Not Dead Enough

by Peter James

  As Skunk got out of the car, Spiker ended his call, then, brandishing his phone like a dagger, walked up to him. ‘What the fuck’s this piece of shit? I wanted a three-point-two V6. This is a two-litre piss-pot. No use to me. Hope you’re not expecting me to buy it!’

  Skunk’s heart sank. ‘You – you didn’t . . .’ He dug the crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, on which he had taken down the instructions this morning, and showed it to Spiker. On it was written, in his shaky handwriting, New-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.

  ‘You never specified the motor size,’ Skunk said.

  ‘So which fucking tree did you fall out of? People who buy nice cars happen to like nice engines to go with them.’

  ‘This goes like hot shit,’ Skunk said defensively.

  Spiker shrugged, looked at the car again pensively. ‘Nah, not for me.’ His phone started ringing. ‘Don’t like the colour much either.’ He checked the display, brought the phone to his ear and said abruptly, ‘I’m busy. Call you back,’ then he hung up. ‘Sixty quid.’

  ‘What?’ Skunk had been expecting two hundred.

  ‘Take it or leave it.’

  Skunk glared at him. The bastard always found some way to screw him. Either there was a mark on the paintwork, or the tyres were knackered, or it needed a new exhaust. Something. But at least he was making a secret profit on the car park, getting back at the man in his own small – but satisfying – way.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Regency Square.’

  Spiker nodded. He was checking the interior carefully, and Skunk knew why. He was looking for any mark or scratch he could use to beat the price down lower. Then Spiker’s eyes alighted greedily on something in the passenger footwell. He opened the door, ducked down, then stood up, holding a small piece of paper, like a trophy, which he inspected carefully. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Nice one!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Parking receipt from Regency Square. Twenty minutes ago. Just two quid! Top man, Skunk! So you owe me twenty-five quid back from that float I gave you.’

  Skunk cursed his own stupidity.

  �

  39

  His words shook her. Scared her. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. Had he been drinking? Taken some drug?

  ‘Open it!’ he said again. ‘Open it, bitch!’

  She was tempted to tell him to go to hell, and how dare he speak to her like that? But, knowing how much stress he must be under, she tried to humour him, to calm him down and bring him back from whatever place or space he was in. She removed another layer of tissue. This was one weird game. First we shout and swear at you, then we give you a present, right?

  She removed another layer, balled it and dropped it on the bed beside her, but there was no thaw in his demeanour. Instead, he was worsening, quivering with anger.

  ‘Come on, bitch! Why are you taking so long?’

  A shiver of anxiety wormed through her. Suddenly she did not want to be here, trapped in her room with him. She had no idea what she was going to find in the gift box. He’d never bought her a gift before, except some flowers a couple of times recently when he’d come over to her flat. But whatever it was, nothing felt right; it was as if the world was suddenly skewed on its axis.

  And with every layer she removed she was starting to have a really bad feeling about what was in the box.

  But then she got down to the last layer of tissue paper. She felt something that was part hard, part soft and yielding, as if it was made of leather, and she realized what it might be. And she relaxed. Smiled at him. The sod was teasing her, it was all a wind-up! ‘A handbag!’ she said with a squeal. ‘It’s a handbag, isn’t it? You darling! How did you know I desperately need a new bag? Did I tell you?’

  But he wasn’t smiling back. ‘Just open it,’ he said again, coldly.

  And that brief moment of good feeling evaporated as her world skewed again. There was not one shred of warmth coming back from his expression or his words. Her fear deepened. And just how strange was it that he was giving her a present on the day his wife was found dead? Then, finally, she removed the last layer of tissue.

  And stared down in shock at the object that was revealed.

  It wasn’t a handbag at all, but something strange and sinister-looking, a helmet of some kind, grey, with bug-eyed glass lenses and a strap, and a ribbed tube hanging down with some kind of filter on the end. A gas mask, she realized with dismay, the kind she’d seen on soldiers’ faces out in Iraq, or maybe it was older. It had a musty, rubbery smell.

  She looked up at him in surprise. ‘Are we about to be invaded or something?’

  ‘Put it on.’

  ‘You want me to wear this?’

  ‘Put it on.’

  She held it to her face and instantly lowered it, wrinkling her nose. ‘You really want me to wear this? You want to make love with me wearing it?’ She grinned, a little stupefied, her fear subsiding. ‘Is that going to turn you on or something?’

  For an answer, he ripped it out of her hands, jammed it against her face, then pulled the strap over the back of her head, trapping some of her hair painfully. The strap was so tight it hurt.

  For a moment, she was completely disoriented. The lenses were grimy, smeared and heavily tinted. She could only see him, and the room, partially, in a green haze. When she turned her head, he disappeared for a moment and she had to swivel her head back to see him again. She heard the sound of her own breathing, hollow exhalations like the roar of the sea in her ears.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ she said, panicking, claustrophobia gripping her, her voice muffled.

  ‘Of course you can fucking breathe.’ His voice was muzzy, distorted.

  In panic she tried to pull the mask off. But his hands gripped hers, forcing them away from the strap, gripping them so hard they were hurting. ‘Stop being a stupid bitch,’ he said.

  She was whimpering. ‘Brian, I don’t like this game.’

  Almost instantly she felt herself pushed down on her back, on the bed. As the walls, then the ceiling scudded past her eyes, her panic worsened. ‘Nooo!’ She lashed out with her feet, felt her right foot strike something hard. Heard him roar in pain. Then she broke free from his hands, rolled away, and suddenly she was falling. She crashed painfully on to the carpeted floor.

  ‘Fucking bitch!’

  Struggling to get to her knees, she put her hands up to the mask, tugged at the strap, then felt an agonizing, crunching blow in her stomach which belted all the wind out of her. She doubled up in pain, shocked at the realization of what had happened.

  He had hit her.

  And suddenly she sensed that the stakes had changed. He had gone insane.

  He hurled her on to the bed and the backs of her legs struck the edge painfully. She screamed out at him, but her voice remained trapped inside the mask.

  Have to get away from him, she realized. Have to get out of here.

  She felt her T-shirt being torn off. For a moment, she stopped resisting, thinking, trying to make a plan. The booming of her breathing was deafening. Have to get the damn mask off. Her heart was thudding painfully. Have to get to the door, downstairs, to the guys downstairs. They will help me.

  She snapped her head right, then left, checking what was on her bedside tables that she could use as a weapon. ‘Brian, please, Brian—’

  She felt his hand, hard as a hammer, strike the side of the mask, jarring her neck.

  There was a book, a thick hardback Bill Bryson tome on science she had been given for Christmas and dipped into from time to time. She rolled over, fast, grabbed it and swung it at his head, striking him side on, flat. She heard him grunt in pain and surprise, and go down, over the side of the bed.

  Instantly she was on her feet, running out of the bedroom, along the short hall, leaving the mask on, not wanting to waste precious time. She got to the front door, grabbed the Yale knob, turned and pulled.

  The doo
r opened a few inches and then halted, abruptly, with a sharp, metallic clank.

  Brian had put the safety chain on.

  A burst water main of icy fear exploded inside her. She grabbed at the chain, pushing the door shut again, tugging at it, trying to pull it free, but it was stuck, the damn thing was stuck! How could it be stuck? She was shaking, screaming, muffled echoing screams. ‘Help! Help me! Help me! Oh, please, HELP ME!’

  Then, right behind her, she heard a grinding, metallic whine.

  She whipped round her head. And saw what he was holding in his hands.

  Her mouth opened, silently this time, fear freezing her gullet. She stood, whimpering in terror. Her whole body felt as if it was collapsing in on itself. Unable to prevent herself, she began urinating.

  �

  40

  I have read that devastating news has a strange impact on the human brain. It freezes time and place together, indelibly. Perhaps it is part of the way we humans are wired, to give us a warning signal marking a dangerous place in our lives or in the world.

  I wasn’t born then, so I cannot vouch for this, but people say they can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, on 22 November 1963, that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas.

  I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news, on 8 December 1980, that John Lennon had been shot dead. I can also remember, very clearly, that I was sitting at my desk in my den, searching on the internet for the wiring loom for a 1962 Mark II Jaguar 3.8 saloon, on the morning of Sunday 31 August 1997, when I heard the news that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris.

  Above all I can remember where I was and exactly what I was doing on that July morning, eleven months later, when I received the letter that ruined my life.

  �

  41

  Roy Grace sat at his desk in his small, airless office in Sussex House, waiting for any news of Brian Bishop and filling in time before the eleven o’clock briefing. He was staring gloomily at the equally gloomy face of the seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout, stuffed and mounted in a glass case fixed to a wall in his office. It was positioned just beneath a round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in the The Bill, which Sandy bought for him in happier times in an auction.

  He had bought the fish on a whim some years back, from a stall in the Portobello Road. He referred to it occasionally when briefing young, fresh-faced detectives, making an increasingly tired joke about patience and big fish.

  On his desk in front of him was a pile of documents he needed to go through carefully, part of the preparations for the trial, some months ahead, of a man called Carl Venner, one of the most odious creeps he had ever encountered in his career. Hopefully, if he didn’t screw up on the preparations, Venner would be looking at the wrong end of several concurrent life sentences. But you could never be sure with some of the barmy judges that were around.

  His evening meal, which he had chosen a few minutes ago from the ASDA superstore, also lay on his desk. A tuna sandwich still in its clear plastic box, stickered in yellow with the word Reduced!, an apple, a Twix chocolate bar and a can of Diet Coke.

  He spent several minutes scanning the waterfall of emails, answering a few and deleting a load. It didn’t seem to matter how quickly he dealt with them, more poured in, and the number of unanswered ones in his inbox was rising towards the two hundred mark. Fortunately, Eleanor would deal with most of them herself. And she had already cleared his diary – an automatic process whenever he began a major crime investigation.

  All she had left in was Sunday lunch with his sister, Jodie, whom he had not seen in over a month, and a reminder to buy a card and birthday present for his goddaughter, Jaye Somers, who would be nine next week. He wondered what to buy her – and decided that Jodie, who had three children either side of that age, would know. He also made a mental note that he would have to cancel the lunch if he went to Munich.

  Over fifteen emails related to the police rugby team, which he had been made president of for this coming autumn. They were a sharp reminder that although it was gloriously warm today, in less than four weeks it would be September. Summer was coming to an end. Already the days were getting noticeably shorter.

  He clicked on his keyboard to bring up the Vantage software for the force’s internal computer system and checked the latest incident reports log to see what had happened during the past couple of hours. Scanning down the orange lettering, there was nothing that particularly caught his eye. It was still too early – later there would be fights, assaults and muggings galore. An RTA on the London Road coming into Brighton. A bag-snatch. A shoplifter in the Boundary Road Tesco branch. A stolen car found abandoned at a petrol station. A runaway horse reported on the A27.

  Then his phone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Guy Batchelor, a new recruit to his inquiry team, whom he had dispatched to talk to Brian Bishop’s golfing partners from this morning.

  Grace liked Batchelor. He always thought that if you asked a casting agency to provide a middle-aged police officer for a scene in a film, the man they sent would look like Batchelor. He was tall and burly, with a rugger-ball-shaped head, thinning hair and a genial but businesslike demeanour. Although not huge, he had an air of the gentle giant about him – more in his nature than his physical mass.

  ‘Roy, I’ve seen all three people Bishop played golf with today. Just something I thought might be of interest – they all said he seemed in an exceptionally good mood, and that he was playing a blinder – better than any of them had ever seen him play.’

  ‘Did he give them any explanation?’

  ‘No, he’s quite a loner apparently, unlike his wife, who was very gregarious, they say. He doesn’t have any really close friends, normally doesn’t say much. But he was cracking jokes today. One of the men, a Mr Mishon, who seems to know him quite well, said it was as if he had taken a happy pill.’

  Grace was thinking hard. Dead wife, big weight off his mind?

  ‘Not the sort of reaction of man who’s just killed his wife, is it, Roy?’

  ‘Depends how good an actor he is.’

  After Batchelor had finished his report, adding little further, Grace thanked him and said he would see him at the eleven p.m. briefing. Then, thinking hard about what Batchelor had just said, he tore away the film covering of the sandwich, levered it out and took a bite. Instantly, he wrinkled his nose at the taste; it was some new exotic kind of bread he’d never tried before – and regretted trying now. It had a strong caraway flavour he did not like. He’d have been much happier with an egg and bacon all-day-breakfast sandwich, but Cleo had been trying to wean him on to a healthier diet by getting him to eat more fish – despite his regaling her with a detailed account of an article he’d read earlier in the year, in the Daily Mail, about the dangerous mercury levels in fish.

  He exited Vantage, launched the website of expedia.com and entered a search for flights to Munich on Sunday, wondering whether it was possible to get out there and back on the same day. He had to go, no matter how slender the information from Dick Pope. Had to go and see for himself.

  It was all he could do to stop himself from getting the next possible plane. Instead, he glanced at his watch. It was nine fifty. Ten fifty in Germany. But hell, Dick Pope would be up and about, he was on holiday. Sitting in some caf�r bar in Bavaria with a beer in his hand. He dialled Pope’s mobile, but it went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Dick,’ he said. ‘Roy again. Sorry to be a pest, but I just want to ask you a few more details about the beer garden where you think you saw Sandy. Call me when you can.’

  He hung up and stared for a moment at his prize collection of three dozen vintage cigarette lighters, hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window, with its view down on the parking area and the cell block. They reflected how much Sandy loved trawling antiques markets, bric-�rac shops
and car-boot sales. Something he still did, when he had the time, but it had never been the same. Part of the fun had always been seeing Sandy’s reaction to something he picked up. Whether she would like it too, in which case they would haggle the price, or whether she would reject it with a single, disapproving scrunch of her face.

  Most of the space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of loose paperwork, his leather go-bag containing his crime-scene kit, and ever-growing small towers of files. Sometimes he wondered if they bred at night, on their own, while he was away from the office.

  Each file on the floor stood for an unsolved murder. Murder files never closed until there was a conviction. There would come a point in every murder inquiry when every lead, every avenue, had been exhausted. But that did not mean the police gave up. Years after the incident room was shut down and the inquiry team disbanded, the case would remain open, the evidence stored in boxes, so long as there was a chance that the parties connected to it might still be alive.

  He took a swig from his Coke. He’d read on a website that all lowcarb drinks were full of all kinds of chemicals hostile to your body, but he didn’t care at this moment. It seemed that everything you ate or drank was more likely to kill you than provide you with nutrients. Maybe, he pondered, the next food fad would be pre-digested food. You would just buy it and then throw it straight down the lavatory, without needing to eat it.

  He clicked his keyboard. There was a British Airways flight out of Heathrow at seven a.m. on Sunday morning. It would get him into Munich at nine fifty. He decided to call the police officer he knew there, Kriminalhauptkommisar Marcel Kullen, to see if he would be free.