it out he would be financially set up for life. That was not how he wanted to view his job, his career. At least, not normally.
But today was different. Today was a real downer. A reality-check day. Circumstances changed, he was thinking, as he sat hunched over his desk, ignoring the pinging of incoming emails on his computer screen, munching an egg and cress brown sandwich, and staring at court transcripts of the Suresh Hossain trial in front of him. Life never stands still. Sometimes the changes were good, sometimes less than good. In little over a year's time he would be forty. His hair was going grey.
And his new office was too small.
The three dozen vintage cigarette lighters that were his prize collection hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window which, unlike the fine view from Alison Vosper's office, looked down onto the parking lot and the cell block beyond. Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill. Sandy had bought him it for his twenty-sixth birthday.
Beneath it was a stuffed seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout he had caught on a visit to Ireland some years ago. He kept it beneath the clock to give him a joke he could crack to detectives working under him, about patience and big fish.
Lined up on either side and slightly cramping it were several framed certificates, and a group photograph captioned 'Police Staff College Bramshill. Management of Serious and Series Crimes. 1997', and two cartoons of him in the police ops room, drawn by a colleague who had missed his true vocation. The opposite wall was taken up by bookshelves bulging with part of his collection of books on the occult, and filing cabinets.
His L-shaped desk was cluttered by his computer, overflowing in and out-trays, Blackberry, separate piles of correspondence, some orderly, most less so, and the latest edition of the magazine with a bad pun of a title, Fingerprint Whorld. Rising from the mess was a
framed quotation: 'We don't rise to the level of our abilities, we fall to the level of our excuses.'
The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of files and loose paperwork, and his leather go-bag, containing his crime-scene kit. His briefcase sat open on the table, his mobile, dictating machine and a bunch of transcripts he had taken home with him last night all lay beside it.
He dropped half his sandwich in the bin. No appetite. He sipped his mug of coffee, checked the latest emails, then logged back on to the Sussex Police site and stared at the list of files he had inherited as part of his promotion.
Each file contained the details of an unsolved murder. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files, maybe even more, stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of cupboards, or locked up, gatherIng mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder happened. The files contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, court transcripts, separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his new brief, to dig back into the county's unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.
He knew most of their contents by heart - the benefit of his near photographic memory which had propelled him through exams both at school and in the Force. To him each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken - and a killer who was still free - it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest, because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had.
Richard Ventnor, a gay vet battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago. Susan Downey, a beautiful girl raped and strangled and left in a churchyard fifteen years back. Pamela Chisholm, a rich widow found dead in her wrecked car - but with the wrong kind of injuries for a car accident. The skeletal remains of Pratap Gokhale, a nine-year-old Indian boy found under floorboards at the flat of a suspected paedophile - long vanished. These were just a few of the many cases Grace remembered.
Although they were interred, or their ashes had been scattered a long time ago, circumstances changed for them too. Technology had brought in DNA testing, which threw up new evidence and new suspects. The internet had brought new means of communication. Loyalties had changed. New witnesses had emerged from the woodwork. People had divorced. Fallen out with their friends. Someone who wouldn't testify against a mate twenty years ago now hated him. Murder files never closed. Slow time, they called it.
The phone rang. It was the management support assistant he shared with his immediate boss, the Assistant Chief Constable, asking if he wanted to take a call from a detective. The whole political correctness thing irritated him more and more, and it was particularly strong in the Police Force. It hadn't been so long ago when they called them secretaries, not bloody management support assistants.
He told her to put him through, and moments later heard a familiar voice. Glenn Branson, a bright Detective Sergeant he'd worked with several times in the past, fiercely ambitious and razor sharp as well as being a walking encyclopedia on movies. He liked Glenn Branson a lot. He was probably the closest friend he had.
'Roy? How you doing? Seen you in the papers today.'
'Yup, well you can fuck off. What do you want?'
'Are you OK?'
'No, I'm not OK.'
'Are you busy right now?'
'How do you define busy.'
'Ever given an answer in your life that isn't a question?'
Grace smiled. 'Have you?'
'Listen, I'm being pestered by a woman - about her fiance'. Seems like some stag-night prank has gone seriously wrong, and he's been missing since Tuesday night.'
Grace had to do a mental check on the date. It was Thursday afternoon now. 'Tell me?'
'Thought you'd be in court today. Tried your mobile, but it's off.'
