Not Dead Enough

‘OK, Ron, you have thirty seconds, starting from now. For one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, where is the resort of Monastir? Is it—’

Sophie’s gullet tightened. She grabbed the remote and muted the show. Her eyes sprang to the doorway again, then to her handbag containing her mobile phone, well out of reach on her dressing table.

The shadow was moving. Jigging. Someone out there, motionless, but not able to stand without swaying a fraction.

She gripped her tray for an instant. It was the only weapon she had, apart from her small fork. ‘Who’s there?’ she said. ‘Who is that?’

Then he came into the room and all her fear evaporated.

‘It’s you!’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ, you gave me a fright!’

‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d be pleased to see me.’

‘Of course I am. I – I’m really pleased,’ she said. ‘I so wanted to talk to you, to see you. How are you? I – I didn’t think—’

‘I’ve brought you a present.’

35

When he was a child growing up here, Brighton and Hove had been two separate towns, each of them shabby in their own very different way. They were joined at the hip by a virtual border so erratic and illogical it might have been created by a drunken goat. Or more likely, in Grace’s view, by a committee of sober town planners, which would have contained, collectively, less wisdom than the goat.

Now the two towns were enshrined together, forever, as the City of Brighton and Hove. Having spent most of the last half-century screwing up Brighton’s traffic system and ruining the fabled Regency elegance of its seafront, the moronic planners were now turning their ineptness on Hove. Every time he drove along the seafront, and passed the hideous edifices of the Thistle Hotel, the Kingswest, with its ghastly gold-foil roof, and the Brighton Centre, which had all the architectural grace of a maximum-security prison, he had to resist a desire to drive to the Town Hall, seize a couple of planning officers and shake their fillings out.

Not that Roy Grace was against modern architecture – far from it. There were many modern buildings that he admired, the most recent one being the so-called Gherkin, in London. What he hated was seeing his home city, which he so loved, being permanently blighted by whatever mediocrity went on behind the walls of that planning department.

To the casual visitor, Brighton became Hove at the only part of the border that was actually marked, by a rather fine statue on the promenade of a winged angel holding an orb in one hand and an olive branch in the other: the Peace Statue. Grace, in the passenger seat of the Ford Mondeo, stared at it over to his left, out of the window, silhouetted against the steadily darkening sky.

On the opposite side of the road, two lines of traffic streamed into Brighton. With the windows down, he could hear every car. The blam-blam of show-off exhausts, the boom-boom-boom of in-car woofers, the stuttering rasp of tuc-tuc tricycle taxis. Hell was Friday night in central Brighton. Over the coming hours, the city would explode into life, and the police would be out in force, mostly down West Street – Brighton’s answer to the Las Vegas strip – doing their best, as they did every Friday night, to stop the place turning into a drug-fuelled war zone.

From memories of his own time as a beat copper here, he did not envy the uniform crews out tonight one bit.

The light changed to green. Branson put the car in gear and moved forward in the slow stream of traffic. Regency Square was passing by on their right. Grace peered past Branson’s bulk at the fine square of cream-painted eighteenth-century facades, with gardens in the middle, marred by signs for an underground car park and various letting agencies. Then Norfolk Square, a cheap-rent area. Students. Transients. Hookers. And the impoverished elderly. On Grace’s left now was coming up a part of this city he loved the most, the Hove Lawns, a large expanse of neatly mown grass behind the seafront promenade, with its green shelters and, a short distance further on, its beach huts.

In daytime you could spot the old codgers out in force. Men in blue blazers, suede brogues, cravats, taking their constitutionals, some steadied by their walking sticks or Zimmer frames. Blue-rinse dowagers with chalky faces and ruby lips, exercising their Pekinese, holding their leads in white-gloved hands. Stooped figures in white flannels, moving in slow motion around the bowling greens. And nearby, ignoring them as if they were all already long dead, were the clusters of iPodded kids who now owned the promenade on the far side of the railings, with their roller blades and skateboards, and games of volleyball, and their sheer, raw youth.

He wondered, sometimes, if he would make old bones. And what it would be like. To be retired, hobbling along, confused by the past, bewildered by the present and with the future mostly irrelevant. Or being pushed along in a wheelchair, with a blanket over his knees, another one over his mind.

Sandy and he used to joke about it sometimes. Promise me you’ll never drool, Grace, no matter