Looking Good Dead

by Peter James

  After checking a computer screen she replied, ‘Mr Jonas Smith?’

  ‘Um, right.’

  ‘Is he expecting you?’

  Yes, he sodding well is. ‘Um, right.’

  ‘May I have your name, sir. I will phone his room.’

  ‘Um, John Frost.’

  ‘One minute please, Mr Frost.’ She lifted a receiver and dialled a number. Moments later she said into the phone, ‘I have Mr John Frost in reception. May I send him up?’ After a brief pause she said, ‘Thank you,’ and replaced the receiver. Then she looked at the Weatherman again. ‘Number seven one four – on the seventh floor.’

  Staring down again at the American Express forms, he bit his lower lip, nodded, and then said, ‘Um, OK, right.’

  He took the elevator to the seventh floor, walked along the corridor and rapped on the door.

  It was opened by the Albanian, whose real name was Mik Luvic but who the Weatherman had to call Mick Brown – all in his view part of a ridiculous charade in which all of them, including himself, had to go under assumed names.

  The Albanian was a muscular man in his thirties with a lean, hard face set in a cocksure expression, and gelled spikes of short, fair hair. He was dressed in a gold-spangled black singlet, blue slacks and white loafers, and sported a heavy gold chain around his neck. His powerful bare shoulders and forearms were covered in tattoos, and he was mashing gum with sharp little incisors that reminded the Weatherman of a piranha fish he had once seen in the local aquarium.

  Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Oh, hi. I’ve come to see Mr Smith.’

  The Albanian, who had once made a living by illegal bare-knuckle and cage fighting but now had a cushier gig, stared at him for several seconds in silence, chewing continuously with his mouth open, then gestured him into a large suite which reeked of cigar smoke and was furnished in plush, ersatz Regency, and closed the door swiftly behind them. Pointing disinterestedly towards an open doorway, the Albanian turned his back on the Weatherman, strutted across the room, sat down on a chair and resumed watching a football game on a television.

  The Weatherman had met the Albanian on several occasions now, and had yet to hear him speak. He wondered sometimes if he was deaf and dumb, but didn’t think so. Walking through the doorway as he was bid, he entered a much larger room in the centre of which the grossly overweight Mr Smith was seated on a sofa, his back to the French windows which overlooked the sea, concentrating on a bank of four computer screens on the coffee table in front of him and biting at a fingernail as if he was chewing a chicken bone.

  He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt open to the navel, revealing folds of hairless, pale flesh that made him look as if he had breasts. The top of his blue slacks stretched across stubby legs the width of mature tree trunks. By contrast, his tiny feet, in monogrammed velvet Gucci slippers, without socks, seemed dainty, like dolls’ feet, and his head, coiffed with immaculate silver, wavy hair bunched into a short pigtail at the back, was even more out of proportion, as if it belonged to someone twenty sizes smaller. He had so many chins that until his minuscule mouth opened and the muscles around came into play it was hard for the Weatherman to see where his face ended and his neck began.

  ‘You want lunch, John?’ Jonas Smith said, in a sharp Louisiana drawl that contained not an ounce of warmth. He jabbed a porcine finger, the skin around the nails bitten raw in places, across at a room-service trolley laden with plates of sandwiches and aluminium food covers.

  Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Actually, I have my sandwich.’

  ‘Huh. You want a drink? Order yourself a drink and sit down.’

  ‘Thanks. Um, OK. Right. I don’t need a – um, drink. I – um . . .’ the Weatherman looked at his watch.

  ‘Then fucking sit down.’

  The Weatherman hesitated for a moment, contained his anger and moved towards the nearest chair.

  The American resumed gnawing on his nail and fixed his small, piggy eyes on the Weatherman, who unhitched his rucksack and perched himself on the edge of a chair, his eyes scanning the pile of the carpet as if searching for a pattern that was not there.

  ‘Coke? You want a Coke?’

  ‘Umm, actually, umm.’ The Weatherman looked at his watch again. ‘I have to be back by two.’

  ‘You’ll go back when I fucking tell you.’

  The Weatherman was hungry. He thought about his tofu and bean-shoot sandwich in the plastic box inside his rucksack. But the problem was he didn’t really like people watching him eat. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which helped with his anger. ‘Fisher, German Bight, south-west four or five, veering north-west, six to gale eight. Showers. Moderate or good.’ Opening his eyes again, he noticed a glass ashtray, containing a half-smoked cigar that had gone out, on the table next to the sofa.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mr Smith said. ‘What d’you say there?’

  ‘Shipping forecast. You might need it.’

  The American, whose real name was Carl Venner, stared at the geek, well aware that he was part genius, part two chips short of a circuit board. A hostile little fuckwit with a major attitude problem. He could handle that; he’d handled worse shit in his life. The thing was to remember that right now he was useful, and when he stopped being useful, nobody would miss him.

  ‘Appreciate you coming at such short notice,’ Venner said, his mouth forming a brief smile, but there was no thaw in his voice.

  ‘Um, right.’

  ‘We have a problem, John.’

  Nodding his head, the Weatherman said, ‘OK, right.’

  There was a long silence. Sensing someone behind him, he turned his head to see the Albanian had entered the room and was standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, watching him. Two other men had joined him, flanking him. The Weatherman knew they were both Russian, although he had never been introduced to them.

  They seemed to materialize out of the walls for every meeting he had with Venner but he hadn’t figured out where they fitted in. They were unsmiling, lean, sharp-faced, with topiaried hair and sharp black suits; business associates of some kind. They always made him feel uncomfortable.

  ‘You told me that our site was not hackable,’ Mr Smith said. ‘So you want to explain to Mr Brown and myself how come we got hacked last night?’

  ‘We have five firewalls. No one can hack us. I had an automatic alert come through within two minutes that we had someone making an illegal access, and I disconnected them.’

  ‘So how did he make that access?’

  ‘I don’t know; I’m working on it. At least,’ he added petulantly, ‘I was until you interrupted me and called me here. Could be a software glitch.’

  ‘I was eleven years head of network monitoring for Europe for US Military Intelligence, John. I know the difference between a software glitch and footprints. I’m looking at footprints here. Come and take a look.’ He pointed at one of the computer screens.

  The Weatherman walked round until he could see the screen. Rows of digits, all encrypted, ran down and across it. One group of letters was blinking. Studying the screen for some moments, he then carefully studied the other three screens. Then back to the first one, to the steady blink-blink-blink.

  ‘Um, there could be a number of reasons for this.’

  ‘There could be,’ the American agreed, impatiently. ‘But I’ve eliminated them. Which leaves us with just one possibility – someone unauthorized has gotten hold of a subscriber disc. So what I need you to do is provide us with the name and address of the subscriber who lost it, and this person who found it.’

  ‘I can give you the user ID of the subscriber – that will be on the login details. Um, the person who found it – er – um, might not be that easy.’

  ‘If he was able to find us, you’ll be able to find him.’ Mr Smith folded his hands, and his lips parted into a fleshy smile. ‘You have the resources. Use them.’

  8

  Roy Grace was in
a muddy field, waist-high in rape, in a white paper suit pulled on over his clothes, and protective overshoes. For some moments he just stood in the rain-spotted wind and watched an ant steadfastly making its way across the female human hand that was lying, palm down, among the stalks of brilliant yellow rape.

  Then he knelt and sniffed the flesh, flapping away a bluebottle. No smell came from the hand, which told him that it must be fresh – in this summer warmth probably less than twenty-four hours old.

  Years back, as a fledgling detective attending a murder scene – a young woman found raped and strangled in a churchyard in the centre of Brighton – he had been approached by an attractive young red-headed journalist on the Argus who had been hanging around outside the police cordon. She had asked him if he felt emotions when he attended a murder, or whether he regarded it as just doing his job, the way anyone else did any other kind of job.

  Although happily married to Sandy at the time, he had enjoyed his flirtatious chat with her and had not wanted to confess that this was actually the first murder he had ever attended. So, trying to be all macho he had told her that yes, it was a job, just a job, that was how he coped with the horror of murder scenes.

  Now he was thinking back to that moment.

  To that bravado lie.

  The truth was that the day he turned up to a murder scene and it felt no more than just doing a job, the day he did not care deeply for the victim, would be the day he would quit the force and do something else. And that day was still a long way off. Maybe it would eventually happen to him, the way it had happened to his dad and the way it seemed to happen to many of the old sweats on the force, but right now he was feeling a whole bellyful of the same emotions he had each time he came to a murder scene.

  It was a potent mixture of fear at what he was going to have to look at, and the awesome burden of responsibility that fell on his shoulders as Senior Investigating Officer – the knowledge that this dead woman, whoever she was, had parents, maybe siblings, maybe a husband or lover, maybe children. One of her loved ones would have to identify the body, and all of them, in a state of grief and shock, would have to be interrogated and eliminated from enquiries.

  The hand was elegant, long fingers, well kept nails, the bright pink varnish contrasting vividly with flesh that had turned the colour of alabaster, except for a long strip of dark, congealed blood in a gash that ran along the leading edge of her thumb and into her wrist. It looked like a defence wound. He wondered who she was, what kind of a person she was, what had led to this.

  The first twenty-four hours in a murder enquiry were key. After that, detection became increasingly slow and laborious. Over the following hours and days he knew he would have to drop just about everything else in his life for this enquiry. He would get to know as many details of her life and death that her body, her home, her personal effects, her family and friends could yield. It was likely he would end up knowing more about her than anyone who had known her when she was alive.

  The enquiry would be invasive and at times brutal. Death alone did a pretty thorough job of stripping away human dignity, but it had nothing on a police forensic investigation. And there was always the haunting sense that this dead person’s soul might – just might – be watching him.

  ‘This is where we think the hand came from, Roy.’ The bulky figure of Bill Barley, the local Detective Inspector from East Downs Division, made even bulkier-looking by his white oversuit billowing in the wind, stood beside him, pointing a latex-gloved finger across the field which he had diligently cordoned off at a site where several SOCO members, also in white suits, were busy erecting a square white tent.

  Beyond, at the edge of the field where he had parked, Grace could see yet another vehicle joining the cluster of marked and unmarked police cars, the dog-handler’s van, the photographer’s van and the tall, square truck-sized shape of the Major Incident Vehicle dwarfing everything.

  The Coroner’s black van hadn’t been summoned yet. Nor had the press been notified, but it wouldn’t be long before the first reporter arrived. Just like the blowflies.

  Barley was a true old sweat, in his fifties, with a bluff Sussex accent and a rubicund face lined with broken veins. Grace was impressed by the speed with which he had secured the area. The worst nightmare was to arrive at a murder scene where inexperienced officers had already trampled most of the evidence into the ground. The DI appeared to have this scene well under control.

  Barley covered the hand with some heavy-duty sheeting, then Grace followed him, stepping carefully in his tracks to disturb the ground as little as possible, glancing every few moments at a police Alsatian loping gracefully through the rape in the distance, until they reached the area where most of the activity was concentrated. Grace could see immediately why. In the centre, flattening a small area of the crop, was a large, crumpled black bin liner, with torn shreds jigging in a gust of wind, and several bluebottles flying around it.

  Grace nodded greetings at one of the SOCO officers, Joe Tindall, who he knew well. In his late thirties, Tindall used to look like a mad scientist, with a thatch of dull hair and bottle-lensed glasses, but had had a makeover since falling in love with a much younger girl. Now, inside his hooded white suit, he sported a completely shaven head, a quarter-inch-wide vertical strip of beard running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin, and hip rectangular glasses with blue-tinted lenses. He looked more like a drugs dealer than a boffin.

  ‘Morning, Roy.’ Tindall greeted him in his usual sarcastic tone. ‘Welcome to “One Thousand and One Things to Do with a Bin Liner on a Wednesday Morning in Peacehaven”.’

  ‘Been shopping, have you?’ Grace asked, nodding at the black plastic.

  ‘You can’t believe the things you can get with your Nectar points these days,’ Tindall said. Then he knelt and very carefully opened out the liner.

  Roy Grace had been in the police for nineteen years, the past fifteen of which he had spent investigating serious crimes, mostly murders. Although every death disturbed him, there wasn’t much any more that really shocked him. But the contents of the black bin liner did.

  It contained the torso of what had been clearly a young, shapely woman. It was covered in congealed blood, the pubic hairs so matted he couldn’t tell their colour, and almost every inch of her flesh had been pierced by some sharp instrument, probably a knife he thought, in a frenzy of stabbing. The head was absent and all four limbs had been severed. One arm and both legs were in the bag along with the body.

  ‘Jesus,’ Grace said.

  Even Tindall’s humour had dried up. ‘There’s some really sick bastard out there.’

  ‘Still no head?’

  ‘They’re looking.’

  ‘A pathologist’s been called?’

  Tindall waved away a couple of bluebottles. Some more appeared and Grace flapped those away, angrily. Bluebottles – blowflies – could smell decaying human flesh from five miles away. Short of a sealed container, it was impossible to keep them away from a body. But sometimes they were useful. Bluebottles laid eggs, which hatched into larvae, which became maggots and then bluebottles. It was a process which took only a few days. On a body that had not been discovered for weeks it was possible to work out roughly how long it had been dead from the number of generations of insect larvae infestation.

  ‘Someone’s called for a pathologist, I presume, Joe?’

  Tindall nodded. ‘Bill has.’

  ‘Nadiuska?’ Grace asked, hopefully.

  There were two Home Office pathologists who tended to be sent to murder scenes in this area, because they lived reasonably locally. The police favourite was Nadiuska De Sancha, a statuesque Spaniard of Russian aristocratic descent who was married to one of Britain’s leading plastic surgeons. She was popular because not only was she good at her job, and extremely helpful with it, but she was wonderful to look at. In her late forties, she could easily pass for a decade younger; whether her husband’s craftsmanship had had anything to
do with that was a matter of constant debate among all who worked with her – the speculation fuelled even more by the fact she invariably wore roll-neck tops, winter and summer.

  ‘No, luckily for her – Nadiuska doesn’t like multiple stabbings – it’s Dr Theobald. And there’s a police surgeon on his way as well.’

  ‘Ah,’ Grace said, trying not to let the disappointment show in his voice. No pathologist liked multiple stab wounds because each one had to be painstakingly measured. Nadiuska De Sancha was not just eye candy, she was fun to work with – flirtatious, a big sense of humour and fast in her work. By contrast, Frazer Theobald was, by general consensus, about as fun to be around as the corpses he examined. And slow. So painfully slow. But his work was meticulous and could never be faulted.

  And suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Grace could see the man’s diminutive frame, all in white and clutching his large bag, striding across the field towards them, his hooded head not that far above the top of the rape.

  ‘Good morning, all,’ the pathologist said, and exchanged latex-gloved handshakes with the trio.

  Dr Frazer Theobald was in his mid-fifties. A stockily built man a tad under five foot two inches tall with beady, nut-brown eyes, he sported a thick Adolf Hitler moustache beneath a Concorde-shaped hooter of a nose and an untidy, threadbare thatch of wiry hair. It would have not needed much more than a large cigar for him to have gone to a fancy dress party as a passable Groucho Marx. But Grace doubted Theobald was the kind of man ever to have contemplated attending something as frivolous as a fancy dress party. All he knew about the man’s private life was that he was married to a lecturer in microbiology, and that his main relaxation was solo dinghy sailing.

  ‘So, right, Detective Superintendent Grace,’ he said, his eyes fixing first on the remains inside the flapping sheets of the bin liner, then on the ground around. ‘Can you bring me up to speed?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Theobald.’ It was always formal with the pathologist for the first half-hour or so. ‘So far we have this dismembered torso of what looks like a young woman with multiple stab wounds.’ Grace looked at Barley as if for confirmation and the DI took over.