Dead Man's Time Read online

  He put the paper down, stood up a little unsteadily, and carried his glass over to the dank-smelling kitchenette, popping some ice cubes out of the fridge-freezer into his glass. It was just gone midday, and he was thinking hard. Thinking how much pleasure he was going to get from hurting Roy Grace. It was the one thing that sustained him right now. The rest of the nation had Olympic fever – the games were starting in a month’s time. But he didn’t give a toss about them; getting even with Roy Grace was all he cared about.

  All he could really think about.

  He was going to make that happen. His lips curled into a smile. He just had to find the right person. There were names he knew from before he’d gone to prison, and a few more contacts he’d made inside. But whoever it was wouldn’t come cheap, and that was a big problem right now.

  Then his phone rang. The display showed the number was withheld.

  ‘Yes?’ he answered, suspiciously.

  ‘Amis Smallbone?’ It was not a voice he recognized. A rough, Brighton accent.

  ‘Who are you?’ he replied, coldly.

  ‘We met a long time back, but you won’t remember me. I need some help. You have connections in the antiques world, right? Overseas? For high-value stuff?’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘I’m told you need money.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that you shouldn’t be calling me on a fucking mobile phone?’

  ‘Yeah, I know that.’

  ‘Then why the fuck are you calling me on mine?’

  ‘I’m talking a lot of money. Several million quid.’

  Suddenly, Amis Smallbone was very interested indeed. ‘Tell me more.’

  The line went dead.

  6

  They were right, thought Roy Grace, all those people who had told him that having a baby would totally change his life. He yawned, leadenly tired from endless disturbed nights with Cleo getting up every time Noah had woken needing a feed or his nappy changing. One of his colleagues, Nick Nicholl, a recent first-time father, had told him he’d taken to sleeping in a separate room so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the baby. But Roy was determined never to do that. The baby was a joint commitment and he had to play his part. But, shit, he felt tired; and grungy; it was a sticky August day and, although all of the windows were open, the air was listless, warm and humid.

  The television was on, playing the recording of the Olympics closing ceremony from less than a couple of weeks ago. He and Cleo had both fallen asleep watching it live on the night. He could not remember ever feeling so tired in his life, and it was affecting his concentration at work. He was definitely suffering from baby brain.

  Ray Davies, from one of his favourite bands, The Kinks, was singing ‘Waterloo Sunset’, and he turned up the sound slightly to listen. But Cleo did not look up from her book.

  Grace had recently crossed the Rubicon to his fortieth birthday. For the past couple of years he had increasingly been dreading that milestone. But when it had finally arrived, both he and Cleo had been too tired to think about a proper celebration. They’d opened a bottle of champagne and fallen asleep before they’d even drunk half of it.

  Now they had another celebration due. After a long time, the formalities for his divorce from his wife, Sandy, on the grounds of her being presumed legally dead, had this week been completed, and he was finally free to marry Cleo.

  Sandy had been missing since the day of his thirtieth birthday, ten years ago, and he still had no clue as to what had happened to her, or whether she was alive, as he still liked to believe, or long dead, as his friends and family all told him, which probably was the truth. Either way, for the first time he was feeling a sense of release, of truly being able to move on. And a further big part of that was that finally a buyer had been found for the home he and Sandy had shared.

  He stared down lovingly – and hopelessly proudly – at his seven-week-old son. At the tiny, cherubic creature, with rosebud lips and chubby pink arms and fingers like a toyshop doll. Noah Jack Grace, in a sleeveless white romper suit, eyes shut, lay on his lap, cradled in his arms. Thin strands of fair hair lay, brushed forward, with his scalp visible beneath. He could see elements of both Cleo and himself in his face, and there was one slightly bemused frown Noah sometimes gave, which reminded Grace of his late father – a police officer, like himself. He would do anything for Noah. He would die for him, without a shadow of hesitation.

  Cleo sat beside him on the sofa, in a sleeveless black top, her blonde hair cut shorter than usual and clipped back, engrossed in Fifty Shades of Grey. The house was filled with a milky smell of baby powder and fresh laundry. Several soft toys lay on the play mat on the floor, including a teddy bear and a cuddly Thomas The Tank Engine. Above them dangled a mobile with brightly coloured animals and birds.

  Humphrey, their young black Labrador-Border collie cross, gnawed a bone, sulkily, in his basket on the far side of the room. He had taken a couple of disdainful looks at Noah when he had first come home, then wandered off, tail between his legs, as if aware he was no longer number one in his owner’s eyes, and his attitude had remained the same ever since.

  Roy Grace clicked his fingers, beckoning the dog. ‘Hey, Humphrey, get over it! Make friends with Noah!’

  Humphrey gave his master the evil eye.

  It was midday on Tuesday, and Roy Grace had sneaked home for a few hours, because he had a long meeting ahead of him this evening. It was with the prosecution counsel on the trial, at the Old Bailey, of a particularly repugnant villain, Carl Venner, the mastermind behind a snuff movie ring, whom Grace had arrested last year. The trial had been adjourned recently for several weeks because the defendant had claimed to be suffering chest pains. But doctors had now cleared the man to continue with his trial, which had restarted yesterday.

  At this moment Roy Grace honestly believed he had never felt happier in his life. But at the same time he felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility. This tiny, frail creature he and Cleo had brought into this world. What kind of future lay ahead for Noah? What would the world be like in twenty or so years, when he became an adult? What would the world be like during the next twenty years – at the end of which Grace would be sixty years old? What could he do to change it? To make it a safer place for Noah? To protect his child from the evil out there, of which Venner, sadly, was just one of life’s sewer rats?

  What could he do to help his son cope with all the shit that life, inevitably, threw at you?

  God, he loved him so much. He wanted to be the best father in the world, and he knew that meant committing a lot of time. Time he wanted to spend, yet, in his chosen career, he was painfully aware it was time he would not always have.

  Since Noah had been born, Grace had spent much less time with his son than he’d hoped, because of the demands of work. If he got lucky, and there were no major crimes committed, he might have this weekend relatively free. He was the duty Senior Investigating Officer and his week was due to end at 6 a.m. on Monday. Normally, all SIOs hoped for a high-quality murder – one which would hit the national press, enabling them to shine, to get on the Chief Constable’s radar. But right now, Roy Grace hoped for a silent telephone.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  7

  The old lady heard the knock on the door for the third time. ‘I’m coming!’ she called out. ‘Bejazus, I’m coming!’ She lifted the saucepan of boiling water and green beans off the hob, grabbed her wheeled Zimmer frame, and began making her way across the kitchen.

  Then the phone started ringing. She hesitated. Her brother rang every day at 7 p.m. on the dot, whether he was in England or France, to check she was okay. It was 7 p.m. She grabbed the phone, with its extra-large numbers for her failing vision, and shouted, over the Emmerdale theme tune blaring from the television, ‘Hold on a minute, will you!’

  But it wasn’t her brother’s voice. It was a younger man with a silky purr. ‘I only need a moment of your time.’

  ‘There’s someone at the doo
r!’ she shouted back, fumbling with the TV remote to turn the sound down. Then she clamped her arthritic hand over the mouthpiece. Despite her years, she still had a strong voice. About the only thing left of her that was still strong, she rued. ‘You’ll have to wait. I’m on the phone,’ she hollered at the front door. Then she lifted her hand. ‘I’m back with you, but you’ll have to be quick,’ she said with her Irish lilt.

  ‘A good friend of yours told me to call you,’ the man said.

  ‘And who would that be?’

  ‘Gerard Scott.’

  ‘Gerard Scott?’

  ‘He said to say hello!’

  ‘I don’t know any Gerard Scott, for sure.’

  ‘We’re saving him two thousand five hundred pounds a year off his heating bill.’

  ‘And how would you be doing that?’ she asked, a tad impatiently as she stared at the door, worrying about her beans staying too long in the hot water.

  ‘We have a representative working in your area next week. Perhaps I could make an appointment at a time convenient for you?’

  ‘A representative for what, exactly?’

  ‘Loft insulation.’

  ‘Loft insulation? Why would I be needing loft insulation?’

  ‘We are England’s leading specialists. The insulation we put in is so effective it will have fully paid for itself in just nine years from savings on your fuel bills.’

  ‘Nine years, you say?’

  ‘That’s right, madam.’

  ‘Well now, I’m ninety-eight years old. That would be a high-class problem, I’d say, for me to think I’m going to be worrying about my heating bills when I’m a hundred and seven. But thank you kindly.’

  She hung up, then carried on towards the front door. ‘I’m coming! I’m on my way!’

  Her brother had been trying to convince her for a long time to sell the house and move into sheltered accommodation, but why the hell should she? This had been her home for over fifty years. Here she had lived happily with her husband, Gordon, who had passed away fifteen years ago, had raised her four children, who had all predeceased her, and had created the once beautiful garden, which she still continued to work in. All her memories were in this house, as well as all the fine paintings and antiques she and her husband had collected during their lives – guided by her brother’s discerning eye. She’d been uprooted once in her life, and it was not going to happen again. She was adamant that when she left this place she loved so much, it would be feet first.

  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.

  8

  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 G5s, 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?’