Not Dead Enough

by Peter James

  She’d become hardened to most things in the eight years she had been in this profession, but not to the bodies of children. They got her every time. There seemed to be a different kind of grief that people had for a child, deeper somehow than for the most loved adult, as if it was incomprehensible that a child could be torn from anyone’s life. She hated seeing the undertaker bringing in a tiny coffin and she hated doing those post-mortems. This little girl’s would be on Monday – making it a great Monday morning to look forward to.

  Then, this afternoon, she’d had to go to a grim flat in a run-down terraced house near Hove station and recover the body of an elderly lady which had been there for a good month, at least, in the opinion of her colleague Walter Hordern, judging from the condition of the body and the level of infestation of flies and larvae.

  Walter had gone with her, driving the coroner’s van. A dapper, courteous man in his mid-forties, he was always smartly attired in the business clothes of someone who worked in a City office. His official role was chief of Brighton and Hove cemeteries, but his duties also included spending a part of his time helping in the process of collecting bodies from their scene of death and dealing with the considerable paperwork that was required for each one.

  Walter and Darren had recently taken to challenging each other on how close they could get in estimating the time of death. It was an inexact science, subject to weather conditions and a raft of other factors, and one that got harder the longer it took to retrieve the body. Counting the stages of the life cycle of certain insects was one, unpleasant, very rough guide. And Walter Hordern had been boning up on that on a forensic medical site he had found on the internet.

  Then, just a couple of hours ago she’d had a distraught phone call from her sister, Charlie, of whom she was hugely fond, saying she had just been dumped by her boyfriend of over six months. At twenty-seven, Charlie was two and a half years younger than she was. Pretty and tempestuous, she always went for the wrong men.

  Like herself, she realized, more sadly than bitterly. Thirty in October. Her best friend, Millie – Mad Millie, she used to be called when they were teenage rebels at Roedean School – had now settled into landed life with a former naval officer who’d made a fortune in the conference business, and was expecting her second child. Cleo was a godmother to the first, Jessica, as well as to two other children of old schoolfriends. It was starting to feel as if this was her destiny in life. The godmother with the strange job who wasn’t capable of doing anything normal, not even holding down a normal relationship.

  Like Richard, the barrister she’d fallen madly in love with after he had come to the mortuary to view a body in a murder case he was defending. It wasn’t until after they’d got engaged, two years later, that he’d sprung the big surprise on her. He had found God. And that became a problem.

  At first she’d thought it was something she could deal with. But after attending a number of charismatic church services in which people had fallen to the ground, struck with the Holy Spirit, she had begun to realize she was never going to be able to connect with this. She had seen too much unfair death. Too many children. Too many bodies of young, lovely people, smashed up or, worse, incinerated in car accidents. Or dead from drug overdoses, deliberate or accidental. Or decent, middle-aged men and women who had died in their kitchens, falling off chairs or plugging in appliances. Or gentle elderly folk crushed by buses when crossing the road or struck down by heart attacks or strokes.

  She watched the news avidly. Saw items about young women in African countries who had been gang-raped, then had knives inserted up their vaginas, or revolvers, which had then been fired. And, she was sorry, she had told Richard, she just could not buy into a loving God who let all this shit happen.

  His response had been to take her hand and enjoin her to pray to God to help her understand His will.

  When that hadn’t worked, Richard had stalked her fervently, relentlessly, bombarding her alternately with love and then hate.

  Then Roy Grace, a man she had long considered a truly decent human being, as well as extremely attractive, had suddenly, this summer, become a part of her life. She even had, perhaps na�ly, started to believe that they were true soul mates. Until this morning, when she had realized that she was nothing more than a temporary substitute for a ghost. That was all she could ever be in this relationship.

  All the sections of today’s Times and Guardian lay spread out on the sofa beside her, mostly unread. She kept trying to settle down to work on her Open University course, but was unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into her new book, a Margaret Atwood novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which she had wanted to read for years and had finally bought this afternoon from her favourite bookshop in Hove, City Books. She had read and re-read the first page four times, but could not engage with the words.

  Reluctantly, because she hated squandering time – and considered most television just that – she picked up the remote and began to surf through the Sky channels. She checked out the Discovery channel, hoping there was maybe a wildlife documentary, but some fossilized-looking professor was pontificating on the Earth’s strata. Interesting, but not tonight, Josephine.

  Now her phone was ringing again. She looked at the caller display. The number was withheld. Almost certainly business. She answered it.

  It was an operator at the police call centre in Brighton. A body had been washed up on the beach, near the West Pier. She was required to accompany it to the mortuary.

  Hanging up, she did a quick calculation. When had she opened that bottle of wine? About six o’clock. Four and a half hours ago. Two units of alcohol would put the average woman at the limit for driving. A bottle of wine contained six average units. You burned off one per hour. She should be OK to drive, just about.

  Five minutes later she left her house, walked up the street and unlocked the door of her MG sports car.

  As she climbed in and fumbled with her seat belt, a figure emerged from the shadows of a shop doorway, just a short distance down the street, and took the few short steps to his own car. She started the MG, revved the engine and pulled into the street. The small black Toyota Prius, running on just its electric motor, glided silently through the darkness behind her.

  �

  53

  So far no one had said a word about her dress. Not Suzanne-Marie, not Mandy, not Cat, not a single one of the girlfriends she had bumped into at the party tonight had even seemed to notice it. Which was very unusual. Four hundred and fifty quid and not one comment. Maybe they were just jealous.

  Or maybe it looked a disaster on her.

  Sod them. Bitches! Wandering through into another room, which was pulsing with coloured lights, crammed with people, music pounding, the sharp, rubbery smell of hashish heavy in the air, Holly downed the last dregs of her third peach martini and realized she was starting to feel decidedly tipsy.

  At least men were noticing her.

  The black, diamant�dged dress seemed even skimpier when she had put it on tonight than it had in the shop. It was so open at the front that there was no possibility of wearing a bra – and hell, she had great boobs, so why not flaunt them, the same the way the dress – or rather the lack of it – enabled her to flaunt her legs, almost every inch of them, most of the way up to her navel? And she did feel good in this, wickedly good!

  ‘Cool dresshh. Where you from?’

  The man, slurring his words through sharp, pointy little teeth that reminded her of a piranha’s, swayed in her path, smoke from his cigarette curling in her eye. He was dressed in black leather trousers, a skin-tight black T-shirt, a rhinestone belt, and sported a large gold earring. He had one of the stupidest haircuts she had ever seen.

  ‘Mars,’ she said, sidestepping past him, looking around, increasingly anxiously, for Sophie.

  ‘North or south?’ he slurred, but she barely heard him. Sophie had not returned the two messages she had left about meeting for a drink before this party and sharing a taxi. It was now h
alf past ten. Surely she should be here by now?

  Pushing her way through the crowd, looking everywhere for her friend, she reached open French windows and stepped outside on to a relatively quiet terrace. One couple sat on a bench, locked in serious tonsil hockey. A very spaced-out man with long, fair hair was staring at the beach and sniffing, repeatedly. Holly dug her mobile phone out of her bag and checked for a text she might have missed, but there was nothing. Then she dialled Sophie’s mobile phone.

  Again it went straight to voicemail.

  She tried Sophie’s home number. That went to voicemail too.

  ‘Ah – here you are! Losht shight of you!’ His sharp incisors glinted demonically in the flash of a strobe. ‘You come out for air?’

  ‘And now I’m going in again,’ she said, walking back into the m�e. She was worried, because Sophie was reliable. This simply wasn’t like her.

  But not so worried it was going to stop her from enjoying herself tonight.

  �

  54

  Because of a problem with a baggage door, the plane took off half an hour late. Roy Grace spent the entire journey bolt upright in his seat, which he didn’t even think about reclining, staring out through the window at the rivets on the bulbous grey metal of the starboard engine casing.

  For two interminable hours in the air he had been unable to concentrate on anything for very long, to pass the time, other than memorizing part of the street map of Munich city centre. The cardboard box containing the plastic wrap and empty box of the unpleasant cheese roll he had eaten out of sheer hunger, and the dregs of the second bitter coffee he had drunk, wobbled on his tray as the plane bumped through clouds, finally starting its descent.

  He was frustrated about the loss of those precious thirty minutes, eating into the very short time he had ahead of him today. He barely noticed the hands of the stewardess reaching down in front of him and removing the detritus of his breakfast as he stared at the landscape now opening up below him.

  At the vastness of it.

  Butterflies swarmed in his stomach as he absorbed his first-ever sights of German soil. The patchwork of brown, yellow and green rectangles of flat farmland spread out over a seemingly endless, horizonless plain. He saw small clusters of white houses with red and brown roofs, copses, the trees an emerald green so vivid they looked like they had been spray-painted. Then a small town. More clusters of houses and buildings.

  A great, yammering panic was building up inside him. Would he even recognize Sandy if he saw her? There were days when he could no longer recall her face without looking at her photograph, as if time, whether he liked it or not, was slowly erasing her from his memory.

  And if she was down there, somewhere in that vast landscape, where was she? In the city that he couldn’t yet see? In one of these remote villages beneath them that they were slowly passing? Was Sandy living her life somewhere in this vast open landscape below him? An anonymous German hausfrau whose background no one had ever questioned?

  The stewardess’s hand appeared again in front of him, pushing up the grey table and rotating the peg to secure it. The ground was getting closer, the buildings bigger. He could see cars travelling along roads. He heard the captain’s voice on the intercom, ordering the cabin crew to take their seats for landing.

  The captain then thanked them for flying British Airways and wished them a pleasant day in Munich. To Grace, until these past few days, Munich had just been a name on a map. A name in newspaper headlines in the deepest recesses of his mind. A name in television documentaries. A name in history lessons when he had been at school. A name where distant relatives of Sandy, whom she had never met, in a past she had been disconnected from, still lived.

  The Munich where Adolf Hitler had made his home and been arrested as a young man for attempting a coup. The Munich where, in 1958, half the Manchester United football team had died in a plane crash on a snow-covered runway. The Munich where, in 1972, the Olympic Games were grimly immortalized by Arab terrorists who massacred eleven Israeli athletes.

  The plane banged down hard and, moments later, he felt the seat belt digging into his stomach as it braked, the engines roaring in reverse thrust. Then it settled down to a gentle taxiing speed. They passed a windsock, the hull of an old, rusting plane with a collapsed undercarriage. There was an announcement on the intercom about passengers with connecting flights. And it felt to Roy Grace that every single one of the butterflies in his stomach was now trying to make its way up his gullet.

  The man in the seat next to him, whom he had barely noticed, switched on his mobile phone. Grace dug his own out of his cream linen jacket and switched it on too, staring at the display, hoping for a message from Cleo. Around him he heard the beep-beeps of message signals. Suddenly his own phone beeped. His heart leapt. Then fell. It was just a service message from a German telecom company.

  During the restless night, he had woken several times, and lain fretting about what to wear. Ridiculous, he knew, because in his heart he did not feel he would see Sandy today, even if she really was there, somewhere. But he still wanted to look his best, just in case . . . He wanted to look – and smell – the way she might remember him. There was a Bulgari cologne she used to buy him, and he still had the bottle. He’d sprayed it on this morning, all over himself. Then he’d dressed in a white T-shirt beneath his cream jacket. Lightweight jeans, because he had looked up the temperature in Munich, which was twenty-eight degrees. And comfortable sneakers, because he’d figured he might be doing a lot of walking.

  Even so, he was surprised by the cloying, sticky, kerosene-laced heat that enveloped him as he walked down the plane’s gangway and across the tarmac to the waiting bus. Minutes later, without any baggage, shortly after ten fifteen local time, he strode through the comfort of the quiet, air-conditioned customs hall into the arrivals hall, and instantly saw the tall, smiling figure of Marcel Kullen.

  Cropped wavy black hair, some flopping loose over his forehead, a wide grin on his genial face, the German detective was dressed in Sunday casuals, a lightweight brown bomber jacket over a yellow polo shirt, baggy jeans and brown leather loafers. He clamped Grace’s outstretched hand firmly with both hands, and said, in his guttural accent, ‘Roy, nearly was not recognizing you. You are looking so young!’

  ‘You too!’

  Grace was so touched by the warmth of the greeting, from a man he had never really known that well. In fact he was so overwhelmed by the emotion of the occasion that he found himself, suddenly and very uncharacteristically, close to tears.

  They exchanged pleasantries as they walked through the almost empty building, across the black and white chequerboard tiled floor. Kullen’s English was good, but it was taking Grace time to get used to his accent. They followed a solitary figure pulling an overnight bag on wheels, past the striped awning of a gift shop and back outside into the cloying heat, past a long line of cream taxis, mostly Mercedes. On the short walk to the car park Grace compared the almost suburban calm of this airport to the hurly-burly of Heathrow and Gatwick. It felt like a ghost town.

  The German had just had his third child, a boy, and if there was time today, he very much hoped to bring Grace to his home to meet his family, Kullen informed him with a broad grin. Grace, sitting in the cracked leather passenger seat of the man’s ancient but shiny BMW 5-series, told him he would like that a lot. But secretly he had no desire to do that at all. He had not come here to socialize, he wanted to spend every precious minute finding a trail for Sandy.

  A welcome current of cool air blew on his face from the asthmatic-sounding air conditioning, as they headed away from the airport, driving through the rural landscape he had scanned from the plane. Grace stared out of the windows, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of it all. And he realized he had not properly thought this through. What on earth could he hope to achieve in just one day?

  Road signs flashed past, blue with white lettering. One bore the name of Franz Josef Strauss airport, which they ha
d just left, then on another he read the word M�. Kullen continued chatting, mentioning names of the officers he had worked with in Sussex. Almost mechanically, Grace gave him the download on each of them, as best he could, his mind torn between thinking about the murder of Katie Bishop, worrying about his relationship with Cleo and trying to concentrate on the task in front of him today. For some moments his eyes followed a silver and red S-bahn train running parallel with them.

  Suddenly Kullen’s voice became more animated. Grace heard the word football. He saw on his right the massive new white stadium, in the shape of a tyre, the words Allianz Arena in large blue letters affixed to it. Then beyond it, high on what looked like a man-made mound, was a solitary white wind-farm pylon with a propeller attached.

  ‘I show you a little around, give you some feeling for Munich, then we are going to the office and then the Englischer Garten?’ Kullen said.

  ‘Good plan.’

  ‘You have made a list?’

  ‘I have, yes.’

  The Lieutenant had suggested that before he came Grace write down a list of all Sandy’s interests, then they could go to places she might have visited in pursuit of them. Grace stared down at his notepad. It was a long list. Books. Jazz. Simply Red. Rod Stewart. Dancing. Food. Antiques. Gardening. Movies, especially anything with Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen and Pierce—

  Suddenly his phone was ringing. He pulled it from his pocket and stared down at the display, hoping to see one of Cleo’s numbers.

  But the number was withheld.