Looking Good Dead

34

Roy Grace was having a sleepless night, also. An endless list of things he needed to check for Operation Nightingale churned through his brain. As well as the words of Brent Mackenzie.

The thing is, mate, they’re telling me you are in real danger. Something to do with this scarab beetle. You need to watch your back.

What did he mean? Maybe he had just picked up the vibe of the scarab, which was preying heavily on his mind?

Then his thoughts went back to Janie Stretton. He pushed away all the emotion of her distraught father – he had become hardened to those things over the years. Perhaps more hardened than he liked, but maybe that was the only way to cope. He was thinking about what had been done to her. What was the sense in removing her head but leaving a hand? Other than that it was some kind of message? To whom? The police? Or perhaps a sick trophy?

And why the scarab beetle?

For the killer to show off his – or her – intellect?

Then his thoughts turned darkly to the warning from Alison Vosper, and the knowledge that this case was the Last Chance Saloon for him. To keep his job and his life here in Brighton, he needed to find Janie’s killer with no fuck-ups, no newspaper headlines about cops dabbling in the occult and nobody killed in a car chase.

He had to walk on bloody eggshells.

Might be easier, he thought, to walk on water.

By six in the morning Grace had had enough of listening to the dawn chorus, to rattling milk bottles, to a barking dog way off in the distance, to all the damned stuff inside his head.

He pushed back the duvet, swung his legs out of bed and sat still for some moments, his eyes raw from lack of sleep, his head pounding. He had not slept for more than half an hour throughout the entire night, if that. And tonight he had a date. A really, really serious date.

And that too, he knew, was a big part of the reason he had barely slept. Excitement. Like a smitten teenager! He couldn’t help it. He could not remember when he had last felt like this.

He walked to the window, opened the curtains a fraction and stared out. It was going to be a fine day; the sky was a blank, dark blue canvas. Everything felt very still. An enormous thrush was hopping clumsily around the dew-drenched lawn, pecking at the ground in search of worms. Grace stared at the Zen water garden Sandy had created, with its skewed-oval shape and its large, flat stones, and then at all the plants she had put around the borders of the lawn. A lot had died, and the ones that remained were wildly out of control.

He had no idea about gardening; that had always been Sandy’s domain. But he’d enjoyed helping her create her own special garden out of the boring eighth of an acre rectangle of lawn and borders that they had started with. He dug in places she told him to dig, fertilized, watered, lugged bags of peat up and down, weeded, planted, a willing skivvy to Sandy as foreman.

Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, making their home, their nest, cementing their life together.

The garden that Sandy had created and loved so much was neglected now. Even the lawn looked ragged and weed-strewn, and he felt guilty about that, sometimes wondering what she would say if she returned.

Saturday mornings. He remembered how he used to go off for his early run, and come back bringing Sandy an almond croissant from the bakery in Church Road and her Daily Mail.

He drew the curtains right back, and light flooded in. And suddenly, for the first time in almost nine years, he saw the room differently.

He saw a woman’s bedroom, decorated mostly in different shades of pink. He saw a Victorian mahogany dressing table – which they had picked up for a song at a stall in the Gardner Street market – very definitely covered in a woman’s things: hairbrushes, combs, make-up and scent bottles. There was a framed photograph of Sandy in evening dress and himself in black tie finery, standing beside the captain of the SS Black Watch on the only cruise they had ever been on.

He saw her slippers still on the floor, her nightdress on a hook on the wall beside the bed. What would any woman make of this if he brought her back here? he thought suddenly.

What would Cleo think?

And, he realized, these thoughts had never occurred to him before. The house was a time warp. Everything was exactly the way it had been that day, that Tuesday, 26 July, when Sandy had vanished into thin air.

And he could still remember it so damned vividly.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday Sandy had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love.

He’d left the house later than usual, at nine fifteen, and reached his office at Brighton police station shortly after half past for a briefing on the murder of a Hell’s Angel biker who had been dumped in Shoreham Harbour with his hands tied behind his back and a breeze block chained to his ankles. He’d promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple, his then best friend Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife Leslie, who Sandy got on well with. There had been developments on the case, and he’d arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.

At first he’d thought she was angry at him for being so late and was staging a protest. The house was tidy; her car and handbag were gone; there was no sign of a struggle.

Then, twenty-four hours later, her elderly black VW Golf was found in a bay in the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There had been two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one from Boots, and one from Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.

His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday. On the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 6.18 a.m., he could hear a muffled American voice through the party wall between their semi-detached houses; it sounded like John Wayne, addressing a bunch of bums he had just rounded up.

He went downstairs into the kitchen, wondering whether to make a cup of tea or go for his run first. His goldfish was drifting aimlessly around his circular bowl, as ever.

‘Morning, Marlon!’ he said breezily. ‘Having your morning swim? Are you hungry?’

Marlon’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

He filled the kettle, pulled up a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, looking around, wondering what signs of Sandy were in this room. Almost everything, except for the silver fridge, was red or had a red motif. The oven and the dishwasher were red, the handles on the white units, the hob, the doorknobs, were all red. Even the kitchen table was red and white. All Sandy’s choice. It had been the fashionable colour at the time, but it all looked a little tired now; the ceramic surfaces were badly chipped. Some of the unit hinges had sagged. The paintwork was scratched and grimy.

The truth was, he knew, he would be better off in a flat. They rattled around in this place – himself, Marlon and Sandy’s ghost.

He opened the cupboard door beneath the kitchen sink, ducked down, found a roll of black bin liners and tore one off. Then he picked up a photograph of himself and Sandy from a shelf and stared at it for a moment. It had been taken by a stranger, with Grace’s camera, on their honeymoon. Right at the top of Mount Vesuvius. Sandy and he stood, looking sweaty from the exertion of the hard climb, both wearing T-shirts, against the backdrop of the crater partially masked by low grey cloud.

He placed the photograph in the bin liner, then stood still as if waiting to be struck dead by a thunderbolt.

But nothing happened.

Except a whole load of guilt crept up through him. What if it went really well tonight and he ended up bringing Cleo Morey back here after their dinner date?

He realized he needed to remove anything that was obviously Sandy’s. And that was a huge milestone for him. A mountain.

But maybe it was time?

Then, having second thoughts, he took the photograph out of the bin liner and put it back on the shelf. It would look odd if he did not have photographs. It was her personal things he needed to reduce around the house.

Up in the bedroom, he looked at her hairbrush. There were still strands of her long, fair hair in the bristles. He pulled one out, held it up, his heart leaden suddenly. He let the strand drop and watched it float to the carpet, feeling a lump in his throat. Then he brought the brush to his nose and sniffed, but there was no scent of Sandy remaining on it, just a flat, dry smell.

He put the brush into the bin liner, and all the rest of her belongings from the dressing table and then from the bathroom. He carried the bag into the spare room used for storing junk, and placed it next to an empty suitcase, the box that his laptop had originally come in and several old rolls of Christmas wrapping paper.

Then he got changed into his shorts, singlet and trainers, folded a five-pound note into his pocket, and set off for his run.

His route took him straight down to the Kingsway, a wide dual carriageway running along Hove seafront. On one side were houses that would give way in half a mile or so to continuous mansion blocks and hotels – some modern, some Victorian, some Regency – that continued the full length of the seafront. Opposite were two small boating lagoons and a playground, lawns and then the promenade with stretches of beach huts, and the pebble beaches beyond, and just over a mile to the east, the wreck of the old West Pier.

It was almost deserted and he felt as if he had the whole city to himself. He loved being out this early on a weekend, as if he had stolen a march on the world. The tide was out, and he could see the orb of the rising sun already well up in the sky. A man walked, far out on the mudflats, swinging a metal detector. A container ship, barely more defined than a smudge, sat out on the horizon, looking motionless.

A sweeper truck moved slowly towards Grace, engine roaring, its brushes swirling, scooping up the usual detritus of a Friday night, the discarded fast-food cartons, Coke cans, cigarette butts, the occasional needle.

Grace stopped in the middle of the promenade, a short distance from a wino curled up asleep on a bench, and did his stretches, breathing deeply that familiar seafront smell he loved so much – the salty tang of the fresh, mild air, richly laced with rust and tar, old rope and putrid fish – that Brighton’s elder generation of seaside landladies liked referring to in their brochures as ozone.

Then he began his six-mile run, to the start of the Marina and back again. For the final mile, he always turned inland, running up to the busy shopping thoroughfare of Church Road, Hove, to an open-all-hours grocery store, to pick up some milk and a newspaper, and maybe a magazine that took his fancy. Maybe this morning he would buy another style magazine. Something like Arena. Get some more ideas about what to wear tonight.

He stopped outside the shop door, partly refreshed by his run and partly exhausted from his lack of sleep, perspiring heavily. He did his stretches, then entered the store and walked over to the newspaper and magazine section. And instantly saw the headlines of the morning edition of the Argus.

Beetle Riddle in Brighton Law Student Murder

Seething with anger, he grabbed a copy of the paper from the stand. There was the photograph of Janie Stretton he had released yesterday. Inset below it was a small photograph of a scarab beetle.

Sussex CID are refusing to say whether a rare scarab beetle, not native to the British Isles, might hold a vital clue to Janie Stretton’s killer. When asked to confirm the discovery of the beetle during the post-mortem examination by Home Office Pathologist Dr Frazer Theobald, Senior Investigating Officer Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Brighton and Hove CID was not available for comment…

Grace stared at the words, his fury growing by the minute. Not available for comment? No one had bloody asked him to comment. And he had given strictest instructions that the press were not to be told about the discovery of the beetle.

So who the hell had leaked it?