Looking Good Dead

‘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.’

The FLO tapped her chest. ‘That is what we did our training for. We are specialists in all aspects of bereavement.’

Grace looked at the women in turn. ‘I know all about your training and I know both of you – I’ve worked with you before and I respect you. This has nothing to do with your abilities. Your training gives you guidance, but at the end of the day there’s also the policing aspect. On this occasion I have my reasons for wanting to break the news, and as the SIO on this case I set the rules, OK? I don’t want any more sour faces from you, I want cooperation. Understood?’

The two FLOs nodded but still did not look comfortable.

‘Have you decided how much you are going to tell the father?’ Vanessa Ritchie said tartly.

‘No, I’m going to play it by ear. I’ll bring you up to speed before I call you in, OK?’

Maggie Campbell smiled in a half-hearted, conciliatory way. DC Ritchie gave him a reluctant You’re the boss shrug.

On a nod from his boss, Branson pressed the bell, and moments later the gates swung jerkily open. They drove up to the house. Grace parked between the two cars outside, an old, rather grubby BMW 7 series and a very ancient Subaru estate.

As they approached the front door it was opened by a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties, with dark hair streaked with silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked white business shirt with gold cufflinks, suit trousers and shiny black loafers. He was holding a mobile phone.

‘Detective Superintendent Grace?’ he said in an upper-crust accent which was slightly muffled as he seemed to speak through his teeth, scanning both police officers uncertainly. He had a pleasant smile, but sad blue-grey eyes like a pair of little lost souls.

‘Mr Derek Stretton?’ Grace asked. Then he and Branson both showed him their warrant cards out of courtesy.

Ushering them in, Derek Stretton asked, ‘How was your drive?’

‘It was fine,’ Grace said. ‘I think we picked a good time of day.’

‘It’s a beastly road; can’t think why they can’t just make it motorway. Janie’s always spending hours stuck when she comes down here.’

The first thing Grace noticed as he entered the hallway was how sparsely furnished the place was. There was a fine long inlaid table, and a tallboy and antique chairs, but there were no rugs or floor coverings, and he observed a row of shadows along the walls where paintings had clearly recently been removed.

Leading them through into an equally barren drawing room, with two large sofas on bare boards and what looked like a plastic picnic table put between them as a coffee table, Derek Stretton seemed in a hurry to explain, gesturing at the bare walls of the room and the large rectangular shadows, many with bare wires poking out, some with small lights at the top. ‘Afraid I’ve had to let go of some of the family silver. Made a few bad investments…’

That explained the shadows on the wall, Grace thought. They’d probably gone to auction. Stretton looked so