’t have a car. How am I supposed to manage? I – I’ve got things in the car. CDs. Parking vouchers. My sunglasses.’