Dead Man's Footsteps

by Peter James

  Now she was back. In hiding. A stranger in her own life. Desperate not to be recognized by anyone. Turning her face away on the rare occasions when she passed someone she knew. Or saw an old friend in a bar and immediately had to leave. God damn it, she was lonely!

  And scared.

  Not even her own mother knew she was back in England.

  Just turned twenty-seven three days ago – and that was some birthday party, she thought ironically. Getting smashed up here on her own, with a bottle of Moët et Chandon, an erotic movie on Sky and a vibrator with a dead battery.

  She used to pride herself on her natural good looks. Brimful of confidence, she could go out to any bar, any disco, any party and have the pick of the crop. She was good at chatting, good at laying on the charm, good at playing vulnerable, which long ago she had understood was what guys liked. But now she was vulnerable for real, and she was really not enjoying that.

  Not enjoying being a fugitive.

  Even though it would not be for ever.

  The shelves, tables and floors of the flat were piled high with books, CDs and DVDs, ordered from Amazon and from Play.com. During the past two months on the run she had read more books, seen more films and watched more television than ever before in her life. She occupied much of the rest of her time by doing an online course in Spanish.

  She had come back because she thought she would be safe here. Dave had agreed. That this was the one place he would not dare show his face. The only place on the planet. But she could not be completely sure.

  She had another reason for coming to Brighton – a big part of her agenda. Her mother’s condition was getting slowly worse and she needed to find her a well-run private nursing home where she could have some quality of life in the years remaining. Abby did not want to see her end up in one of those terrible National Health Service geriatric wards. She had already identified a beautiful home in the countryside nearby. It was expensive, but she could afford to keep her mother there for years now. All she had to do was lie low for just a little longer.

  Her phone pinged suddenly with an incoming text. She looked down at the display and smiled when she saw who it was from. The one thing that helped sustain her was these texts, which she received every few days.

  Absence diminishes small loves and increases

  great ones, as the wind blows out the candle

  and blows up the bonfire.

  She thought for some moments. A benefit of having so much time on her hands was that she could surf the net for hours without feeling guilty. She loved collecting quotations, and texted back one she had saved up.

  Love is not gazing at each other. Love is staring

  together in the same direction.

  For the first time in her life she had met a man who stared in the same direction as herself. Right now it was at just a name on a map. Images downloaded from the web. A place she went to in her dreams. But soon they would both be going there for real. She just had to be patient for a little longer. They both needed to be.

  She closed The Latest magazine, where she had been browsing dream houses, crushed out her cigarette, drained her glass of Sauvignon and began her pre-exit checks.

  First she walked to the window and peered down through the blinds at the wide terrace of Regency houses. The sodium glow of the street lights bled orange into every shadow. It was dark enough, with a howling autumn gale blasting rain as hard as buckshot against the windowpanes. As a child she used to be scared of the dark. Now, ironically, it made her feel safe.

  She knew the cars that were regularly parked there on both sides, with their residents’ parking stickers. Ran her eyes over each of them. She didn’t used to be able to tell one make from another, but now she knew them all. The grimy, bird-shit-spattered black Golf GTi. The Ford Galaxy people carrier belonging to a couple in a flat across the street who had grizzly twins and seemed to spend their lives lugging shopping and collapsible strollers up and down the stairs. The odd-looking little Toyota Yaris. An elderly Porsche Boxster belonging to a young man she had decided was a doctor – he probably worked at the nearby Royal Sussex County Hospital. The rusty white Renault van with soggy tyres and a FOR SALE notice written in red ink on a strip of brown cardboard stuck in its passenger-door window. Plus another dozen or so cars whose owners she knew by sight. Nothing new down there, nothing to be concerned about. And no one lurking in the shadows.

  A couple were hurrying by, arms linked, with a bloated umbrella threatening to turn inside out at any moment.

  Window locks in bedroom, spare bedroom, bathroom, living/dining room. Activate timers on lights, television and radio in each room in turn. Blu-Tack single cotton thread, knee high, across the hallway just inside the front door.

  Paranoid? Moi? You’d better believe it!

  She tugged her long mackintosh and umbrella from the hooks in the narrow hallway, stepped over the thread and peered through the spyhole. The dull-yellow fish-eye glow of the empty landing greeted her.

  She unhooked the safety chains, opened the door cautiously and stepped out, instantly noticing the smell of sawn timber. She pulled the door shut and turned the keys in turn in each of the three deadlocks.

  Then she stood listening. Somewhere downstairs, in one of the other flats, a phone was ringing, unanswered. She shivered, pulling her fleece-lined mac around her, still not used to the damp and cold after years of living in the sunshine. Still not used to spending a Friday night alone.

  Her plan tonight was to catch a film, Atonement, at the multiplex in the Marina, then grab a bite to eat – maybe some pasta – and, if she had the courage, go to a bar for a couple of glasses of wine. That way at least she could feel the comfort of mingling with other humans.

  Dressed discreetly in designer jeans, ankle-length boots and a black, knitted polo neck beneath the mac, wanting to look nice but not to draw attention to herself if she did go to a bar, she opened the fire door to the stairwell, and saw to her dismay that the workmen had left it blocked for the weekend with lengths of plasterboard and a whole stack of timber.

  Cursing them, she debated whether to try to stumble her way through, then, thinking better of it, she pressed the button for the lift, staring at the scratched metal door. Seconds later she heard it clanking, jerking and bumping obediently upwards, reaching her floor with a jarring clang before the external door opened with a sound like a shovel smoothing gravel.

  She stepped in and the door closed again with the same sound, along with the lift car’s own double doors, enclosing her. She breathed in the smell of someone else’s perfume, and lemon-scented cleaning fluid. The lift jerked upwards a few inches, so sharply she almost fell over.

  And now, when it was too late to change her mind and get out, with the metal walls pressing in around her and a small, almost opaque mirror reflecting the dawning look of panic on her mostly invisible face, it lunged sharply downwards.

  Abby was about to realize she had just made a bad mistake.

  3

  OCTOBER 2007

  Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, seated at the desk in his office, put down the phone and leaned back with his arms folded, tilting the chair until it was resting against the wall. Shit. At 4.45 on a Friday afternoon, his weekend had just gone down the toilet – more or less literally. Down a storm drain, at any rate.

  On top of a lousy run of cards at his weekly boys’ poker game last night, when he’d lost nearly three hundred quid.

  There was nothing like the idea of a field trip to a storm drain on a howling wet Friday afternoon, he thought, for putting you in a really foul mood. He could feel the icy draught of the wind blowing through the ill-fitting windowpanes of his small office and listened to the rattle of the rain. Not a day to be outside.

  He cursed the Control Room operator who had just rung him with the news. It was shooting the messenger, he realized, but he had everything planned to spend tomorrow night in London with Cleo, as a treat for her. Now that would have to be cancelled, for a case he
knew instinctively he was not going to enjoy, and all because he had stepped in as duty Senior Investigating Officer to cover for a colleague who had gone down sick.

  Murders were what really floated his boat in this job. There were between fifteen and twenty every year in Sussex, with many of them in the City of Brighton and Hove and environs – more than enough to go round all the SIOs and give them a chance to show their abilities. It was a tad callous to think this way, he knew, but it was a fact that handling a brutal, high-profile murder inquiry well was a good career opportunity. You got noticed by the press and the public, by your peers and, most importantly, by your bosses. There was intense satisfaction to be had out of a successful arrest and conviction. More than just a job done, it allowed the family of the victim a chance of closure, to move on. To Grace, this was the most significant factor of all.

  He liked to work on murders where there was a hot, live trail, where he could crack into action with an adrenaline rush, think on his feet, galvanize a team into working 24/7 and have a good chance of catching the perpetrator.

  But from the sound of the operator’s report, the findings in the storm drain indicated anything but a fresh murder. Skeletal remains. Might not even be a murder at all, could be a suicide, maybe even a natural death. There was even the remote possibility it could be a shop-window dummy – that had happened before. Remains like this could have been there for decades, so another couple of days wouldn’t have made a sodding bit of difference.

  Guilty at this sudden flash of anger, he looked down at the twenty or so blue boxes, stacked two and three deep, that were taking up most of the carpeted floor area of his office that wasn’t already filled by the small round conference table and four chairs.

  Each box contained the key files of an unsolved murder, a cold case. The rest of the case files were bulging out of cupboards elsewhere in the CID headquarters, or were locked up, going mouldy, in a damp police garage in the area where the murder happened, or were archived away in a forgotten basement room, along with all the tagged and bagged items of evidence.

  And he had a feeling, born from close on twenty years of investigating murders, that what awaited him now in the storm drain was more than likely to result in another blue box on his floor.

  He was so saturated with paperwork at the moment that there was barely a square inch of his desk that wasn’t buried under mounds of documents. He was having to work through the time lines, evidence, statements and everything else needed by the Crown Prosecution Service for two separate murder trials next year. One concerned a scumbag internet sleaze merchant called Carl Venner, the other a psychopath called Norman Jecks.

  Glancing through a document prepared by a young woman, Emily Gaylor from the Brighton Trials Unit, he picked up the phone and dialled an extension, taking only a small amount of satisfaction from the fact that he was about to ruin someone else’s weekend too.

  He was answered almost instantly. ‘DS Branson.’

  ‘What are you doing at the moment?’

  ‘I’m about to go home, old-timer, thanks for asking,’ said Glenn Branson.

  ‘That’s the wrong answer.’

  ‘No, it’s the right answer,’ the Detective Sergeant insisted. ‘Ari has a dressage lesson and I’m looking after the kids.’

  ‘Dressage? What’s that?’

  ‘Something involving her horse that costs thirty quid an hour.’

  ‘She’ll have to take the kids with her. Meet me down in the car park in five minutes. We need to take a look at a dead body.’

  ‘I’d really prefer to go home.’

  ‘So would I. And I expect the body would prefer to be at home too,’ Grace replied. ‘At home in front of the telly with a nice cuppa instead of decomposing in a storm drain.’

  4

  OCTOBER 2007

  After just a few seconds the lift jerked sharply to a halt, swaying from side to side, banging against the walls with an echoing clang like two oil drums colliding. Then it rocked forward, throwing Abby against the door.

  Almost instantly it plunged sharply again, in freefall. She let out a whimper. For a split second, the carpeted floor dropped away below her, as if she had become weightless. Then there was a jarring crash and the floor seemed to rise, striking her feet with such force it knocked the air out of her stomach – it felt as if her legs were being driven up into her neck.

  The lift twisted, throwing her like a busted puppet against the mirror on the back wall, and lurched again before becoming almost still, swinging slightly, the floor tilted at a drunken angle.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Abby whispered.

  The lights in the roof flickered, went out, came on again. There was an acrid reek of burnt electrics and she saw a thin coil of smoke glide, unhurriedly, past her.

  She held her breath, trapping another cry in her throat. It felt as if the whole damned thing was being suspended by one very thin and frayed thread.

  Suddenly there was a rending sound above her. Metal tearing. Her eyes shot up in stark terror. She didn’t know much about lifts, but it sounded as if something was shearing away. Her imagination running wild, she pictured the shackle holding the cable on to the roof breaking off.

  The lift dropped a couple of inches.

  She shrieked.

  Then another couple of inches, the angle of the floor becoming steeper.

  It lurched left with a massive metallic bang, then sagged. There was a sharp crack above her head, like something snapping.

  It dropped a few more inches.

  When she moved to try to balance herself, she fell over, bashing her shoulder against one wall, then her head against the doors. She lay still for a moment, with dust in her nostrils from the carpet, not daring to move, staring up at the roof. There was a central opaque glass panel, with illuminated strips either side of it. Had to get out of this thing, she knew, had to get out fast. Lifts in movies had roof hatches. Why didn’t this one?

  The button panel was just out of reach. She tried to get on to her knees to reach it, but the lift started swaying so wildly, banging into the sides of the shaft again as if it really was held by a single thread, that she stopped, afraid that one movement too many could snap it.

  For some moments she lay still, hyperventilating in utter blind terror, listening for any sounds of help coming. There were none. If Hassan, her neighbour two floors below, was away, and if the rest of the residents were either away too or in their flats with their televisions up loud, no one would know what was happening.

  Alarm. Got to ring the alarm.

  She took several deep breaths. Her head felt tight, as if her scalp was a size too small. The walls were closing in around her, suddenly, then expanding, moving away before closing in again, as if they were lungs. In towards her, then moving away again, lungs that were breathing, pulsing. She was having a panic attack.

  ‘Hi,’ she said quietly, in a croaking whisper, saying what she had been taught to say by her therapist whenever she felt a panic attack coming on. ‘I am Abby Dawson. I am fine. This is just a wonky chemical reaction. I’m fine, I am in my body, I am not dead, this will pass.’

  She crawled a few inches towards the alarm button. The floor rocked, spun, as if she was lying on a board that was balanced on the point of a sharp stick and would fall off at any moment. Waiting until it had stabilized, she inched forward again. Then again. Another wisp of blue, acrid-smelling smoke passed by her, silent, like a genie. She reached out her arm, stretching as far as she could, and jabbed her trembling finger hard against the grey metal button printed in red with the word ALARM.

  Nothing happened.

  5

  OCTOBER 2007

  There was a meagre amount of daylight left when, deep in thought, Roy Grace turned the unmarked grey car into Trafalgar Street. It might be proudly named after a great naval victory, but this skanky end of the street was lined on both sides with grimy, unloved buildings and shops and, at most times of the day and night, drug dealers. Although the foul weathe
r this afternoon was keeping all but the most desperate of them indoors. Glenn Branson, sharply dressed in a brown chalk-striped suit and immaculate silk tie, was sitting in morose silence beside him.

  Unusually for a pool vehicle, the almost new Hyundai had not yet begun to reek like a discarded McDonald’s carton filled with old hair gel but still had that fresh, new-car smell. Grace turned right, alongside the tall hoarding wall of a construction company. Behind it, a large and run-down area of central Brighton was getting a makeover, transforming two old and largely disused railway goods yards into yet another urban chic development.

  The artist’s glossy impression of the architect’s vision ran much of the length of the hoarding. THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTER. ASPIRATIONAL LIFESTYLE HOMES AND OFFICES. It looked, Grace thought, like every other modern development in every town and city you ever passed through. All glass and exposed steel beams, courtyards with neat little shrubs and trees dotted around, and not a mugger in sight. One day the whole of England would look the same and you wouldn’t know what town or city you were in.

  But does that actually matter, he wondered suddenly. Am I already an old fart at thirty-nine? Do I really want this city I love so much preserved, warts and all, in some kind of a time warp?

  At this moment, however, he had something bigger on his mind than the Brighton and Hove Planning Department’s policies. Bigger too than the human remains they were on their way to observe. Something that was depressing him a lot.

  Cassian Pewe.

  On Monday, after a long convalescence following a car accident and several false starts, Cassian Pewe would finally be commencing work at the CID headquarters, in the same role as Grace. And with one big advantage: Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe was the blue-eyed boy of Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, whereas he was pretty much her bête noire.