You Are Dead

by Peter James

  Then silence.

  45

  Saturday 13 December

  We’re having a bloody emergency early meeting this morning. That stupid bitch Ashleigh Stanford should not have hit me, she should not have resisted. My projects are meant to be passive. I dictate what happens to them. It’s my agenda, not theirs. Everything’s going pear-shaped. That’s how it feels. And it feels that I’m surrounded by flakes. Ashleigh Stanford died before I had any fun with her, the bitch.

  Felix is telling me to calm down, that it’s fine, that sometimes shit happens. He’s really the one I can trust the most. I don’t think Harrison’s helped matters with his idea about that sodding London shrink. What was he thinking? He has a dangerous sadistic streak. He’s a loose cannon. He’s suggesting another visit, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. He says he likes to push the envelope, that it gives him pleasure to present people with conundrums. Although I have to admit what the shrink said made me smile. It’s the only thing that has made me smile for a long time.

  I’ve now got two dead projects. Two that I need to dispose of. Marcus is angry with me, he thinks I should have controlled myself last night, taught Ashleigh Stanford a lesson, but not killed her. Now I’m all out of sequence. Logan Somerville should have been next. I need to find a new one this week, then I can move Logan up the chain.

  The good news is there are plenty of potential new projects lining up. The four of us are taking a look at their photos right now, the front-runners in my Hall of Fame!

  On the big screen on the wall, copies of each of the thirty-five photographs of the young women who might make suitable projects, whom he had spotted and followed during the past months, appeared in sequence, their names and addresses beneath them. Two of them he had first seen on the Volks Railway; another had arrived grinning, with her boyfriend, at the end of the ghost train ride on Brighton Pier; another he had snapped sitting outside Lovefit café in Queen’s Road; another he had first seen lying on the grass, with two girlfriends, on the Pavilion lawns; another on the Hove Lawns; another outside the Big Beach Café. Another, one that really excited him for reasons he couldn’t totally explain, except that she looked like a younger version of his bitch wife, was eating prawns outside the Brighton Shellfish and Oyster Bar—a cream-painted stall, famed for its seafood, down by the arches.

  Eating standing up.

  That was a sin in his book. He despised people who ate standing up. Food wasn’t just fuel, it should be savored, enjoyed, shared with friends. Eaten seated. It was like those vile women who smoked while walking along. Smoking sitting down was fine, sometimes elegant. But women who walked with a fag in their mouth were slags.

  Flotsam.

  They should be eliminated.

  But he could hardly be expected to clean up the entire city single-handed. On that point, Felix, Marcus and Harrison were all agreed. Nice to have consensus.

  And now, as he froze one particular image, they all agreed again.

  “That one!” Felix said.

  Harrison studied it for some moments, and then said, “Yes, that one.”

  Even bolshy Marcus, who always took some time convincing, had no issues here. “I’m with you. That one!”

  “All happy, guys?”

  They agreed. They were all happy. Unanimous. That was rare! Although she was fairly new, she was so perfect, it had to be her!

  Her name was Freya Northrop. He knew a lot about her. He would enjoy taking her.

  She’d be a great project.

  His mood changed. He felt happy again. Happy all over. We’re strong, he thought. The four of us—we’re like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Conquest. War. Famine. Death. He smiled, he liked that a lot. The Four Horsemen!

  46

  Saturday 13 December

  Roy Grace dropped Tanja Cale back at Sussex House, then drove as fast as he dared downtown, heading for John Street police station—better known to all the local officers as “Brighton nick.”

  He drove almost on autopilot. He was stressed about their impending move, desperately wishing they could delay it—but it wasn’t possible, the new owners were moving into Cleo’s house next weekend. Though he had planned to be there to help Cleo with packing everything up, with the way this inquiry was going, that was not going to be an option.

  Sure, he was excited about the new house and the prospect of living in the countryside, but he barely had room for that in his thoughts at this moment. His absolute priority, for however long it took, was Logan Somerville, as well as the new potential abductee, Ashleigh Stanford. His concerns for her were deepening and darkening every second.

  Martin Horner.

  The HOLMES—Home Office Large Major Inquiry System—analyst team on Operation Haywain had so far identified hundreds of Martin Horners in the UK and was working through the list. One was ninety-three years old, suffering from Alzheimer’s, in a care home in Bradford. One was seventeen, at school in Newark, Nottinghamshire, and the third was a sixty-three-year-old vicar in Oldham, Lancashire, with a solid alibi.

  He was increasingly certain that Martin Horner was a cleverly constructed false identity. Clever enough to have been able to register a vehicle in this name. The one mystery remaining was why whoever Martin Horner was had selected Anne Hill’s house for his fake registration address.

  Did he know her? Or someone who knew her? Or had he just picked her address at random? The old bag who lived there was strenuously denying knowledge of any Martin Horner, and he had a feeling she was telling the truth. But they would find out for sure.

  He drove up the steep hill toward the Whitehawk area of Brighton, then made a right into the open, lower car park of the police station, found an empty bay between a row of marked cars, then climbed out, staring affectionately up at the five-story slab of a building where he had started his career over twenty years ago.

  He hurried past a couple of young uniformed officers having a smoke, up to the rear entrance, and used his pass card to open the door. Here at John Street he always felt the pulse of excitement. Street crime, neighborhood policing, child protection, public order policing, and many other divisional units were run out of this place, which was soon to have a massive facelift.

  He’d recently discussed the possibility of promotion to Head of CID. But that would have tied him to a desk and endless meetings. The buzz in his job came from doing exactly what he was doing right now—fully hands-on on a major crime investigation. There was only one promotion he would ever consider, and that was the top job here at John Street—the Chief Superintendent job, Divisional Commander of Brighton and Hove. The current commander, Nev Kemp, and his predecessor, Graham Barrington, had both come from similar CID backgrounds to himself. It could be some years before Nev Kemp moved on up the career ladder, but when that time came, he might be tempted to put himself forward for the role.

  But right now, as he bypassed the lift and sprinted up the two flights of concrete stairs, that thought was a long way from his mind. He turned right along the familiar corridor then almost instantly turned right again. Ahead of him were signs saying SUPERINTENDENT AND CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT. But before them he stopped at an open door on his left. Inside the small office sat Wayne Brookes, the slightly camp duty CID inspector, hunched over his desk, phone clamped to his ear, writing down notes on an electronic tablet.

  Grace waited, impatiently, for him to finish. Then he stepped into the office.

  Brookes, a thin, wiry man in a gray suit and with a shaven head, looked up. “Roy, darling! Good morning! How are you?”

  “I’ve been better. Congrats on your promotion.”

  “Four months ago, but thank you, it’s wonderful, I’m loving it. Nice to see you here—anything I can help you on?”

  “I hope so. You’ve a reported misper, from last night. Name of Ashleigh Stanford?”

  “Yes—that was her boyfriend I was just on the phone to.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Not looking good. No o
ne’s heard from her. Not her parents, nor either of her two closest friends. Sounds out of character—she’s a pretty stable person, not likely to have run off on a one-night stand—although she’s a fashion design student—I’d have thought that world might be a bit flighty—or, you know, flaky.”

  “What info do you have on her?”

  “Just got a couple of pictures through from her mother, and from the boyfriend—that one that was sent to you. I’ve sent copies up to CCTV—there won’t have been that many solitary women cycling home at around one a.m. this morning.”

  “Can I see the others?”

  “Sure.”

  Brookes tapped his keyboard. After some moments, the image of an attractive young woman appeared. She was smiling, looking like she hadn’t a care in the world, against a glorious, summery backdrop of Brighton Pier and the crowded beach beside it.

  Grace stared again at the pretty face he had seen on the text, earlier.

  At her high cheekbones, her full lips, her long brown hair.

  Ashleigh Stanford, Logan Somerville and Emma Johnson could have been sisters. And so, if you ignored the thirty-year gap, could Katy Westerham.

  “Presumably someone’s tried her mobile phone?” Grace asked.

  “Yes, her boyfriend’s rung it continuously. It’s still on. We’ve put a request in to EE, the service provider, for triangulation, but I don’t think we’re going to get much back for a while.”

  “Has the boyfriend been interviewed yet?” Grace asked.

  “Not yet, no.”

  He looked at his watch. It was just coming up to midday. “Shit! Why not?” he said, more angrily than he had intended.

  “Because I’m short-handed thanks to all the sodding cuts, darling,” Brookes said. “If you want the truth.”

  Grace nodded. “Yep. OK, give me his address, I’ll get one of my team there right now to interview him.”

  “Is there something more to this, Roy, that I don’t know about?”

  “I hope to hell not. But if you want the truth, I think there is, and it’s not good news. You need to start increasing the number of officers you have available for this coming week. I’ll give you a heads-up now that we could be looking at canceling all rest days, imminently, and banning new applications for time off.”

  The inspector frowned. “Something big going on?”

  Grace stared down again at Ashleigh Stanford’s image. “It’s looking increasingly like it.”

  47

  Sunday 14 December

  “They’re on the table, getting cold!” Zak shouted. “And we have to get going!”

  Freya Northrop lay in bed, reading and enjoying “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which her new doctor, the eccentric but rather jolly Edward Crisp, had been talking about when she’d had her appointment with him on Friday.

  She’d left his surgery, walked straight down to Church Road, turned left and along to where it morphed into Western Road, entered City Books, and asked if they had any volumes of T. S. Eliot poetry. Then headed home.

  She yawned and called out, “Almost finished. Be one minute!” She could smell the tantalizing aroma of warm toast. The alarm clock beside her read 9:40 a.m.

  He shouted back, “You said you’d be one minute already—that was about five minutes ago! You wanted your eggs soft, they’ll be stone cold!”

  Wow, you sure found out stuff you didn’t know about someone when you started living with them, Freya thought. Like, one of them was good-bye to her Sunday morning lie-ins. Zak hated to waste a minute of the weekend, and had already been up for hours, finally realizing the only way he was going to get her out of bed was by tempting her with her favorite Sunday breakfast, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Besides, she thought ruefully, in any case Sundays as a day off were about to become a thing of the past.

  Zak Ferguson was an accomplished chef. She’d met him six months ago, when he came into the Notting Hill restaurant where she was waitressing, and where he ate alone. He had returned the next night, alone again, and spent every moment that he could chatting her up. She’d realized, by the time she brought him a double espresso at the end of his meal, that she was a little bit smitten.

  Being a totally rubbish cook, she had bought herself a bunch of cookery books, and the one she had found the most comprehensible and that provided really tasty and easy to prepare recipes was called Don’t Sweat the Aubergine by someone called Nicholas Clee. It lay beside her bed now.

  Zak had big plans. Thanks to an inheritance—which had also paid for this small executor-sale Edwardian mock-Tudor house in a leafy close near Hove Park—he’d quit his job at an uber-cool restaurant in London’s Hoxton and had bought a bankrupt Brighton restaurant, which he was in the process of revamping. When it opened in two months’ time, Freya was going to be the front-of-house manager.

  Until then he was full-on, traveling to the best seafood restaurants around the country, seeing what was on offer, what ideas he could glean and recipes he could “borrow” and improve on. Today they were making the two-hour drive to Whitstable in North Kent at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. Famed for its oysters, in recent years the town had become increasingly fashionable with a number of highly rated restaurants. They were booked to have lunch at two of them. But there were two gastro pubs he wanted to check out on the way, hence the early start.

  Zak, who had already done a twenty-mile bike ride at 5:30 this morning, remained thin as a rake, despite the eating marathon they had embarked upon. Freya had put on over a stone. One effect, which had pleased Zak, was that her breasts, never her best feature, had become larger. Another effect, which seriously displeased her, was that her thighs had become larger and dimpled. She should start exercising, too, she knew. Dr. Crisp had asked her about that, and had frowned when she’d admitted to smoking ten cigarettes a day, and had frowned even more when she’d confessed to downing the best part of a bottle of white wine a day.

  “You should stop smoking—and that’s too much for someone your age to be drinking,” he had admonished her.

  He was right, she knew. But she enjoyed both. And they were pleasures she shared with Zak. After a year on her own, since she’d been crassly dumped by her previous boyfriend, by text, Zak made her smile. She loved his energy, his humor and his ambition. And she loved just how much he genuinely seemed to enjoy cooking for her, trying out his recipes. Although she’d been less happy last night when he’d knocked over a saucepan and two very bolshy lobsters had skittered across the floor, claws clacking, causing her to shriek and jump onto a chair in fright.

  She looked back at the T. S. Eliot poem. God, how prescient Dr. Crisp had been. It was all about food! References to sawdust restaurants with oyster shells; tea and toast; a life measured out with coffee spoons; tea and cakes and ices. They were in a seaside city and today they were going to another seaside place. And here in this poem Eliot had written about growing old and wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled.

  Would Zak be like this one day? Would they grow old together? Walk along the seashore, he with his trousers rolled up and barefoot in the lapping water. She could see it. For the first time in her life she had met someone she could truly see having a life with. Growing old with.

  She put the poem down, slipped naked out of bed and pulled her dressing gown around her. Then she walked barefoot downstairs into the kitchen where Zak was sitting, showered, shaved and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, smelling of the aftershave she loved, and studying the food pages of the Observer. She put her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. “You smell delicious,” she said.

  The breakfast was laid out the artistic way it might have been in a top-rated restaurant. The eggs splayed on the plate, with slivers of truffle on top, the smoked salmon in neat curls beside it, interspersed with slices of lemon, and a display of sliced cherry tomatoes. The toast was in a silver rack, butter in a square, modern dish. “This looks seriously yum.” She nuzzled his ear. “Almost as yum as you.”

/>   “Your eggs are going to be rock hard!”

  She slid her hand down onto his thigh, then around to his crotch. “Hmmn,” she said. “They’re not the only things hard around here.”

  “Eat your bloody breakfast, girl!” he said, stifling a grin, then he turned and kissed her back.

  * * *

  An hour later they went downstairs again and walked out of the front door of the house, into the dry, blustery morning. Zak’s old MX5 was parked in the short driveway in front of the integral garage, alongside Freya’s beat-up Fiesta. The MX5, which hadn’t been polished in years, had a rip in the canvas roof patched up with black tape, and was spattered with seagull dropping.

  “This dog, how long are we going to be stuck with it?”

  “Bobby!” she said. “He’s called Bobby and he’s totally adorable. You’ll want a puppy after you see him!”

  “Koreans eat dogs. They have great recipes for them.”

  “Zak, that’s horrible.”

  “Yeah, OK, sorry. It’s just I want you to myself, I don’t want to have to share you with a dog.”

  “You’ll love him, I promise you. And it’s only for a week.”

  She had agreed to look after her friends’, Emily and Steve’s, mixed-breed terrier, while they were away on holiday. But she hadn’t reckoned on Zak being so negative about the adorable creature.

  * * *

  The man inside the small gray Renault saloon parked a short distance up the road, his face masked by the main section of the Sunday Times, watched the MX5 reverse out into the road and drive off.

  He was reading the front page article about Logan Somerville with great interest. On the passenger seat beside him was a yellow hi-viz tabard and a clipboard. Like taxis, he knew, people never took any notice of someone in a hi-viz jacket holding a clipboard.

  48

  Sunday 14 December

  “Shit, man, that’s the oldest trick in the book,” Glenn Branson said in his tiny office, cradling a can of Diet Coke in his massive hand.