Bromley, south London, sounds very interesting. He had a request to supply a scarab beetle just over ten days ago. To a man with an eastern European accent.’
‘Magic!’ Grace said. ‘And?’
‘I’ve arranged to see him tomorrow.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
Grace then looked down at his notes. ‘Norman, we’ve removed the answering machine from the victim’s flat. I’m having it examined by the Technical Support Unit. Whatever information they can extract I’d like you to check up on.’
‘Any good-looking birds?’
‘I’ll find someone to help you if you find any.’
‘I quite like the sound of this agency, if it’s got birds of the calibre of Janie Stretton on its books.’
Grace ignored the man. His remark didn’t even warrant an answer. ‘I’ll see you all here at eight thirty in the morning,’ he said. ‘Sorry to muck up your weekends.’
In particular he avoided eye contact with Glenn Branson. Glenn’s wife was getting increasingly fed up with the hours that police work consumed. But that was his choice, Grace thought. When you signed up to Her Majesty’s police, you took the Queen’s shilling. And in return you dedicated your life.
OK, so maybe it wasn’t actually spelled out in the contract. But that was the reality. If you wanted a life, you were in the wrong career.
31
It was windier down in Brighton than in London, but the air was plenty warm enough to be outside.
Girls Aloud were pounding out of the CD player built into the barbecue, and a digital light show flashed with the music. Jessica, dressed in baggy jeans, a black top and sparkly shoes, her long fair hair flailing, and Kellie, barefoot in white calf-length trousers and a striped man’s shirt, were dancing on the lawn, gyrating wildly, laughing, having just the greatest time.
Max, in grubby grey shorts and an even grubbier Dumbledore sweatshirt, his blond hair hanging like a tousled mop over his forehead, had not yet finished inspecting the barbecue. He treated it with the reverence with which he might have treated a spaceship that had landed in their backyard. Which indeed was what it looked like.
It was vast, taking up a good chunk of the garden, eight feet from end to end, curved, with a futuristic design fashioned from stainless steel, brushed aluminium and some black, marbled material, complete with extremely comfortable fold-out stools. It looked more like the bar from one of those hyper-hip London hotels where Tom sometimes met clients for a drink than a device for grilling sausages.
The Giraffe must have walked past twenty times this evening. Tom saw Len Wainwright’s head, craned forward way above the top of the close-boarded fence, bobbing steadily along, up and down, up and down, dying to catch Tom’s eye and get into a natter about the machine. But Tom was in no mood for small talk tonight.
‘What does that do, Daddy?’ Max, pointing at a digital display, shouted above the sound of the music.
Tom set down his glass of rose wine, then thumbed through the English section of an instruction manual the size of a London phone directory. ‘I think it measures the temperature of the inside of the meat – or whatever you are cooking.’
Max’s mouth opened and shut, as it always did when he was impressed by something. Then he frowned. ‘How does it know that?’
Tom opened a compartment and pointed at a spike. ‘There’s a sensor in the spike; it reads the internal temperature. It’s like a thermometer.’
‘Wow!’ Max’s eyes lit up for a moment, then he was pensive again, and took a few steps back. ‘It is a bit big, isn’t it?’
‘A little,’ Tom said.
‘Mummy said we might be moving, then we’d have a bigger garden, so then it won’t be so big.’
‘Did she?’ Tom said.
‘She said that ’xactly. Will you come and play Truck Racing with me?’
‘I have to start cooking – we’re going to eat soon. Aren’t you hungry?’
Max puckered up his mouth. He always considered any question carefully, even one as basic as this. Tom liked that quality about him; he took it as a sign of his son’s intelligence. So far he didn’t seem to have inherited his mother’s recklessness.
‘Umm. Well, I could be hungry soon, I think.’
‘Do you?’ Tom smiled and stroked the top of his son’s head fondly.
Max ducked away. ‘You’ll muck my hair up!’
‘You reckon?’
He nodded solemnly.
‘Well it looks to me like you have a bird nesting in it.’
Max stared at him even more solemnly. ‘I think you’re drunk!’
Tom looked at him in shock. ‘Drunk? Me?’
‘That’s your third glass of wine.’
‘You’re counting, are you?’
‘They said in school about drinking too much wine.’
Now Tom was even more shocked. Was the nanny state now sending kids home from school to spy on their parents’ drinking habits? ‘Who said that, Max?’
‘It was a woman.’
‘One of your teachers?’
He shook his head. ‘A nothingist.’
Tom smelled sweet barbecue smoke coming from one of his neighbours’ gardens. He was still poring through the manual, trying to find out how to fire up the gas grill. ‘A nothingist?’
‘She was telling us what was good to eat,’ Max replied.
Now Tom got it, or thought he had. ‘You mean a nutritionist?’
After some moments of deep thought, Max nodded. ‘Can’t we have one game of Truck Racing before you cook? Just one teeny game?’
Tom finally located the on-off switch. The instruction manual said to switch the grill on, then leave for twenty minutes. Kellie and Jessica looked well away, dancing to yet another track.
‘One game.’
‘Promise you won’t beat me?’ Max asked.
‘That wouldn’t be a fair game, would it?’ Tom said, following him into the house. ‘Anyhow, I never beat you; you always win.’
Max burst into giggles, and scampered on ahead of his father upstairs to his bedroom. Tom paused in the kitchen to glance at the television, in case the news was on, and to fill his wine glass up – finishing the bottle in the process. Unless Kellie had been helping herself, Max was wrong, he realized. It hadn’t been his third glass, it had been his fourth. And on Monday he intended phoning Max’s headmaster and asking what the hell he thought he was playing at, indoctrinating kids into monitoring their parents’ drinking habits.
But as he climbed the stairs, being careful not to spill any wine, he had something infinitely more important on his mind. He stopped at the top, thinking.
Max called out, ‘You can have any colour you want except
‘OK,’ he called back. ‘You’re having green!’
Max won the first race easily. Squatting on the carpet in his son’s bedroom, holding the remote control, Tom could not get his brain to focus on the track. He crashed on the first bend in the second race, then went off again at the next opportunity, scattering tyres and bales of straw. Then he somersaulted into a grandstand.
For the past two hours, since he had seen the photograph of Janie Stretton in the Evening Standard, then seen her again on the Six O’Clock News when he’d got home, his brain had been mush.
