Dead at First Sight

26 Monday 1 October

Roy Grace generally had an even temper and lost it rarely, but this evening he was close to boiling point, with a raging toothache not helping. The day had started well: a glorious early-morning jog with Humphrey across the fields, through an autumnal dawn — their rescue Labrador-Border Collie cross was loving their move to the country.

Then it had begun going downhill soon after, when his beloved Alpha Romeo wouldn’t start. It had a flat battery, for no apparent reason. He’d jump-started it and it had got him to the office, then wouldn’t start again. The RAC had duly arrived and cheerily given him the good and bad news. The bad was that the battery was knackered. The good was that they had a spare on board, for which they relieved him of nearly £200.

He’d then had a two-hour meeting with a solicitor at the Crown Prosecution Service, who was pedantically questioning Roy’s identification of a Brighton GP, Edward Crisp, a suspected serial killer. How much veracity did you need to identify a man who had fired a twelve-bore shotgun at you from ten feet and nearly blown your leg off?

Next he’d had to endure a performance review by his immediate boss — and nemesis — Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe. There had been, unsurprisingly, high-level repercussions over a kidnapping case Grace had handled six weeks ago, Operation Replay, because of the high body count, mostly within the Brighton Albanian community. Pewe wasn’t interested that Roy had nearly died in the process of achieving a successful outcome, saving a fourteen-year-old boy from what would otherwise have been certain death. He was only concerned to personally come out smelling of roses from the Independent Office for Police Conduct enquiry into seven deaths related to the kidnap.

On top of it all, it was his week to be the Duty Force Gold Commander. This was a responsibility that came around every four months, on a roster that included the Chief, Deputy and Assistant Chief Constables, as well as all the force’s Chief Superintendents. It was the role of a Gold Commander to take strategic charge of any major incident in the county, and to authorize, if required, the deployment of firearms.

It meant no alcohol all that week, and he was badly in need of a drink at this moment. A large one. A very large one. He craved an ice-cold vodka Martini, which would do the trick nicely. But that wasn’t an option all the time he was on-call.

Instead, being home from work in time for once, he read to Noah, their fourteen-month-old son, his favourite book, about a hungry caterpillar, and put him to bed. He’d done this every night during the past fortnight he had been off, and he loved it. Loved the trust in his son’s eyes. Noah’s giggles and little laughs, and his naughtiness, splashing his arms in the bathwater, soaking himself and Cleo, and giggling even harder each time he did it.

Oftentimes during this he found himself reflecting on Bruno, all the missed childhood years. It made him even more determined to spend as much time as he could with both his sons.

When Noah was finally settled, Cleo, himself and Bruno had supper in the kitchen. Tonight, Bruno sat at the table, very upright, in a clean T-shirt, eating, but, as normal, saying nothing. Humphrey did his usual routine of moving around the table, sitting beside each of them in turn for some minutes in the hope a scrap would fall his way. Grace was less tolerant of the boy’s silence than his wife. It seemed to him it was, in his son’s mind, a way of getting back at them — punishing them — for uprooting him from Germany. Except what choice had they had? Boarding school was one but they didn’t feel that would be right. The only other option for Bruno would have been to go and live with his ghastly grandparents in Seaford — and life in their home, with their legendary meanness, would have been hellish for him. But Bruno did not seem to appreciate anything. At this moment he was toying with a piece of vegetarian sausage he had cut off and pronged with his fork, examining it suspiciously like a pathology specimen.

‘They’re Linda McCartney’s, Bruno,’ Cleo said.

‘Who is that?’

‘She was married to Paul McCartney.’

He looked blank.

‘One of the Beatles. Maybe you don’t know them — you’re too young.’

Ignoring her, he sniffed the morsel, turning it round with his fork as if concerned it might escape if he took his eye off it. ‘This does not even smell like meat.’

‘It’s not meant to,’ Cleo said. ‘It’s vegetarian.’

The boy smirked, but there was more supercilious mockery — and almost pity — in his expression than humour. ‘If people want to be vegetarian they should eat vegetables that look like what they are. My mother would never have eaten something as ridiculous as this. A beetle would taste better.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Cleo saw Roy was about to react, and she mouthed for him to hold off. ‘You told me your mother was vegan,’ she said.

‘She was a correct vegan. She cared about not eating animals. Meine Mutter would never have eaten a fake sausage or a fake hamburger,’ he sneered. ‘That’s just silly. If you want to be a vegetarian or a vegan, do that, but don’t make it look like meat and mess with everyone’s heads.’

Roy and Cleo shot a glance at each other. ‘So you didn’t become a vegan yourself, Bruno?’ Grace asked.

‘I’m blood-type A,’ Bruno said, solemnly. ‘It is important to eat according to your blood type. If you are type A you need proper meat.’ He pushed his plate aside and stood up, abruptly. ‘I go to my room.’

Again Roy Grace was about to rebuke him, when Cleo signalled for him to be quiet.

‘You’ve not eaten anything,’ she said. ‘You must have something.’

Bruno stared at his stepmother strangely. It was a look Roy Grace had seen many times before, during his career. It was the gleam in the eyes of a prosecution counsel, in court, who is just about to deliver a crushing rebuke to a key defence witness.

‘If you get me some proper food, I will,’ he said. ‘Why did you think I would wish for vegetarian?’

Smiling, as if determined not to be riled by him, Cleo asked, ‘What kind of proper food would you like me to get you, Bruno?’

‘Sausages,’ he said. ‘Proper German sausages: Weisswurst, Frankfurters, Bratwurst, Blutwurst, Bockwurst, Bregenwurst, Knackwurst, Gelbwurst, Teewurst, not the crap you have in butcher’s here.’

‘OK,’ she said, brightly. ‘German sausages it will be. Which kind would you would most like me to get you?’

‘Weisswurst and Bratwurst.’

‘OK, I’ll get some in for you.’

Without a word of acknowledgement, Bruno turned his back, walked away from the kitchen table, through the open-plan living room and up the stairs.

‘The word is thanks,’ Roy Grace murmured, so quietly only Cleo could hear. He looked at her and she gave him a what-can-you-do look back. Then she reached out a hand and covered his.

‘Gently,’ she said quietly, almost whispering. ‘Gently, gently, gently.’

Almost whispering back, Grace said, ‘Yes, that’s how I’d like to throttle him. Gently.’

She grimaced.

To add to his bad mood, there was a bunch of bills that had arrived in today’s post, which he always liked to settle promptly. He glanced through them. The first was for new netting for the chicken run. ‘Blimey!’ he said, wincing at the amount. ‘I hate to think how much each egg costs us!’

‘At least we know where they come from — and that the hens have a nice life, darling.’

‘From the cost of this netting it would be cheaper to keep them in a suite in the Ritz.’

The second invoice was a stage payment request from Starling Row, their bathroom fitters. ‘Yikes!’ he said. ‘We’ve got our hens in the Ritz and I hope Bruno appreciates his swanky bathroom — let’s hope he doesn’t tell us he had a bigger one in Germany!’

The final invoice was from a company whose name he didn’t recognize. ‘Who are Lloyds Environmental Services?’ he asked, showing Cleo the invoice.

‘They’re the people who come twice a year to suck the sewage from the cesspit.’

‘To remove our shit,’ he added. ‘Hmmmm. I might have a job for them at Headquarters.’

His job phone rang. Apologizing to her, he answered with a curt, ‘Roy Grace.’

And immediately his spirits sank even lower as he recognized the nervy voice of Inspector Andy Anakin, known to most of his colleagues as ‘Panicking Anakin’. Tonight Anakin was the Golf 99 — the Duty Critical Incident Inspector at Brighton police station — and a person with a temperament less suited to handling critical incidents would be hard to find, Grace thought. The vast majority of his colleagues, at all ranks, were good people, but just occasionally someone like Anakin would slip through the cracks — or rather, rise through them. He often wondered how on earth Anakin ever managed to make it into the police force, let alone get promoted to inspector.

‘Roy, ah, good, you are there!’ He sounded out of breath, as ever.

‘I am, yes, Andy.’

‘Ah, good.’

There was a brief silence. Grace took advantage of it. ‘Well, if that’s all you wanted to ask, I’ll sign off now. Cheerio, Andy.’

‘No... no, no, no, I... I... I just wanted to alert you. The thing. Well, sir, you see, I think we may have a situation. Thought I’d better forewarn you.’

‘OK, tell me?’

‘It could turn out to be nothing, of course, a false alarm.’

Grace waited patiently for Anakin to get to the point. It was a long wait. ‘It’s this guy’s wife, you see — ah — as I understand they had a pretty big bust-up eight months ago — quite a long history of abuse. His name’s Liam Morrisey — long history with us, small-time drug dealer, sacked as a bouncer for excessive violence, once did three years for GBH after stabbing someone in a pub.’

‘Nice chap,’ Grace said.

‘No, not really,’ Anakin said. ‘Not at all nice, sir. Thing is, he’s under a court order not to go near her — his former wife — Kerry — he has to remain half a mile distant. She phoned earlier this evening apparently, dialled the nines, because she’d seen him driving up and down her street.’

‘Where does she live, Andy?’

‘Hadden Avenue, just off Freshfield Road, up near the racecourse.’

‘I know it.’

‘An hour ago he threw something from his car into her front garden. She thought it might be a bomb or something. We sent a unit to investigate and it turned out to be what looked like a roadkill fox in a bin liner. The bastard sent her a text saying the next thing the police will find in a bin liner will be her body.’

‘What reassurances have you given her, Andy?’

‘I’ve told her that all the crews have been alerted, and they will drive past her house as often as they can throughout the night. But we haven’t got the resources to do a proper job, you know that, Roy. I’ve got four cars out covering the whole city, it’s ridiculous!’

‘OK, so all’s calm at the moment?’

‘At the moment.’

‘OK, good.’

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, Roy. I think it’s going to kick off.’

‘OK, I’m here if you need me. What you should be thinking about is putting a team of officers together who may have to effect a forced entry. Where are your ARVs at the moment, if required, and do you have someone on Division, other than yourself, overseeing this? Do you have a sergeant monitoring the situation for a quick response if required? I suggest you ensure you have a plan to respond quickly if the situation escalates.’

‘OK, I will, I will,’ he said. ‘I definitely will. It’s going to kick off, I know it.’