Despite his wariness of the danger in making assumptions, Roy Grace always made hypotheses at every crime scene. And the first one he made here was that money might be involved. A dead man in expensive clothes. A business partner? A blackmailer? Winter’s wife’s lover? Winter’s own lover? A creditor? A business rival? Or was it someone totally unconnected with Winter, who had merely used this place as a dump site?
‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Early in my career I had a very wise Super in Major Crime. He said to me,
there is no case colder than one in which the victim is unidentified
. Remember that. Identifying the victim is always the first priority.’
Sending Branson back inside with his head spinning, Grace walked over to the car, sat in the driver’s seat and closed the door for some privacy. He started to jot down the names of the enquiry team he wanted to put together, hoping that some of his regulars, recently stood down from
Operation Violin
, would be available. After a quiet start to this year, everything had kicked off in May. Sussex had an average of eighteen murders a year. So far in these first five months, there had been sixteen already. A statistical blip, or a sign of the times?
He stared through the windscreen at the expensive Range Rover and the Impreza – a rich man’s toys – and the architect-designed farmhouse. Maybe there was money to be made in farming chickens?
But, as experience had long taught him, wherever there was money to be made, there was killing to be done, too.
‘We’re fucked!’ Maxim Brody’s gloomy voice said.
Larry Brooker, in his First Class seat, held the cellphone to his ear. ‘Why? What do you mean, Max?’
‘I just came off the phone with Gaia’s agent. She’s walking.’
‘Whaddya mean she’s walking?’
‘The insurance company won’t let her go to England,’ said Brody, sounding even more defeatist than ever.
‘So, okay, worst case scenario, we shoot everything here in LA!’
‘Sir,’ the stewardess insisted, ‘you have to turn that off.’
‘Yeah, right, Larry,’ Brody replied. ‘We’re gonna build a replica of the Brighton Royal Pavilion here on the Universal lot? On our budget? Rebuild the whole goddamn city of Brighton, England, here?’
‘I’m flying to New York right now to meet with our broker, Peter Marshall, at DeWitt Stern – he’s gonna—’
The grumpy stewardess reached out her hand, imperiously.
‘Sir, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take your cellphone for the duration of the flight if you don’t switch it off.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ he shouted at her.
She frowned. ‘Having memory problems are you, sir?’ She glanced down at the list she was holding in her free hand. ‘Seat 2B? You’re Mr Larry Brooker! Does that help you, sir?’
He balled his fists in frustration. ‘Jesus!’
‘God delusions. I’m sure we can find a chaplain to assist you.’
Larry Brooker drained the remains of his glass of champagne before the bitch seized that, too.
Then he sat, in silent fury, as the plane jerked and bumped along its taxi path, his thoughts veering between ritually disembowelling the harridan, and the prospects of salvaging his rapidly collapsing film production. They had Gaia, one of the world’s most bankable stars. They now had their leading man, Judd Halpern, a senior B-lister to replace that coked-up shithead A-lister, Matt Duke, who’d trashed himself in a car wreck. They had their director, ageing Jack Jordan, a two-times Academy Award nominee, a prima donna who had a reputation for being impossible, but who was hungry for this project because he saw it as possibly his last chance to bag an Oscar.
They were not going to get shafted by a goddamn insurance company wimping out. No way.
No fucking way, baby.
He ordered a Bloody Mary as soon as the drinks started after take-off. Then another. Followed by another. Then some wine with his meal, until he finally reclined his seat and fell into a stupor.
At eight o’clock the next morning he staggered off the plane, clutching his overnight bag in one hand and a bottle of water, understanding, as he did each time he made this domestic journey, why they called it the Red Eye Special. His mouth was parched and his head felt like it had a heavyweight title fight going on inside it.
An hour later he climbed out of the limousine, clutching another complimentary bottle of mineral water, and entered the front door of 420 Lexington Avenue, the headquarters of the insurance company DeWitt Stern. He’d worked with one of its principals, Peter Marshall, on several previous productions. Marshall was a good guy, who had never let him down. His mission today was to persuade the insurance broker not to be put off by a little thing like an attempt on Gaia Lafayette’s life. They were going to be in England. The UK, for fuck’s sake. The safest goddamn place on earth. If someone was seriously out to kill Gaia, then where better for her to be? A country that had no guns.
Marshall would agree. He was smart, he would get it.
Larry popped a sugar-free mint gum into his mouth to mask the alcohol on his breath. Then he stepped out of the elevator and walked up towards the reception desk with a big, warm smile on his face.
His winning smile.
Roy Grace was smiling.
‘You look so happy, my love,’ Cleo said in greeting as he let himself in at the front door of her home. It was twenty to midnight. Her hair was pinned up and she was wearing a slinky, powder-blue nightdress beneath her bathrobe. Humphrey, their young rescue dog – a Labrador–Border Collie cross – barked enthusiastically, jumping up at his suit trousers, wanting attention too, his high-pitched yip-yap-yips echoing around the cobbles of the gated townhouse development.
‘You make me happy,’ he said and kissed her, then tugged Humphrey’s ears. The dog immediately rolled on his back. Grace knelt and rubbed his belly. ‘How was your evening?’
‘Apart from crawling around in chicken shit, it was fine!’ she replied. ‘Yours?’
‘You went there? Yourself?’
‘With Darren.’ She shrugged. ‘We’re short staffed. And hey, I like free-range cadavers.’
He shook his head. Then as he stood up, Cleo thrust an ice-cold vodka Martini, with four olives on a cocktail stick, into his hand. ‘Thought you might be in need of sustenance!’ She gently fended off Humphrey, who was jumping up again.
‘You’re amazing!’ Grace sipped the drink gratefully, put the glass down on a shelf and kissed her again, putting his arms around her white towelling bathrobe, holding her firmly but gently, feeling the bulge of their baby against his stomach, smelling her freshly shampooed hair, then took the glass and drank another slug of it. The dog lay on his back, paws in the air again. ‘Okay, jealous one!’ He knelt and rubbed his belly once more.
‘I know!’ she said. ‘I am amazing! Totally amazing. Never forget that, will you, Detective Superintendent Grace?’
He grinned, standing up again. ‘Why would I want to?’
He looked into her clear blue eyes, feeling so incredibly happy. Happier than he had any right to be. He loved her. He loved being here in her home, especially this living room, with the lights dimmed, candles burning all around.
A City Books carrier bag lay on the floor – their favourite bookshop in Brighton. On the table lay a copy of
The World According To Joan
, held open by a solid glass paperweight.
He’d long been a Joan Collins admirer, and he loved that Cleo had actually made the effort to get the book in order to try to understand why.
For all these past years now since Sandy had gone, he had never believed it would be possible to feel happy – or even at peace – ever again. Cleo had changed that, and he felt almost guilty to be so happy again. Guilty because in all these years he had never stopped looking for Sandy. Her disappearance had been so sudden, so completely unexpected, without the remotest hint of any foreshadowing. One moment they had been totally happy together, and the next she was gone. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday they’d made love, as they always had done on each other’s birthdays. He’d gone to work, and when he had arrived home, looking forward to a celebratory dinner with Sandy and another couple, their closest friends, she had vanished. There was no note. All her belongings were still in the house, except for her handbag.
Twenty-four hours later, her elderly black VW Golf was found in the short-stay car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two small transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one from Boots, and one from Tesco. She had taken no clothes, and no other belongings of any kind. Her credit card was never used again.
In all the years since there had not been a single night, even when lying in Cleo’s arms, when he hadn’t fallen asleep wondering what had happened to her. Had she run off with a lover? That was possible, of course – how much did anyone really know about their partner? Had she decided, for whatever reason, to disappear and totally reinvent herself in a new life? People did that. But, when she had never given any hint that she was unhappy, why would she have? Another possibility was that she’d had an accident. But that didn’t fit with her car being at Gatwick.
More likely, he thought, she had been abducted, and whoever had taken her had left her car at the airport to throw pursuers off the scent. The grim reality was that in most abductions the person taken was killed within hours. Then again, there had been cases of abductees being held against their will for years.
For a long time now his friends and his sister had been urging him to move on, to accept that Sandy was gone and that he had to live his life in the present, not the past. He was trying so hard to do that, and Cleo made it easier than he could ever have imagined. He loved her, totally, utterly, madly. Yet there was still something that he could not quite let go of.
The nightmare that would wake him, screaming, every few months. Sandy down the bottom of a well shaft, like the abducted senator’s daughter in
Silence Of The Lambs
.
And the guilt that followed in those sleepless hours listening to the dawn chorus – that he had not done enough to find her – that there was one key, something blindingly obvious, staring him in the face, that he had overlooked.
His eyes fell on the copy of
Autocar
that was lying on the coffee table. He had bought it because it had a road test of the Alfa Giulietta. Ever since his own beloved, ageing Alfa had been written off following a chase last summer, he had hankered after another. They were cars that, in his view, had
soul
. At least, the only ones within his price range that did. There had been months of wrangling with the insurance company who had been trying to wriggle out of responsibility because, they argued, he should not have been using it on a police pursuit. But they had finally caved in.
He’d fallen in love with one of their models, a two-seater, but with the baby on the way, that was completely impractical. A couple of friends, including Glenn Branson, had advised him that a people carrier would be the sensible option, with all the paraphernalia he would have to carry around once the baby was born. He’d looked at a few but they did not appeal. Now he had seen on a Tates garage forecourt a two-year-old Giulietta, and was totally smitten. It was a hatchback, big enough to take a pushchair.
‘What’s troubling you, my love?’ Cleo asked as she sat beside him on the huge red sofa. On the television on the wall opposite, with the sound muted, chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was demonstrating how to fillet a mackerel.
‘Cars!’ he said.
‘Go with your heart.’
‘I need to be practical.’
She shrugged. ‘You know what? I have so many friends whose lives have been totally changed by their children. They don’t have time for each other any more. They hardly ever make love any more. Their lives are consumed by their kids. I don’t want that to happen to us. Surely we can be good parents, but still find the time for each other? Get the car you want, not the one that you think will be most practical. We can adapt. Bump will have to learn to fit in with us!’
He smiled again and drank some more of the Martini. On an empty, caffeine fuelled stomach it was hitting the spot, making him more relaxed by the second. It suddenly occurred to him how incredibly understanding Cleo was. If he’d arrived home to Sandy at midnight on a Friday, with the knowledge that he was going to have to work over the weekend, she would have been sound asleep, and extremely bolshie when he’d disturbed her, leaving for work at dawn the next morning. But there was total understanding from Cleo, who was herself liable to be called out in the middle of any night, weekday or weekend.
‘You know, the other thing that’s troubling me is . . .’ he paused as Humphrey jumped up on the sofa beside them and then rolled on his back in his favourite position, belly up, expecting his tummy to be rubbed yet again. Grace obliged.
‘What’s troubling me is – ’ he kissed Cleo’s soft cheek – ‘I love you so much,’ he said.
‘Oh, is
that
what’s troubling you?’
‘Uh huh, maybe.’ He kissed her again. Then again, feeling increasingly pleasantly woozy as he drank some more of the massive Martini. ‘I love you and I can’t get enough of you.’
‘You never read what it said on the tin,’ she said, smiling. ‘
Use Cleo sparingly with caution
.’