Need You Dead

13 Wednesday 20 April

Roy Grace’s anxiety was growing deeper by the second. Tomorrow afternoon he was due to fly to Munich to meet Bruno. He knew very little about the boy. He had some information from the German lawyer and from Anette Lippert, the mother of Bruno’s friend, Erik, with whom Bruno was currently staying. And he’d had a couple of stilted phone conversations with him, not really knowing what to say, after his attempts at Skyping with him had failed.

He didn’t even know Bruno’s birthday, at this moment, and he had only seen a few photographs, including one taken a couple of years ago in a park, with Sandy, that had been emailed to him by Anette. But fortunately Bruno spoke good English. In the photographs he was nice-looking, neatly dressed, but with a deep sadness in his expression that the smile he had put on for the camera could not hide.

All he really knew, from what Sandy had written in her suicide note to him, was that this child was the reason why she had disappeared all those years back, leaving Roy bewildered and distraught — and searching for her for the last decade.

He felt totally ill-equipped to take Bruno on. How was the small boy going to feel meeting his father for the first time? How would he feel about leaving Munich and coming to England? To live with an entirely new family?

Should he take him to attend the burial of his mother? He’d talked to a child psychologist friend of Cleo, who told him he should, that it would be important for him to have a sense of closure with his mother, and to have a place he could return to in future years to pay his respects.

There was another problem for him. Sandy had left no instructions on whether she wanted to be buried or cremated, as was often the practice in German wills. He remembered once, many years ago, they’d discussed it briefly out at dinner one night, when the subject of death had come up — the husband of an old friend of Sandy’s had drowned in a sailing accident on holiday. He was pretty sure Sandy had said she didn’t care, that when you were dead your spirit departed from your body, leaving it an empty shell. She didn’t care what happened to her shell. Roy and her parents had decided that burial would provide somewhere more tangible for Bruno to visit than a name on a crematorium memorial wall or a plant in a Garden of Remembrance.

He was in his office, with his workload of Crown Prosecution files in front of him. He was meant to be preparing for an important forum here in half an hour. Present would be DC Emma-Jane Boutwood and Emily Denyer — Emily Gaylor’s new married name — to discuss the financial aspects of the forthcoming trial of ‘black widow’ Jodie Bentley. But he was unable to concentrate on anything other than what would happen in Munich tomorrow.

Now that he and Cleo were married and had a son of their own, Noah, life was good. Or had been until the events of the past few weeks, when Sandy had surfaced in a hospital in Munich after being hit by a taxi, and had then committed suicide, leaving him the note informing him they had a son, Bruno.

And, suddenly, his life was turned upside down.

A son he had never known about, but now had no option but to care for. Permanently.

He picked up his phone and dialled a police friend and colleague, recently promoted Superintendent Jason Tingley, who had a son, Stan, of a similar age to Bruno. He asked him a load of questions about what a boy of ten might be interested in. Tingley was helpful and gave a large amount of information and advice, but Roy ended the call feeling even more worried. So much had changed; the world for a child today was so very different from how it had been for him.

Apart from football, Stan Tingley’s world was one Grace knew virtually nothing about, and it revolved around few of the things he was familiar with. Stan had a vocabulary of slang; Snapchat and Instagram were his social media platforms. He rarely watched conventional television, instead he used the screen to play FIFA and a shooting game on his PlayStation. And he had his own YouTube channel. Tingley offered for the two boys to meet, inviting Bruno to come over to their home. Maybe the boys would click and become friends, Grace hoped. Finding friends for Bruno and getting him into a school where he’d be happy were going to be priorities.

But there was another thing really worrying him. It was the cryptic warning Sandy had written in her suicide note to him, about Bruno. He’d been fretting about this for days.

Just what exactly had she meant by that?