Need You Dead

40 Saturday 23 April

Roy Grace had a fondness for the sprawling, hilly mass of the Hangleton estate, to the northwest of the city. It was where he and Sandy had been the happiest, the first five years of their married life, in a tiny flat, with a view out across the rooftops on the far side of the street towards the hilly pastureland of the South Downs.

The village of Hangleton was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. Its small, beautiful Norman church, St Helen’s, is one of the oldest surviving buildings in the whole city of Brighton and Hove. And its close neighbour, medieval Hangleton Manor, is the oldest secular building in the city. But not much else in Hangleton is historic. Most of it was developed in the first half of the twentieth century and subsumed into the city at the same time.

Grace sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked car, as Guy Batchelor drove. He felt the same emotions he always did when in this area. So many memories.

They swept down a hill, made a right, up a steep incline, then a sharp right again into a crescent-shaped close. Batchelor slowed to a crawl as they peered out at the house numbers. Grace pointed to the right. ‘Twenty-nine over there.’

Moments later Batchelor halted the car outside a squat little house, with a large bay window, that looked only a few years old. A small, dog-wee-yellow-coloured hatchback was parked on the driveway.

The two detectives climbed out of the car and walked up to the front door. Batchelor rang the bell, which set off loud barking from inside.

Moments later the front door opened a fraction, accompanied by more deep barking, and a coarse female voice shouting out, ‘Shut the fuck up, Shane!’

The door opened wider, and they saw a tiny woman, with a mass of tangled black, wiry hair and almost absurdly large black-rimmed glasses, dressed in a brown velour tracksuit. She was stooping down, struggling to restrain a massive Rhodesian Ridgeback by its collar. Behind her was a small, dingy hallway. The place smelled of damp dog.

Batchelor held up his warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Batchelor and Detective Superintendent Grace, Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Branch. We’d like to have a word with Mr Seymour Darling. Is he in?’

‘Not, if I have anything to do with it, for much longer.’

‘Are you Mrs Darling?’ Batchelor asked.

‘So what if I am?’ She turned back to the dog and yelled, ‘Fuck you! Shut the fuck up, Shane! OK? Shut the fuck up!’ Then she turned back to the two detectives. ‘He’s not in, he’s gone to the football.’ Then she turned back to the dog. ‘I’m fucking warning you!’

‘May we confirm your name, please, madam?’

‘You know it, don’t you, you just said it.’

‘And your first name?’

‘It’s Trish. Trish Darling. And I don’t want any funny comments about it, had enough of them.’

‘What time are you expecting your husband home, Mrs Darling?’ Grace asked.

‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’

‘Beautiful dog,’ Batchelor said.

‘Yeah? You want him? Take him, he’s yours! Seymour can’t handle him, I can’t handle him, he’s a fucking nightmare. And my husband goes to the footy, leaves me to walk him. I can’t walk him, I ain’t got the strength.’

Batchelor handed her a card. ‘We’d like to have a word with your husband. Could you call me — or ask him to call me — when he gets home?’

She took the card in her hand, dubiously, without glancing at it, as if she had been handed a leaflet by a street peddler. ‘I’ll be the one having a word with him when he gets home.’ Then, darkly, she added, ‘If he gets home.’

Picking up on this, Batchelor pressed her. ‘Does he sometimes not return home?’

Staring back at them, as if realizing, albeit late in the day, that they might actually be allies, she replied, ‘Lately he’s become very strange. I don’t know what’s got into him. If you want to know the truth.’

‘We very much want to know the truth,’ Grace replied. ‘What can you tell us?’

‘I think he’s having an affair.’ As the dog barked again she yanked hard on his collar. ‘That’s what I think.’ Then as she leaned closer, Grace smelled alcohol on her breath and saw the blaze of anger in her eyes. ‘Whoever she is, she’s welcome to him. Good luck to her. She clearly sees something in him I don’t — and you want to know something? It can’t be the size of his weeny, that’s for sure.’ She raised her free hand in the air and made a curling motion with her index finger.