Dead Like You (26 page)

65

You think you’ve been clever, don’t you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace? You think you’re going to make me angry by insulting me, don’t you? I can see through all that shit.

You should accept you are just a lame duck. Your colleagues didn’t catch me before and you won’t catch me now. I’m so much smarter than you could ever dream of being. You see, you don’t realize I’m doing you a favour!

I’m getting rid of the poison in your manor! I’m your new best friend! One day you’ll come to realize that! One day you and I will walk along under the cliffs at Rottingdean and talk about all of this. That walk you like to take with your beloved Cleo on Sundays! She likes shoes too. I’ve seen her in some of the shops I go in. She’s quite into shoes, isn’t she? You are going to need saving from her, but you don’t realize that yet. You will do one day.

They’re all poison, you see. All women. They seduce you with their Venus fly trap vaginas. You can’t bear to be apart from them. You phone them and text them every few minutes of your waking day, because you need to know how much they still love you.

Let me tell you a secret.

No woman ever loves you. All she wants to do is control you. You might sneer at me. You might question the size of my manhood. But I will tell you something, Detective Superintendent. You’ll be grateful to me, one day. You’ll walk with me arm in arm along the Undercliff Walk at Rottingdean and thank me for saving you from yourself.

66

Tuesday 13 January

Jessie felt a deep and constant yearning all the time she was away from Benedict. It must be an hour now since she had texted him, she thought. Tuesdays were their one night apart. She played squash with a recently married friend, Jax, then after would pick up a takeaway Chinese and go round to Roz’s and watch a DVD – something they had done almost every Tuesday night for as long as she could remember. Benedict, who liked to compose guitar music, had a similar long-standing Tuesday evening commitment – working late into the night with his co-writing partner, coming up with new songs. At the moment they were putting together an album they hoped might be their breakthrough.

Some weekends Benedict played gigs in a band in a variety of Sussex pubs. She loved watching him on stage. He was like a drug she just could not get enough of. Still, after eight months of dating, she could make love to him virtually all day and all night – on the rare opportunities they had such a length of time together. He was the best kisser, the best lover by a million, million miles – not that she’d had that many for comparison. Four, to be precise, and none of them memorable.

Benedict was kind, thoughtful, considerate, generous, and he made her laugh. She loved his humour. She loved the smell of his skin, his hair, his breath and his perspiration. But the thing she loved most of all about him was his mind.

And of course she loved that he really, truly, genuinely did seem to like her nose.

‘You don’t really like it, do you?’ she’d asked him in bed, a few months ago.

‘I do!’

‘You can’t!’

‘I think you’re beautiful.’

‘I’m not. I’ve got a hooter like Concorde.’

‘You’re beautiful to me.’

‘Have you been to an optician lately?’

‘Do you want to hear something I read that made me think of you?’ he asked.

‘OK, tell me.’

‘
It’s beauty that captures your attention, personality that captures your heart.
’

She smiled now at the memory as she sat in the traffic jam in the sodium-lit darkness, the heater of her little Ford Ka whirring noisily, toasting her feet. She was half listening to the news on the radio, tuned to Radio 4, Gordon Brown being harangued over Afghanistan. She didn’t like him, even though she was a Labour supporter, and she switched over to Juice. Air were playing, ‘Sexy Boy’.

‘Yayyyy!’ She grinned, nodding her head and drumming the steering wheel for a few moments, in tune to the music.
Sexy Boy, that’s what you are, my gorgeous!

She loved him with all her heart and soul, of that she was sure. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him – she had never ever been so certain of anything. It was going to hurt her parents that she wasn’t marrying a Jewish boy, but she couldn’t help that. She respected her family’s traditions, but she was not a believer in any religion. She believed in making the world a better place for everyone who lived in it, and she hadn’t yet come across a religion that seemed capable of or interested in doing that.

Her iPhone, lying beside her on the passenger seat, pinged with an incoming text. She smiled.

The rush-hour gridlock up the London Road was being made worse than usual by new roadworks. The traffic light ahead had gone from green to red, to green to red again now, and they hadn’t moved in inch. She was still alongside the brightly lit window display of British Bookshops. She had time to look at her phone safely, she decided.

Hope you win! XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

She smiled. The engine idled and the wipers alternated between a scraping and a screeching sound, flattening the droplets of rain that landed on the windscreen into an opaque smear. Benedict told her she needed new wiper blades and was going to get her some. She could have done with them now, she thought.

She looked at her watch: 5.50.
Shit.
Normally, the half an hour she allowed to get from the charity’s offices in the Old Steine, where she had a free parking space, to the Withdean Sports Stadium was more than adequate. But this evening she had not moved an inch for over five minutes. She was due on court at 6 p.m. Hopefully it would be better once she was past the roadworks.

Jessie wasn’t the only person being made anxious by the bad traffic. Someone waiting for her at the Withdean Sports Stadium, someone who was not her squash partner, was in a very bad mood. And it was worsening by the second.

67

Tuesday 13 January

It was meant to be dark here! It had been dark when he’d checked it out last night. It was less than a month since the longest night of the year – only 13 January, for Christ’s sake! At 6 p.m. it should be totally dark. But the sodding car park of Withdean Sports Stadium was lit up like a sodding Christmas Tree. Why did they have to pick tonight to have bloody outdoor athletics practice? Hadn’t anyone told the stadium about global warming?

And where the fuck was she?

The car park was a lot fuller than he had expected. He’d already driven around it three times, checking that he had not missed the little black Ka. It definitely wasn’t here.

She distinctly said on Facebook that she would meet Jax here at 5.45. The court was booked for 6 p.m.
As usual.

He’d looked up pictures of Roz on Facebook, too.
View photos of Roz (121). Send Roz a message. Poke Roz. Roz and Jessie are friends.
Roz was quite a sexy vixen, he thought. She rocked! There were some photos of her all dressed up for a prom night.

He focused on the task in hand as his eyes hunted through the windscreen. Two men hurried across in front of him, each carrying sports bags, heads ducked low against the rain, going into the main building. They didn’t see him. White vans were always invisible! He was tempted to follow them inside, to check in case somehow he had missed Jessie Sheldon and she was already on court. She’d said something about her car, that it had been fixed. What if something had gone wrong with it again and she’d got a lift from someone instead, or taken a bus or a taxi?

He stopped the van alongside a row of parked vehicles, in a position that gave him a clear view of the entrance ramp to the car park, switched the engine off and killed the lights. It was a God-awful cold, rainy night, which was perfect. No one was going to take any notice of the van, floodlights or no sodding floodlights. Everyone had their heads down, dashing for the cover of the buildings or their cars. All except the stupid athletes on the track.

He was prepared. He was already wearing his latex gloves. The chloroform pad was in a sealed container in his anorak pocket. He slipped his hand inside, to check again. His hood was in another pocket. He checked that again too. Just one thing concerned him: he hoped that Jessie would have a shower after her game, because he didn’t like sweaty women. He didn’t like some of the unwashed smells women had. She must shower, surely, because she was going straight on to pick up a Chinese takeaway and then to watch a horror film with Roz.

Headlights approached up the ramp. He stiffened. Was this her? He switched on the ignition to sweep the wipers over the rain-spattered screen.

It was a Range Rover. Its headlights momentarily blinded him, then he heard it roar past. He kept the wipers going. The heater pumped in welcoming warm air.

A guy in baggy shorts and a baseball cap was trudging across the car park, with a sports bag slung over his shoulders, engrossed in a conversation on his mobile. He heard a faint beep-beep and saw lights wink on a dark-coloured Porsche, then the man opened the door.

Wanker
, he thought.

He stared again at the ramp. Looked at his watch: 6.05 p.m.
Shit.
He pounded the wheel with his fists. Heard a faint, high-pitched whistling sound in his ears. He got that sometimes when he was all tensed up. He pinched the end of his nose shut and blew hard, but it had no effect and the whistling grew louder.

‘Stop it! Fuck off! Stop it!’

It grew louder still.

Exceptionally diminutive manhood!

Jessie would be the judge of that.

He looked at his watch again: 6.10 p.m.

The whistling was now as loud as a football referee’s whistle.

‘Shut up!’ he shouted, feeling all shaky, his eyes blurring with anger.

Then he heard voices, suddenly, and the scrunch of shoes.

‘I told her he’s an absolute waste of space.’

‘She said she loves him! I told her, like, I mean, what??????’

There was a sharp double beep. He saw a flash of orange over to his left. Then he heard car doors click open and, a few moments later, slam shut. The brief whir of a starter motor, then the rattle of a diesel. The interior of the van suddenly stank of diesel exhaust. He heard the blast of a horn.

‘Sod off,’ he said.

The horn blasted again, twice, to his left.

‘Sod off! Screw you! Fuck you! Fuck off!’

There was a mist in front of his eyes, inside his head. The wipers screeched, clearing the rain. More came. They cleared that too. More came.

Then the horn blasted again.

He turned in fury and saw reversing lights on. And then realized. A big, ugly people carrier was trying to reverse and he was parked right in front of it, blocking it.

‘Fuck you! Screw you!’ He started the van, crunched it into gear, jerked forward a few inches and stalled. His head was shaking, the whistling even louder, slicing his brain to bits like a cheese-wire. He started the van again. Someone knocked on the passenger door window. ‘Fuck you!’ He rammed the gear lever into first and shot forward. He carried on, almost blind with fury now, and hurtled down the ramp.

In his haze of fury he was utterly oblivious of the headlights of the little black Ford Ka racing up the ramp, in the opposite direction, and passing him.

1998

68

Wednesday 14 January

‘I’m sorry I’m late, my darling,’ Roy Grace said, coming through the front door.

‘If I had a pound for every time you’ve said that, I’d be a millionaire!’ Sandy gave him a resigned smile, then kissed him.

There was a warm smell of scented candles in the house. Sandy lit them most evenings, but there seemed more than usual tonight, to mark the special occasion.

‘God, you look beautiful,’ he said.

She did. She’d been to the hairdresser’s and her long fair hair was in ringlets. She was wearing a short black dress that showed every curve of her body and she had sprayed on his favourite perfume, Poison. She raised her wrist to show him the slim silver bracelet he’d bought her from a modern jeweller in the Lanes.

‘It looks great!’ he said.

‘It does!’ She admired it in the mirror on the Victorian coat-stand in the hall. ‘I love it. You have great taste, Detective Sergeant Grace!’

He held her in his arms and nuzzled her bare neck. ‘I could make love to you right now, here on the hall floor.’

‘Then you’d better be quick. There’s a taxi coming in thirty minutes!’

‘Taxi? We don’t need a taxi. I’ll drive.’

‘You’re not going to drink on my birthday?’

She helped him out of his coat, slung it on a hook on the stand and led him by the hand into the sitting room. The juke box they’d bought a couple of years earlier in the Saturday morning Kensington Gardens market, and had restored, was playing one of his favourite Rolling Stones tracks, their version of ‘Under the Boardwalk’. The lights were dimmed and candles were burning all around. On the coffee table sat an open bottle of champagne, two glasses and a bowl of olives.

‘I had thought we might have a drink before we went out,’ she said wistfully. ‘But it’s OK. I’ll put it in the fridge and we can have it when we get back! You could drink it off my naked body.’

‘Mmmm,’ he said. ‘It’s a lovely idea. But I’m on duty, darling, so I can’t drink.’

‘Roy, it’s my
birthday
!’

He kissed her again, but she pulled away from him. ‘You’re not on duty on my birthday. You were on duty all over Christmas. You’ve been at work all day today since very early. Now you’re switching off!’

‘Tell Popeye that.’

Popeye was his immediate boss, Detective Chief Inspector Jim ‘Popeye’ Doyle. The DCI had been appointed the Senior Investigating Officer on
Operation Sundown
, the investigation into the disappearance of Rachael Ryan, which was currently consuming all Grace’s working hours – and keeping him awake every night, his brain racing.

‘Give me his number and I will!’

Grace shook his head. ‘My darling, all leave has been cancelled. We’re on this case around the clock. I’m sorry. But if you were Rachael Ryan’s parents, that’s what you’d expect of us.’

‘You’re not telling me you can’t have a drink on my birthday?’

‘Let me nip up and change.’

‘You’re not going anywhere until you promise me you’re going to drink with me tonight!’

‘Sandy, if I get called out and someone smells alcohol on my breath, I could lose my job and get kicked off the force. Please understand.’

‘
Please understand!
’ she mimicked. ‘If I had a pound for every time you said that as well, I’d be a
multi-millionaire
!’

‘Cancel the cab. I’m going to drive.’

‘You are not bloody driving!’

‘I thought we were trying to save money for the mortgage and for all the work on the house.’

‘I don’t think one taxi’s going to make much bloody difference!’

‘It’s two taxis actually – one there and one back.’

‘So?’ She placed her hands on her hips defiantly.

At that moment, his radio phone crackled into life with an incoming call. He tugged it from his pocket and answered.

‘Roy Grace.’

She looked at him, giving him a
Don’t you dare, whatever it is
, glare.

It was his DCI.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said.

The reception was poor, Jim Doyle’s voice crackly.

‘Roy, there’s a burnt-out van just been found in a field by a farmer out lamping for rabbits. The index shows it was stolen yesterday afternoon. There’s a body in it which he thinks is female – he was in the Tank Corps of the army out in Iraq and knows a bit about these things apparently. Sounds possible it could be our missing Rachael Ryan – we need to secure the vehicle immediately. It’s off the Saddlescombe Road, half a mile south of the Waterhall Golf Club. I’m on my way over now. Can you meet me there? How long would it take you?’

Grace’s heart sank. ‘You mean
now
, sir?’

‘What do you think? Three weeks’ time?’

‘No, sir – it’s just – it’s my wife’s birthday.’

‘Wish her Happy Birthday from me.’