Looking Good Dead

by Peter James

  She peered into her wine glass as if staring at ancient runes. ‘But, everyone – everyone knows about him. I mean – I thought – you must know.’

  ‘I’m clearly not everyone.’

  ‘He’s been driving the team at the mortuary nuts for months.’

  Grace rattled the ice cubes around in his glass. ‘I’m not sure I’m on your bus.’

  ‘Number forty-two,’ she said. ‘The meaning of everything? The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?’

  ‘Right,’ he said, the penny dropping. He wondered for a moment whether Cleo was drunk. But she did not look drunk. Not even tipsy. ‘I’m sorry, I’m lost. You have a fiancé who’s been driving everyone nuts?’

  ‘I thought you knew,’ she said, looking very meek suddenly. ‘Oh shit, you didn’t, did you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She drained her glass. ‘Oh God!’ Then she tilted the glass as if searching for a few more drops of precious alcohol. ‘Actually, that’s totally the wrong word to use, the God word.’ She shrugged again.

  ‘You want to fill me in?’

  ‘You want the full Richard download?’

  ‘Might be a good starting point.’

  ‘Richard and I met about three years ago – he’s a barrister. He came to the mortuary because he wanted to view a body in a murder case he was defending.’ She raised her glass expectantly, then looked disappointed when she saw it was empty. ‘I liked him; we started going out; my parents liked him; my brother and sister both thought he was lovely – and about a year and a half ago we got engaged. But about the same time I discovered I had a big rival. God.’

  ‘God?’

  She nodded. ‘He found God. Or God found him. Whatever.’

  ‘Lucky Richard,’ Grace said.

  ‘Very lucky,’ she said with a trace of sarcasm. ‘I envy anyone who finds God; how nice to be able to abdicate all your responsibilities to God.’ Suddenly she stood up. ‘You need any more whisky?’

  Grace looked at his tumbler, which was still three-quarters full. ‘I’m fine, thanks – I have to drive.’

  Cleo went out of the room, returned with a full wine glass, and sat back down, much nearer this time.

  ‘He started taking me to a charismatic church in Brighton,’ she said. ‘But it just wasn’t for me. I tried it, because at the time I loved him, but all it did was start pulling us apart.’

  ‘And his solution was to pray even more?’

  ‘Right. Hey, you know you’re quite astute – for a copper.’

  Grace gave her a pointed look, but couldn’t mask his grin. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  She chinked her glass against his. ‘He started making me kneel with him, praying for an hour, sometimes even longer, asking God to make our relationship better. After a while I just couldn’t hack it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m just not a believer.’

  ‘Not in anything?’

  ‘I spend my days cutting bodies open – you know what I do. I haven’t yet found a soul in any of them.’ She swigged some wine down. ‘Do you believe?’

  ‘I believe in some form of existence beyond death. But I have a problem with religion.’

  ‘That puts us on the same bus,’ she said.

  ‘I saw Colin Wilson’s The Occult on your bookshelf.’

  ‘All that stuff intrigues me. I know you are into that, and that’s fine. You can believe in ghosts, in some kind of spirit world, but you don’t necessarily have to believe in some kind of monotheistic God. Right?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘I broke it off with Richard six months ago, and he can’t accept it. He’s convinced God will fix it for us. It’s hurt his career too. He spends more and more time praying for God to help him with his cases instead of reading up the briefs. I’m sorry; I look at all the shit that’s happening in the world and mostly it’s caused by people under some kind of delusion about their particular version of God. Sometimes I don’t think Richard’s obsession is that far removed from that of a Muslim suicide bomber. It’s all part of the same damned belief system – that it’s not this life that matters, it’s the next one. What a crap ideal! Shall we change the subject?’

  Grace drank some more whisky. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  She set her glass down, then removed his glass from his hand and put that down also. She wrapped her arms around his neck and whispered into his ear, ‘How about we don’t talk at all for a few minutes?’

  Then she pressed her lips against his. They were soft, so incredibly soft; he breathed in her musky perfume, the smell of her freshly washed hair, felt her soft, sweet tongue deep inside his mouth, felt her pulling him deeper and deeper into her body, as if she was gathering him in like folds of silk.

  And somehow, their bodies entwined, their lips never parting, they were climbing steep stairs – one flight, two flights, he was not counting – he was shuffling across a polished wood floor, then across a deep rug. El Divo were still playing, a soft jazzy song now. Candles, flames guttering, lined the walls, and she was still kissing him, exploring his teeth with her tongue, then the roof of his mouth, then duelling with his tongue, and he felt –

  Oh Jesus, deep fire in his groin – bursting . . .

  An electrical current was running inside his belly, shooting tiny, wonderful sparks through his body. He opened his eyes, saw her pale blue eyes smiling back at him. She was unbuttoning his shirt, and suddenly pressing her mouth, moist and soft, against each of his eyes in turn, and it was as if someone had turned up the current. She kissed his forehead, then his cheek, then his lips, again. Then again.

  It was so good he was hurting.

  Just a few times in the past nine years he had dialled a number in the personal ads in the Argus, and ended up in seedy basements in Brighton. One time he’d had a handjob from a fat Spanish girl. Another time he’d had oral sex from a Thai. And there had been a third, embarrassing time, when he had been barely able to raise it for a thin, local girl with a coarse voice and a flat chest.

  Maybe because in his mind Sandy had been standing in that room. But she wasn’t here now.

  Cleo’s slender fingers were fumbling with his belt. Another kiss, on his neck, right under his chin. He heard the clank of the buckle. Another kiss on his neck, lower now. Then suddenly he felt the release of his trousers opening, felt her hands inside his boxers, so warm and so incredibly – deliciously – sensually cold at the same time.

  ‘Ohmygod.’ He winced, feeling almost deliriously aroused. But he was determined to make this last a long, long time.

  She smiled at him, the most totally, utterly dirty smile he had ever seen in his life. Then she was working on his shirt buttons again, undoing each one in sequence, pushing the fabric wider open.

  Then she pressed her lips against his right nipple and he thought he was going to die of joy.

  She continued working on him slowly, setting her own slow, so slow, so tantalizingly slow pace. She pinched his left nipple with her fingers, softly, then firmly, staring him in the face again now, smiling that wicked, beautiful, so incredible . . .

  So incredibly . . .

  Dirty . . .

  Smile.

  And he was so hard he could barely endure it one second longer.

  Her tongue pushed deep in his belly button. Her hands were working his trousers and boxers together downwards, down over his calves, right down to his shoes.

  Then she took him in her mouth.

  Air shot out of his lungs, air from deep inside him, from some place or zone he did not know even existed any more, that he thought had long ago died. And he slid his hands under her sweatshirt, felt the flesh, the soft flesh of her toned midriff, pulled the sweatshirt slowly, steadily upwards, not wanting this moment to end, not wanting to remove it, just wanting to be here for ever, sliding her top upwards for ever, for all the days, hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, femtoseconds of his life. Frozen in time.

  Then he touched her bre
asts. No bra. Just large, much larger than he had imagined, firm, round, and she let out a moan as he touched them, then took him in her mouth again, deeper, far deeper.

  Moments later, with his shoes still on and his trousers and boxers around his ankles, they were lying on a leopard-skin print throw on her bed. Staring at each other in silence. He slid his hand across her shoulders, feeling her strong shoulder blades, the contours of her back, her warm skin, and he was thinking – and he was trying not to think this, but he couldn’t help it – how so different she felt to Sandy. Not better – just different.

  Flashes of Sandy began coming into his mind. Comparisons. Sandy was shorter, her body fleshier, less well toned; her breasts were smaller, a different shape, her nipples larger, pinker. Cleo’s were smaller, like crimson studs. Sandy’s pubes were brown, a wild tangle. Cleo’s were the winter-wheat colour of her hair, trimmed, neat. She was entwined around him, her fine strong limbs like some amazing pedigree racehorse, writhing, whispering, ‘Roy, you are amazing. God, Roy, I’ve wanted this for so long. Make love to me.’

  And he was gathering her up into him, not able to get enough of her, as if he was lost in some fairy tale. She was trying to pull him inside her, but he wasn’t ready, not yet. It had been so long, he was trying to remember, had to hold back, had to remember how to hold back.

  Had to slow everything down, somehow. Had to please her first. That had always been his private rule with Sandy, and with the small number of girlfriends he had slept with before her.

  He moved down her body, caressing her breasts with his lips, then the contours of her stomach, running his tongue through the soft bristles of those winter-wheat hairs and then tasting her moistness, breathing it in, an incredible taste, smell, an even more intoxicating muskiness than the perfume she was wearing.

  She was moaning.

  Oh God, she tasted so good, so good, so damned beautifully good.

  His phone started ringing.

  She giggled. The phone persisted. Then it stopped. He went in deeper with his tongue.

  ‘Roy!’ she murmured. ‘Roy! Oh Roy! Oh my God, Roy!’

  Two sharp beeps from his bloody phone. A message.

  He was beyond caring.

  64

  Chris Willingham stared at the hysterical man with puke spattered down the front of his T-shirt standing in the doorway of the living room, screaming at him, and tried desperately to remember from his recent training how to deal with a situation like this.

  ‘YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING! PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. YOU HAVE TO HELP ME FIND MY WIFE!’

  Talk quietly, he remembered. That was the first thing. So, in a soft voice he said, ‘What’s happened, exactly?’

  ‘SHE’S SCREAMING. SHE’S TERRIFIED OUT OF HER FUCKING WITS, OK?’ Tom Bryce entered the room and grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘YOU’VE GOT TO FUCKING DO SOMETHING!’

  The young family liaison officer gagged at the stench of the vomit. Keeping his voice soft, he said, ‘Tell me, Mr Bryce, what’s happened?’

  Tom Bryce turned and walked out of the room. ‘Come on, come and see! She’s on my computer!’

  The PC followed Tom up the stairs and into the small den lined with books and files and framed photographs of his wife and children. He saw a laptop on the desk, the lid open, the screen blank. Tom Bryce tapped the carriage return on the keyboard and his email in-box appeared.

  The stench of vomit was even stronger in here, and Willingham, concentrating on the screen, carefully stood clear of the mess on the carpet. He watched Bryce sit down, stare at the screen, frown, then search down through it.

  ‘It was here,’ Tom said. ‘It was here, an email with a fucking attachment. Oh Jesus, where the hell is it?’

  Willingham said nothing; Tom seemed a little calmer for a moment. Then he appeared to lose it again. ‘IT WAS HERE!’

  Tom stared in disbelief. The bloody email had vanished. He tapped in as a search key, one after another, every word from the email that he could remember. But nothing appeared. He sank forward, cradling his head in his hands, sobbing. ‘Please help me. Oh please do something, please find her, please do something. Oh Christ, you should have heard her.’

  ‘You saw her, on your screen?’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘But she’s not there now?’

  ‘Nooooo.’

  Willingham wondered about the man’s sanity. Was he imagining something? Flipping under the pressure? ‘Let’s take it from the top, shall we, sir?’

  Trying to keep calm, Tom talked him through exactly what he had seen and what Kellie had said.

  ‘If you received an email,’ the PC said, ‘then it must be on your computer somewhere.’

  Tom searched the deleted folder, the junk mail folder, then the rest of the folders in his email database. It had gone.

  And he began to wonder, just for a moment, whether he had imagined it.

  But not that scream. No way.

  He turned to the constable. ‘You are probably thinking I imagined it, but I didn’t. I saw it. Whoever these people are, they’re clever with technology. It’s happened before – I’ve had emails this week that vanished, wiping my entire database out.’

  Willingham stood there, unsure what to believe or what to do. The man was in a bad state but did not seem mad, just in shock. Something had happened, for sure, but in his limited knowledge of computers emails did not just disappear. They might get misfiled; that had happened to him. ‘Let’s try again, sir. Let’s go through all your files, one at a time.’

  It was past midnight by the time they finished. Still they had not found it.

  Tom looked up at him, imploring. ‘What are we going to do?’

  The FLO was thinking hard. ‘We could try the High Tech Crime Unit, but I doubt if anyone will be there at this hour on a Sunday night. How about the technical support of your internet service provider – they might be twenty-four-hour?’ Then he frowned. ‘I, er . . . Actually, on second thought, I need to run this by DS Grace first.’

  ‘Let me just try,’ Tom said. He looked up the number and dialled it. An automated response put him on hold. After ten minutes of drecky music a human voice came on the line, an Indian accent, helpful and eager to please. After a further ten minutes that felt like ten hours he came back and reported that he could find no sign of the email or the attachment.

  Tom slammed the phone down in fury.

  In a tone that told Tom the FLO was becoming increasingly sceptical, Willingham asked, ‘What were the exact words your wife said to you?’

  Trying desperately to think clearly, Tom related her words as accurately as he could remember.

  ‘She said, “Don’t tell the police. Do exactly what they tell you, otherwise it will be Max next then Jessica. Please do exactly what you are told. You must not tell the police – they will know if you do.”’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, feeling so utterly helpless.

  Willingham pulled out his digital radio. Tom immediately clamped his hand over it. ‘NO!’

  There was a long silence between them. Several more emails came in and the junk filter deleted them. Tom checked the folders. Nothing.

  Finally, Willingham said, ‘I think I should file a report on this.’

  ‘No!’ Tom snapped back.

  ‘It will be secure, sir; I will only file it on the police system.’

  ‘NO!’

  Taken aback by the man’s vehemence, the constable raised his hands. ‘OK, sir, no problem.’ He grimaced. ‘How about I make a cup of tea for us both – or a coffee – and we have a think about what to do next?’

  ‘Coffee,’ Tom said. ‘Coffee would be good, thank you. Black, no sugar.’

  The constable left the room. Tom continued to stare at the screen; his entire life lay somewhere beyond its horizon.

  A new email came in. It was from postmaster@scarab.tisana.al. Instantly, he clicked on it.

  Congratulations, Tom! You are
cottoning on fast! Now get out of the house, take Kellie’s car, head north on the A23 London Road and wait for her to call you. I don’t like you ignoring my instructions not to talk to the police. If you say one word, just ONE word to your new best friend, your rookie cop housekeeper, then my friend you will never see your wife alive again. Don’t attempt to reply to this email. And don’t bother searching for the hidden camera – you are looking at it.

  65

  Cleo smiled at him, her face so gentle and beautiful in the glow of the candlelight. Mellow jazz was playing in the background. Roy Grace could feel her warm, sweet breath on his face, saw strands of her tousled hair on her cheeks.

  ‘That wasn’t bad,’ she whispered.

  ‘For a copper?’

  She gave him a playful punch. Then she cupped his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth. The bed felt so comfortable, Cleo felt so comfortable, so good to be with, as if he had known her for years, as if they were the bestest-ever mates in all the world.

  He caressed her skin, a deep warm glow inside him; he felt utterly, sublimely at peace. He was, for this fleeting moment at least, in a space he never believed he could ever find again in his life. Then he remembered his phone ringing earlier, the beep of a message which he had ignored and should not have, and he looked at the clock, emitting weak blue light, on the bedside table.

  1.15 a.m.

  Shit!

  He rolled over, groped on the floor, found his phone and pulled it to his ear, hitting the message retrieval button.

  It was Glenn, telling him to call if he picked the message up before midnight, otherwise to wait until the morning. He put the phone back down, relieved.

  ‘I’m glad you came over,’ Cleo murmured.

  ‘It was the lure of Glenfiddich, that was all. Can’t resist it.’

  ‘So you really are that shallow, are you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?’ she teased. ‘Anything for a free drink?’

  ‘Uh huh. And maybe I was just a tiny bit curious about your fiancé. How shallow does that make me?’ He took a sharp breath as she suddenly cupped his balls in her hands.