You Are Dead

69

Thursday 18 December

Roy Grace left Iain Maclean in charge of the 8.30 a.m. briefing, then drove with DS Cale the short distance down the A27, over a series of roundabouts and up a hill that climbed steeply, adjacent to the dual carriageway. He pulled up close to a five-barred gate and noticed the padlock chain had been cut through and had fallen to the ground. Then they hurried up a grassy hill, avoiding a line of horse dung. It was a cold, sunny, blustery day and Grace was grateful that the rain of the past few days had stopped.

After ten minutes of hard, uphill climbing, following tyre tracks in the soggy grass, he saw the small, domed temple-like structure over to the right nestling among the hills. The tyre tracks veered towards it. The Chattri was one of the city of Brighton and Hove’s most beautiful but less well-known landmarks. It was a round, white temple at the top of several flights of stone steps, in a beautiful location on the South Downs. Open to the elements, it comprised a dome supported by a circle of columns.

During the First World War, many Indian soldiers who had been wounded fighting for the British Empire had been brought to makeshift hospitals in England. One had been sited in Brighton in the Royal Pavilion. The Chattri had been constructed on the site where those who had died had been cremated.

As the two of them approached the fence around the monument, Roy Grace stopped, suddenly.

Ahead were two women with long brown hair, lying motionless, side by side on stone slabs at the foot of the monument steps, in front of a neat row of empty benches, their arms folded behind their heads as if they were asleep. But they were too still. Impossibly still. He raised a cautionary hand to DS Cale, signalling her to follow him.

As he stepped closer to them again he stopped. He’d seen enough bodies in the course of his career to be able to tell the difference, even from a distance, between the dead and the living.

These two women were clearly dead.

Young women. One was in jeans and sneakers, wearing a puffa over a knitted sweater; the other was in jeans, also, and a soiled T-shirt. Both had long, dark brown hair.

In death, human expressions changed. They became inert, like waxworks in a museum. But, he knew sadly, he was not staring at two waxworks. From the photographs he had committed to memory he was looking at the bodies of Emma Johnson and Ashleigh Stanford. Their faces were alabaster white. Both of them had their eyes open, blind to the vapour trail of a plane high in the sky.

He did not need to go any closer and touch either of them. Instead he stayed where he was, not wanting to contaminate this crime scene any more than he already had, and pulled out his phone.

He was as close to despair as he had ever felt in all his career.

Then he noticed something fluttering in the wind, behind the neck of the woman he believed might be Emma Johnson. Signalling DS Cale to stay where she was, he stepped forward and knelt down. There was a note wedged between her fingers. Snapping on gloves, he teased it out and read it.