by Peter James
‘No.’
‘Would you like to go there?’
He shrugged.
‘What country would you like to go to, if you could?’
He shrugged again. ‘Maybe England.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Why England?’
The dog had almost finished the huge trotter and was looking at him expectantly.
‘They have jobs there. You can be rich in England. You can get a nice apartment.’
‘Really?’ She feigned surprise.
‘I heard that.’ Romeo checked inside the plastic bag, to ensure he had missed nothing, then dropped it. The wind sent it skittering away. Immediately, another dog, a misshapen brown and white creature, ran after it, pounced and began pawing at it.
The woman still had a tight grip on her leather bag.
‘Would you like an air ticket to England? I might be able to arrange it for you, if you would really like to go. I could get you a job.’
Their eyes met. Hers were beautiful, the colour of blue steel. She was smiling, looking sincere. He looked back at the handbag. Almost as if she knew what he was thinking, she kept her grip on it.
‘What kind of job?’
‘What do you want to do? What are your skills?’
A truck rumbled slowly by, close to the verge. Romeo looked up at its large, dirty wheels, its black, rusting underbelly, its billowing exhaust. If he was going to do it, this would be a good moment. Push her, grab the bag, run!
But suddenly he was more interested in what she was saying. Skills? There was a boy who had stayed with them recently, who talked about his brother who worked as a cocktail waiter in London and was earning over 400 lei a day. That was a fortune! Not that he knew anything about making cocktails. Someone else had said recently you could make that sort of money cleaning hotel rooms in London too.
‘Making cocktails,’ he replied. ‘Also, I’m a good cleaner.’
‘Do you have friends in London, Romeo?’ she asked.
Artur whined, as if wanting more food.
The woman opened her handbag and took out a fat purse. From it she removed a banknote. It was a 100 lei note. She handed it to Romeo. ‘I want you to buy some food for Artur, OK?’
He looked at her, then nodded solemnly.
Then she handed him another banknote. This was a 500 lei banknote. ‘That’s for you to buy anything you want, OK?’
He stared at the money and back at the woman. Then, as if afraid she was suddenly going to snatch them back, he stuffed the money into his trouser pocket.
‘You are kind,’ he said.
‘I want to help you,’ she replied.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Marlene,’ she said.
Despite her smile and her generosity, something about the woman was making Romeo very wary. He knew, from others he had talked to, that there were organizations that helped people who were living on the streets, but he had never tried to find one. He had been warned that sometimes, if you went to see them, you could end up getting taken into a government institution. But perhaps this woman really would help him get to England.
‘Charity?’ he asked. ‘You are with a charity?’
She hesitated for an instant. Then, smiling and nodding her head vigorously, she replied, ‘Yes, charity. Absolutely. Charity!’
35
Despite the arrival of two black, heavy-duty plastic body bags at the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, containing the bodies that had been recovered from the Channel this morning, Roy Grace was in the sunniest mood he had been in for years.
He didn’t mind that it was quarter to three on a Friday afternoon and that the post-mortems, depending on how soon Nadiuska De Sancha arrived, were likely to wipe out his plans for the evening. He was floating on air.
He was going to be a father! That thought now dominated everything else. And at last night’s poker game he had won £550, his biggest win in as long as he could remember!
What he loved most about poker, apart from the camaraderie of an evening relaxing with a bunch of male friends and colleagues, was the psychology of the game. You were very unlikely to win if you came to the table in a downer of a mood. But if you were upbeat, your enthusiasm could be infectious and you could, even with modest cards, dominate the game. But he hadn’t just had modest cards last night, he’d been on a complete roll. He’d had one hand of four tens, countless trips – three cards of a kind – full house after full house, and a bunch of high flushes.
Alone with Cleo for a few moments, in the small mortuary office, with the sound of the kettle coming slowly to the boil, he put his arms around her and kissed her.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Do you?’ she said, grinning. ‘Do you really?’ All gowned up, she raised her arms. ‘Even like this?’
‘To the ends of the earth and back.’
He truly did. After the poker game he had gone back to her house and showered the cash over the bed. Then he had lain awake beside her, too wired to sleep, thinking about his life. About Sandy. About Cleo. He wanted to marry Cleo, he was sure of that. More sure of that than of anything. He had made his mind up that in the morning he would start the process, long overdue, of having Sandy declared legally dead.
And first thing this morning he had contacted a Brighton solicitor he had been recommended to, Susan Ansell, and done just that. He had made an appointment with her.
Cleo kissed him. ‘Only to the ends of the earth?’
He smiled, checked the door to make sure no one was coming in, then kissed her again. ‘How about to the ends of the universe?’
‘Better,’ she said. Then she raised her palms upwards and wiggled her fingers, indicating more was required.
‘And to the ends of any other universe that we might discover.’
‘Better still!’ She kissed him again.
Then he stopped, feeling a sudden chill, wishing he had not started on that analogy. Sandy had been a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He remembered her favourite being the second book in the series, called The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Why the hell did her shadow have to keep falling over everything, darkening his happiest moments? It sometimes felt as if he was being stalked by a ghost.
‘You OK?’ Cleo said.
‘Very OK!’
‘You sort of disappeared for a second.’
‘I was overwhelmed by your beauty.’
She grinned again. ‘You’re such a good liar, aren’t you, Grace?’
Grinning back, he said, ‘I wasn’t lying!’
‘You spend half your time interviewing criminals who are lying convincingly. Don’t tell me that hasn’t rubbed off on you!’
He held her shoulders, firmly but gently, and stared into her eyes. ‘I would never lie to you,’ he said. ‘I would never want to lie to you.’
‘I feel the same way about you,’ she replied.
They stood in comfortable silence for some moments. The kettle rumbled to the boil, then clicked off. Distracted for an instant, Roy looked past her, at an L-shaped row of chairs beside the cluttered desk. At the table in the corner, on which sat a small Christmas tree, covered in glitter and shiny balls. At the walls, which were even more cluttered than the desk, with framed certificates, a calendar, a photograph of Brighton Pier at sunset and a row of clipboards on hooks, containing details of all their current, hapless residents in the fridges. And at the Argus newspaper lying on a chair.
Kevin Spinella’s piece on the finding of Unknown Male appeared on page five. It was a small column, pretty much reporting the facts as Grace had relayed them, with Grace’s appeal to the public. To his relief, Spinella had kept to his agreement not to mention anything about organs.
There was a shrill ring at the door.
Cleo glanced up at the CCTV monitor on the wall and said, ‘Your chum’s just arrived.’
Grace turned to the screen and saw Glenn Branson’s face. He was not looking a particularly happy bunny.
‘I�
�ll go,’ he said.
He walked down the short corridor, past the changing room, and pulled open the door. He was shocked by the sight that greeted him. He’d rarely seen Glenn looking anything other than immaculate. Now the Detective Sergeant stood in front of him, in the rain, looking a complete wreck. His tan shoes were sodden, his white shirt was spotted with dark marks, his silk tie was covered in blotches, and awry, and his cream mac was a patchwork of brown stains the colour of rust and oil, and what looked like shiny fish scales.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Grace asked. ‘Kick-boxing in an abattoir? Or mud-wrestling in a fish market?’
‘Very funny, old-timer. Next time you send me on a cruise, I’ll book the tickets myself.’
Grace stepped back to let him in.
‘Nadiuska here yet?’ Branson asked.
‘She just phoned. She’s ten minutes away. I thought you said you were going home to change.’
‘Yeah, well, I did, didn’t I? Got back to your place and there were two sodding letters waiting for me.’
‘Feel free about redirecting your post there.’
Branson looked at his friend, unsure for a moment whether he was being sarcastic or genuine. He could not tell and decided not to push his luck. ‘One was from Ari’s solicitor, all pompous, right? Telling me that she’s been instructed by Ari, who is commencing divorce proceedings, and that I should get myself a solicitor, like I just rode into town in the back of a lorry and don’t know anything about the law.’
Grace shut the door behind him. ‘Sounds to me like you need to get one, PDQ.’
‘I’m ahead of you. I got one already.’
‘Act for a lot of tramps, does he?’
‘Actually, it’s a she.’
‘Very wise. They can be a lot more brutal than men.’
Glenn swayed suddenly and put his arm out on the wall to steady himself. For a moment Grace wondered if he was drunk.
‘The ground’s still swaying. I’ve been back on dry land for more than two hours and it’s still moving under me!’
‘So, your ancestors on the slave ship? Nautical life didn’t rub off on you? Not in your genes, then?’
‘Who told you about that slave ship stuff?’
‘Your fame as a seafarer goes before you.’
‘Did you ever see that film, Master and Commander?’
Grace frowned.
‘Russell Crowe.’
He nodded. ‘Yep. Saw it.’
‘That’s how I feel. Like I’m one of his crew who took a cannonball in the stomach.’
‘Listen, mate. Ari may be hacked off with you, but that doesn’t give her automatic rights to screw your life up.’
‘You’re wrong. Shit, do you remember Kramer versus Kramer?’
‘Meryl Streep?’
Glenn Branson smiled for a fleeting instant. ‘Fuck, I’m impressed. Two films in a row I’ve mentioned that you’ve actually seen! Yeah, Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman. Well, that’s about my situation.’
‘Except you’re not as good-looking as Dustin Hoffman.’
‘You know how to kick a man when he’s down, don’t you?’
‘In the nuts. It’s the only place.’
Branson peeled off his mac. ‘So, right, the other letter is the divorce petition from the court. You can’t believe this, man, you can’t fucking believe what she is saying!’
The Detective Sergeant slung his mac over his arm, held out his fingers and began counting them off. ‘She says there is an irretrievable breakdown, OK? She’s alleging unreasonable behaviour by me. That I’m not interested in sex any more. That I’m drinking excessively – yeah, well, that’s true, she’s driving me to fucking drink, right? She’s citing lack of affection.’
He dug his hand inside his mackintosh and pulled out several sheets of folded paper, clipped together. Reading from the top one, he said, ‘Apparently I refuse to join in with the family. I shout at her when we are in a car together. I keep her short of money – shit, I bought her a fucking horse! And get this – apparently I don’t appreciate how Ari looks after our children.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s rich, that is! What am I supposed to do? Tell everyone, Sorry, I know this is a murder inquiry, but I have to get home and bath Remi?’
The words gave Roy Grace a sudden chill. He suddenly realized that’s exactly where he was going to be when his child was born. It was normal for him to be in his office by seven in the morning, if not even earlier. And not to get home until eight, or even later. When his child was born, could he change those hours?
Not without harming his career.
He looked at Glenn, stared into his questioning eyes. And he knew the answer was one that the DS was not going to like. To be a good police officer was to be married to the force. For those thirty years until you collected your pension – and longer now, if you wanted – your work would come first. You were a lucky person if your spouse or partner accepted that. A tragically large number, like Glenn’s wife, Ari, did not.
‘You know the problem?’ Grace said.
Branson shook his head.
‘She’s probably right. A little insensitive, sure, but fundamentally right. You have to decide if you want a successful career or a successful marriage. It is possible to combine both, but you need a very tolerant and understanding partner.’
‘Yeah, well, the irony is I joined the police so that my kids could be proud of their dad.’
‘So they should be.’
‘So how proud of me would they be if I quit?’
‘And went back to being a bouncer? Or a security guard at Gatwick? It’s not what job you do,’ Grace said, ‘it’s the person you are. You can be a good, very human bouncer. You can be a vigilant security guard. You can be a crap cop. It’s what you are inside, not what it says on your badge or your ID card.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. But you know what I mean.’
‘Look, I’ve told you before, with the mess I’ve made of my life, I’m not the right person to give marital advice. But you know what I really think? If Ari loved you, really loved you, she’d stick with it. I’m not sure she does really love you at all – all this legal process and stuff she’s throwing at you. I think if you did quit the force to appease her, at some point she’d want something else. Whatever you do is ultimately going to be wrong for her. I think she’s that kind of restless person. Appeasing her will never be more than a short-term solution. So, if I were you, I’d stay with your career.’
Branson nodded gloomily.
‘Know what Winston Churchill said about appeasement?’ said Roy.
‘Tell me?’
‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.’
36
The two bodies had been dumped in the sea in an identical way to Unknown Male, trussed up in plastic sheeting tied with blue cord and weighed down with breeze blocks.
They arrived at the mortuary parcelled in two further layers, the white plastic forensic bags in which they had been brought to the surface by the police divers, and the heavier-duty black plastic body bags in which they had been hauled up on to the dive boat, and in which they had remained until arriving at the mortuary.
The first to be unwrapped, in a tediously slow process, was a young teenage boy, perhaps a year or two older than the previous body, Nadiuska estimated. Less good-looking, with a beaky nose and a face badly pockmarked from acne, Unknown Male 2 was also missing his heart, lungs, kidneys and liver. They had been surgically removed in the same meticulous way.
Nadiuska was now working on the layers around the body of a young girl, also in her mid-teens, she estimated. Death took away the personality from a face, Grace always thought, leaving it a blank, which made it difficult to tell what people had really looked like when they were alive. But even with her pale, waxy skin and her long brown hair, tangled and matted, he could see she had been quite beautiful, if far too thin.
The pathologist was of the opinion that these two bodies had been in t
he water for the same length of time as Unknown Male. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist, Grace figured, to work out the probability that all three of them had gone into the sea together.
Which raised the stakes from the initial discovery of a single body considerably. In his mind, he had now dismissed any possibility that these were formal burials at sea that had drifted from the official seabed grave area. So who were these three teenagers? Where had they come from? Who were their parents? Who was missing them? Had they been dumped overboard from one of the dozens of foreign-registered merchant ships that travelled down the English Channel around the clock, from just about every country in the world?
There were no marks on Unknown Male 2’s body to suggest death from an accident or a blow to the head. There were puncture marks on his skin, just like the earlier body, consistent, as Nadiuska had just repeated, with organ removal for transplant.
A dark shadow was moving across Grace’s mind. For most of the time, he stood in the corridor that led into the now very crowded post-mortem room, mobile phone to his ear, making one call after another. His first had been to his MSA, Eleanor Hodgson, getting her to clear his diary for the immediate days ahead. There were just two dates he hoped to be able to keep. One, tonight, was his promise to a colleague to visit a football game at the Crew Club in White-hawk. He might be able to make that if DI Mantle took the 6.30 briefing meeting instead of him.
The second, was the CID dinner dance tomorrow night, which, with over 450 attending, was going to be quite a bash. It had been a tough year and he was looking forward to taking Cleo, now that their relationship was out in the open, and relaxing with his colleagues. And maybe getting an opportunity to improve on the poor impression he reckoned he had made with the new Chief Constable on Wednesday night.
Cleo, who had spent weeks fretting about what she was going to wear, and an amount equal to the GDP of an emerging African nation buying a dress, would be deeply disappointed if they now did not make it.
After going through his diary, Grace had then made a series of calls expanding his Outside Inquiry Team from the original six, to twenty-two. Now, as he stood talking to Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer at Sussex House, organizing space for his new team in one of the building’s two Major Incident Rooms, he watched Nadiuska at work, carefully taping the high-tensile cords around the breeze blocks, in the hope of finding a tell-tale skin cell or glove fibre from whoever had tied them. When each strip lost its tackiness, she bagged it for microscopic inspection later.