Not Dead Enough

‘Where the hell was he?’

‘He said he just went out for some air.’

Walking out of the room, into the corridor, Grace said, ‘Like hell he did. Get on to the CCTV team – see what they’ve picked up around that hotel in the last few hours.’

‘I will do, right away. When will you be ready for me to bring him down for the viewing?’

‘Be a while yet. A good three or four hours – I’ll call you.’

As he hung up, his phone immediately rang again. He didn’t recognize the number – a long string of digits starting with 49 that suggested it was from somewhere overseas. He answered it.

‘Roy!’ said a voice he instantly knew. It was his old friend and colleague Dick Pope. Once Dick and his wife, Lesley, had been his best friends. But Dick had been transferred to Hastings and since they had moved over there, Grace hadn’t seen so much of them.

‘Dick! Good to hear from you – where are you?’

There was a sudden hesitation in his friend’s voice. ‘Roy, we’re in Munich. We’re on a motoring holiday. Checking out the Bavarian beer!’

‘Sounds good to me!’ Grace said, uneasy at the hesitation, as if there was something his friend was holding back from saying.

‘Roy – look – this may be nothing. I don’t want to cause you any – you know, upset or anything. But Lesley and I think we may have just seen Sandy.’

18

Skunk’s phone was ringing again. He woke, shivering and sweating at the same time. Jesus, it was hot in here. His clothes – the ragged T-shirt and undershorts he was sleeping in – and his bedding were sodden. Water was guttering off him.

Breeep-breeep-breeeep.

From somewhere in the fetid darkness down towards the rear of the camper, the Scouse voice shouted out, ‘Fokking thing. Turn the fokking thing off, for Chrissake, ’fore I throw it out the fokking window.’

It wasn’t the phone he had stolen last night, he realized suddenly. It was his pay-as-you-go phone. His business phone! Where in hell was it?

He stood up hurriedly and shouted back, ‘You don’t like it, get the fuck out of my van!’

Then he looked on the floor, found his shell-suit bottoms, dug his hands in the pocket and pulled the small green mobile out. ‘Yeah?’ he answered.

The next moment he was looking around for a pen and a scrap of paper. He had both in his top, wherever the hell that was. Then he realized he had been sleeping on it, using it as a sort of pillow. He pulled out a thin, crappy ballpoint with a cracked stem, and a torn, damp sheet of lined paper, and put it down on the work surface. With a hand shaking so much he could barely write, he managed to take down the details in spiky scrawl, and then hung up.

A good one. Money. Moolah! Mucho!

And his bowels felt OK today. None of the agonizing gripes followed by diarrhoea that had been plaguing him for days – not yet, at any rate. His mouth was parched; he was desperate for some water. Feeling light-headed and giddy, he made his way to the sink, then, steadying himself on the work surface, he turned on the tap. But it was already on, the contents of the water tank all run out. Shite.

‘Who left the fucking tap on all night? Hey? Who?’ he yelled.

‘Chill out, man!’ a voice replied.

‘I’ll fucking chill you out!’ He pulled open the curtains again, blinking at the sudden intrusion of the blinding, early-afternoon sunlight. Outside he saw a woman in the park, holding the hand of a toddler on a tricycle. A mangy-looking dog was running around, sniffing the scorched grass where a circus big-top had been until a couple of days ago. Then he looked along the camper. A third crashed-out body he hadn’t noticed before, stirred. Nothing he could do about either of them now, just hope the fuck they’d be gone when he came back. They usually were.

Then he heard an almost rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak, and saw Al, his hamster, with his busted paw all bound up in a splint by the vet, still spinning the shiny chromium treadmill, his whiskers twitching away. ‘Man, don’t you ever get tired?’ he said, putting his face up close to the bars of the cage – but not too close – Al had bitten him once. Actually, twice.

He had first found the creature abandoned in its cage, which had been tossed by some callous bastard into a roadside skip. He had seen its paw was busted and tried to lift it out, and been bitten for his troubles. Then another time he had tried to stroke it through the bars and it had bitten him again. Yet other days he could open the cage door and it would scamper into the palm of his hand, and sit there happily, for an hour or more, only shitting on it occasionally.