Her only concessions to her brother’s concerns were the panic button that hung from a cord around her neck, and the housekeeper who came twice a week.
She peered through the spyhole in the front door. In the light of the summer evening she saw two middle-aged men in brown uniforms, with identity tags hung from chains around their necks.
She removed the safety chain and opened the door.
They smiled politely. ‘Sorry to disturb you, madam,’ the one on the right said. ‘We’re from the Water Board.’ He held up his identity card for her to read.
She did not have her glasses on, but she liked his Irish accent. The face on the card was a little blurred, but it looked like the face of the shaven-headed man in front of her.
Richard
Carroll
, she thought his name read, but she couldn’t be sure.
‘How can I help you, gentlemen?’
‘We’re investigating a water leak. Have you noticed a drop in water pressure during the past twenty-four hours?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I can’t say that I have.’ But, she knew, there was a lot of stuff she did not notice these days. Much though it angered her, she was
increasingly becoming dependent on others. Although she still kept a tight grip on everything she could.
‘Do you mind if we come in and check your water pressure? We’d hate you to be charged for water you’re not using.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be wanting that either,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye, in her soft Dublin accent. All these bastard utilities were trying to rob you blind all the time
and she wasn’t one to be having any of it. She scrutinized the phone bills, the electricity bills, the gas and the water. ‘I’ve been thinking the water charges are high of
late.’
‘All the more indication of a problem,’ Richard Carroll said, apologetically.
‘You’d better be coming in.’
Holding the Zimmer with one hand, she stepped aside to let the men enter, then closed the door behind them.
Almost immediately she did not like the way their eyes began roaming. At the fine oil paintings hanging on the walls, and then at the Louis XIV table in the hallway. The Georgian tallboy. The
Georgian chest. The two Chippendale chairs. Bargains, once, all of them, pointed out by her brother, who knew a thing or two about antiques of all descriptions.
‘Where would you like to start your investigations, gentlemen?’
She saw the blur of the man’s fist only a fraction of a second before it struck her stomach, punching all the wind out of her. She doubled up, her frail hand clutching at the panic
button.
But it was ripped off her neck long before she could press it.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
, PC Susi Holiday thought. A sturdily built woman of
twenty-eight, with brown curly hair and a constantly cheerful face. That line had been running through her head repeatedly ever since she had woken up this morning. She’d had a day off
yesterday, and much to her husband James’s incredulity had spent much of it watching all six episodes of the BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice
, binge-eating junk food, and
smoking an entire packet of fags. She was like that. One week all healthy, working out at the gym, not smoking, then the next being a total slob.
Now, irreverently, she decided that another truth universally acknowledged is that no one looks their best sitting on a toilet seat with their trousers round their ankles.
Especially not if they are dead.
Memo to self. Please, please, please don’t die on the loo.
The need to go to the lavatory was a frequent precursor to a heart attack. All too many did die that way.
Like the plump old man in front of them, in the dingy, narrow little toilet in the squalid Housing Association flat with its bare pale-blue walls and unwashed underwear, socks and shirts lying
all over the floor in every room. It smelled rank: a mixture of a rancid, cheesy reek and, the worst smell in the world, a decaying human. Its tenant was named Ralph Meeks, and this was whom she
presumed, with revulsion tinged with sadness, she was now staring at. Like all G5s who had been dead for more than a couple of days, he looked more like a waxwork than a real human being. She
always found the total stillness of a cadaver both eerie and fascinating.
His bulky frame was wedged between the walls. There were liver spots on his hands, the crimson and green blotches of advanced decomposition on his face and visible parts of his body. An
insistent swarm of blowflies crawled over his face and neck and hands, and buzzed around him.
Folds of flesh hung from the man’s midriff, forming a canopy over his private parts. His dome was bald with little tufts of hair on either side, he had a hearing aid in his right ear, and
his mouth was frozen open in an expression of surprise, one that was mirrored in his startled, lifeless eyes. As if dying had not, she thought, irreverently, been on his list of
things to
do
that day, and certainly not in this undignified way.
A television was on in the sparsely furnished living room, a daytime chat show on which, ironically, there was a discussion about the plight of the elderly.
She glanced around looking for signs of anything personal. But there were no photographs, no pictures on any of the walls. She saw an ashtray full of butts, with a lighter and a packet of
cigarettes beside it, and a beer can with a half-empty glass tumbler. A small, untidy stack of old gardening magazines lay on the floor, next to a pile of
Daily Mirror
newspapers.
Ralph Meeks had clearly been dead for a while, in here all alone. It was a sad but common story in cities. They were on the second floor of a low-rise apartment block. But Ralph Meeks had no
friends, no neighbours bothering to check he was okay, no one who had thought it odd that the post was getting more and more jammed in the letter box every day. Not until he had started to
decompose, and neighbours had begun to notice the smell out in the corridor, had anyone been bothered to check on Meeks.
The stench in the corridor was nothing compared with that inside the flat. It was a hundred times worse in here. The stench and the buzzing of flies. It was making her gag, and her colleague, PC
Dave Roberts, was keeping his gloved hand over his nose.
The two immediate tasks were to call in their Sergeant to help them assess whether this was a natural death, or whether there were any suspicious circumstances, in which case they would involve
CID and seal the flat as a crime scene. Their second was to call a paramedic to have the man’s death confirmed. Fairly unnecessary in this case, but a legal formality. The next duty would be
to ask a Coroner’s Officer to attend. And finally, if it was decided no forensic examination of the body was required in situ, a call would be made to Brighton and Hove Mortuary to recover
the body.
Sudden deaths – or
G5
s, as the form for them was called – were the least favourite shouts for most Response officers. But Susi Holiday actually liked them, and found them
interesting. This was the fifteenth she had attended since joining the Response Team three years ago.
Turning to her colleague, eighteen years her senior, she said, ‘Anything bothering you about this?’
He shook his head, feeling queasy. ‘Nope.’ He shrugged. ‘Except – just the thought that could be me one day.’
Susi grinned. ‘Best thing is to try to avoid growing old. Growing old kills you, eventually.’
‘Yep, guess I’d prefer to die young, with my trousers on.’
She gave him a mischievous grin. ‘Wouldn’t that depend who you were with?’
Whenever Roy Grace left his front door he was always on guard. After over twenty years as a cop, looking around for anything unusual or out of place had long become second
nature. It used to irritate his former wife, Sandy. One time, during his early days as a Detective Constable, he’d spotted a man slipping a handbag off the back of a chair in a crowded pub,
and chased him a mile on foot, through Brighton, before rugby-tackling and arresting him. It had been the end of their evening, as he’d had to spend the next four hours booking the thief into
custody and filling out forms.
Often when he and Sandy were out for a meal, she would notice his eyes roving and kick him sharply under the restaurant table, hissing, ‘
Stoppit, Grace!
’
But he couldn’t help it. In any public place, he couldn’t relax unless he knew he was somewhere there were no obvious villains, and no immediate signs of anything about to kick off.
Sandy used to joke that while other women had to be wary of their men ogling other women, she had to put up with him ogling Brighton’s pond life.
But there was one thing he never told her, because he didn’t want to worry her: he knew, like all police officers, there was always the danger of retribution by an aggrieved villain. Most
crims
accepted getting arrested – some saw it as part of the game; some shrugged at the inevitability; some just gave up the ghost from the moment the handcuffs were snapped in
place. But there were a few who harboured grudges.
Part of the reason judges traditionally wore wigs was to disguise themselves, so they would not be recognized later by those they had sent down. The police had never had such protection. But
even if they had, to someone who was determined enough, there were plenty of other ways to track them down.
*
Such a man, right now, was sitting in his car, in front of an antiques shop that specialized in fireplaces, opposite the gates of a smart town-house development in the centre of
Brighton.
He had a grudge against one particular Sussex Police officer, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.
The cop’s baby was in there, in the third house on the left. He’d obtained plans of the house from the Planning Office where they were filed in the original building application,
fifteen years ago, to turn the old warehouse into a courtyard development of seven town houses.
The baby would sleep in the tiny room opposite, with the window overlooking the courtyard.
But what interested him most of all right now was an estate agent’s sign, fixed to the wall to the right of the wrought-iron gates to the courtyard, advertising,
TOWN
HOUSE TO RENT
.
What fun to be Roy Grace’s neighbour. And how convenient?
He’d be able to watch every movement. And bide his time.
Happy days again!
Two hours after first entering Ralph Meeks’ flat, Susi Holiday and Dave Roberts were back out on the streets of Brighton in their patrol car. Susi drove. She loved her
job. Hunting was what she liked to call it, all the time they weren’t actually on a
shout
– as calls to incidents were known colloquially.
Dave, at forty-six, was one of the oldest PCs on the unit. Response was considered a young person’s game, and it could at times be extremely physical – intervening in violent
domestic fights, pub brawls and chasing after robbers and burglars. But he’d been on this unit for twenty years and had no interest in promotion and the desk work that would involve, or in
any other area of policing.
If anyone were to ask him what he most loved about his job, he would have replied that it was never knowing what was going to happen in five minutes’ time. That, and ripping through the
city on blues and twos, which almost every police officer with a Pursuit Driving ticket he had ever talked to admitted was one of the greatest kicks of the job.
They were driving up North Street towards the Clock Tower, one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. Watching the faces of people meandering along the pavements on both sides of the
road, recognizing the occasional villain among the crowds. And all the time monitoring their radios, clipped below their shoulders. Waiting for the next shout from the Control Room.
It was coming up to midday, on a fine late August Thursday morning. They’d started their shift at 7 a.m. and would be on until 4 p.m. So far they’d attended a call to a potential
firearms incident up at Brighton Racecourse, which had turned out to be a man shooting rabbits. That had been followed by a rip across the city to attend a collision between a motor scooter and a
bin lorry, which had, fortunately, been less serious than it had sounded. Then another shout to attend a report of a woman screaming for help. Which had turned out to be an infant having a tantrum.
Then the Ralph Meeks G5.
For the past thirty minutes all had been quiet. They were thinking about returning to John Street police station to eat their packed lunches, have a comfort break and fill in the paperwork on
Meeks.
‘What are your plans for the weekend?’ Dave Roberts asked Susi. They crewed together regularly and got on well.
‘Going to the Albion with James,’ she said. ‘You?’
‘It’s Maxim’s fifteenth birthday on Saturday,’ he replied. ‘Marilyn and I are taking him and some of his friends for fish and chips on the pier – to the Palm
Court. Best fish and chips in Brighton!’
‘Tiffany going, too?’
Tiffany was his teenage daughter.
As he was about to reply, their radios crackled into life.
‘Charlie Romeo Zero Three?’
‘Yes, yes, Charlie Romeo Zero Three,’ Dave answered.
‘Charlie Romeo Zero Three, we’ve a call from a concerned individual. A man who normally speaks to his elderly sister every day. Says he’s not been able to reach her for two
days. He’s out of the country, otherwise he would have gone round to check on her himself. Her name is Aileen McWhirter. The address is 146 Withdean Road, Brighton. Please check this out,
Grade Two.’
All Control Room calls were graded One to Four.
Grade One
was immediate response, with a target time of within fifteen minutes.
Grade Two
was prompt response, with a target
time of within one hour.
Grade Three
was a planned response, by appointment, which could be made several days later.
Grade Four
was no attendance by police, but dealt with over
the phone.