One of Us Is Dead

46 Tuesday 4 October 2022

Roy Grace woke as usual, shortly after 5 a.m., and the first thing he did was check the recently instigated Chief Officer’s Briefing Sheet, which gave a summary of the day ahead — including who the duty SIO, gold and tactical commanders were, all serious incidents that had happened overnight, as well as sudden deaths of apparently healthy people during the past twenty-four hours. The professor at Brighton University who had died from an apparent wasp sting was listed.

Then he took Humphrey for a run across the Downs at 5.30 a.m., during which he reflected on what Cleo had told him the previous night. About the professor who had died from a wasp sting. On top of the recent death of the golf captain who had died from eating death cap mushrooms. Like Barnie Wallace.

Accidental deaths happened all the time. He had long been aware that next to being in a car or on a motorbike, the second most dangerous place in the world — the place where you were most likely to die — was in your kitchen. The seemingly harmless domestic kitchen quietly hosted a litany of things that could kill you — fires, treacherously slippery floors, wonky stepladders, dodgy electrics, gas leaks, choking, toxic chemicals including bleach, and potentially fatal bacteria like salmonella were among its deadly arsenal. Cleo had even had one tragic kitchen death when a young mother had leaned over to empty the dishwasher and was stabbed through the eye by a protruding boning knife.

So two fatal mushroom poisonings and a fatal wasp sting occurring within a couple of weeks of each other wouldn’t or-dinarily have struck anyone as suspicious, but it was the way Cleo had said it. She had good instincts for when something was wrong, and he could feel from the tone of her voice last night that she was uneasy.

And it echoed his own concerns.

Barnie Wallace and Rufus Rorke had both been at Brighton College school together. Rorke had ‘died’ over two years ago but was now possibly still alive. He’d been under suspicion of operating a service of creating fatalities and framing them as accidental, through the dark web. Now Barnie Wallace had died from a death that might have seemed ‘accidental’ had it not been for the CCTV in the Organica supermarket.

Was there history between the two of them?

He had been planning on a quick breakfast after showering when he got back, and being at his desk by 7 a.m., where he would then dig a little deeper into all three of these deaths. But, he rued, as John Lennon said: Life is the stuff that happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

And in this case life was Cleo’s aunt, already berthed at the breakfast bar at this early hour, dressed in what looked like a circus marquee suspended from her shoulders by straps.

‘Good morning, Eileen!’ he said breezily, standing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘How did you sleep?’

‘Morning, Roy. To be honest, I’d forgotten how noisy the countryside is. Sheep bleating in the night, then the cockerel, crowing. If it was mine I’d wring its neck and cook that bird.’

He had debated making a dash for his car but hesitated out of politeness.

It cost him an hour of his life he would never get back.