Love You Dead

by Peter James

  ‘Awfully sorry! Pardonnay-moi!’ His apology was as clumsy as his actions.

  ‘Dickhead,’ she said, freeing herself from his clutches.

  ‘There’s no need to be rude.’

  ‘Oh, right, I’m just standing here minding my own business and you crash into me. What do you want me to do – dance?’

  She stepped away from him, huffily, and resumed staring up at the slopes, clocking anyone in a black jacket and trousers who might, possibly, be her fiancé. Not that she was expecting to see him. But she continued watching, her story prepared just in case – however unlikely it was – he appeared.

  An hour and a half later Jodie stepped out of the bar, pulled on her fur-lined Cornelia James gloves, hoisted her skis onto her shoulder and trudged the short distance up the steep incline towards the Chabichou Hotel. Above her she heard the wokka . . . wokka . . . wokka sound of a helicopter and looked up at it. Maybe it was taking a group heli-skiing up to some off-piste powder. Or maybe it belonged to the local emergency services.

  Had someone found his body already? A bit sooner than she had planned – damn the weather, she’d hoped for the white-out to last a bit longer. But no matter.

  Popping a piece of mint chewing gum into her mouth to mask the smell of alcohol, she placed the skis and poles in the rack by the ski-room entrance and went inside and into the ski shop. There were rows of new skis lining one wall, a rack of helmets on another and several mannequins clad in the latest in skiing chic dotted around.

  The young, handsome Frenchman who was the ski-shop manager, and had kitted them out with their rental skis, greeted her with a smile. In a charming French accent Simon Place said, ‘You’re not skiing? We have the best conditions here in the mountains in weeks – beautiful powder – and I think this afternoon the weather will be sunshine!’

  ‘I’ve lost my fiancé – it was a white-out at the top when we went up. I don’t like skiing on my own. Stupidly left my phone in our room – I’m going to call him to try to find him. That’s one problem with this resort, it’s so big.’

  As he helped her off with her boots, he asked, ‘You liked the skis?’

  ‘Yes, they’re good.’

  ‘Stockli skis – they are – you know – the Rolls-Royce skis.’

  ‘Too bad they don’t come with a chauffeur,’ she said and walked out into the corridor, leaving him puzzling over the remark.

  She picked her key up from the hotel’s reception desk, telling the receptionist she’d become separated from her fiancé out skiing, and was worried because she’d waited for him at the bottom for an hour and he hadn’t turned up. She added that he was an experienced skier and she was sure he would be fine, and asked the receptionist, when Walt eventually turned up, to tell him she’d be in the spa if she wasn’t in their room. Then she took the lift up to the third floor.

  The room had already been cleaned; it looked neat and tidy, and there was a faint, pleasant smell of pine. She removed her phone from the back of the shelf where she had placed her underwear and dialled Walt’s number, wanting to be sure that if the police were subsequently to check her phone, she had done what she had said.

  She heard Walt’s phone buzz and then begin warbling as well. She ended the call, removed his phone from under the pile of his clothes in the drawer where she had hidden it, and placed it on the desk beside his laptop. Then she peeled off her wet jacket, hung it over a radiator, dumped her gum into the waste bin and sat down on the freshly plumped duvet, thinking hard.

  So far so good. She felt hungry. And the large schnapps had gone to her head a little. She had a witness that she’d travelled up to the top with her fiancé. She had another witness in the ski shop that she had returned without him, having become separated in the white-out, and that she’d gone back to the hotel to get her phone.

  And no witness to what had happened at the top of the Saulire.

  When they had got engaged, Walt had told her that he had written her into his will. So sweet of him.

  There was a nice spa downstairs, with a swimming pool. She’d check her emails, have some lunch in the restaurant and check with the receptionist again. Then, if no update, she’d have a relaxing afternoon in the spa and perhaps get a massage. Around 5.30 p.m., a good hour after the lifts had closed, she’d go back to the reception desk and reiterate her concerns about her fiancé not having returned – and ask if they could check with the police and clinics.

  Just like any anxious loved one might do.

  She was feeling pretty happy with herself.

  3

  Tuesday 10 February

  Roy Grace was feeling pretty happy with himself, too, as he slid off the physiotherapist’s table in her small Brighton consulting room. And looking forward to Saturday, Valentine’s Day. He’d booked a table at his and Cleo’s favourite Brighton restaurant, English’s, and he was already thinking, with anticipation, about what he was going to have. Oysters Kilpatrick – grilled, with bacon – and then either lobster or a Dover sole – with mushy peas. A glass of champagne to start with and then a nice bottle of their Pouilly-Fuissé white burgundy, his favourite wine, when he could afford it.

  Buying their new house, a cottage in the country on the outskirts of Henfield, had stretched them both financially, but they’d still kept a small amount aside for spoiling each other on special occasions, and this was one. They’d already had a great house-warming party with family and friends, and he was delighted that his sister was becoming close friends with Cleo’s sister, Charlie. His first wife, Sandy, had had no siblings, and relations with her odd parents had always been strained, at best. So this was really nice to see.

  ‘That’s it!’ Anita Lane said. ‘We’re done! I don’t think I need to see you again, unless your leg starts giving you any grief, in which case call me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Brilliant!’

  He’d been coming here twice a week since early January, after a surgeon at the Royal Sussex County Hospital had removed eleven shotgun pellets from his right leg just before Christmas. He had been shot at close range by a suspected serial killer he’d been attempting to arrest in a bunker beneath a house in Hove. The surgeon had breezily told him he’d been very lucky not to lose his leg.

  To begin with, recovery had been agony, with several of the nerves damaged, and he’d woken many times during the nights that followed with the sensation that his leg was on fire. But he’d stuck rigidly to the exercise programme the physio had given him, in between their sessions; finally the pain had eased and the mobility was returning.

  ‘Keep up the exercises for a few more weeks,’ she said.

  ‘How soon can I start running again, Anita?’

  ‘You can start now but build it up slowly. Don’t try and do a marathon, OK?’

  ‘I won’t!’

  ‘If you get pain, come straight back to see me. That’s an order!’

  ‘You’re quite the bully, aren’t you?’ He grinned.

  ‘It’s because I can see you’re chomping at the bit. You’ve had a massive trauma to that leg, and just because you’ve thrown your walking stick away and I’m discharging you doesn’t mean you can start going mad. Comprende?’

  ‘Comprende!’

  ‘And try not to get into any bundles with any villains for a while.’

  ‘I’m a detective superintendent, I don’t get into many fights with suspects.’

  ‘Oh, right, being a detective superintendent means you just get shot by them?’

  He grimaced. ‘Yep, well, hopefully not too often.’

  ‘I hope not. A lot of people only get shot once, and it’s not a physiotherapist they need afterwards but an undertaker. Stay safe, isn’t that what you say?’

  ‘I’m impressed with your police lingo!’ He shook her hand, went out to the receptionist and paid the bill, carefully sticking the receipt in his wallet. Treatment for injuries sustained whilst on duty were reimbursed out of police funds.

  Twenty minutes later he arrived back
at his office in Sussex House, feeling a sense of an era passing. Although in part a lateral, out-of-the-box thinker, Roy Grace was at heart an extremely methodical man, the quality he had always admired and respected in those he had learned from in the past, and which he sought in anyone he selected to work with him. He was a creature of habit, and didn’t like change, which he always found unsettling. And thanks to the government’s swingeing budget cuts to the police, massive changes had already happened and there were more afoot.

  The effect on morale was palpable. A decade ago he could guarantee that almost everyone in the force loved their job. Now, too many people were leaving before their retirement time, fed up with the freezes on promotion, or with the alterations to their pensions foisted on them midstream in their careers, or with walking on eggshells in fear of the political correctness zealots. Being a police officer had become a job where you were afraid to speak your mind or tell a joke. Yet, Grace knew only too well from his own experience, it was precisely that gallows humour the police were so famous for that enabled officers to cope with the horrors they sometimes saw.

  In truth, many of the changes had helped to create more tolerant, less corrupt, less sexist and less racist police forces than when Roy Grace had begun his career. There were many pluses. He did still love his job and he tried not to let the negatives get to him, but there were moments, too, for the first time in the two decades he had served, that he had found himself contemplating alternatives. Particularly during his month off in January convalescing, when he’d had time to think. But in his heart he knew nothing could ever give him the satisfaction that solving murders did, despite all the changes.

  And there was one very big change happening right here, to this building. Formerly the HQ CID, before the merger of the Major Crime Team with Surrey, this two-storey art deco building had been his base for the past decade. Once it had been a hive of activity, filled with detectives, SOCOs, a forensic department, the Fingerprint, Imaging and High Tech Crime Units, and the hub for many homicide and other serious crime investigations. But in a few months it would be no more, thanks to the brutal – and in his view highly short-sighted – government budget cuts inflicted on his and other police forces in the UK.

  The Imaging Unit had already moved to Surrey. Soon the High Tech Crime Unit would be moved a few miles north of Brighton to Haywards Heath. And while nothing was confirmed yet, the rumour was that his branch of the Major Crime Team would be moved to the Sussex Police headquarters in Lewes.

  Like most of the officers and support staff here, he had never really liked this building. Stuck on an industrial estate on the edge of the city, with no canteen, far too many people crammed into it, and a heating and air-conditioning system that was unable to cope in any weather conditions, he should have been glad of the impending move. But now, with the building beginning to take on the air of a ghost town, he was starting to feel nostalgic for it. All that would remain on this site, by this coming autumn, would be the custody block right behind it.

  He walked through the large, deserted open-plan first-floor office that had until recently been the Detectives’ Room, passing the cleared desks of officers and civilian staff who had already moved elsewhere, then entered his own office, one of the few enclosed ones.

  He closed the door and sat behind his desk, staring out through the drizzle at the Asda superstore across the road which served as their canteen, thinking about Cleo’s first Mother’s Day which was just a few weeks away. He needed to get her a present from Noah. Roy had an ongoing list on his phone of gifts to get Cleo for her birthday and for Christmas, one of which was turquoise earrings – she loved the colour – and a rollerball pen. He added book, to remind himself to get down to City Books to pick up a novel she wanted, although he had forgotten the title. He would have to tease it out of her, somehow.

  Then he logged on to his computer terminal and checked the serials and emails that had come in since he’d been at the physio, noting an email trail that referred to the Sussex Police rugby team. It reminded him he needed to find a new captain, as the current one was being sent to work on anti-terrorist training at the FBI’s base in Quantico, Virginia. He was also pleased to see that the bread-making machine Cleo and he had ordered for the house was on its way.

  He fired off some quick responses and forwarded the rugby emails to one of his predecessors, a retired former detective chief superintendent, David Gaylor, who had continued to be the team manager. Next he turned his attention back to the case that had been consuming him ever since his return to work.

  His assailant, Dr Edward Crisp.

  He glanced at the photograph of the Hove general practitioner, who appeared to be staring back at him with a smug grin.

  Crisp had murdered five women in their early twenties – or rather, five that they knew about. His tally could quite possibly be higher. Maybe a lot higher. They’d had him cornered in an underground lair, but after shooting Grace in the leg with a shotgun, the man had made a seemingly impossible escape. No one knew how. One theory was that Crisp, an experienced potholer and caver, had gone through the Brighton and Hove sewer system, and had emerged through one of the manholes in the complex network.

  Southern Water, who controlled it, were initially adamant that it would not have been possible for anyone to have survived. If Crisp hadn’t drowned, he’d have ended up in one of the filters that prevented objects larger than a fraction of an inch reaching the open sea. Yet their searches found no trace of a body. They’d been forced to admit, reluctantly, that it was possible, however unlikely, that Crisp had survived.

  One thing that Roy Grace was certain of was Crisp’s cunning. The man’s estranged wife, Sandra, had been interviewed exhaustively, and exonerated from any complicity. She seemed very happy – and relieved – to be away from him. The only one who appeared to be missing the doctor was the family dog, Smut, now living with her and apparently pining. Incredible though it was, for all the years that they had lived together, she’d had no idea that the derelict house next door to their Brighton mansion, where Crisp had carried out some, if not all, of his atrocities, had been owned by an offshore company set up by her husband.

  Very recently the police had received possible evidence that Crisp had survived.

  It was in the form of a sinister email that the doctor had subsequently sent to one of Roy’s team, some weeks after his disappearance – and presumed death.

  The source of the email was apparently untraceable. An anonymous Hotmail account that could have come from anywhere in the world. And which, just possibly, could have been sent, on a time delay, weeks earlier.

  Fortunately, so far February had been a calm time, with no reported homicides in Sussex, leaving Roy Grace free to work, doggedly, through contacts at police forces throughout Europe, the USA, Australia, Africa and the Far East for any signs of the doctor. He had also spent some time with a desk officer at Interpol, ensuring that Crisp’s details and photograph were circulated around the world.

  Crisp’s MO was to target women in their early twenties with long brown hair. Summaries of every unsolved murder matching this profile, from within the UK and overseas, were stacked all round Roy and filled numerous folders on his computer.

  And he was still no further forward. There were around two hundred countries in the world, and right now Dr Edward Crisp could be sitting in a hotel room, with his bald head and big glasses and smug grin, in any one of them.

  Although a few, especially Syria and North Korea, could probably be safely eliminated.

  ‘So where the hell are you, you bastard?’ Grace said aloud in frustration.

  ‘Right here, O master!’

  He looked up, startled, to see his mate DI Glenn Branson, a black, shaven-headed man-mountain, standing in front of him with a broad smile.

  ‘You’re not looking a happy bunny,’ Branson said.

  ‘Yeah, you know why not? Because every time I start to feel a happy bunny, I see Edward bloody Crisp’s face grinning at m
e.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got some news for you.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Branson reached over and placed an email printout on Grace’s desk.

  Grace read it, then looked up at his mate. ‘Shit.’

  4

  Tuesday 10 February

  Shortly before 6 p.m., Jodie woke up with a start, on the big soft duvet in her Courchevel hotel room, to the sound of a helicopter flying low and fast over the resort. She could see through the window it was almost dark outside. Her mouth was dry and she had a slight headache.

  She drank some water, went over to the desk and flipped open the lid of her Mac laptop. She tapped in her password, then checked her emails. Immediately she smiled. Another one from him!

  My dearest Jodie,

  I trust you are having a good time, wherever in the world this finds you on your travels. For too long you’ve been tantalizing me with your lovely messages. I love that very very sexy picture you sent me yesterday. I feel a truly wonderful connection between us and cannot wait to finally meet you! When do you think that might be? I’m now settled into my glorious new beachfront house in Brighton where I have some very lovely celebrity neighbours. Please tell me it won’t be long?

  Fondest love, Rowley

  She typed her reply.

  My very sexy Rowley!

  I agree, even though we’ve not yet met I feel massively in touch with you, too, and just love how you think. I really do! And I love how you make me feel just by reading your words! I plan to be back in Brighton just as soon as I’ve finished my business commitments here in New York – or, as I’ve been told how to pronounce it like the locals, Nooo Yawk! Each time I think of you I think of a beautiful expression I once read, written by an Indian poet. ‘The path of love is narrow, and there is not room for two people on it, so you must become one.’ That’s how I feel about us.

  She signed it with a row of kisses and sent it. Then she carefully filed his email and her reply into a folder titled Charities Local, which was buried inside another folder marked Charities. Just in case, somehow, Walt had ever found his way into her computer. Not that there had ever been much likelihood, as he wasn’t particularly computer savvy.