24

‘I can’t believe your music, man,’ Branson said. ‘It’s crap, it’s just total crap. There’s no other word for it.’

They were on a long stretch of downhill dual carriageway heading west, past the grassy expanse of the old World War II fighter base, down to their left, that had now become Shoreham Airport, a busy base for private aircraft and commercial flights to the Channel Islands, and in the direction of Southampton.

Shoreham was the extreme western suburb of Brighton, and Grace always felt a strange mixture of relief and loss when he left it behind him. Loss, because Brighton was where he really felt at home, and anywhere else felt like uncharted waters where he was out of his depth, a little insecure. And relief, because all the time he was in the Brighton and Hove City conurbation he felt a sense of responsibility, and away from it he could relax.

After his years in the force it was his second nature to subconsciously assess every pedestrian and the occupants of every car on the street. He knew most of the local villains, certainly all of the street drug dealers, and some of the muggers and burglars; knew when they were in the right place and when in the wrong place. That was one of the things so ridiculous about Alison Vosper’s threat to transfer him. A lifetime of knowledge and contacts down the pan.

Roy Grace had decided to drive, because his nerves wouldn’t take another journey with Branson showing off his high-speed pursuit skills. Now he wasn’t sure his nerves could take any more of the Detective Sergeant’s poking about with the CD player. But Branson wasn’t finished with him yet.

‘The Beatles? Who the hell listens to the Beatles in their car these days?’

‘Me, I like them,’ Grace said defensively. ‘Your problem is you can’t differentiate between loud noise and good music.’ He brought the Alfa Romeo to a stop at a red light, the junction with the Lancing College road. He had decided to take his own car because it hadn’t had a long run in a while and the battery needed a good charge. More importantly, if he had taken a pool car, Branson would probably have insisted on driving and been hurt if he hadn’t let him.

‘That’s well funny, coming from you,’ Branson said. ‘You just don’t get music!’ Then suddenly changing the subject, he pointed at a pub across the road. ‘The Sussex Pad. Do good fish there, went there with Ari. Yeah, it was good.’ Then he turned his attention back to the CD player. ‘Dido!’

‘What’s wrong with Dido?’

Branson shrugged. ‘Well, if you like that kind of thing, I suppose. I hadn’t realized how sad you were.’

‘Yeah, well I do like that kind of thing.’

‘And – Jesus – what’s this? Something you got free with a magazine?’

‘Bob Berg,’ Grace said, getting irritated now. ‘He happens to be a seriously cool modern jazz musician.’

‘Yeah, but he’s not black.’

‘Oh, right, you have to be black to be a jazz musician?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘You are! Anyhow he’s dead – he was killed in a crash a few years ago and I love his stuff. Just an awesome tenor saxophonist. OK? Want to pull anything else apart? Or shall we talk about your hunch?’

A tad sullenly, Glenn Branson switched on the radio and tuned it into a rap station. ‘Tomorrow, right, I’m taking you clothes shopping? Well I’m going to take you music shopping as well. You get a hot date in this car and she sees your music, she’s going to be looking in the glove locker for your pension book.’

Grace tuned him out, turning his mind back to the immediate task ahead of them and all the other balls he had to keep in the air simultaneously.

His nerves were frayed this morning, both from his meeting with Alison Vosper, which had left him feeling very down, and from the task that was facing him in about an hour’s time. Ordinarily, Grace could have said with complete honesty that he liked almost every aspect of police work – except for one thing, and that was breaking the news of a death to a parent or loved one. It wasn’t something he had to do very often these days as it was a task for family liaison officers, detectives who were specially trained. But there were some situations, like the one he was going to now, where Grace wanted to be present himself to gauge the reaction, to glean as much information as he could in those key early moments after the news was broken. And he was taking Glenn Branson because he thought it would be good training for him.

Newly bereaved people followed an almost identical pattern. For the first few hours they would be in shock, totally vulnerable, and would say almost anything. But rapidly they would start to withdraw, and other members of the family would close ranks around them. If you wanted information, you had to tease it out within those first few hours. It was cruel but almost always effective, and otherwise you were stuffed for weeks, maybe months. Newspaper reporters knew that, too.

He recognized the two family liaison officers, DC Maggie Campbell and DC Vanessa Ritchie, sitting in their car, a small grey unmarked Volvo parked over on the grass verge of the lane outside the entrance to the house, and pulled the Alfa up just past them. Their two faces, frosty with disapproval, stared through the Volvo’s windscreen at him.

‘Shit, man! How do people afford these places?’ Glenn said, staring at the steel gates between two columns topped with stone balls.

‘By not being cops,’ Grace retorted.

Money had never been a big factor in Grace’s life. Sure he liked nice things, but he’d never had swanky aspirations and he had always been careful to live within his means. Sandy had been terrific at saving here and there. It always amused him that she used to buy the next winter’s Christmas cards in the January sales.

But from these savings she was always buying them little treats, as she liked to call them. During the first few years of their marriage, when she worked for a travel agent and could get discounted holidays, she had twice saved enough for an entire fortnight abroad.

But no amount of scrimping and saving on his salary, even with all the overtime bonuses in the world that he used to get as a junior officer, would ever buy him anything close to the magnitude of the spread he was looking at now.

‘Remember that film, The Great Gatsby?’ Branson said. ‘The Jack Clayton version, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, right?’

Grace nodded. He remembered it vaguely, or at least the title.

‘Well that’s what this place is, innit? That’s a fuck-off house you’re looking at.’

And it was: a dead straight tree-lined drive, several hundred yards long, opening into a circular car park with an ornamental pond in the middle, in front of a substantial white Palladian – or at least Palladian-style – mansion.

Grace nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the doors of the Volvo open. ‘Here comes trouble,’ he said quietly. The DCs climbed out of their car.

Maggie Campbell, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, and Vanessa Ritchie, a tall thin redhead, two years her senior, with a harder face – and demeanour – strode up to them, both in smart but sombre plain clothes.

‘There’s no way four of us can go in, Roy,’ DC Ritchie said. ‘It’s too many.’

‘I’ll go in first with Glenn, and break the news. Then I’ll phone you when I think you should come in and take over.’

He saw Maggie Campbell frown. Ritchie shook her head. ‘It’s the wrong way round – you know that.’

‘Yes, I do, but that’s the way I want to play this.’

‘Play this?’ she responded angrily. ‘This isn’t some kind of a bloody experiment. It’s wrong.’

‘What’s wrong, Vanessa, is that a father shouldn’t have to find out that part of his daughter has been found, short of a few important bits such as her head, in a bloody field with a beetle up her rectum. That’s what’s bloody wrong.’