Dead Simple

most of the time – always off having conversations with people inside his head.’ He put the cigarette down in a tin ashtray, then blotted his eyes with a scrunched up handkerchief and sniffed. ‘He was always chatting. I sometimes had to switch off, otherwise he could drive me nuts.’
    ‘Can you remember what he said about Michael Harrison?’
    ‘He was very excited – I think it was Friday – he’d been told he could be a hero. You see, he loved American cop shows on the telly – he always wanted to be a hero. He was going on about knowing where someone was, and that he was the only person in the world who knew, you see, and this was his chance to be a hero. But I didn’t take much notice; had a busy day with two wrecks we had to bring in – I didn’t make the connection.’
    ‘Do you have the radio?’
    He shook his head. ‘Davey must have taken it with him.’
    ‘Did Davey drive?’
    He shook his head. ‘No. He liked to steer the truck sometimes, I let him do that on a quiet road – you know – like one hand on the wheel? But no, he could never drive, didn’t have the ability. He had a mountain bike, that was all.’
    ‘He was found about six miles away from here – do you think he went off to find Michael Harrison? To try to be a hero?’
    ‘I had to pick up a car on Saturday afternoon. He didn’t want to come with me, told me he had important business.’
    ‘Important business?’
    Philip Wheeler gave a sad shrug. ‘He liked to believe he mattered.’
    Grace smiled, thinking privately, we all do. Then he asked, ‘Did you glean anything from Davey about where Michael Harrison might be?’
    ‘No, it didn’t occur to me to make any connection – so I didn’t take much notice of what he said.’
    ‘Would it be possible to see your son’s room, Mr Wheeler?’
    Phil Wheeler jabbed a finger, pointing past Grace. ‘In the Portakabin. Davey liked it there. You can go across – please don’t mind if I don’t – I—’ He pulled his handkerchief out.
    ‘That’s fine, I understand.’
    ‘It’s not locked.’
    Grace crossed the yard and walked up to the Portakabin. The dog which he had still not yet seen, which he thought had to be on the far side of the bungalow, began barking again, even more aggressively. Fixed to the wall beside the front door was a warning sign to intruders reading ‘ ARMED RESPONSE! ’
    He tested the door handle, then pulled the door open and stepped inside onto carpet tiles, several of which were curling at the edges, but most of which were covered in either socks, underpants, T-shirts, sweet wrappers, a McDonald’s burger container lying open, the lid smeared with congealed ketchup, car instruments, hub caps, old American licence plates and several baseball caps. The room was even more untidy than the bungalow, and had a rank odour of cheesy feet, which reminded him of a school locker room.
    Much of the space in the room was taken up by a bed and an unstable television flickering between colour and black and white, on which he saw the credits running for Law and Order. Grace never liked watching British cop shows – they always managed to irritate him by showing wrong procedures or stupid decisions by the investigating officers. US cop shows seemed more exciting, more together. But maybe that was because he didn’t know US police procedures well enough to be critical.
    Glancing around, he saw adverts which looked like they had been torn from magazines plastered all over the walls. Looking more closely, he identifed all of them as being for things American – cars, guns, food, drink, vacations.
    Stepping past the burger container, he looked down at a very old Dell computer, with a floppy disk protruding from the front of the processor, sharing a work surface that sufficed for a desk with a carton of Twinkie bars, a six-inch-tall plastic Bart Simpson and a large scrap of lined notepaper on which there were ballpoint jottings in childlike handwriting.
    Grace looked carefully at the jottings and realized it was a crude diagram. Beside two sets of parallel lines was scrawled: ‘ A 26. NORTH KROWBURG. DUBBLE KATTLE GRYD. 2 MYLES. WITE COTIDGE. ’
    It was a map.
    Below it, he saw a sequence of numbers: 0771 52136 . It looked like a mobile number, and he tried dialling it, but nothing happened.
    He spent another twenty minutes rummaging through everything in the room, opening every drawer, but he found nothing else of interest. Then he took the sheet of