Dead Man's Time

from him over a cigar in her garden, she deserved at least that.
Instead she had died from terrible injuries in hospital.
    He had never felt more determined in his life to find the perpetrators of a crime and lock them up. Hopefully for ever. If he got lucky and didn’t end up with a woolly-minded liberal of a
judge.
    He looked back across at Marlon. And momentarily was distracted by the thought of packing up the house, and all those past years of his life. Then he focused back on the film and what he could
learn from it that might, in any way, help him with this case.

51
    Someone else was packing up his life too, and it was hurting. It wasn’t the memories that were painful – Amis Smallbone didn’t have any memories he wanted to
pack into a suitcase, other than a photograph of his father and his mother that had been the only decoration in his cell. He no longer had photographs of his ex-wives, or his two long-estranged
children, whom his wife had taken to Australia twenty years ago.
    The packing, little though it was, hurt him physically. Every moment. His whole body was in pain from the beating he’d had. But what upset him most of all was the damage to his mouth. Not
long before his arrest, thirteen years ago, he’d paid a fortune for work on his teeth. Now, five of his front teeth were missing, and his jaw was broken, and hurting like hell. His dentist
told him he needed surgery on it. He didn’t have time for surgery, so he dulled the pain as best he could with Nurofen and whisky. He’d get it fixed when he got paid on this deal; until
then, in public, he’d have to keep his mouth shut.
    It was just past midnight, but he was wide awake, with a cigarette clamped between his lips, as he double-checked the cupboards in his basement flat. The last night in this shithole, he thought
with some relief. He was spending the weekend with his mate Benny Julius in his Dyke Road Avenue mansion, just a few doors away from the huge house he used to live in himself, with his Ferrari
parked outside. He’d had his villa in Marbella, and a boat in Puerto Banus, too.
    All he had here now was one large, cheap suitcase, only half full. How great was that? He was sixty-two years old and his worldly possessions – his clothes and washing kit – did not
even fill half a suitcase.
    He laid his parents’ photograph down carefully on top of a folded shirt. Maurice Smallbone had been a tall man, with big shoulders and a lean, handsome face, his hair, dyed dark brown to
the end of his life, brushed straight back. His mother had been tall and elegant, too. So why the hell was he only five foot one inch? Why had life dealt him such a shitty hand?
    Why had Roy Grace picked on him all those years back? Everything he used to have was gone, thanks to Roy Grace’s determination to destroy him. Grace assured him at the time it wasn’t
personal, but it was. Amis Smallbone knew that. And Grace was not going to get away with it.
    His friends told him to forget it, that Grace had merely been a copper doing his job, but Smallbone didn’t see it that way. He found out from an old lag in prison that Grace’s
father, also a detective, had spent much of his career pursing his father, and that one of his big regrets was never potting him.
    So it was personal for Grace. The detective had been in his face for years. Even after he had done his time, Grace had continued to go after him. Accusing him of etching a message on his
girlfriend’s car, kidnapping him after a funeral and dumping him on top of the Devil’s Dyke, leaving him to walk five miles home in the pissing rain.
    Thanks to this one man, not only did he have nothing in his life, but most of his old acquaintances didn’t want to know him any more, as if he was some kind of pariah, a has-been. His
father had been the big guy of the Brighton crime scene. Everyone feared and respected him. No one dared touch Maurice Smallbone, not even the police, most of whom he’d had in his pay back in
his heyday.
    What the fuck had gone wrong?
    Detective Superintendent Roy Grace would go to his grave regretting what he had done. You didn’t take away twelve years of someone’s life; and all the other shit that went with it.
The prison doctor had warned him about not getting angry, because of his high blood pressure. But fuck that. He stubbed the butt out and lit another cigarette. Then spotted something he had missed.
Another framed photograph of his father outside Lewes