Dead Like You

hang your coat on there, Roy,’ said Foster. ‘If she’d split up with her boyfriend she could have topped herself. Christmas, you know, that’s a time when people feel pain like this. I remember my ex walking out on me three weeks before Christmas. I damned near topped myself over that Christmas holiday – 1992, it was. Had Christmas dinner on my own in a bloody Angus Steak House.’
    Grace smiled. ‘It’s possible, but from all I learned about her at that time I don’t think so. Something I do think is significant is that one of her neighbours happened to be looking out of his window at three o’clock on Christmas morning – the timing fits perfectly – and saw a man pushing a woman into a white van.’
    ‘Did he get the registration?’
    ‘He was shit-faced. He got part of it.’
    ‘Enough to trace the vehicle?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You believed him?’
    ‘Yes. I still do.’
    ‘Not a lot to go on, is it, Roy?’ said Jim Doyle.
    ‘No, but there’s something strange. I came in early this morning to look up that particular file before this meeting – and do you know what?’ He stared at each of them.
    They all shook their heads.
    ‘The pages I was looking for were missing.’
    ‘Who would remove them?’ Brian Foster said. ‘I mean – who would have access to them to be able to remove them?’
    ‘You used to be a copper,’ Grace said. ‘You tell me. And then tell me why?’

25
    Monday 5 January
    Maybe it was time to quit.
    Prison aged you. Ten years it put on – or took off – your life, depending on which way you looked at it. And right now Darren Spicer wasn’t too happy about either of the ways he was looking at it.
    Since he was sixteen, Spicer had spent much of his life inside. Doing bird. A revolving-door prisoner , they called him. A career criminal. But not a very successful one. He’d only once, since becoming an adult, spent two consecutive Christmases as a free man, and that had been in the early years of his marriage. His birth certificate – his real one – told him he was forty-one. His bathroom mirror told him he was fifty-five – and counting. Inside he felt eighty. He felt dead. He felt…
    Nothing.
    Lathering up, he stared at the mirror with dull eyes, grimacing at the lined old geezer staring back at him. He was naked, his gangly, skinny body – which he liked to think of as just plain lean – toned up from daily workouts in the prison gym.
    Then he set to work on his hard stubble with the same blunted blade he had been using for weeks in prison before his release and which he had taken with him. When he had finished, his face was as clean-shaven as the rest of his body, which he had shaved last week. He always did that when he came out of prison, as a way of cleansing himself. One time, in the early days of his now long-dead marriage, he’d come home with lice in his pubes and chest hair.
    He had two small tattoos, at the top of each arm, but no more. Plenty of his fellow inmates were covered in the things and had a macho pride in them. Macho pride equalled mucho stupidity, in his view. Why make it easy for someone to identify you? Besides, he had enough identifying marks already – five scars on his back, from stab wounds when he’d been set on in prison by mates of a drug dealer he’d done over some years back.
    This last sentence had been his longest yet – six years. He was finally out on licence now after three of them. Time to quit, he thought. Yeah, but.
    The big but .
    You were supposed to feel free when you left prison. But he still had to report to his probation officer. He had to report for retraining. He had to obey the rules of the hostels he stayed in. When you were released, you were supposed to go home.
    But he had no home.
    His dad was long dead and he’d barely spoken a dozen words to his mum in twenty-five years – and that was too many. His only sibling, his sister Mags, had died from a heroin overdose five years back. His ex-wife was living in Australia with his kid, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years.
    Home was wherever he could find a place to doss down. Last night it was a room in a halfway house just off the Old Steine in Brighton. Shared with four pathetic, stinking winos. He’d been here before. Today he was going to try to get into a better place. St Patrick’s night shelter. They had decent grub, a place you could store things. You had to sleep in a big dormitory but it was clean. Prison was meant to help your rehabilitation