Dead Simple

barking of a guard dog shattering the quiet stillness of the warm evening, and remained prudently in the car for some moments, waiting for a hound to appear. Instead, the front door of the bungalow opened, and a hulk of a man came out. In his fifties, he had thinning, greasy hair, a heavy five-o’clock shadow and a massive beer belly barely restrained by a string vest and bulging over the buckle of his brown dungarees like an overhang of snow about to avalanche.
    ‘Mr Wheeler?’ Grace said, approaching, still wary of the sound of the barking dog, which was getting even louder and deeper.
    ‘Yes?’ The man had a gentle face with big sad eyes, and massive, grimy hands. He smelled of rope and engine grease.
    Grace pulled out his warrant card and held it up for him to see. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace from Sussex CID. I’m very sorry to hear about your son.’
    The man stood still, impassively, then Grace saw he was starting to tremble. His hands clenched tight, and a tear rolled down from the corner of each eye. ‘You want to come in?’ Phil Wheeler said, in a faltering voice.
    ‘If you have a few minutes, I’d appreciate it.’
    The inside of the house was pretty much like the outside and the reek of the place indicated a heavy smoker. Grace followed the man into a dingy sitting room with a three-piece suite and a large old television. Almost every inch of the floor and furniture was covered in motorbiking magazines, country and western magazines and vinyl record sleeves. There was a photograph of a fair-haired woman resting her hands on the shoulders of a small boy on a scooter, on the sideboard, and a few cheap-looking china ornaments, but nothing at all on the walls. A clock on the mantelpiece, set into the belly of a chipped porcelain racehorse, indicated the time at ten minutes past seven. Grace was surprised, checking it against his own watch, that it was more or less accurate.
    Scooping several record sleeves off an armchair, Phil Wheeler said, by way of an explanation, ‘Davey liked this stuff, used to play it all the time, liked to collect—’
    He broke off and walked out of the room. ‘Tea?’ he called.
    ‘I’m fine,’ Grace said, unsure what kind of hygiene went on in the kitchen.
    This level of interview would have been delegated to someone junior by most SIOs, but Grace had always been a firm believer in getting out in the field himself. It was his style of operating – and it was one of the aspects of police work that he found most interesting and rewarding if sometimes, like now, challenging.
    After a couple of minutes, Phil Wheeler lumbered back into the room, swept a pile of magazines and some more record sleeves off the settee and eased himself down, then pulled a tobacco tin out of his pocket. He prised open the tin with his thumbnail, removed a packet of cigarette papers, then proceeded, one-handed, to roll himself a cigarette. Grace couldn’t help watching; it had always fascinated him how people could do this.
    ‘Mr Wheeler, I understand your son told you he had some conversations on a walkie-talkie radio with a missing person, Michael Harrison.’
    Phil Wheeler ran his tongue along the paper and sealed the cigarette. ‘I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt my boy. He was the friendliest person you could meet.’ Holding his unlit cigarette, he bicycled his hand in the air. ‘Poor kid had – you know – water on the brain, encephalitis. He was slow, but everyone liked him.’
    Grace smiled in sympathy. ‘He had a lot of friends in the traffic police.’
    ‘He was a good lad.’
    ‘So I understand.’
    ‘He was my life.’
    Grace waited. Wheeler lit the cigarette from a box of Swan Vesta matches and moments later the sweet smoke wafted across to Grace. He breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell, but not enjoying this task. Talking to the newly bereaved had always been, in his view, the single worst aspect of police work.
    ‘Can you tell me a bit about the conversations he had? About this walkie-talkie?’
    The man inhaled, smoke spurting from his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. ‘I got pretty angry with him on – I don’t know – Friday or Saturday. I didn’t know he had the damned thing. He finally told me he’d found it near that terrible wreck on Tuesday night with the four lads.’
    Grace nodded.
    ‘He kept talking about his new friend. To be honest I didn’t take much notice. Davey lived in – how do you put it – his own little world