Dead Man's Time

you played regularly, every now and then you would win a trophy. Which you would put on display.
‘Where do you play locally?’
    ‘Haywards Heath, mostly. I’m sorry, what does this have to do with my aunt – my late aunt?’
    ‘Do the names Anthony Macario and Kenneth Barnes mean anything to you, Mr Daly?’
    Daly squinted at him, as if a stream of smoke had gone into his eyes. ‘No, never heard of them.’
    Grace nodded. ‘So it wasn’t you or your father who had anything to do with them ending up in the harbour at Puerto Banus, then?’
    For a moment Grace really thought, from Daly’s ferocious expression, that he was going to be punched in the face; he braced himself to duck. But the punch never came. Instead, Lucas Daly
pointed an arm in the direction that the crowd was taking. ‘Never heard of them. Okay if I go now? I want to beat this mob out of the car park.’
    ‘You can go, but I want you to know something. No one’s above the law, Mr Daly. Okay? I’m very sorry about your aunt. What happened to her should not happen to any human being,
ever. But you need to know I don’t allow vigilantes.’
    Daly dragged on his cigarette again. ‘What exactly are you insinuating, Detective Grates?’
    ‘
Grace
,’ he corrected. ‘I’m insinuating nothing. But I’m not convinced you went to Marbella to play golf and I don’t allow people to take the law
into their own hands.’
    ‘My father and I are law-abiding people,’ he said.
    ‘Good.’
    ‘So can I ask, how are you doing in finding out who killed my aunt, and getting her property back? In particular the watch – it means a great deal to my dad.’
    ‘We’re working on it,’ Roy Grace said.
    ‘Yeah, well, my dad and I are working on it too. Just in case you don’t deliver – nothing personal. We’ll see who gets the watch back first, Detective Grace. The longer
it’s gone, the less chance any of us have of getting it back. True?’
    ‘No one’s going to find it easy to sell a rare watch of that high value, regardless of its provenance,’ Grace replied.
    ‘That’s what worries me, Detective,’ he said. ‘Maybe some scumbag who knows nothing about watches took it and flogged it to a fence for a few quid.’
    ‘Which is why you went to Marbella, right? To stop the watch from being taken any further distance overseas? Anthony Macario and Kenneth Barnes got in your way, so you had them drowned. Am
I warm?’
    ‘Warm? You’re the advance guard of the fucking Ice Age. I suggest you stop wasting public money having freebies at football matches, and get back to catching villains.’

69
    It was 10.15 p.m. by the time Roy Grace drove out through the congested exit of the Amex stadium car park. There was an accident ahead on the A27, which partially blocked the
road, and it took him another forty minutes to finally arrive back at Cleo’s house.
    He punched in the entry code to the gate and entered the cobbled courtyard, looking at the house next door, which was in darkness, curious about the new neighbours. Seemed like they went to bed
early, which was good news. In a small, gated community like this, the biggest nightmare would be someone who stayed up late playing loud music.
    He let himself in, happily unaware of the figure behind net curtains in a dark, upstairs room next door, cigarette burning in the ashtray beside his tumbler of whisky, who was watching him with
hate burning in his eyes.
    All was quiet in Cleo’s house, with a few dimmed lights on downstairs. Humphrey bounded over and he patted and hushed the dog. Then he removed his shoes, tiptoed across the lounge to say
hi to Marlon, and went into the kitchen. Cleo had left him a plate of cod, mash and beans wrapped in clingfilm and handwritten instructions on how long to microwave it, followed by a row of
kisses.
    He followed the instructions, gave Humphrey a biscuit, poured himself a glass of rosé wine from a bottle in the fridge, gave Humphrey a second biscuit, then carried his meal on a tray
back into the living room, and sat on the sofa, which the dog insisted on sharing with him. He promised Humphrey he’d take him out for a walk later, switched on the television, the sound low,
to see if there was anything he wanted to watch. Then he noticed the handcuffs.
    They lay on the far right-hand side of the low coffee table, pinning down a handwritten note, which said:
    For sometime soon . . . XXXXXXXXXXX
    He grinned, then channel-surfed through to Sky News,