Dead Simple (6 page)

Routine gave you structure. Structure gave you perspective. And perspective gave you a horizon.

And when you looked at the horizon, you felt calmer.

Now he measured each hour with a small sip of whisky. Half a bottle left, and his horizon was the hour hand of his watch. The watch Ashley had bought him, a silver-rimmed Longines with luminous Roman numerals. It was the classiest watch he had ever owned. Ashley had great taste. She had class. Everything about her was classy, the kink in her long, brown hair, the way she walked, the confidence with which she talked, her classically beautiful features. He loved walking into a room with her. Anywhere. Eyes turned, stared. Jesus, he loved that! There was something special about her. Totally unique.

His mother said that too, and usually she never approved of his girlfriends. But Ashley was different. Ashley had worked on his mum and charmed her. That was another thing he loved about her, she could charm anyone. Even the most miserable damned client. He fell in love with her the day she walked into the office he shared with Mark, for a job interview. Now, just six months later, they were getting married.

His crotch and thighs itched like hell. Nappy rash. Long back he’d given up on his bladder. Twenty-six hours had passed now.

Something must have happened, but he had no idea what. Twenty-six fucking hours of shouting into the walkie-talkie, dialling his mobile and getting the same damned message.
No service.

Tuesday. Ashley wanted the stag night to be well before the wedding.
You’ll get drunk and feel like shit. I don’t want you feeling like that on our wedding day. Have it early in the week to give yourself time to recover.

He pushed up with his hands for the hundredth time. Maybe the two hundredth time. Maybe even the thousandth time. It made no difference. He had already tried grinding a hole in the lid with the only hard implement he had, the casing of his walkie-talkie. The mobile and the torch were both plastic. But the casing still wasn’t tough enough.

He switched on the walkie-talkie again. ‘Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?’

Static was there.

A dark thought occurred to him. Was Ashley in on this? Was this why she’d been so insistent that he should have the stag party early in the week, on Tuesday? So he could be locked in here — wherever
here
was — for a whole twenty-four hours, longer, without it causing any problem?

Never. She knew he was claustrophobic, and she didn’t have a cruel bone in her body. She always put everyone else first, was always thinking about other people’s needs.

The number of presents she had bought for his mother and himself had staggered him. And everything exquisitely appropriate. Her favourite perfume. A CD of her favourite singer, Robbie Williams, a cashmere jumper she had been hankering after. A Bose radio he had coveted. How did Ashley find out all these things? It was a knack, a gift, just one of the endless list of attributes that made her such a special person.

And made him the luckiest man in the world.

The torch beam dimmed, noticeably. He switched it off again to conserve the battery and lay still in the darkness again. He could hear his breathing getting faster. What if?

If they never came back?

It was nearly 11.30. He waited, listening for a gaggle of voices that would tell him his friends were back.

Jesus, when he got out of there they weren’t half going to regret this. He looked at his watch again. Twenty-five to midnight. They would be along soon, any minute now.

They
had
to be.

Sandy stood over him, grinning, blocking the sunlight, deliberately provoking him. Her blonde hair swung down either side of her freckled face, brushing his cheeks.

‘Hey! I have to read — this report — I—’

‘You’re so boring, Grace, you always have to read!’ She kissed his forehead. ‘Read, read, read, work, work, work!’ She kissed his forehead again. ‘Don’t you still fancy me?’

She was wearing a skimpy sun dress, her breasts almost falling out the top; he caught a glimpse of her long, tanned legs, her hem riding up her thighs, and suddenly he felt very horny.

He reached up his arms to cup her face, pulling her down to him, staring into those trusting blue eyes, feeling so incredibly — intensely — deeply — in love with her.

‘I adore you,’ he said.

‘Do you, Grace?’ Flirting. ‘Do you really adore me more than your work?’ She pulled her head back, pouted her lips quizzically.

‘I love you more than anything in—’

Darkness suddenly. As if someone had pulled out a plug.

Grace heard the echo of his voice in cold, empty air.

‘Sandy!’ he shouted, but the sound stayed trapped in his throat.

The sunlight faded into a weak orange glow; street lighting leaking in around the bedroom curtains.

The display on the digital clock said 3.02 a.m.

He was sweating, eyes wide open, his heart tossing around in his chest like a buoy in a storm. He heard the clatter of a dustbin — a scavenging cat or a fox. Moments later it was followed by the rattle of a diesel — probably his neighbour three doors down, who drove a taxi and kept late hours.

For some moments he lay still. Closed his eyes, calmed his breathing, tried to return to the dream, clinging as hard as he could to the memory. Like all the recurring dreams he had about Sandy it felt so real. As if they were still together but in a different dimension. If he could just find some way of locating the portal, crossing the divide, they really would be together again, they’d be fine, they’d be happy.

So damned happy.

A huge swell of sadness rolled through him. Then it turned to dread as he started to remember. The newspaper. That damned headline in the
Argus
last night. It was all coming back. Christ, oh Christ. What the hell were the morning papers going to say? Criticism he could cope with. Ridicule was harder. He already got stick from a number of officers for dabbling in the supernatural. He’d been warned by the previous Chief Constable, who was genuinely intrigued by the paranormal himself, that to let his interests be known openly could harm his promotion prospects.

‘Everyone knows you’re a special case, Roy — having lost Sandy. No one’s going to criticize you for turning over every stone on the damned planet. We’d all do the same in your shoes. But you have to keep that in your box, you can’t bring it to work.’

There were times when he thought he was getting over her, when he was getting strong again. Then there were moments like now when he realized he had barely progressed at all. He just wished so desperately he could have put an arm around her, cuddled up against her, talked through the problem. She was a glass-half-full person, always positive, and so savvy. She’d helped steer him through a disciplinary tribunal in his early days in the Force which could have ended his career, when he’d been accused by the Police Complaints Authority of using excessive force against a mugger he’d arrested. He’d been exonerated then, largely through following Sandy’s advice. She would have known exactly what he should do now.

He wondered sometimes if these dreams were attempts by Sandy to communicate with him. From wherever she was.

Jodie, his sister, told him it was time to move on, that he needed to accept that Sandy was dead, to replace her voice on the answering machine, to remove her clothes from the bedroom and her things from the bathroom, in short — and Jodie could be very short — to stop living in some kind of a shrine to Sandy, and start all over again.

But how could he move on? What if Sandy was alive, being held captive by some maniac? He had to keep searching, to keep the file open, to keep updating the photographs showing how she might look now, to keep scanning every face he passed in the street or saw in a crowd. He would go on until—

Until.

Closure.

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Sandy had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love. He’d left the house later than usual, at 9.15, and reached his office in Brighton shortly after half past, late for a briefing on a murder case. He’d promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple — his best friend at the time, Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife, Leslie, who Sandy got on well with — but it had been a hectic day and he’d arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.

At first he’d thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, there was no sign of a struggle.

Then, twenty-four hours later, her car was found in a bay of the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for
£7.50 at Boots, and £16.42 for petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.

His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday, and on the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 3.45 a.m., he could hear an American cop drama through the party wall between their semi-detached houses. Guns banged, tyres squealed, sirens
whup-whupped
. She’d seen nothing.

Noreen Grinstead, who lived opposite, was the one person he might have expected to have noticed something. A hawk-eyed, jumpy woman in her sixties, she knew everyone’s business in the street. When she wasn’t tending to her husband, Lance, who was steadily going downhill with Alzheimer’s, she was forever out front in yellow rubber gloves, washing her silver Nissan car, or hosing and scrubbing the driveway, or the windows of the house, or anything else that did or did not need washing. She even brought stuff out of the house to clean it in the driveway.

Very little escaped her eye. But, somehow, Sandy’s disappearance had.

He switched the light on and got out of bed, pausing to stare at the photograph of himself and Sandy on the dressing table. It had been taken in a hotel in Oxford during a conference on DNA fingerprinting, a few months before she disappeared. He was lounging back in a suit and tie, on a chaise longue. Sandy, in an evening dress, was lying back against him, hair up in blonde ringlets, beaming her constant irrepressible grin at a waiter they had sequestered to take the picture.

He went over, picked up the frame, kissed the photo then set it down again, and went into the bathroom to urinate. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee was a recent affliction, a result of the health fad he was on, drinking the recommended minimum eight glasses of water a day. Then he padded, clad only in the T-shirt he slept in, downstairs.

Sandy had such great taste. Their house itself was modest, like all the ones in the street, a three-bedroom mock-Tudor semi, built in the 1930s, but she had made it beautiful. She loved browsing the Sunday supplements, women’s magazines and design magazines, ripping out pages and showing him ideas. They’d spent hours together, stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, varnishing, painting.

Sandy got into Feng Shui, and built a little water garden. She filled the house with candles. Bought organic food whenever she could. She thought about everything, questioned everything, was interested in everything, and he loved that. Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, cementing their life together, making all their plans.

She was a good gardener, too. She understood about flowers, plants, shrubs, bushes, trees. When to plant, how to prune. Grace liked to mow the lawn but that was about where his skills ended. The garden was neglected now and he felt guilty about that, sometimes wondering what she would say if she returned.

Her car was still in the garage. Forensics had been through it with a toothcomb after it had been recovered, then he’d brought it back home and garaged it. For years he kept the battery on trickle charge, just in case … The same way he kept her slippers out on the bedroom floor, her dressing gown hanging on its peg, her toothbrush in its mug.

Waiting for her return.

Wide awake, he poured himself two fingers of Glenfiddich, then sat down in his white armchair in the all-white lounge with its wooden floor and pressed the remote. He flicked through three movies in succession, then a bunch of other Sky channels, but nothing grabbed his attention for more than a few minutes. He played some music, switching restlessly from the Beatles to Miles Davis to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, then back to silence.

He picked one of his favourite books, Colin Wilson’s
The Occult
, from the rows of books on the paranormal that filled every inch of his bookshelves, then sat back and turned the pages listlessly, sipping his whisky, unable to concentrate on more than a couple of paragraphs.

That damned defence barrister strutting around in court today had got under his skin, and was now strutting around inside his mind. Richard bloody Charwell. Pompous sodding bastard. Worse, Grace knew he had been outsmarted by the man. Outmanoeuvred and outsmarted. And that really stung.

He picked up the remote again and punched up the news on Teletext. Nothing beyond the same stories that had been around for a couple of days now and were getting stale. No breaking political scandal, no terrorist outrage, no earthquake, no air disaster. He didn’t wish ill on anyone, but he had been hoping for something to fill up the morning’s headlines and airwaves. Something other than the murder trial of Suresh Hossain.

His luck was out.

Two national tabloids and one broadsheet led with front-page splashes on the murder trial of Suresh Hossain, and all the rest of the British morning papers had coverage inside.

It wasn’t the trial itself that was the focus of their interest, but the remarks in the witness box made by Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who at 8.30 in the morning found himself on the carpet in front of his boss, Alison Vosper, feeling as if the clock had been wound back three decades, and he was back at school, trembling in front of his headmistress.