by Peter James
He dialled Cleo. When she answered he heard furious barking. ‘Hi, darling!’ she said cheerily over it. Then she said, her voice raised, ‘QUIET!!!’
‘What’s he barking at?’ Grace asked, apprehensive suddenly.
‘Someone just rang a doorbell on television!’
He smiled with relief. ‘How are you feeling?’ Across the road he watched the two smokers go back inside.
‘Tired, but a lot better. Bump’s been very active. Treating me like I’m a football!’
‘God, poor you!’
‘What time do you think you’ll be home?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you had supper?’
‘A stale KitKat.’
‘Roy!’ she said, admonishing him. ‘You have to eat properly.’
‘Yep, well there’s a bit of a limited menu where I am at the moment.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’ll explain when I see you.’
‘I’m going to bed soon. Did you get my message about food?’
‘Message?’
‘I left you a message, earlier this afternoon – I couldn’t get through. Asking what you were doing about food tonight.’
‘I didn’t hear any message.’ Strange, he thought. Had she dialled a wrong number? He doubted it.
‘Shall I leave you something in the fridge? I’ve got some nice lasagne.’
‘That would be great, thanks,’ he said.
‘I’ve made a salad – I want you to eat it, okay?’
‘I promise! Hey, Glenn’s on Crimewatch tonight.’
‘I know, you told me earlier, I’m recording it for you.’
He was about to ask her more about the message she’d left, when the pub door opened and a figure stepped out into the rain, looking a little unsteady on his pins. Although it was across the street, in a rain-lashed dusk, there was no mistaking him.
Hastily ending the call, he watched Amis Smallbone, nattily attired in a brown Crombie coat with a velvet collar, popping open an umbrella. Then, with his head held arrogantly high and a slightly swaying gait, he strutted along the pub’s short forecourt towards him, then stopped on the pavement, as if looking around for a taxi.
Grace was astonished the man was unaccompanied. And could not believe his luck. He stepped out of the car, and strode quickly and decisively over to him, noting the street seemed empty of people in both directions. Good.
Diminutive and perfectly formed, like a bonsai version of a much bigger thug, Smallbone looked as neat and tidy as a carefully gift-wrapped package. He spoke with a small sharp voice, perfectly matched to his stature, but imbued with phoney grandeur. It was as if he imagined himself having the appearance of a respected country squire, whereas to the outside world he looked like a racetrack spiv, or a sleazy character on a street corner selling fake wristwatches.
‘Amis Morris Smallbone. Fancy bumping into you here! Roy Grace – remember me?’
Amis Smallbone stopped in his tracks. He blinked through the gloom, as if he were having difficulty in focusing. Then, his voice a little slurred but as unpleasant as ever, he said, ‘What do you want?’
‘Don’t you know what it means when someone uses all three of your names?’
Smallbone squinted, puzzled, then momentarily lost his balance. Grace gripped his arm to steady him, and kept hold of it. He could smell the booze on the man and he reeked of tobacco. ‘No,’ he said sullenly.
‘Think!’ Grace said.
‘I have no idea.’
‘It means you’re being arrested.’
41
Anna sat in her Gaia shrine, dressed in the turquoise, feathered ball gown Gaia had worn on stage in her Save The Planet tour. She had showered before putting it on earlier this evening, not wanting any of her own body smells to contaminate her idol’s perfume and perspiration, which she believed she could still detect in the ten-year-old garment.
She was busy revising. Re-reading parts of Gaia’s authorized biography, after having spent the first part of this evening testing and re-testing herself on Gaia’s song history, to make sure she had absolutely every single title, and in the right order, and the date it was first performed. It really would not do, when they finally met tomorrow, for her to make a silly mistake. She wanted to be perfect for her idol.
And she was pretty confident she did have them all right. She was good at dates, always had been. She’d excelled at history at school – she could remember the dates of every king and queen of England; and every battle; and just about all the other important dates. Some of her fellow pupils had called her a swot. So? She didn’t care. What did they know about the world? How many of them today, all these years later, had a Gaia collection like this?
Huh?
‘How many do you think, Diva?’ she said to the cat.
The cat sat at the foot of a glass display cabinet, which contained framed concert tickets and racks of programmes. It did not respond.
She checked her watch. 8.55 p.m. It was time to go downstairs to watch one of her favourite programmes, Crimewatch.
True crimes. With luck there would be a murder on the show; perhaps a reconstruction. She replaced the cat litter on a couple of pages torn from Sussex Living, a free magazine that she never bothered reading but was good for this purpose. Then she went into the living room and switched on the television.
She liked the filmed reconstructions, the more violent and gruesome the better. So much more powerful than in a TV drama or a movie, because you knew they were for real. She could close her eyes and imagine the victim’s fear; the pain; the desperation. It aroused her. Sometimes Gaia played around with bondage in her stage acts. She loved that. That really aroused her too.
Maybe Gaia would tie her up tomorrow? She could suggest it to the star, couldn’t she? She shivered, deliciously, at the thought.
*
Twenty minutes into the show the presenter Kirsty Young introduced a tall, black detective dressed as if he had just come from a funeral. On the screen appeared the caption, Detective Inspector Glenn Branson, Sussex CID.
Anna took a delicate sip of her Gaia mojito. Sussex. Something local, even better! In the Argus and on the radio and television news there had been coverage about a body found on a chicken farm in East Sussex. Not much had been said about it so far, but it sounded very sinister. Deliciously sinister. She hoped he might be going to talk about that now.
Moments later there was a film clip of the detective standing by a metal gate, with a sign beside him saying STONERY FARM. He looked very nervous.
Yes! Oh yes! Thank you, Detective! She was so excited she slopped some of her mojito over the rim of her cocktail glass.
‘Sussex police were called to this free-range chicken farm last Friday morning, where a male torso was discovered by workers cleaning out the waste tank of the chicken shed,’ Kirsty Young said.
The film cut to show a huge, single-storey shed, a good hundred yards long, with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents, and tall steel silos beside it. The television camera pulled back to reveal this was on a screen in the studio; the detective pointed, saying, ‘The body was found in here, and we believe he had been here for between six and nine months, could be longer. We have no DNA, no fingerprints and no dental records. We need to identify this man. There is no case colder than the one in which the victim is unidentified. And tonight we are asking for your help.’
Anna sipped her drink and watched eagerly. Oh yes, this was her kind of stuff!
‘The man is estimated to have been between forty-five and fifty years old, five feet six or seven inches tall, of slight build,’ the detective continued. ‘At some point in the past he suffered two broken ribs, either from being involved in an accident – could have been a sporting injury, or sustained in a road accident, or indeed a fight.’ He smiled, but it could just as easily have been a nervous twitch, Anna thought.
‘Help from the public is vital to us in this case. We cannot start a murder investigatio
n in earnest until we know who that body is. One thing that may be significant in helping to jog the mind of someone out there is the gentleman’s stomach contents. He ate a last meal which probably included oysters and wine.’
What kind of oysters? Tell us? Anna urged, silently. Colchester? Whitstable? Blue Point? Bluffs? What kind? Tell us, tell us! Colchester? Colchester are the best!
Now the detective was pointing at two ragged pieces of fabric that were stuck to a whiteboard. Next to them was a complete male suit in the same material, on a shop-window mannequin. ‘Something that may be significant to our enquiry is these two pieces of cloth found in the vicinity of the body. We believe they come from a suit similar to this one.’ He pointed at the mannequin.
The screen filled with a blow-up photograph of the two pieces. It was a distinctive yellow ochre and red and dark-brown check. Anna listened to the detective’s voice, taking another, larger sip of her drink.
‘This is a tweed suit material, in a heavyweight cloth from the quality manufacturer Dormeuil,’ DS Branson said. ‘You can see this is a very bold and distinctive design. You’d remember if you saw a suit of this pattern, or if you knew someone who had a suit like this.’
Anna did. She drained the rest of her drink in one gulp then set the glass down. The numbers to call for the Incident Room and the anonymous number for Crimestoppers came up. But Anna did not call either of them.
Instead she made herself another drink.
42
‘This isn’t the way to the nick,’ Amis Smallbone slurred, as the car bumped and jolted over the grass.
‘Woken up at last, have you?’ Grace said, watching him in the rear-view mirror, although in the growing darkness, it was getting harder to see him. He’d been good as gold for the past twenty minutes, out for the count. He’d hardly needed the handcuffs, one of which was clamped around Smallbone’s right wrist, behind his back, the other to the rear passenger door handle, which had been made inoperable from the inside by the child lock.
Smallbone’s mobile phone, which Grace had removed and placed on the passenger seat beside him, rang for the third time.
‘Hey, that’s my phone ringing.’
‘Crap ringtone,’ Grace said as it stopped. He was out of his comfort zone, doing what he was now doing, but he didn’t care. He was going to teach this little shit a lesson he would not forget. He drove for several hundred yards towards an old fort, long abandoned, at the top of the Devil’s Dyke, Brighton’s highest landmark. It was where he used to come and play as a child, and where he used to bring Sandy when they were courting. The lights of the city were some miles behind them across farmland.
In his first couple of years as a uniformed copper, before he’d joined CID, and before the force had today’s level of public scrutiny and accountability, they used to scoop up aggressive drunks on a Friday or Saturday night in a police van, drive them up here, and toss them out on the grass, leaving them with a five-mile trek back to the town centre. No better way to sober them up!
He climbed out of the car, and carefully checked all around him, peering through the driving rain. It was deserted. Then he opened the rear door and peered in. Smallbone glared at him. He slid in beside him and pulled the door shut. The smell of booze and cigarettes coming off the man was much stronger, mixed with a sickly cologne.
‘What the fuck do you want?’
Grace stared at him and gave him a cheery smile. ‘Just a little chat, Amis, then I might release you without charge, if we come to an understanding.’
‘Without charge for what?’
‘Breaching your prison release conditions, by not staying at the hostel where you were instructed to reside, and failing to report to your probation officer. I can of course read you your rights and formally charge you on both these counts, and you’ll be straight back inside, if you’d prefer. Five more years, maybe? That sound good to you?’
Smallbone said nothing for some moments. Grace continued to stare at him. He’d aged noticeably, he thought. His face, which once had cold, boyish good looks that used to remind him of one of those perfect, soulless young men in Hitler Youth posters, now had the leathery, lined texture that prison and heavy smoking did for you. His hair was still immaculate, but the blonde colour had gone and instead was the gingery colour of bad dye. But he still exuded the same arrogance from every pore of his skin. ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘What you said I done.’
‘Vandalize my lady’s car?’
‘I didn’t do it. You’re making a mistake.’
Clenching his fists, and having to work hard to control the anger that was steadily building inside him, and his hatred for this scumbag all the more intense now he was so close to him, Grace said, ‘Your handwriting’s all over it.’
Smallbone shook his head. ‘You can think what you like, Grace, but knowing your reputation in this city, I don’t think I’m the only person who isn’t signed up to your fan club.’
Grace leaned closer, his face right up against Smallbone’s. ‘Twelve years ago, just after you were sent down, someone burned almost identical words on to my lawn. Don’t even try to deny that was you, because that will make me even angrier. All right?’
He leaned back a little. Smallbone said nothing. Then Grace leaned forward again, pressing his face even closer, so their noses were almost touching. ‘You’re out on licence, a free man, Smallbone, free to do anything you want. But I’m warning you now, and I’m not ever going to warn you again. If anything happens to my lady and the child she is carrying, anything at all, anything, I won’t be locking you up again, understand? I won’t be locking you up because there won’t be enough bits of you left to fill a matchbox, by the time I’ve finished with you. Do you understand?’
Without waiting for any comment, Grace climbed out and walked around to the other side of the car, then jerked the door open as hard as he could. Smallbone, his right arm twisted behind his back and hooked by the other end of the cuff to the door handle, was jerked out and fell on his back in the grass, with a pained grunt.
‘Oops, sorry,’ Grace said. ‘Forgot you were holding on to the door.’ Then he knelt and frisked him for a second time. When he was satisfied he didn’t have another phone, he unlocked the cuffs, and pulled him to his feet. ‘So, we understand each other, do we?’
Smallbone stared around him, in the almost pitch darkness now, the pelting rain matting his hair to his head. ‘I told you, I haven’t touched her car. It’s not my doing. I don’t know anything about it.’
‘In that case,’ Grace said with a smile, ‘you’ve got nothing to worry about. Have a nice walk home. It should sober you up nicely!’
‘Hey – what do you mean?’
Grace walked round to the driver’s door and opened it.
‘You’re not leaving me here?’
‘Actually, I am.’
Smallbone patted his pockets. ‘You’ve got my phone!’
‘Don’t worry, it’s safe!’ Grace climbed in, shut the door and hit the central locking. Then he started the engine.
Smallbone pounded on the roof, shouting, ‘Hey!’ He tried to open the front passenger door.
Grace lowered the window a fraction. ‘I’ll drop your phone off at Brighton nick – oh, and your umbrella too!’
‘Don’t leave me here like this . . . please,’ Smallbone said, trying politeness for once in his life. ‘At least give me a lift back to town.’
‘Sorry,’ Grace said. ‘It’s an insurance thing. Not allowed to take passengers unless on official police business. You know how it is these days. Health and Safety, all that shit. Bummer.’
He drove off, slowing down for a brief instant to flick on the rear spotlight, and enjoy the sight of the forlorn, bewildered-looking figure stumbling across the grass after him.
43
Apart from one night here during happier times with Ari, when they’d toured around Wales before Sammy was born, Glenn Branson did not really know Car
diff at all, and he wasn’t sure of his exact whereabouts in the city right now. Except it was a nice, swanky hotel, and the bar was still open and busy. He sat at the counter with Bella Moy next to him. He was buzzing, on a high from having been in the TV studio, feeling a faint sense of anticlimax that it was all over.
He grabbed a handful of nuts in exotically coloured coatings and crunched them, then lifted his pint glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
Bella raised her Cosmopolitan and they clinked glasses.
‘Well done, star!’ he said.
‘You were the star,’ she returned with a sweet smile.
She was dressed in a navy trouser suit with an open-necked white blouse and elegant high-heels. He wanted to tell her how lovely she looked, but he didn’t quite have the courage, unsure how she might react, knowing from past experience that she had a very brittle side to her. And besides, he thought regretfully, in today’s politically correct police world, the slightest innuendo taken the wrong way could have you up before a disciplinary tribunal for sexual harassment.
But what a transformation, he thought, from the normally drab attire she wore at work, and her messy mousy hair. She’d had it done especially for tonight, an elegantly layered cut, and for the first time since he had known her, he was looking at her as an attractive woman. He noticed the fine gold chain with a tiny cross around her neck, and wondered how religious she was. He realized, despite having worked closely with her for the past two years, how little he knew her. ‘Must be tough with your mum being in hospital,’ he said.
She nodded sadly. ‘Yes.’ She shrugged, and in that gesture he saw, through that sadness, what might have been a hint of relief.