Dead Like You

32

Friday 9 January

Roy Grace’s father had been a true copper’s copper. Jack Grace told his son that to be a police officer meant that you looked at the world differently from everyone else. You were part of a healthy culture of suspicion, he’d called it.

Roy had never forgotten that. It was how he looked at the world, always. It was how he looked, at this moment, at the posh houses of Shirley Drive on this fine, crisp, su

At least, you were to anyone driving by who did not have a copper’s jaundiced eye.

Roy Grace did not have a jaundiced eye. But he had a good, almost photographic memory. As David Alcorn, in a smart grey suit, drove the small Ford up past the recreational ground, Grace clocked the houses one by one. It was routine for him. The London protection racketeer’s Brighton home was along here. So was the Brighton brothel king’s. And the crack cocaine king’s was just one street away.

In his late forties, short, with cropped brown hair and smelling permanently of cigarette smoke, David Alcorn looked outwardly hard and officious, but inside he was a gentle man.

Turning right into The Droveway he said, ‘This is the street the missus would like to live in.’

‘So,’ Grace said, ‘move here.’

‘I’m just a couple of hundred grand short of being a couple of hundred grand short of the down payment,’ he replied. ‘And then some.’ He hesitated briefly. ‘You know what I reckon?’

‘Tell me.’

Grace watched each of the detached houses slide by. On his right, they passed a Tesco convenience store. On his left, a dairy with an ancient cobbled wall.

‘Your Cleo would like it here. Suit a classy lady like her, this area would.’

They were slowing now. Then Alcorn braked sharply. ‘That’s it there on the right.’

Grace looked for any signs of a CCTV camera as they drove down the short, laurel-lined driveway, but saw none. He clocked the security lights.

‘All right, isn’t it?’ David Alcorn said.

It was more than sodding all right, it was totally stu

It was like a piece of brilliant white sculpture. A mixture of crisp, straight lines and soft curves, some played off against each other in daring geometric angles. The place seemed to be built on split levels, the windows were vast and solar panels rose from the roof. Even the plants strategically placed around the walls looked as if they had been genetically modified just for this property. It wasn’t a huge house; it was on a liveable scale. It must be an amazing place to come home to every night, he thought.

Then he focused on what he wanted to get from this crime scene, ru

They climbed out and the Constable, a respectful old-school officer, briefed them pedantically on what he had found earlier this morning when he had attended, and informed them that SOCO was on its way. He was not able to add much more to the details Alcorn had already given Grace, other than the fact that the woman had arrived home and apparently had deactivated the burglar alarm when she entered.

While they were talking, a small white van pulled up and a senior SOCO, a Crime Scene Manager called Joe Tindall with whom Grace had worked many times and found more than a tad tetchy, climbed out.

‘Friday,’ the Crime Scene Manager muttered by way of a greeting. ‘What’s with you and sodding weekends, Roy?’ He gave Grace a smile that was incubating a leer.

‘I keep asking offenders to stick to Mondays, but they’re not an obliging lot.’

‘I’ve got tickets to Stevie Wonder at the O2 Centre tonight. If I miss that my relationship is kaput.’

‘Every time I see you, you’ve got tickets to something, Joe.’

‘Yeah. I like to think I have a life outside of this job, unlike half my colleagues.’

He gave the Detective Superintendent a pointed stare, then produced a clutch of white paper suits and blue overshoes from the rear of the van and handed them out.

Roy Grace sat on the rear sill of the van and slowly levered himself into the one-piece. Every time he did this, he cursed the designer as he wriggled to get his feet down through the trousers without tearing them, then worked himself into the arms. He was glad not to be in a public place, because the suit was almost impossible to put on without making a spectacle of yourself. Finally, grunting, he stooped down and pulled on the protective overshoes. Then he snapped on some latex gloves.

The Constable led the way inside and Grace was impressed that he’d had the good sense to mark on the ground with tape a single entry and exit route.

The open-plan hall, with polished parquet flooring, elegant metal sculptures, abstract paintings and tall, lush plants, was something that Cleo would love, he thought. There was a strong, pleasant smell of pine and a slightly sweeter, muskier scent, probably from pot-pourri, he thought. It made a refreshing change not to walk into a house that smelt of curry.

The Constable said he would come upstairs, to be available to answer questions, but he would not enter the bedroom, to minimize the disturbance in there.

Grace hoped that the officer, being this forensically aware, hadn’t trampled all over it when he had responded to the emergency call earlier. He followed Alcorn and Tindall up a glass spiral staircase, along a short galleried landing and into a huge bedroom that smelt strongly of perfume.

The windows had curtains like a fine white gauze and the walls were lined with fitted wardrobes with curtained glass panels. The double doors of one of them were open and several dresses on their hangers lay fallen on the carpeted floor.

The centrepiece of the room was a king-sized bed with four tapered wooden columns rising from it. An unwound dressing gown cord lay around one of them, and a striped man’s tie, knotted to a plain tie, around another. Four more ties, knotted together into two doubles, lay on the floor. The cream satin duvet was badly rumpled.

‘Mrs Pearce was left gagged and tied by her wrists and ankles to each of those posts,’ the Constable said from the doorway. ‘She managed to free herself at about half past six this morning, and then she called her friend.’ He checked his notebook. ‘Mrs Amanda Baldwin. I have her number.’

Grace nodded. He was staring at a photograph on a glass-topped dressing table. It was of an attractive woman, with sleek black hair clipped up, wearing a long evening dress, standing next to a sharp-looking guy in a di

Pointing at it, he said, ‘Presume this is her?’

‘Yes, chief.’

David Alcorn studied her too.

‘What state was she in?’ Grace asked the Constable.

‘Pretty bad shock,’ he replied. ‘But quite compos mentis, considering her ordeal, if you know what I mean.’

‘What do we know about her husband?’

‘He went away yesterday on a business trip to Helsinki.’

Grace thought for a moment, then looked at David Alcorn. ‘Interesting timing,’ he said. ‘Might be significant. I’d like to find out how often he goes away. It could be someone who knows her, or who’s been stalking her.’