Want You Dead

by Peter James

  It would be just his rotten luck that the ball had rolled into that. Then there really would be no recovery, and he’d have to play his provisional, which meant his next shot would be his fourth. No chance of a par on this hole.

  ‘This smell is making me really hungry!’ Bob Sansom said. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast because I’m trying to lose weight – now I’m bloody ravenous! I’m hallucinating roast pork and crackling!’

  ‘Lucky for you I’ve got a jar of apple sauce in my bag!’ joked Gerry Marsh.

  ‘And I’ve got gravy and potatoes!’ said Terry Haines.

  Anthony Mascolo hacked his way through dense brambles to the edge of the ditch and looked down into it, gloomily expecting to see his ball lying at the bottom, probably half submerged in muddy water.

  Instead, he saw something else.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he said.

  Gerry Marsh joined him and peered down also. When he saw what his companion was looking at, he turned away, his complexion draining to sheet white, and moments later he threw his breakfast up over his two-tone golf shoes.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Terry Haines said, backing away shaking, his face drained of colour. ‘Oh God.’

  In the perverse way the human brain sometimes works, as Anthony Mascolo pulled his mobile phone out of his golf bag and dialled 999, he was thinking, Hey, we’re going to have to abandon our game here today, so I don’t have to worry about screwing up this hole! As the full horror of what he was looking at struck home, and the reek of Gerry Marsh’s vomit hit him, he continued to stare, mesmerized, shaken to the core, then backed away, unable to look further.

  A disembodied voice said, ‘Emergency, which service please?’

  It was coming from his phone.

  He didn’t know which service. He really didn’t. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘Ambulance. Police.’

  His phone slipped from his hands into the undergrowth, and he turned away. His head was spinning. He felt giddy. He clutched a thin tree trunk for support.

  9

  Thursday morning, 24 October

  Detective Superintendent Roy Grace sat in his office on the second floor of Sussex House, which housed the Force Crime and Justice Department and the Brighton HQ of the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team. He was sipping the remnants of an hour-old coffee, which was now somewhere between lukewarm and tepid. Several stacks of paper lay on his desk, which, along with some sixty emails in his inbox, he had been steadily working through since 7 a.m., with his tired and addled ‘baby brain’.

  His son, Noah, now almost four months old, was not allowing him or his beloved Cleo much peace at night. But he didn’t mind, he was still overwhelmed with joy at having become a father. Although just one night of unbroken sleep would be nice, he thought – and soon, hopefully, he would have four!

  Saturday week, in just under ten days’ time, he and Cleo were getting married. They’d originally planned their wedding, which had been subsequently postponed over legal difficulties in getting his long-vanished wife, Sandy, declared dead, to take place in a country church in the village where Cleo’s parents lived; but they’d now decided on the pretty church in Rottingdean, a coastal village annexed to the eastern extremity of Brighton, because they both liked the vicar, Father Martin, who they had met on various occasions through their work.

  They were heading off for a short honeymoon the following Monday to a surprise destination for Cleo – four nights in Venice. She had mentioned a couple of times in the past how much she had always wanted to go there. He was so much looking forward to that time with her, although he knew they would miss Noah badly – but not the sleep deprivation.

  However, despite his intense love of Cleo, his joy was tinged with a dark shadow. Sandy. He could not escape the guilt that continued to haunt him; the fear that just maybe, while he was getting on with his life, and happier than he had ever been, Sandy might still be suffering somewhere at the hands of a maniac who had captured her and was keeping her prisoner – or that she had died, suffering a terrible death. He did his best to push these thoughts aside, in the knowledge that he had done everything humanly possible during the past decade to find her. He turned his attention back to his workload.

  One stack of paper in front of him, the smallest and least urgent, had a yellow Post-it note on the top, with the wording, written in his new Lead Management Secretary’s handwriting, Rugby stuff. He was President and Secretary of the Police Rugby Team, and needed to sort out several forthcoming fixtures. Another pile, also labelled with a Post-it note, contained a list of queries and requests from Nicola Roigard, the recently appointed Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex. In addition to being the county’s second most senior homicide detective, Grace also had responsibility for the ongoing work and reopening of many of Sussex’s cold cases, and had to give her regular updates. She was pleasant to deal with but sharp, and missed no tricks.

  The third and most pressing stack – as well as the largest – was the paperwork he needed to complete, with the help of financial investigator Emily Gaylor, previously from the Criminal Justice Department, for the trial of the perpetrators of his most recent case, Operation Flounder, a nasty tie-up burglary in Brighton earlier in the year, in which the victim had died.

  On his iPhone notepad he had a ‘to do’ list, which was the reserve list for their wedding. There was a limit on numbers, so every time they had a refusal they’d been able to add someone else from the waiting list. There were so many people he would have liked to have asked that it was really worrying him. What should have been a joyous occasion had turned into a major headache for them.

  But one thing he was looking forward to was this evening’s poker game, which he had played most Thursday nights for the past fifteen years with a group of friends, several of whom were police colleagues.

  It was his turn to host the game, and Cleo had been hard at work preparing snacks and cooking a coq au vin for the meal they always had halfway through the evening.

  With particularly bad timing, he was the duty Senior Investigating Officer for this week, and he sincerely hoped that none of the average thirteen homicides a year that occurred in the county of Sussex would happen today and mess up his plans.

  He dealt with the rugby club correspondence and then made his way to the tiny kitchenette that housed a fridge and a few basics to make himself another coffee. As the kettle came to the boil his mobile phone rang.

  ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered. Instantly, he recognized with dismay the voice of the duty Ops-1 Controller, Inspector Andy Kille.

  It was not good news. Such calls never were.

  10

  Thursday morning, 24 October

  ‘You okay, Red?’

  No, I am so not okay, she thought. But that was not what her boss, Geoff Brady, at Mishon Mackay, the estate agency where she worked as a negotiator, would want to hear. Still not a word from Karl.

  Bastard.

  You complete bastard.

  Why did you lie to me?

  She looked up from the property details in front of her that she had been tasked with writing. It was a new instruction and a horrid little place in her opinion. A tiny terraced house, overshadowed by an industrial estate next to it, on a busy hill with endless traffic day and night. It fronted straight onto the road, had no parking facility outside, and a sunless backyard just about big enough to exercise a lame gerbil in. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  Geoff Brady smiled. He always smiled. Forty-five years old, a dapper dresser with an Irish accent, he exuded charm. If he’d been told the world would end tomorrow, he would have kept smiling, and still managed to sell a property to someone. ‘You’ve a worried look on your face,’ he said.

  ‘I’m good.’

  He peered down at what she had written on her computer screen.

  Period bijou terraced cottage within five minutes’ walk of Hove station, close to the recreation ground and all the amenities of the much sought after Church Road district. In need of some modernization, this
period property comprises two ground-floor rooms, a separate kitchen and cloakroom, and two bedrooms upstairs, with separate bathroom, all nicely proportioned. A unique opportunity to acquire a city-centre property.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Mention that it’s handy for the buses.’

  It was, she thought. There was a bus stop almost outside, so close the engines made every room shake. ‘Okay, good point.’

  ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘People always like that word. You have two periods. Change the first one to charming.’

  ‘ Charming bijou terraced cottage?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like that. That has a nice ring to it. What about photographs?’

  She clicked to bring them up, feeling proud of her artistry with her camera. Brady peered at them. ‘These are terrible – who took them?’

  ‘I did,’ she said, a tad crestfallen.

  He pointed. ‘Look, the toilet seat’s up in that one! There’s a bottle of bleach on the draining board there. There are clothes strewn everywhere in that bedroom. You can’t put photographs like that on any property details. The place has to look immaculate.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll get the hang of it. But you’ll need to retake those. How many viewings do you have today, Red?’

  ‘Twelve so far,’ she said. ‘I’m working on some more.’

  He nodded. The daily target was fifteen viewings for each negotiator. ‘Okay,’ he said, and moved on.

  The large open-plan office was themed in white, and partially screened off from the front of the premises by a low wall. A giant clock was fixed above them as if there as a reminder never to waste time, and on one wall was a gridded whiteboard captioned, with a thick blue marker pen, COUNTDOWN £164,000 to go! It was the target remaining for commission for this branch of the estate agency chain to try to achieve before the year-end. Running down the left was a list of properties, starting from £165,000 and rising to £3,500,000, with the number of viewings to date listed alongside.

  The negotiators all adhered to a strict dress code – the men in suits and ties and pale shirts, the women in conservative clothes and shoes that were suitable for endless climbing up and down staircases. It was early still; they’d just had their morning meeting and now everyone was settling down to the business of the day. The place smelled of a combination of coffee and a whole range of colognes, aftershaves, eaux de toilette and perfumes. Outside, the rush hour was just winding down. It was 9.30 a.m.

  There was a team of nine altogether in this branch, and the firm was doing well, but Red was a relatively new kid on the block, having spent the last twelve years doing a variety of secretarial jobs before finding her niche, and she was still learning. Through the window, if she sat up straight, Red could just about see out onto the wide, busy shopping precinct of Church Road in Hove and the Tesco superstore across the road.

  She yawned. Her eyes felt raw from an almost sleepless night waiting for the phone to ring. Or a knock on the door. She was in denial, she knew, about having been stood up by Karl. Dumped. But it was totally out of character, or so she thought.

  She really had thought that Karl was different. Unlike dickhead Dominic, then Bryce, who had been totally possessive about her to the point of obsession, Karl seemed so gentle and normal. He always asked her how her day had been, what she had done, and seemed to really like hearing about the properties she had shown to clients. Bryce had only ever been interested in telling her about his day, and sometimes trying out a new magic trick that he was working on. Then flying into a temper and lashing out at her at the slightest thing.

  Men were shits, shits, total shits.

  She had actually allowed herself to think that she and Karl might have a future. He was the first man she had met whom she could imagine having a child with. From the way he talked about his children he seemed to be a wonderful father. At least that’s what she had thought up until only yesterday.

  But not after being stood up.

  She read through the details of the property, then added in the word that her boss had suggested. Charming bijou terraced cottage.

  She felt a pang in her heart. In spite of her anger and disappointment, she was missing Karl, dammit. She pinged him a text.

  What happened? I waited all night. R u ok?

  Then, for good measure, she sent him an email as well.

  Karl, I’m really worried. Are you okay? If you’ve dumped me, at least let me know.

  Ten minutes later she dialled his number, and again it went straight to voicemail. She left yet another message. ‘Karl, it’s Red, please call me.’

  Then she froze.

  Bryce was standing outside, in a hoodie, staring in. Staring at her.

  An instant later, he was gone.

  She dashed from her desk, ran to the front door, and out onto the pavement. A bus roared past, followed by a delivery lorry. She looked up and down, saw other shoppers, but no sign of Bryce. He had a distinctive swagger of a walk, like he owned the pavement, which always made it easy for her to pick him out in a crowd. A taxi in the Streamline livery suddenly pulled away from the kerb a hundred yards or so to her left.

  Was he in that?

  Or had she imagined this?

  No, she was certain, she had not. He was clever, wearing a hoodie so she could not recognize him clearly. But then he had always been clever. If only he used his brain for something constructive, instead of just finding endless – and sometimes ingenious – ways to make her life hell, he might be a happier person himself.

  But as her father, a retired solicitor, told her, someone like Bryce would never change. Which meant she would have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.

  And through windows.

  11

  Thursday midday, 24 October

  Bryce Laurent yawned. He was so excited by the successful activities of last night that he’d barely slept a wink, and his breakfast shift here in the kitchen doing the laundry had started at 5 a.m. He didn’t need the money and he loathed the work, but he had a very definite purpose. It was physical, hot, and the smell and chemicals were not pleasant. Several times since starting here he had gone home with a raw throat and a headache from the fumes.

  But not for much longer, if all went to plan. And he had every reason to believe all would go to plan. He’d practised in his workshop several times, simulating the same conditions, and he had prepared for today with fastidious care. He was looking forward to it a lot.

  The thought made him smile, and not a huge amount had done since . . .

  He winced.

  Sometimes it was just too painful to think about. In his mind, his life was carved up into three distinct segments. The years which it seemed, in retrospect, he had sleepwalked through before he had met Red. Then with Red he had come alive, truly alive. It had been the most intense, magical, thrilling time ever. And now this kind of colourless, angry half-life. This unbearable segment of his life – post-Red. The endgame. The closing weeks of her life, and his.

  There were big lessons to teach her and her nasty parents before it was over for them all. Before she would be ready to say the words he now wanted to hear so much. The last words she would ever utter:

  I’m sorry.

  12

  Thursday midday, 24 October

  A fire engine, two police cars and a paramedic’s car were parked on the grass on the third fairway of Haywards Heath Golf Club.

  Roy Grace radioed the local DI, Paul Hazeldine, who had requested his attendance and, accompanied by newly promoted Detective Inspector Glenn Branson, followed the agitated Club Secretary on foot. Ahead, he could see a strip of blue and white crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze, with a uniformed PCSO scene guard standing in front, and a small Crime Scene Investigators’ changing tent nearby. The tall figure of Detective Inspector Hazeldine appeared, in a protective oversuit, and ducked under the tape.

  The smell of burnt human flesh messed with your mind, Roy Grace
thought. It reminded you of roast pork, which made you feel hungry, until you saw the human cadaver. Then it twisted your mind inside out, making you feel guilty at such a terrible thought. Yet still hungry at the same time.

  They passed a group of golfers standing with their bags and trolleys by the clubhouse, and Grace heard an indignant voice.

  ‘Look at the bloody ruts! Did they have to drive over the fairway? What if a ball lands there? And when the hell are they going to let us back on the course?’

  Resisting the temptation to turn and give the man a piece of his mind, they walked across to the DI, who greeted them with a grim expression and brought them up to speed.

  Hazeldine had urbane good looks, and normally an irrepressibly cheery demeanour. Roy Grace had once crewed with him in a Response car in Brighton way back when they had been uniformed PCs.

  ‘Good to see you, Roy, and thanks for coming out.’

  ‘Good to see you, too, Paul.’

  Hazeldine peeled off a glove and shook hands with both men.

  ‘So what have we got?’

  ‘Single body, heavily burnt. There’s a petrol can nearby. We’re conducting a search of the immediate area.’

  ‘Do we have a name?’ Grace asked.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  Grace and Branson went into the tent, sat on plastic chairs and wormed their way into protective oversuits and then overshoes.

  Branson sniffed several times. ‘Long pig,’ he said.

  ‘Long pig?’ Grace replied.

  ‘You don’t know about long pig?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean, I actually know something you don’t?’ He grinned.