Looking Good Dead (31 page)

‘Mmmmnnnnnnnnnnnuuuug.’

She could see nothing, could not open her eyes. There was total bitumen blackness beyond the images inside her head. She could hear nothing except for the sound of her blood roaring in her ears. The sound of her own fear.

Shaking in terror and from cold. And from lack of alcohol.

Her throat was parched. She needed a drink. Desperately, desperately needed a gulp of vodka. And water.

Her crotch was cold and itchy. A while ago, when she had finally let go of the urine she could no longer contain, it had felt strangely, comfortably warm for several minutes. Until it had started to turn cold. Occasionally she could smell it; then it would just be the musty, chilly, cellar smell again.

She had no idea what the time was. Nor where she was. Her head pounded. Cold, sick fear swirled in the deep, black well of her insides, swirled in the blood inside her veins. She was so scared it was impossible to think clearly.

Just occasionally, she thought she could hear the very faint sound of traffic. An occasional siren. Coming to rescue her?

But she had no idea where she was.

Tears welled in her sealed eyes. She wanted Tom, she wanted Jessica and Max, wanted to hear all their voices, feel their arms around her. She tried to remember those moments, those confused, all-speeded-up moments.

She had driven Mandy Morrison home. Pulled up outside her parents’ modern Spanish-style house in swanky Tongdean Lane, a steep hill near the Withdean sports stadium. She sat in the car, music playing on the radio, waiting to see that Mandy had let herself safely in the front door before driving on.

Mandy had opened the door, gone inside, turned and waved and closed the door.

Then the passenger door of her car had opened.

And the rear door behind her.

A hand as strong as steel had pulled her neck back. Then something wet and acrid was being held against her nose.

She whimpered at the memory.

Then she was here.

Shaking uncontrollably.

On her back on a rock-hard floor.

She struggled, trying to move her arms again, but the pain became unbearable. She tried to move her legs, but they felt cemented together. Her breathing was getting faster, her chest tightening.

She felt light pouring onto her. The darkness behind her eyelids became a red haze.

Then she emitted a muffled bellow of pain as tape was ripped away from her eyes, taking what felt like half her skin. And she blinked, momentarily dazzled by the light. A squat man with a smug grin and wavy silver hair pulled back into a small pigtail, grossly overweight, in a baggy shirt open to the navel, was standing over her.

At first she felt relief; she thought this man had come to help her. She tried to speak to him, but all she could make was a gurgling sound.

He stared back at her without speaking, eyeing her up and down with an expression of deep thoughtfulness. Then, finally, he smiled at her, and her heart leapt. He had come to help her – he was going to get her out of here, take her home to Tom and Jessica and Max!

Suddenly his tongue slipped out of his lips and gave a quick flick, like a snake’s, wiping all the way round them, moistening them. Then he said in an American accent, ‘You look like a woman who takes it up the ass.’

He put his hand in his pocket and Kellie heard the clink of metal. As fear squeezed her, crushing every cell in her body, she saw a delicate silver chain swing from his fingers.

‘I’ve brought you a present, Kellie,’ he said in a voice that told her he was her new best friend. He held it up in front of her face; there was a small pendant hanging from the chain, and in the poor light she couldn’t quite make out the design engraved on it. It looked like some kind of beetle.

‘You can relax,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to take a few pictures for your family album!’

‘Grnnnngwg,’ she responded.

‘If you’re a good girl and do exactly what I tell you, I might even let you have a drink. Stoli vodka’, he said. ‘That’s your favourite, isn’t it?’

In his other hand he held up a bottle.

‘I wouldn’t want you to die of thirst,’ he added. ‘That would really be a waste.’

50

‘So, an appropriate name for him then,’ Norman Potting said. ‘D’Eath.’ Pronouncing it death.

Grace, Potting and Nicholl were seated in the oak-timbered saloon of the Black Lion in Rottingdean, each with a pint tumbler in front of him. Grace took a mouthful, holding the wide rim of the glass to his nose, breathing in the aroma of the hops, trying to get the reek of the sulphuric acid out of his nostrils.

His hand was shaking, he realized. From his hangover? From what he had seen this morning?

He remembered early on in his career when he had been a beat copper, out in a patrol car on nights, being called to attend a suicide on the London–Brighton railway line. A man had lain down on the track by the entrance to a tunnel, and the wheels had gone over his neck. He’d had to walk along the track and recover the head.

He would never forget the surreal sight of it lying there in the beam of his torch, barely any blood at all leaking and the almost surgically precise cut. The dead man had been about fifty, with a ruddy, outdoor complexion. Grace had picked the head up by the shaggy thatch of ginger hair, and had been surprised by just how heavy it was. D’Eath’s head had been just as heavy.

He watched the kaleidoscope of lights on a fruit machine, which no one was using, go through their routine. He could hear the faint chimes that went with them. It was still early; there was just a handful of people in the place. A trendy-looking man, a media type, was seated by the fireplace, drinking what looked like a Bloody Mary and reading the Observer. An elderly, shapeless couple sat a couple of tables away, slouched over their drinks in silence, like two sacks of vegetables.

Thinking through the day’s agenda – which had been thrown badly by D’Eath’s murder – he was worrying about Nick Nicholl meeting the SIO of the murder investigation in Wimbledon, where a headless young woman wearing a bracelet with a scarab motif had been discovered two months earlier. It might be better to go himself, one SIO to another, rather than send a junior member of his team.

Turning to Nicholl, Grace asked, ‘What time are you meeting the SIO of the murder in Wimbledon?’

‘He’s going to call me this afternoon. He has a brother in Brighton; he’s coming down to have lunch with him.’

‘Let me know and I’ll come with you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Despite being in his late twenties, Nick still had something of a socially clumsy youth about him. And he still could not get his head around calling him Roy, as Grace liked all his team to do.

Grace checked the growing list of notes on his Blackberry. The smell of roasting meat coming from the kitchen was churning his already very queasy stomach. It would be a while, he thought, before he could swallow a morsel of food again. He wasn’t even sure if drinking with all the paracetamol he had taken was very smart. But this was one of those moments when he needed a drink. On duty or not.

He took his phone out of his pocket and checked it was still on – just in case it had somehow got switched off and he had missed a call back from Cleo.

He wondered briefly how Glenn Branson was getting on, worrying a little about his friend. Underneath the hulking frame that must have made him a formidable nightclub bouncer was a gentle guy. Too damned gentle and kind-hearted for his own good, at times.

‘Sulphuric acid,’ Potting said pensively, raising his glass and taking a long draught.

Grace stared at him. The poor sod had not been blessed with good looks – in fact he verged on being plug ugly. Despite the ageing detective’s failings, he suddenly felt a little sorry for his colleague, sensing a sad and lonely man behind the bravado.

Potting put his glass down on a Guinness mat, dug his hand in his pocket and got out his pipe. He stuck it in his mouth, then pulled a box of matches from the opposite pocket. Nick Nicholl watched in fascination.

‘Ever smoked, lad?’ Potting asked.

The young DC shook his head.

‘Didn’t think so; you don’t look the type. Fit bugger, I suppose?’

‘I try.’ Nicholl sipped his beer. ‘My dad smoked. He died at forty-eight from lung cancer.’

Potting was silenced for a second. Then he said, ‘Cigarettes?’

‘Twenty a day.’

He held up his pipe, smugly. ‘There’s a difference, you see.’

‘Nick’s a good runner,’ Grace cut in. ‘I want to poach him for my rugby team this autumn.’

‘Sussex need some good runners at the moment,’ Potting retorted. ‘They’ve got a lot of bloody runs to get today. What a Horlicks yesterday! Three bowled out for ten! Against bloody Surrey!’ He struck a match and lit his pipe, blowing out a cloud of sickly sweet smoke which billowed around Grace.

Potting puffed away until the bowl of his pipe glowed an even, bright red.

Normally Grace liked the smell of pipe smoke, but not this morning. He waved the smoke away, watching it curl heavily and lazily up towards the nicotine-decorated ceiling. Reggie D’Eath’s murder could have been coincidental, he thought. The man was a key witness for the prosecution in the trial of members of a major international paedophile ring. There were several people who would have good reasons for wanting him silenced.

Yet what had been found on the two computers seemed to him to indicate another possibility. Bryce had been warned not to contact the police. He had – rightly – ignored the warning, and a police examination of his computer had connected it to Reggie D’Eath’s PC. Less than twenty-four hours later D’Eath was dead.

There was an irritating chime from the fruit machine, then a series of further chimes like a xylophone. Potting and Nicholl were now deep into a conversation about cricket, and Grace drifted more deeply into his own thoughts. He remained so deep in thought that, even when they were back in the car, he barely registered the one piece of information that Norman Potting, changing the subject from cricket back to Reggie D’Eath, suddenly revealed.

51

The emergency vet, who had introduced herself as Dawn, a rather butch-looking Australian woman in her mid-thirties, was kneeling beside Lady, who was still very drowsy. She pulled down the Alsatian’s left eyelid and examined it with the aid of a pencil torch. Max and Jessica watched anxiously. Tom stood with an arm around each of them.

The detective, Glenn Branson, had gone outside to make a phone call.

Tom stared down at the dog, his mind in turmoil. Yesterday morning he had gone to the police, defying the email warning that had been sent to him. Now Kellie was missing and the car had been found, burned out.

Oh Christ, my darling, where are you?

Standing in the brilliant morning sunshine out in the street, Branson held his mobile phone to his ear, talking to a family liaison officer, WPC Linda Buckley, arranging for her to come straight over to the Bryces’ house.

Almost immediately after he ended the call, the phone rang. It was an officer from British Transport Police, PC Dudley Bunting, returning Branson’s call. Glenn told him what he was looking for and that it was very urgent. Bunting promised to come back to him as quickly as he could.

‘Today is what I need,’ Branson said. ‘Not three weeks time. That possible?’

Bunting sounded hesitant. ‘It’s Sunday.’

‘Yeah, I know, I should be in church. And I’m with a geezer who would quite like to spend the day with his wife, and I’m with his two kids who’d quite like to spend the day with their mother – except it looks like someone abducted her in the middle of the night. So maybe you’d like to sacrifice the Sunday roast with your in-laws and pull your fucking finger out for me?’

Bunting assured him he would exert maximum digital extraction.

While he was talking, another call came in – from Ari. Branson ignored it. When he finished his call, a message signal appeared on the phone’s display, accompanied by two sharp beeps.

The DS stared at the sign on the windows of the gym on the other side of the road. Gym and Tonic. It was a good name, he thought. Yeah, he liked that. With a balled fist he tested his own stomach muscles. He still had a six-pack, but he needed to get back into the gym soon; there had been a time when he went to the gym every single day; now, he thought guiltily, he did well to make it twice a week.

But there was something else making him feel a lot more guilty, as he looked up at the clear blue sky and felt the glorious warmth of the sun on his face.

Ari, his wife – and his kids.

Sammy was just eight and Remi was three; he missed both of them every minute of the day he wasn’t with them. Yet these days he hardly ever was with them. Work was increasingly consuming his life.

He pressed the message retrieval button and listened to the voicemail Ari had just left – in a tone that was short and sarcastic, and growing shorter and more sarcastic by the day. ‘Glenn, going to take Sammy and Remi onto the beach; be nice if you joined us as it was your suggestion. They’d quite like to see their father for at least one hour over the weekend. Perhaps you can call me back. My name’s Ari, in case you’ve forgotten. I’m your wife.’

He sighed heavily. They rowed increasingly frequently about his hours. Ari seemed to have forgotten already that he’d taken the whole of last weekend off to drive up to Solihull for her sister’s thirtieth birthday, dumping his work onto a broad-shouldered Grace.

Glenn Branson’s problem was that he was ambitious; he wanted to rise through the ranks, like Roy Grace had done. But that meant long hours were not a temporary thing. This was the way it was going to be for the next twenty years.

A lot of his colleagues found the job tough on their marriages; it often seemed only those officers married to other police officers, who understood each others’ crazy hours, had happy marriages. At some point he was going to have to make a decision about which was more important to him, his job or his family.

That was pretty ironic, really. Soon after Sammy was born, when Glenn Branson had been working as a nightclub bouncer, he had decided he wanted to have a career his son would be proud of, and that was when he had joined the Sussex force.