One of Us Is Dead

11 Sunday 25 September 2022

All Saints, Patcham, like many rural English parish churches, was a picture-postcard hodge-podge of architectural styles through the centuries. It had a Saxon doorway, a Norman interior, and nods to Gothic, Early English and Perpendicular. It was the kind of church that tourists ticked off their lists and that couples craved for the background to their wedding photos. Just as Roy and his first wife had twenty-four years ago.

Sandy was now, after many traumatic years, at peace. She lay in the graveyard close to the flint wall at the rear, beyond which sheep grazed on the soft contours of a hill. Their troubled son, Bruno, was buried just fifty feet away from his mother, in the nearest plot that had been available at the time of his death. Just eleven years old.

Despite his sadness about Sandy’s death, in 2018, Grace had never quite been able to forgive her for running off, without a word, on his thirtieth birthday. He still carried some anger towards her. It had been the worst time of his life, following her disappearance, as he searched continuously for clues about what might have happened to her. Had she been murdered? Kidnapped? Run off with a lover? Had an accident? Taken her own life? Lost her memory?

It had turned out to be none of these. And it also turned out she had subsequently given birth to Bruno, less than nine months after leaving him. After her death, Bruno had come to live with him and Cleo.

He had been a challenging boy — hardly surprising considering all his mother had put him through, Grace always thought. Given time, he was confident he could have helped Bruno shake off all the traumas his erratic early years with Sandy had left him with. But a stupid accident, a moment of carelessness, had deprived Bruno of his life and Roy of that chance.

He was feeling guilty this Sunday afternoon because it had been over a month since he’d last visited Bruno’s grave; he normally tried to come at least once a fortnight, to stand beside it and chat to him. He carried in his hand a small posy of blue and red flowers — the colours of Bruno’s beloved Bayern Munich football club — to place on the grave, as he did each time he came.

But, as he walked around to the rear of the church and along the path, he saw in the distance a figure he thought he recognized. And as he drew closer, he realized who it was.

Seriously? What the hell was he doing here?

The man had seen him, and was just standing there, immaculately dressed as ever in a Crombie coat with a velvet collar, and shiny brogues, his coiffed fair hair barely ruffled by the wind.

Standing, Grace realized as he drew nearer, right by Bruno’s grave.

What?

Throughout his life, Roy Grace had always given people the benefit of the doubt. A Buddhist saying had long been part of his philosophy: Everyone you meet is fighting a battle of their own that you know nothing about. Be kind, always.

If there had been one exception to this it had been Cassian Pewe, the man he was looking at now with great curiosity. And he knew one thing. Whatever the reason this bastard was here, it wasn’t going to be a good one.

A few years back he had risked his own life saving Pewe’s, when the front part of the former senior police officer’s car had gone over the edge of a cliff. How had Pewe rewarded him? Firstly by trying to establish that Roy Grace had murdered his then missing wife, Sandy. Then secondly, after being promoted to the role of assistant chief constable, above him, by doing his best to make Roy’s life hell for two years.

But, as proof there really was a God, Grace liked to joke, Pewe’s career had crashed and burned after Grace had discovered — and subsequently proved — that the ACC was corrupt. He had been kicked out of the force and jailed for two years; the last Grace had heard, which had made him smile, was that the former very senior cop was now working selling advertising space.

So what the hell was he doing here?

As Grace strode towards him, memories were playing like old videos inside his head. Cassian Pewe, when he had been ACC, turning up to Sandy’s funeral. That had surprised him, and then it had surprised him even more when he’d seen, at the wake, Pewe talking animatedly to Bruno in fluent German. Clearly on a charm offensive.

For what reason?

Grace, still some distance away, saw Pewe had clocked him. That old, unpleasantly familiar supercilious smile.

‘Roy!’ he said. ‘How very good to see you!’ He stretched out a hand.

Ignoring it and keeping one hand firmly in his pocket and the other holding the posy, Grace couldn’t restrain himself after all these years of pent-up anger at this total bastard. ‘How was prison, Cassian?’

‘Pretty bearable actually, Roy.’ He raised his hands in the air. ‘Please don’t think I’m bitter — you were just a humble copper doing your duty. I don’t take it personally that you snitched on me.’

Grace stared at him levelly.

‘I’ve no idea what you are talking about, Cassian,’ he said. ‘You were a corrupt copper who abused your position as an assistant chief constable, using it to line your pockets. If I reported you and that made me a snitch, what would my not reporting you have made me?’

‘You didn’t have to report me. You could have spoken to me. But you wouldn’t do that, would you, because you knew I was screwing your wife, didn’t you?’