It was rapidly becoming clear to Roy Grace that he was going to get very little more from the man. ‘Is there someone you can phone?’ he asked him. ‘A relative or a friend who could come over?’

After some moments, Derek Stretton said meekly, ‘My sister. Lucy. She’s not very far away. I’ll give her a call. She’ll be devastated.’

‘Why don’t you make the call while we’re still here, sir?’ Branson urged, as gently as he could.

The pair of them waited while he made the call, retreating as discreetly as they could to the far end of the room. Grace heard him sobbing; then he went out of the room for a while. Finally he came back in and walked over to join them, holding a brown envelope. ‘I’ve put some photographs of Janie together for you. I’d appreciate them back.’

‘Of course,’ Grace said, knowing the poor man would probably have to make half a dozen calls over the coming months to get them back – they would inevitably get misfiled somewhere in the system.

‘Lucy’s on her way – my sister. She’ll be here in about half an hour.’

‘Would you like us to wait?’ Grace asked.

‘No, I’ll be OK. I need some time to think. I… Can – can I see Janie?’

Grace shot a glance at Branson. ‘I don’t think it would be advisable, sir.’

‘I’d really like to see her one more time. You know? To say goodbye?’ He put out a hand and gripped Grace’s firmly.

Grace realized he had not absorbed from the newspapers that Janie’s head was missing. This was not the moment to tell him. He decided to leave that to the two FLOs. Vanessa Ritchie and Maggie Campbell were about to earn their keep and give some payback for the massive investment in their training.

‘There are two women detectives who will be along to see you shortly, from our Family Liaison Unit. They’ll be able to guide you on that.’

‘Thank you. It would mean a lot to me.’ Then he gave a sad little laugh. ‘You know, officers, I – I never discussed death with Janie. I have no idea whether she wanted to be buried or cremated.’ Wild-eyed he added, ‘And her cat, of course.’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘Bins! She used to bring Bins here before she went away. I – don’t know… it’s all so…’

‘They’ll be able to help you with everything; that’s what they are here for.’

‘It never occurred to me that she might die, you see.’

Grace and Branson walked back out to the car in a deeply uncomfortable silence.

27

A community support officer, barely distinguishable from a uniformed constable, stood outside the front door of the building in Kemp Town where Janie Stretton had rented her flat, with a clipboard, logging all the people who entered and left the building. By contrast with the – albeit faded – grandeur of her father’s house, this street with its run-down terraced houses, kaleidoscope of estate agents’ boards, overstuffed rubbish bins, modest cars and vans, was real student bedsit land.

In the nineteenth century, Kemp Town had been aloof from Brighton, a posh Regency enclave of grand houses, built on a hill crested by the racecourse, with fine views out across the Channel. But gradually, during the latter half of the following century, with the construction of council estates and tower blocks and an increasing blurring of the boundary, Kemp Town became infected by the same seedy, tatty aura that had long corroded Brighton.

Parked at the far end of the street and sticking out much too much, Grace could see the tall, square, truck-sized hulk of the Major Incident Vehicle. He squeezed his Alfa Romeo into a space between two cars just past it, then walked back along the street with Branson, both men carrying their holdalls.

It was just before three o’clock, and Grace had stomach ache from having gobbled down two prawn sandwiches, a Mars bar and a Coke in the car on the way back from Janie’s father. He’d been surprised he’d had any appetite at all after delivering the grim news, and even more so that he had actually felt ravenous – as if somehow in eating he was reaffirming life. Now the food was biting back.

A blustery, salty wind was blowing and the sky was clouding over. Gulls circled overhead, cawing and wailing; a Mishon Mackay for sale board rocked in a gust as he walked by. This was a part of Brighton he had always liked, close to the sea, with fine old terraced villas. If you closed your eyes, imagined the agency boards gone, the plastic entryphone boxes gone and a lick of fresh white paint on the buildings, you could picture wealthy London folk a hundred years ago, emerging from the front doors in their finery and swaggering off, maybe down to a bathing machine at the water’s edge, or to a grand cafe, or for a leisurely stroll along the promenade, to enjoy the delights of the town and its elegant seafront.

The city had changed so much, even in his brief lifetime. He could remember, as a child, when streets like this were the domain of Brighton’s seaside landladies. Now, after a couple of decades in the hands of property speculators, they were all chopped up into bedsits and low-rent student flats – cash paid, heavies sent round to collect the rent. And if anything went wrong, maybe you’d get it fixed, eventually, if you were lucky.

Sometimes, on a wet Sunday, Grace loved to go into the local museum and look at the prints and watercolours of Brighton in a bygone age, in the days of the old chain pier and hansom cabs, when men walked along in silk top hats wielding silver-handled canes. He used to wonder for some moments what life must have been like in those days, and then he would remember his father telling him how his dentist used to pedal the drill by foot. And suddenly he was glad he lived in the twenty-first century, despite all modern society’s ills.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Glenn Branson said.

‘I like this part of Brighton,’ Grace said.

Branson looked at him, surprised. ‘You do? I think it’s skanky.’

‘You’ve got no appreciation of beauty.’

‘This part of town reminds me of that movie Brighton Rock. Dickie Attenborough playing Pinkie.’

‘Yes, I remember. And I read the novel,’ Grace said, for once trumping him.

‘It was a book?’ Branson looked at him in surprise.

‘Christ, what stone did you crawl out from under?’ Grace said. ‘Graham Greene. It was one of his most famous novels. Published in the 1940s.’

‘Yeah, well that explains it, old timer. Your generation!’

‘Yeah, yeah! You give me all this crap about knowing so much about movies, but you’re just a philistine at heart.’

Branson stopped for a moment and pointed at a boarded-up window, then at the salt-burned paintwork above and below it, and then at the crumbling plasterwork. ‘What’s to love about that?’

‘The architecture. The soul of the place.’

‘Yeah, well I used to work at a nightclub around the corner, and I never found any soul here. Just an endless line of fuckwits out of their trees on E.’

They reached the bespectacled community support officer outside the front door and showed him their warrant cards. He dutifully wrote their names down on his log in the slowest handwriting Grace had ever seen. CSOs had been introduced to ease the workload of officers. They had been nicknamed plastic policemen and were perfect for duties such as this.

‘You go up to the second floor,’ he said helpfully. ‘The stairwell and access have been checked – they haven’t found anything forensically appropriate.’ He talked as if he were running the show, Grace thought, privately amused.

Entering the front, the place reminded Grace of every low-rent building he had ever been in: the balding carpet on the floor, junk mail spilling out of the pigeonholes, the tired paintwork and peeling wallpaper, the smell of boiled cabbage, the padlocked bicycle in the hallway, the steep, narrow staircase.