Dead at First Sight

130 Saturday 13 October

At half past five, Roy Grace was on the phone to Glenn Branson, who was updating him on the interviews with Fordwater and with Lynda Merrill, when he heard the sound of Cleo’s car pulling up outside the cottage.

Humphrey ran to the front door, barking, waking Noah, who for the past hour had been sound asleep on the floor.

‘Go to your room!’ he heard Cleo bellow, sounding uncharacteristically furious.

Moments later she stormed into the living room, her face a thundercloud.

‘Call you back in a few minutes,’ Grace said, and put the phone down as Cleo stood in front of him, shaking her head.

He looked up at her. ‘What? What’s happened?’

‘Our... sorry... your... darling son. That’s what’s happened.’

He stood up. ‘Tell me?’ She was close to tears and he put his arms around her.

‘I need a stiff drink.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘No, it’s not wise, and I know I can’t have any. But my mother drank all through her pregnancy with me and I survived.’

He poured two glasses of sparkling water and they sat down. ‘So, what’s happened?’

She burst into tears. Noah began bawling.

Glancing down, as if torn between him and her husband, she said, ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. God.’ She sniffed, composing herself a little. ‘I arrived at this very posh house in Hove, which had a large bus parked in the driveway. The parents of the boy who’d invited Bruno looked at me like I was something the cat brought in. Other parents, too, were looking at me like I’m some kind of monster.’

‘Why, what had he done?’

‘Bruno had completely ruined the party, for fourteen children.’

‘What happened? What on earth happened?’

‘They’d hired the gaming bus, right — for all the children. At some point, Bruno locked himself inside the bus and wouldn’t let any of the other children in. That’s what happened.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘He — just like — barricaded himself inside, halfway through the party. He locked the doors so that none of the kids, nor the driver who’d gone to stretch his legs, could get in. And he spent the rest of the time in there by himself, ignoring everyone hammering on the doors and the windows.’

Grace felt his heart plummeting. ‘What... I mean... how... why? What was going through his mind?’

‘He told me why in the car. He said, Because they were too slow. They were at a completely different level to me, slowing me down.’

Grace stared at her in numb silence. ‘He did that?’

‘The whole party was ruined. By Bruno. He’s got no concept at all of socialization. He alienated himself from every boy and girl there. He’s a bully, Roy, he’s a bloody bully. We can’t have him behaving like that.’

‘I’ll go up and speak to him.’

She shook her head. ‘No, not now. I’ve tried telling him on the way home that what he’s done is just not acceptable. He knows how angry I am. Leave him tonight and let’s both speak to him tomorrow. I don’t think there’s anything you’re going to get from him tonight.’

They sat in silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ Roy Grace said, finally. ‘This is all my fault. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought Bruno here to live with us.’

‘Of course you should — he’s your son. He drives me mad, too, but I honestly think there’s a decent person inside his... his persona or whatever. From what you’ve said about his mother, he’s had a pretty strange upbringing to say the least. The son of a heroin addict can’t be expected to immediately adopt other values.’

‘You really think that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember what we talked about not all that long ago, about when we first met?’

‘Yep, over the corpse in the mortuary. And you were turned on by my scrubs, right?’

He gave her a teasing look. ‘Well, apart from those, what also turned me on was something you said as you looked down at the body. It was a twenty-two-year-old male who’d been stabbed eleven times. He was known to Sussex Police as a local drugs dealer who’d been in and out of prison since his teens. You said that someone, once, must have loved him and perhaps still did. And that he’d started life as an innocent baby. And you wondered what had happened in those years in between to change him. That’s the first thing I fell in love with. Your humanity. The way you could always see the good in people, unlike in my job, where we mostly only ever see the bad.’

‘So it wasn’t my legs or my boobs?’

‘They helped.’ He grinned.

She grinned back and held his gaze. There was such deep trust and intense love in her eyes that it made Roy, momentarily, feel shallow. He knew he could never be as good and compassionate a person as Cleo truly was. There were times, too, when he worried that she thought he was a better person than he really was. Perhaps it was too many years as a copper, only ever seeing the worst of people, that had done that to him.

‘We will change Bruno,’ she said. ‘Whatever it takes. Yes?’

‘Yes!’

‘So tell me,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘Do you know much about Tooth’s background?’

‘Not really — not beyond his criminal past, anyway.’

‘Are you sorry?’ she asked, suddenly.

‘Sorry? About what?’

‘That he’s dead?’

‘I’m sorry in the sense that I’d like to have had the chance to talk to him, to see what made him tick. I heard from the NYPD that at the last count he’d been responsible for over thirty-six contract killings.’

‘What do you think shaped his life to get him to the point where he could kill like that?’

‘Drill down into the background of almost any criminal I’ve ever dealt with and you’ll find the same blueprint.’ He shrugged.

‘I suppose a lot more would have come out if he’d gone to trial. Does it make you feel a bit cheated?’

Grace shook his head. ‘No.’ Then he said, with a smile, ‘I have a feeling that Tooth didn’t do trials.’