Looking Good Dead

by Peter James

  Two in succession contained decent repeat orders, which pleased him. One was from the marketing director of one of their major clients, thanking him personally for all his help in making their recent half-centenary such a success.

  Feeling distinctly cheered, he scanned the rest of the emails, filing some, deleting some and replying to others. Then another new one appeared.

  Dear Mr Bryce

  Last night you accessed a website you were unauthorized to visit. Now you have tried to access it again. We do not appreciate uninvited guests. If you inform the police about what you saw or if you ever try to access this site again, what is about to happen to your computer will happen to your wife, Kellie, to your son, Max, and to your daughter, Jessica. Take a good look, then have a hard think.

  Your friends at Scarab Productions

  Barely before he had time to register the words, they vanished from the screen. Then all the rest of his emails began to vanish, also, as if they were being dissolved in acid.

  Within a minute, maybe less, as he watched helplessly, his brain too paralysed to think about switching the machine off, everything on his computer vanished.

  He tapped at the keys. But there was nothing, just a blank, black screen.

  13

  Dennis Ponds, the senior Sussex PRO, had been given the sobriquet Pond Life by many officers. Too many stories got leaked to the press, and the prime suspect was always his office.

  A former journalist, he looked more like a City trader than a newspaper man. In his early forties, with slicked-back black hair, mutantly large eyebrows and a penchant for sharp suits, he had the tough task of brokering the increasingly fragile relations between police and public.

  Roy Grace, swigging a bottle of mineral water, stared at him across his desk, feeling empathy with the man. Ponds wasn’t trusted by many police and the press were always suspicious of his motives. It was not a job anyone could win at. One police PRO had ended up in a sanatorium; another, Grace remembered well, sipped from a hip flask all day long.

  Ponds had just laid the entire collection of morning newspapers on Grace’s desk and was now sitting in front of him, wringing his hands. ‘At least we managed to keep it off the front page, Roy,’ he said apologetically, his eyebrows rising like two crows preparing for flight.

  They’d been lucky; a Charles and Camilla story took most of the front-page splashes. It was a reflection of modern times that the headless torso story made just a few lines on the inside pages of some papers, and was not mentioned at all in others. But, like the entire half-page of the Daily Mail open in front him, Two Dead After Police Car Chase had made every single national paper.

  ‘You did your best,’ Grace said. Unlike many of his colleagues he recognized the importance of public relations.

  ‘You handled the conference well,’ Pond Life said. ‘The best thing we can do is build on the torso story today. I’ve set a con for two. You up for that?’

  ‘Ready to slay ’em,’ Grace retorted.

  ‘Can you give me anything for them, in advance?’

  Grace fiddled with the bottle cap, screwing it on then unscrewing it again. ‘No matches from the fingerprints. We’re waiting for a DNA report from the labs. Meantime we’re checking through the missing persons lists.’

  ‘Are we telling them the head’s missing?’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to know that yet. I’m just going to say that the body was badly mutilated, which is hampering the identification.’

  ‘I thought I was the one who doctored the truth for you guys.’

  Grace smiled. ‘You’ve obviously been a good teacher.’

  The eyebrows now flexing like wings in flight, Ponds asked, ‘Any hot leads?’

  ‘Come on, Dennis. Now you’re sounding like a journalist.’

  ‘I’d like to throw them a bone.’

  ‘There are several possible matches.’

  ‘Yes, but I hear the most likely is a Brighton girl, a trainee solicitor. Is that right?’

  Stunned at this information, Grace asked, ‘Where did you hear that?’

  The PRO shrugged. ‘Word on the street.’

  ‘What street? Who the hell told you that?’

  Ponds stared at the Detective Superintendent. ‘Three different journalists have already rung my office.’

  Grace remembered his conversation with Glenn Branson over his mobile phone yesterday afternoon, when Glenn was speculating who the young woman might be. Had someone listened in? That was near impossible – the new phones sent digitized signals, scrambled. With anger rising inside him and jabbing his bottle at the ceiling, Grace said, ‘Who the fuck talked to them? Dennis, that dead girl, whoever she is, has a family. Maybe a husband, maybe a mother, maybe a father, maybe kids, who all loved her. We’re not in any state to start speculating.’

  ‘I know that, Roy. But we can’t lie to the press, either.’

  Thinking as ever about Sandy, Grace said, ‘Look, can’t you understand that everyone who has a missing loved one who fits her description is going to be glued to every word that’s printed, to everything that’s said on television and on the radio? I’m not in the business of raising hopes, I’m in the business of finding criminals.’

  Dennis Ponds jotted furiously on a shorthand pad. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘That last line. Can I use that in our press release?’

  Grace stared at the man for a moment. So typical of a press officer that. Sound bites. That’s all Ponds ever wanted, really. He nodded and looked at his watch, wanting to get over to the Incident Room and brief his team there. Then he needed to get to the post-mortem, which would start at 10 a.m.

  There was another reason why he was anxious to attend the post-mortem, and it had nothing to do with the poor young woman whose butchered remains were now being further butchered by the pathologist. It had everything to do with another young woman in the mortuary, with whom he had a date tonight.

  Underneath the mountain of newspapers on his desk was the men’s style magazine FHM. Grace had hoped to grab a few minutes this morning to scan the magazine and see what the hottest men’s fashions were. Glenn Branson kept ribbing him about his clothes, his haircut, even his damned watch. His trusty old Seiko – which Sandy had given him – was too small, apparently, too yesterday; gave out the wrong signals about him. Probably even gave out the wrong kind of time.

  How the hell could you be cool? At nearly thirty-nine was it even worth trying? Then he thought about Cleo Morey, and his stomach did a sort of backflip into wet cement with excitement. And yes, he realized it was. It was hugely worth trying.

  Dennis Ponds stayed nattering for what felt an eternity, but Grace tolerated it because he knew he needed Ponds onside at the moment, and this was good bonding. Besides, Ponds passed on some interesting gossip about the Chief Constable, the Assistant Chief, Alison Vosper, and then had a moan about Chief Superintendent Gary Weston, Grace’s immediate boss, who, Ponds said, seemed to be more interested in horse races and dog tracks than in policing, and that people were starting to notice and talk.

  Whatever the truth, it wasn’t smart of his ambitious boss to let his reputation slip. As a friend, he ought maybe to say something – but how to? And besides, Grace knew – but did not want to admit to himself – that he sometimes felt a little jealous of Gary Weston’s lifestyle, his adoring family, his easy social graces, his effortless rise up through the ranks. He was trying to remember who it was who had said, ‘Every time a friend of mine succeeds, something inside me dies.’ Because, sadly, it was true.

  Finally Dennis Ponds left. As the door closed Grace picked up the magazine and began to browse through it. Within minutes his gloom had returned. There were twenty different fashion looks on twenty different pages. Which would make him look modern and smart for his date? And which a total loser?

  There was only one way to find out, he thought, resigning himself to a serious loss of face.

  14

  Grace left his office and walked through into the Ma
nagement Support Assistants’ area, where Eleanor was stationed along with three other MSAs. Together these four women provided the secretarial backup for all the senior CID officers in CID headquarters, apart from Gary Weston, who had his own full-time assistant.

  One of his dislikes about the building was its depersonalizing sense of uniformity. Perhaps simply because it was fairly newly refurbished, or perhaps because it was away from the city itself, the building felt sterile. It didn’t have the chunks out of the walls made in scuffles with villains or by someone in a hurry with a metal object, or the threadbare patches of carpet, or the nicotine-stained ceilings of most police stations. There were no cracked windows, busted chairs, wonky desks – all the patina of use that gave a place character – although, admittedly, not always welcome character.

  Eleanor had a spray of violets on her desk in a dinky china vase, a photograph of her four kids but curiously not one of her husband, a half-filled-out Sudoku puzzle torn from a newspaper and her plastic lunch box.

  She looked up with her habitual nervous smile at him, a cardigan hanging neatly over the back of her chair. After several years of working together there were certain things she knew to do automatically. One was to clear his diary whenever he was the SIO on a major incident.

  She told him briefly about three committee meetings at which she had cancelled his attendance, one on internal procedures, one on the combined UK police forces Cold Case Review Board, and one on the fixture list for the Sussex Police rugby team.

  He then received a call on his mobile from Emily Gaylor at the Brighton Trials Unit, his case administrator for the Suresh Hossain trial, telling him he definitely would not be needed in court today. Hossain was a local property villain accused of murdering a business rival.

  Clutching his briefcase with his FHM magazine securely tucked away inside it, he walked through the green-carpeted, open-plan area lined with desks housing the support staff of the senior officers of the CID. On his left through a wide expanse of glass he could see into the impressive office of Detective Chief Superintendent Gary Weston. For once, Gary was actually there, busy dictating to his assistant.

  Reaching the doorway at the far end, Grace held his security card up to the grey Interflex eye, then pushed open the door, entering a long, silent, grey-carpeted corridor which smelled of fresh paint. He passed a large red felt-faced noticeboard headed Operation Lisbon beneath which was a photograph of a Chinese-looking man with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocky beach at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn on them. This unidentified man had been found dead four weeks ago at the bottom of the cliff. At first he was assumed to be another jumper, until the post-mortem had revealed that he was already dead at the time he took his plunge.

  Grace passed the Outside Enquiry Team office on his left, a large room where detectives drafted in on major incidents would base themselves for the duration, then a door on his left, marked sio, which would be the temporary office he would move into for this enquiry. Immediately opposite was a door marked mir one, which he entered.

  MIR One and MIR Two were the nerve centres for major incidents. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, One, with its fresh white walls, had an airy feel, good light, good energy. It was his favourite room in the entire headquarters building. While in other parts of Sussex House he missed the messy buzz of police station incident rooms that he had grown up with, this room felt like a powerhouse.

  It had an almost futuristic feel, as if it could as easily have housed NASA Mission Control in Houston. An L-shaped room divided by three principal workstations, each comprising a long, curved desk with space for up to eight people, it contained massive whiteboards, one marked Operation Cormorant, one marked Operation Lisbon, one Operation Snowdrift, each covered in crime-scene photographs and progress charts. And there was a new one, fresh as of yesterday afternoon, labelled Operation Nightingale, the random name the Sussex Police computer had thrown out for the dismembered torso investigation.

  Unlike the workstations in the rest of the building, there was no sign at all of anything personal on the desks or up on the walls in this room. No pictures of families or footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Every single object in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, related to the matters under investigation. There was no banter, either. Just the silence of fierce concentration, the muted warble of phones, the clack-clack-clack of paper shuffling from laser printers.

  Each of the workstations was manned by a minimum team of an office manager, normally a detective sergeant or detective inspector, a system supervisor, an analyst, an indexer and a typist. Grace knew most of the faces, but people were too busy to be distracted by the niceties of greetings in here.

  No one looked up as he walked across to his own team except for Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, six foot two inches tall, black and bald as a meteorite, who greeted him with a raised hand. He was dressed in one of his customary sharp suits, today a brown chalk-stripe that made him look more like a prosperous drug dealer than a cop, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a tie that looked like it had been designed by a colour-blind chimpanzee on crack.

  ‘Yo, old timer!’ Glenn Branson said, in a voice loud enough to cause everyone in the room to look up for a moment.

  Grace glanced down at the rest of his eight core team members with a brief smile. He had taken most of them straight from his last case, which meant they hadn’t had much of a break, if any, but they were a good bunch and had worked well together. From years of experience he had learned that if you had a good team, it was worth keeping it intact if at all possible.

  The most senior was Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, cheery-faced beneath a tangle of hennaed brown hair, an open box of Maltesers, as ever, inches from her keyboard. He watched her typing in deep concentration, every few moments her right hand moving from the keyboard as if it were some creature with a life of its own to pluck a chocolate and deliver it to her mouth. She was a slim woman yet ate more than any human being Grace had ever come across.

  Next to her sat Detective Constable Nick Nicholl, in his late twenties, short-haired and tall as a beanpole, a zealous detective and a fast football forward who Grace was encouraging to take up rugby, thinking he would be perfect to play in the police team he had been asked to be president of this coming autumn.

  Opposite him, reading her way through a thick wodge of computer printout, was rookie DC Emma-Jane Boutwood. A pretty young woman with long blonde hair and a perfect figure, Grace had initially thought her a lightweight when she had first joined his team on the last case. But she had rapidly proved herself a feisty officer, and he had a feeling she had a brilliant future in the force, if she stayed.

  ‘So?’ Glenn Branson said. ‘I’ve changed my hunch. How do I convince you my new hunch is right? Teresa Wallington.’

  ‘Who she?’ Grace asked.

  ‘A Peacehaven girl. Engaged. Never turned up to her engagement party last night.’

  The words twisted something cold deep inside Grace. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I spoke to her fiancé. He’s real.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. His instincts told him it was too soon, but he did not want to dampen Glenn Branson’s enthusiasm. He studied the photographs of the crime scene on the wall, which had been rushed through at his request. He looked at a close-up of the severed hand, then the grisly shots of the butchered torso in the black bag.

  ‘Trust me, Roy.’

  Still looking at the photographs, Grace said, ‘Trust you?’

  ‘There you go doing it again!’ Branson said.

  ‘Doing what?’ Grace asked, puzzled.

  ‘Doing what you always do to me, man. Answering with a question.’

  ‘That’s because I never understand what the hell you are on about!’

  ‘Bulllllll-shit!’

  ‘How many missing women do we have who are not yet elimi
nated?’

  ‘No change from yesterday. Still five. From a reasonable radius of our area. More if we include nationwide.’

  ‘No word from the lab on the DNA yet?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Tonight, by six o’clock, they hope they’ll know whether the victim is on their database,’ DC Boutwood interjected.

  Grace glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes then he needed to go straight on to the mortuary. He did some quick mental arithmetic. According to Frazer Theobald’s best guess in the field yesterday, the woman had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. It was not uncommon for someone to go AWOL for one day. But two days would start causing real concern among friends, relatives and work colleagues. Today was likely to be productive in at least establishing a shortlist of who the victim might be.

  Addressing DC Nicholl he said, ‘Have we got a cast of the footprints?’

  ‘It’s being done.’

  ‘Being done is not good enough,’ Grace said a little testily. ‘I said at this morning’s briefing I wanted two officers out with casts, going round outdoor clothing stores in the area seeing if there’s a match. Chances are someone bought boots for the occasion. If they did, they may be on a CCTV camera. There can’t be that many stores that sell heavy-duty boots in the area – make sure I have a report for our sixty thirty p.m. briefing.’

  DC Nicholl nodded and immediately picked up his phone.

  ‘It’s the second day she hasn’t contacted him,’ Branson pressed.

  ‘Who?’ Grace said distractedly.

  ‘Teresa Wallington. She’s living with her fiancé. There doesn’t sound like any reason why she failed to turn up.’