Looking Good Dead

by Peter James

  The doorbell rang.

  Max ran out into the hallway, shouting excitedly, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy’s home!’

  Jessica sprang to her feet and followed her brother. Tom was right behind them.

  Max pulled the front door open, then stared up in glum surprise at the tall black man in the shiny leather jacket and blue chinos who was standing there. Jessica stopped in her tracks.

  Tom did not like the expression on the detective’s face one bit.

  Glenn Branson knelt down to bring his face to the same level as Jessica’s. ‘Hello!’ he said.

  She fled back towards the kitchen. Max stood his ground, staring at the man.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Branson,’ Tom said, a little surprised to see him.

  ‘Could I have a word with you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Tom gestured for him to come in.

  Branson looked at Max. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Lady won’t wake up,’ the little boy said.

  ‘Lady?’

  ‘Our dog,’ Tom explained. ‘I think she has a bug.’

  ‘I see.’

  Max lingered.

  ‘Why don’t you get some cereal for you and Jessica?’ Tom suggested.

  Reluctantly Max turned and trotted back into the kitchen.

  Tom closed the front door behind the detective. ‘Do you have some news?’ He was still puzzled by Jessica’s remark about the vodka. What did his daughter mean?

  Talking quietly, Glenn Branson said, ‘We’ve found the Audi estate you said your wife was driving. It was burned out, torched, probably by vandals, up on Ditchling Beacon earlier this morning. We did a check on the chassis number – it’s registered in your name.’

  Tom stared at him open-mouthed in shock. ‘Burned out?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  ‘My wife?’ Tom started shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘There was no one in it. Happens all the time at weekends. Cars get nicked by joyriders, then they set light to them, either for fun or to get rid of their prints. Usually both.’

  It took some moments for it to sink in properly. ‘She was driving the babysitter home,’ he said. ‘How the hell could it have been nicked by joyriders?’

  The Detective Sergeant had no answer.

  47

  The City of Brighton and Hove had so many different faces, Grace thought, and so many diverse people. It seemed that some cities were divided into different ethnic communities, but here in Brighton and Hove it was more like different sociological communities.

  There were the genteel elderly, in their mansion blocks or sheltered housing, who on summer days could be seen watching the cricket at the County Ground or playing bowls on the Hove lawns, or sitting in chairs on the promenade, and the beaches in summer, and, if they had the funds, wintering in Spain or the Canaries. And the poorer elderly, shivering out the winter – and half the summer – imprisoned in their damp, dank council flats.

  There were the in-your-face wealthy middle classes with their smart detached houses in Hove 4, and the more discreet, in the handsome seafront mansion blocks. And the more modestly off, like Grace, in homes spread out to the west to the suburb of Southwick, directly behind the commercial port of Shoreham Harbour, and in pockets all over the city and stretching well out to the Downs

  Much of the colour and vibrancy of Brighton and Hove came from the very visible, and often brash, gay community, and the wall-to-wall students, from Sussex and Brighton Universities and the plethora of other colleges, who had colonized whole areas of the city. There were the visible criminals – the drug dealers lurking on the scruffier street corners, who would melt into the shadows at the smell of a police car – and the less visible ones, the rich ones at the top of their game, who lived behind high walls in the swanky houses of Dyke Road Avenue and its tree-lined tributaries.

  Council estates fringed the city; the two biggest, Moulscombe and Whitehawk, had long had reputations for crime and violence, but in Grace’s view these were not particularly deserved. There were crime and violence all over the city, and it made people feel comfortable to point a finger at these estates, as if there was an altogether different species of Homo sapiens living there instead of mostly decent folk who didn’t have enough money to buy themselves smugness.

  And there was the sad underclass. Despite regular attempts to remove them from the streets, the moment the weather warmed up, the winos and the homeless drifted back to the shopfronts, porches, pavements and bus shelters. This was bad for tourism and even worse for the city’s conscience.

  From the start of the festival in May and the arrival of spring, tables and chairs appeared outside every cafe, bar and restaurant, and the streets of the city came alive. Some of those days, Grace thought, you could almost imagine you were on the Mediterranean. Then a weather front would move in off the Channel, a howling south-westerly accompanied by punishing rain that would drum on the empty tables and lash the windows of boutiques filled with mannequins in beachwear, as if mocking anyone who dared to pretend that England ever actually had a summer.

  The beating downtown heart of the city, through which they were travelling now, was concentrated in a square mile or so either side of the Palace Pier. There were the tightly packed Regency terraces of Kemp Town, in one of which Janie Stretton had lived; the Lanes, where the antique dealers were centred; and the North Laines district filled with small, trendy shops and tiny town houses, among which was the converted factory building where Cleo Morey had her flat.

  Nick Nicholl drove the unmarked Ford Mondeo. Grace sat in the front passenger seat, busily making notes on his Blackberry. Norman Potting was in the back. They were driving down the London Road in the centre of Brighton. At most times of the day or night they would have been crawling along in dense traffic, but early on this Sunday morning, apart from a couple of buses, they virtually had the road to themselves.

  Grace checked his watch. Hopefully this interview with Reggie D’Eath would not take long, and he could squeeze a couple of hours out of the day for his god-daughter. Enough to take her to lunch, if not to the giraffes today.

  They were passing the Royal Pavilion, the city’s most distinctive landmark, on their right. None of the three men looked at it – it was one of those places that was so familiar it had become all but invisible to them.

  The turreted and minareted building in the style of an Indian palace was commissioned by George IV when Prince of Wales, as a seaside shag-palace for his mistress, Maria Fitzherbert, in the late eighteenth century. And as seaside shag-palaces go, nothing quite so grand had probably been built anywhere in the world, ever since.

  They stopped at the roundabout at the intersection with the seafront, with the Palace Pier, garish even early on a Sunday morning, opposite them. A leggy blonde in a skirt that barely covered her buttocks crossed in front of them unhurriedly, throwing them a flirty glance and jauntily swinging a bag.

  Potting, who had been quiet for some minutes, murmured, ‘Come on, doll. Bend over; show us your growler!’

  There was a gap in the traffic, and Nick Nicholl turned left.

  ‘She’s all right, she is!’ Potting said, turning to watch her out of the rear window.

  ‘Except she is a he,’ Nick Nicholl corrected him.

  ‘Bollocks!’ Potting said.

  ‘Yes, exactly!’ the DS retorted.

  They drove along Marine Parade, past the debris of broken glass and food cartons outside a nightclub, the über-trendy Van Alen apartment building, then the black and white flinted Regency facades that fronted the imposing crescent of Sussex Square, where, Glenn Branson had told Grace a thousand times, Laurence Olivier had once had a home.

  ‘You’re talking through your arsehole,’ Potting replied. ‘She was gorgeous!’

  ‘Big Adam’s apple,’ the DS said. ‘That’s how you tell.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Potting said.

  ‘I’m sure he would have done, if you’d asked nicely.’

  ‘Shouldn’
t be allowed out on the streets looking like that, bloody fudge-packer.’

  ‘You are so gross, Norman,’ Grace said, turning round. ‘You are quite offensive, you know.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry, Roy, but I find poofs offensive,’ Potting said. ‘Never understood ’em, never will.’

  ‘Yes, well, Brighton happens to be the gay capital of the UK,’ Grace said, really irritated with the man. ‘If you have a problem with that you’re either in the wrong job or the wrong city.’ And you’re a complete fucking prat, and I wish you weren’t in my car or in my life, he would have liked to have added, digging in his pocket for some more paracetamol.

  On their left they passed terrace after terrace of imposing white Regency houses. On their right were the sails of a dozen yachts, fresh out of the Marina on a Sunday race.

  ‘So this bloke we’re going to have a chat with,’ Potting said. ‘Reginald D’Eath, is he one of them, too?’

  ‘No,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘He isn’t – he just likes girls – as long as they’re not older than about four.’

  ‘That’s something I really can’t understand,’ Norman Potting said.

  Popping a pill from the foil pack, Grace thought grimly, Great, at last we’ve found something in common.

  They drove up a steep hill at the back of Rottingdean, alongside a prep school playing field with a cricket pitch marked out in the centre and two large white screens on rollers, with pleasant detached houses opposite. Then they turned into a street with bungalows on either side. It was the kind of quiet area where anything out of the ordinary would stand out – as the bright yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers, prominently displayed in each front window, warned.

  A good choice of location for a safe house, Grace thought, except for one minor detail that appeared to have been overlooked. Who in their right bloody mind would put a paedophile in a house a few hundred yards away from a school playing field? He shook his head. Didn’t anybody ever think?

  ‘Is Mr D’Eath expecting us?’ Nicholl asked.

  ‘With morning coffee and a box of Under Eights, I expect,’ Norman Potting said, following this with a throaty chuckle.

  Ignoring the terrible joke, Grace replied, ‘The woman I spoke to from the Witness Protection Agency said they’d left a message for him.’

  They pulled up outside Number 29. The 1950s bungalow looked a little more tired than the others in the street, its brown pebbledash rendering in need of repair, and repainting considerably overdue. The small front garden was in poor shape also, reminding Grace that he needed to mow his own lawn some time this weekend – and today was a perfect day for it. But when would he get the chance?

  He told Norman Potting to wait in the street, in case Reginald D’Eath hadn’t got the message they were coming and tried to do a runner, then, accompanied by DC Nicholl, he walked up to the front door. It bothered him that the curtains of the front room were still drawn at a quarter to eleven on a Sunday morning. But maybe Mr D’Eath was a late riser? He pressed the plastic bell-push. Dinky chimes rang out inside the house. Then silence.

  He waited some moments, then rang again.

  Still no response.

  Pushing open the letterbox he knelt and called out through it, ‘Hello, Mr D’Eath, it’s Detective Superintendent Grace of Brighton CID!’

  Still no response.

  Followed by Nicholl, he walked around the side of the house, edging through the narrow gap past the dustbins, and pushed open a high wooden gate. The rear garden was in a much worse state than the front, the lawn weedy and badly overgrown, and the borders a sad riot of bindweed and nettles. He stepped over an upturned plastic watering can, then reached a kitchen door with frosted glass panels, one of which was smashed. Shards of glass lay on the brick path.

  He shot a glance at Nick Nicholl, whose dubious frown echoed his own concern. He tried the handle and it opened without resistance.

  They entered a time-warp kitchen, with an ancient Lec fridge, drab fake-wood units and Formica work surfaces on which sat a clapped-out-looking toaster and a plastic jug kettle. The remains of a meal sat on a dreary little table – a plate of half-eaten and very congealed eggs and beans and a half-drunk mug of tea – and a magazine, opened at a double-page spread of naked children, was propped against a serving bowl.

  ‘Jesus,’ Grace commented, disgusted by the magazine. Then he dunked a finger into the tea; it was stone cold. He wiped it on a kitchen towel hanging on a rack, then called out, ‘HELLO! REGINALD D’EATH! THIS IS SUSSEX POLICE! YOU ARE SAFE TO COME OUT! WE ARE JUST HERE TO TALK TO YOU! WE NEED YOU TO HELP US IN AN ENQUIRY!’

  Silence.

  It was a silence Grace did not like, a silence that crawled all over his skin. There was also a smell he did not like. Not the smell of the stale, tired old kitchen, but a more astringent smell which he knew but could not place – except something in his memory was telling him it definitely did not belong in a house.

  He needed D’Eath so badly. He was desperate to talk to him about what he had been looking at on his computer. He knew from Jon Rye that Reggie D’Eath had followed the same links as Tom Bryce and he had no doubt the paedophile would have information about what Tom Bryce had seen.

  It was the best lead they had so far in the Janie Stretton murder enquiry. And, as he couldn’t stop thinking, it wasn’t just about driving the enquiry forward, it was about rescuing his career.

  He bloody well had to succeed in this enquiry.

  He nodded for Nick Nicholl to start looking around the rest of the house. The Detective Constable left the kitchen, and Grace followed him into a small sitting room, where the smell was even stronger. In here there was a cheap-looking three-piece suite, an old television, a couple of very badly framed Turner prints on the walls, and one solitary framed photograph on a mantelpiece above a fireplace containing an electric, fake-coal fire.

  Grace stared at the stiffly posed couple in the photograph: a weak-looking, baby-faced man in his thirties, with thinning hair, dressed in a grey suit, a gaudy tie and a shirt collar riding too high, his arm around a hard-bitten blonde, outside the entrance of what looked like a register office.

  Then he heard a shout. ‘Roy! Jesus!’

  Startled, he ran out of the room, and saw the DC a short distance down the corridor, hand over his face, coughing in an open doorway.

  As he reached him, the sour, acrid smell caught the back of his throat. He held his breath and stepped past the DC into an avocado-coloured bathroom. And came face to face with Reggie D’Eath, through the choking haze.

  Or at least what was left of the man.

  48

  And now Grace knew exactly what that smell was. A sick little ditty his science master had taught everyone at school sprang into his mind:

  Alas here lies poor Joe

  Alas he breathes no more.

  For what he thought was H2O

  Was H2SO4.

  Grace’s eyes were stinging and his face was smarting. It was dangerous to stay in the room for more than a few seconds, but that was enough to see all he needed.

  Reggie D’Eath was lying up to his neck in a bathtub, immersed in liquid that looked as clear as water. But it was sulphuric acid. It had already consumed almost all of the skin, muscle and internal organs below his neck, leaving a clean, partly dissolved skeleton around which a few pale, sinewy tendrils, still attached, were shrinking as he watched.

  A metal ligature, around his neck, was attached to a towel rail above him. The corrosive fumes were working on D’Eath’s face, blistering the skin into livid pustules.

  Grace backed quickly out of the room, colliding with Nicholl. The two men stared at each other in stunned silence. ‘I need air,’ Grace gasped, heading unsteadily to the front door and out into the garden. Nicholl followed him.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Norman Potting asked, leaning against the car, puffing on his pipe.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Grace said, feeling very queasy, so disturbed he was unable to think clearly for some
moments. He took several long, deep gulps of fresh air. A man a short distance up the street was washing his car. Close by was the grind-grind-grind-whrrrrr of a hand-pushed lawnmower.

  Nicholl began a series of deep, hacking coughs.

  Grace pulled his recently issued new phone out of his pocket, and looked down at the buttons; he’d practised with it a few times but never actually used the camera function before. Holding his handkerchief over his nose, he went back into the house, along to the bathroom, took a deep breath outside the door, entered and took several photographs in quick succession. Then he went back out of the room.

  Nick Nicholl was standing there. ‘You OK, chief?’

  ‘Never better,’ Grace spluttered, gulping down air. Then he pocketed his camera, not relishing what he had to do next.

  He took another deep breath, dived into the bathroom, grabbed a large towel off a rail, wrapped it around Reggie D’Eath’s head, and yanked hard.

  After several brutal tugs, the head, along with a length of spinal cord, came free from the ligature. Surprised at how heavy it was and still holding his breath, Grace carried it out of the bathroom and laid it down on the hall floor.

  The young Detective Constable took one look at the sight, keeled over, crashing into a wall, and threw up.

  Grace, remembering something from his first aid training, ran into the kitchen, found a bowl in a cupboard, filled it with cold water then hurried back and emptied it over D’Eath’s face, trying to wash away the acid. If there was any forensic evidence there, it might be saved, and in any case it would help with identification. The smell of the DC’s vomit made him gag, and as he ran back for a refill he narrowly avoided throwing up himself.

  Then he went back into the kitchen and radioed for a support team. He requested SOCO officers, a scene guard and some officers to do an immediate house-to-house. While he was speaking, he noticed a cordless phone lying underneath the vile magazine D’Eath had apparently been reading with his meal.