Not Dead Yet

37

Roy Grace liked the design and location of Brighton’s Woodvale Crematorium. In his experience, the typical urban crematorium was a soulless and charmless place, because it existed for one grim function only. Unlike a church, no one got married there, or christened there, or worshipped there, or simply popped in when they were feeling low. But Woodvale, nestling in lush, well-tended grounds on a hill to the north of the city, had a sense of history and a good deal of charm. The central building of twin chapels with a bell tower between them, in Gothic Revival style, had the appearance of a village parish church.

Although his work revolved almost entirely around the deaths of other people, he tended to avoid dwelling excessively on his own mortality. He still had not come to any decision about what he believed in, and kept a totally open mind. On a few occasions, working with psychics in the past, he’d had astonishing results – but many failures too. When he used to discuss it with Sandy, and more recently with Cleo, he would say what he truly felt – that there was a spiritual dimension to existence, and he believed there was something beyond this world, but not in a Biblical sense. In his heart, he profoundly hoped there would be something else. But then he would see some terrible atrocity on the news – or get called out to one himself – and on those occasions he’d think gloomily that maybe it was better for the human race to restrict all its evil to this planet and the mercifully short lives of its inhabitants.

One decision he had not yet made was his own funeral. Sandy had said she wanted a woodland burial, in an environmentally friendly coffin, but he had always shied away from dwelling on the subject: it disturbed him too much to think about it. Although, after a case he had been on some months back involving the trafficking of human organs, he had finally taken the plunge and done something that Sandy had urged him to do years ago. He’d signed up as an organ donor. But that was as far as he’d got with confronting his own mortality.

He looked out at the scene through the driving rain that conveniently turned his windscreen opaque, concealing him. A black hearse and a cortège of limousines waited some distance from one chapel, like planes stacked on a runway.

A sudden chill rippled through him, making him jump. Someone walking over your grave, his mother used to tell him. He smiled, sadly and fondly for a moment at her memory, and felt a guilty twinge that he had not been to either of his parents’ graves for a long time.

People were coming out of the chapel from the previous service. The usual mix of ages. No one hung around in the late afternoon rain. One group climbed into the back of an undertaker’s limousine, the rest all hurried off to their cars.

The waiting hearse, followed by the cortège, moved to the chapel door. The doors of the first limousine were opening. People stepping out, ducking under umbrellas that the undertakers held for them. He gave the wipers a quick flick to clear the screen – and saw him almost immediately. Stepping out of the first limousine.

Amis Smallbone was here, just as Terry Biglow had predicted.

He would have recognized the runt from a hundred miles away, he reckoned. Smallbone’s ramrod straight posture and his elevator heels made him seem a bit taller than his five feet, one inch. Although masked a little by the rain, he didn’t seem to have changed much in the past twelve and a bit years since Grace had last seen him, across a courtroom, where he had given the evidence that had played a crucial role in putting him away.

Evil was too big a word to use for Amis Smallbone. To have called him evil would have been to flatter him. He wasn’t smart enough to be truly evil. He was just nasty. A very nasty little man.

After a few minutes, the pall-bearers opened the rear door of the hearse and slid out the coffin containing, Grace presumed, the body of the dead fence Tommy Fincher. He grinned irreverently at the thought that the old rogue might have some last stolen item with him, that he planned to offer to God at a knockdown price.

He saw Terry Biglow emerge from the second limousine, a frail-looking figure, heavily reliant on a stick, and couldn’t help feeling sad for the man. It wouldn’t be long before the former racketeer’s funeral would be taking place, and he must be thinking about that now, very acutely, Grace thought. At least Biglow had something endearing about him, despite being a total scumbag, which was more than he could say about Smallbone. Biglow was a man he had always been able to do business with when he wanted information, and he would miss him.

An entire rogue’s gallery of Brighton’s underworld hurried by in front of him, through the rain, and in through the chapel entrance. Grace recognized almost all of the faces. Most of them were male, but there were a couple of significant females, too, notably brothel queen Gloria Jouvenaar, and alongside her an elderly lady on a stick, Betty Washington, who in her time had been the wiliest of all the city’s madams.

While he waited in his car for the cremation service to be over, he called Glenn Branson to wish him luck at the Crimewatch recording. The DS sounded nervous as hell. Grace did his best to calm him down.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ Branson said.

‘Try me.’

‘The movie with Gaia. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of my getting a few days off – like – taking some annual leave – so I can take my kids – and be extras? I’ve no idea if we could even get to become extras, but it would mean an awful lot to them.’

‘Matey, just think that through, will you? You’re the deputy SIO in the early days of a brutal homicide enquiry, and you’re suddenly stepping away to become a film extra? Hello?’

There was a long silence. ‘Yeah, thought you’d say that,’ he replied finally.

Grace felt his friend’s pain. He knew just how shitty life had been for him this past year, but if you wanted a career in Major Crime, your work was always going to have to come first. ‘Look, tell you what I’ll do – no promises – but I imagine I’ll be meeting her sometime in the next couple of days to review her security here. I’ll see if she’d be willing to meet you and your kids for a couple of minutes. What do you think?’

Branson sounded elated. ‘You know, old timer, sometimes you’re not at all bad – for a white man.’

‘Sod off!’ Grace replied with a grin.

Then people began to emerge from the chapel. The service was over fast. Clearly not too many eulogies for Tommy Fincher. He ended the call and sat watching, waiting. Smallbone came out holding the arm of a woman he did not recognize.

He watched them climb back into the black limousine, then after some moments the car moved off. Grace started his engine and began to follow, keeping a safe, discreet distance behind.