Dead Like You

bouncing off the roof.
    She talked and she talked and she talked. She had spewed words non-stop since he had collected her from an address close to the beach in Lancing. Her hair was long and spiky, the colour of tomato ketchup and pea soup. She talked rubbish and she was wearing rubbish shoes. She reeked of cigarettes and Dolce & Gabbana Femme, and she was a mess. She looked like a Barbie doll that had been retrieved from a dustbin.
    She was so out of it, he doubted she would notice if he drove her to the moon, except he didn’t know how to get to the moon. He hadn’t worked that one out yet.
    ‘Thing is, you see,’ she went on, ‘there’s a lot of people going to rip you off in this city. You want quality stuff. You tell them you want brown and they just give you shit, yep, shit. You had that problem?’
    Yac wasn’t sure whether she was talking into her mobile phone, which she had been for much of the journey, or to him. So he continued driving in silence and looking at the clock and fretting. After he dropped her off in Kemp Town he would park up and ignore any calls on his data unit from the dispatcher, wait for 7 p.m. and then drink his tea.
    ‘Have you?’ she asked more loudly. ‘Have you?’
    He felt a prod in his back. He didn’t like that. He did not like passengers touching him. Last week he had a drunk man who kept laughing and thumping him on the shoulder. He had begun to find himself wondering what the man’s reaction would be if he hit him in the face with the heavy, four-way steel brace for removing wheel nuts that was stored in the boot.
    He was starting to wonder how this girl would react if he did that now. He could easily stop and get it out of the boot. She’d probably still be sitting in the back, talking away, even after he had hit her. He’d seen someone do that in a film on television.
    She prodded him again. ‘Hey? So? Have you?’
    ‘Have I what?’
    ‘Oh shit, you weren’t listening. Like, right, OK. Shit. Haven’t you got any music in this thing?’
    ‘Size four?’ he asked.
    ‘Size four ? Size four what?’
    ‘Shoes. That’s what you are.’
    ‘You a shoemaker when you’re not driving or something?’
    Her shoes were really horrible. Fake leopard skin, flat and all frayed around the edges. He could kill this woman, he decided. He could. It would be easy. He had lots of passengers he did not like. But this was the first one he actually thought he might like to kill.
    But it was probably better not to. You could get into trouble for killing people if you got caught. He watched CSI and Waking the Dead and other shows about forensic scientists. You could learn a lot from those. You could learn to kill a stupid person like this woman, with her stupid hair and her stupid black nail paint and her breasts almost popping free of their scarlet cups.
    As he turned left at the roundabout in front of Brighton Pier and headed up around the Old Steine, she suddenly fell silent.
    He wondered if she could read his mind.

94
    Saturday 17 January
    Roy Grace, seated in the office at the end of the Ops Room, was working his way through a horrible slimy and almost stone-cold mound of chicken and shrimp chow mein that some well-meaning officer had brought him. If he hadn’t been ravenous, he would have binned it. But he’d eaten nothing since an early-morning bowl of cereal and needed the fuel.
    All had been quiet at the garage behind Mandalay Court. But the number and quality of the locks on the door continued to bother him. ACC Rigg had agreed readily to allowing Darren Spicer to tell them what he saw without incriminating himself, but as yet Glenn had been unable to find him. Grace hoped the serial villain wasn’t playing a macabre game with them.
    He dug the plastic fork into the foil dish, while staring at the gridded image on the computer screen on the desk in front of him. All the cars and the thirty-five officers on his operation were equipped with transponders which gave him their exact position to within a few feet. He checked the location of each in turn, then the images of the city streets on the CCTV cameras. The images on the screens on the wall showed their night-vision sight as clear as daylight. The city was definitely busier today. People might have stayed home yesterday evening, but Saturday was starting to look like it might be something of a party night.
    Just as he munched on a desiccated shrimp, his radio phone crackled into life and an excited voice said,