Dead Simple

by Peter James

  The pendulum was swinging fast in a tight circle, and Harry Frame, eyes still tight shut, was juddering as if he had been plugged into an electrical socket. 'Here?' Without opening his eyes, Harry Frame confirmed, 'Here.' Grace left him in the car, then stopped at the front gate, staring at the neglected front lawn and the flower beds, which were a tangle of bindweed. There was something odd about the house, which he couldn't immediately figure out. It looked as if it had been built in the 1930s, or maybe early 1950s, and the design was strange, lopsided. He walked up a path of concrete slabs with weeds sprouting between the cracks, and pressed the cracked plastic front-door bell.

  There was a shrill ring, but no one came to the door. He tried again. Still no answer. Then he did a circuit around the house, peering into each window as he went. It had a forlorn, neglected air about it, both inside and out. All the furnishings looked twenty or thirty years old, as did the design of and appliances in the kitchen. Then he noted, to his surprise, that there was a stack of newspapers on the kitchen table. He looked at his watch. It was just gone 6 p.m. He ought to get a search warrant, he knew. But that would take another couple of hours - and with every minute that passed the chances of finding Michael Harrison alive were shrinking. How much did he trust Harry Frame? The medium had been right on several occasions in the past - but he had been wrong on just as many. Shite. The thought of what Alison Vosper would say to him if he was caught breaking into a house without a warrant bothered him. He didn't have enough to back his judgement up, but it would have to do.

  Time was running out for Michael Harrison. With a loose brick from the garden, he smashed a kitchen window pane, then wrapping his hand in his handkerchief, he removed the pieces of glass that remained lodged in the putty, found the window catch, opened it and crawled in. 'Hello!' he shouted. 'Hello! Anyone home?' The place felt and smelled dingy. The kitchen was clean, and other than some newspapers, all bearing yesterday's date, there was no sign of anyone having lived here recently. He checked out each of the downstairs rooms.

  The large sitting room was drab as hell, with a couple of framed prints of seascapes on the walls. He noticed there were lines on the carpet, as if someone had recently moved the sofa. He moved on into a dark dining room, with an oak table and four chairs, and flock wallpaper, then on to a small lavatory, with a 'God Bless This House' cross-stitch hanging on the wall. Upstairs felt equally unloved and unlived in. There were three bedrooms, all the beds stripped to bare mattresses with old, yellowing pillows, without slips, lying on them, and a small bathroom, with a geyser boiler and stained washbasin and bath.

  Above the bed in the smallest room was a loft hatch. By placing a chair, precariously, on the mattress, then standing on it, he was able to push open the hatch and peer in. To his surprise there was a light switch just inside the hatch, which worked, and he could see in an instant there was nothing up here. Just a small water tank, an old carpet sweeper and a rolled-up rug. He opened every cupboard and cabinet door. Upstairs, all the bed linen and bath towels were folded away in the cupboards. Downstairs, the kitchen cupboards contained basics - coffee, tea, a few tins, but nothing else. It could easily have been a year or two since anyone had been here. No sign of Michael Harrison. Nothing. Nowhere. He checked the hall cupboard, in case there was a cellar entrance in there, although he knew that few houses after the Victorian era had cellars.

  He needed to find out who owned this place and when it was last lived in. Maybe the owners had died and it was in the hands of executors? Maybe a cleaning lady came up here occasionally? A cleaning lady who read every national newspaper? Grace let himself out of the back door and walked around to the side of the house, where there were two dustbins. He lifted the lid of the first one, and instantly he had a different story.

  There were eggshells, used tea bags, an empty skimmed milk carton bearing a sell-by date of today and a Marks and Spencer lasagne carton bearing a sell-by date that had not yet been reached. Thinking hard, he walked round to the front of the house, trying again to work out what it was that was wrong with the design. Then he realized. Where there was now an ugly plastic-framed window to the right of the front door, there should have been an integral garage. He could see it now, clearly; the tone of the bricks didn't match the rest of the house. At some point someone had converted this into a living room.

  And suddenly it reminded him of something from his childhood: his dad, tinkering with things. He liked to do his own servicing on his car, changing the oil, doing the brake linings, staying out of the hands of the rip-off merchants, as his dad called garages. He remembered the inspection pit in their garage, where he had spent many happy hours of his childhood helping his dad service the succession of Fords he always bought, getting covered in oil and grease - not to mention the occasional spider. And he thought about the lines on the carpet in the sitting room that he had just seen, where the sofa had been moved. On just a hunch, no more than that, he went back into the house and straight to the sitting room. He lifted the coffee table aside, then pushed back the sofa along the tracks in the green floral carpet that had been made previously.

  Then he noticed that one corner of the carpet was slightly curled up. He knelt and gave it a tug, and it lifted easily. Far too easily. And instead of dust and fluff beneath there was a thick underlay that was not like any conventional carpet underlay. He knew exactly what it was. Soundproofing material. His excitement mounting, he glanced over his shoulder, then peeled the heavy grey material back, and saw beneath it a large sheet of plywood.

  He worked his fingers under the edges, with some difficulty, as it fitted flush into a groove in the floor, then prised it up, and pulled it aside. Instantly he gagged from the stench that hit his nostrils. A horrendous reek of body odour, urine and excrement. Holding his breath and scared of what he was going to find, he peered into the six-foot-deep garage inspection pit and saw a shadowy figure at the bottom, bound hand and foot and across the mouth with duct tape. At first he thought the figure was dead. Then the eyes blinked. Frightened eyes. Oh sweet Jesus, he was alive! Grace felt an almost uncontainable feeling of joy erupt through him.

  'Michael Harrison?'

  A muffled 'Mnhhhh' greeted him.

  'Detective Superintendent Grace of Sussex CID,' Grace said, lowering himself into the pit, oblivious to the smell now, just desperately anxious to see what condition the young man was in. Kneeling beside him, Grace gently peeled the duct tape away from his lips. 'Are you Michael Harrison?'

  'Yes,' he croaked. 'Water. Please.'

  Grace squeezed his arm gently. 'I'll get you some right away. And I'll get you out of here. You're going to be fine.'

  Grace scrambled up out of the pit, hurried into the kitchen and ran the tap, radioing for an ambulance at the same time. Then he climbed back down into the pit clutching a pint tumbler of water.

  He tilted it into Michael Harrison's mouth, who drank it down in one long, greedy draught, with only a few drops spilling down his chin. Then, as he removed the glass, Michael looked at him and asked, 'How's Ashley?'

  Grace stared back at him, thinking hard, then gave him a gentle, reassuring smile. 'She's safe,' he said.

  'Thank God.'

  Grace squeezed his arm again. 'Want more water?'

  Michael nodded.

  'I'll get you some, then I'll cut this tape off you.'

  'Thank God she's safe,' Michael said, his voice weak and trembling. 'She's all I've thought of, all I -1...'

  Grace climbed back out of the pit. At some point he was going to have to tell Michael everything, but this didn't feel like the time or the place.

  And he didn't know how to begin.

 

 

 
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