Not Dead Enough

to be the senior captain of the airline, then get off that plane at once!

Complacency. It was the same with medicine. Not long back, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Sussex had amputated the wrong leg of a male patient. Just a simple error. Caused, almost certainly, by complacency.

Which was why, at a few minutes to six p.m., Grace stopped in the hot, stuffy corridor at the entrance of the Major Incident Suite, his shirt clinging to his chest from the savage afternoon heat, the sighting of Sandy in Munich clinging to his mind. He nodded to Branson and pointed at the first diagram on the wall, just past the door of the HOLMES system manager’s office, which was headed Common Possible Motives.

‘What does maintain active lifestyle actually mean?’ Branson asked, reading off the diagram.

In an oval in the centre was a single word: motive. Arranged around it, at the end of spokes, were the words jealousy, racism, anger/fright, robbery, power/control, desire, gain, payment, homopho bia, hate, revenge, psychotic, sexual and maintain active lifestyle.

‘Killing to inherit someone’s money,’ Grace answered.

Glenn Branson yawned. ‘There’s one missing.’ Then he frowned. ‘Actually, two,’ he said gloomily.

‘Tell me?’

‘Kicks. And kudos.’

‘Kicks?’

‘Yeah. Those kids who set fire to an old bag lady in a bus shelter last year. Poured petrol over her while she was sleeping. They didn’t hate her, it was just something to do, right? Kicks.’

Grace nodded. His mind really wasn’t in gear. He was still thinking about Sandy. Munich. Christ, how was he going to get through this? All he wanted to do right now was to take a plane to Munich.

‘And kudos, right?’ Glenn said. ‘You join a gang, it’s one way to get street cred, right?’

Grace moved on to the next board. It was headed Developing Forensic Overview. He glanced down the list, the words a meaningless blur at this moment. Assess potential information, intelligence, witnesses. Reassess. Develop and implement forensic strategy. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dapper, energetic-looking man in his early fifties, wearing smart fawn suit trousers, a beige shirt and a brown tie, striding up to them. Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer for this building.

‘Hi, Roy,’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ve got MIR One all set up for you, and the tape’s ready for you to rock and roll.’ Then he turned to the Detective Sergeant and shook his hand vigorously. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Welcome back! I thought you weren’t going to be working for a while yet.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Have to be careful when you drink now, do you? So it doesn’t come squirting out the holes in your belly?’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ responded Glenn, missing the joke, either deliberately or because his mind was elsewhere – Grace couldn’t tell which.

‘I’ll be around for a while,’ Case said breezily. ‘Anything you need, let me know.’ He tapped the mobile phone jammed in his shirt’s breast pocket.

‘A fresh-water dispenser? Going to need it with this heat,’ Grace said.

‘Already done that.’

‘Good man.’ He looked at his watch. Just over twenty minutes to the six-thirty pre-briefing he had called. There should be enough time. He led Glenn Branson along, past the SOCO evidence rooms and the Outside Inquiry Team rooms, then doglegged right towards the Witness Interview Suite, where they had been earlier this afternoon.

They went into the small, narrow viewing room, adjoining the main interview room. Two mismatched chairs were pulled up against a work surface, running the width of the room, on which sat the squat metal housing of the video recording machinery, and a colour monitor giving a permanent, dreary colour picture of the coffee table and three red chairs in the empty Witness Interview Room on the other side of the wall.

Grace wrinkled his nose. It smelled as if someone had been eating a curry in here, probably from the deli counter of the ASDA supermarket across the road. He peered in the wastepaper bin and saw the evidence, a pile of cartons. It always took him a while after leaving a post-mortem before he was comfortable at the thought of food, and at this moment, having just seen the remnants of what appeared to be a shrimp rogan josh among the contents of Katie Bishop’s stomach, the sickly reek of the curry in here was definitely not doing it for him.

Grace ducked down, picked up the bin and plonked it outside the door. The smell didn’t clear, but at least it made him feel a little better. Then he sat in front of the monitor, refamiliarized himself with the controls of the video machine and hit the play button.

Thinking. Thinking all the time. Sandy loved curries. Chicken korma. That was her favourite.