Dead Simple

feeling remarkably perky on his two and a bit hours’ sleep. Bella and Emma-Jane were already there, as was Ben Farr, a round-faced, bearded Sergeant in his late forties who was to be the Exhibits Officer, and Joe Tindall. Glenn Branson arrived a few minutes later.
    Over cups of coffee, Grace briefed them. Then, shortly after half past five, all wearing protective waistcoats, they set off in a police Transit van and a marked car, which Branson drove, Grace in the passenger seat.
    Reaching Ashley’s street, Grace told Branson to pull up alongside Nick’s unmarked Astra, and wound his window down.
    ‘All quiet,’ Nicholl reported.
    ‘Good boy,’ Grace said, noting that Ashley Harper’s Audi TT was in its usual place outside her house. He told Nicholl to cover the street behind, then they drove on.
    There were no free spaces in the street, so they double parked beside the Audi. Grace gave Nick Nicholl a couple of minutes to get in place, then, leading the posse, marched up to the front door, in full daylight now, and rang the bell.
    There was no response.
    He rang again, then, after a minute, rang yet again. Then he nodded to Ben Farr, who went over to the Transit and removed a heavy-duty ram, the size of a large fire extinguisher. He hefted it up to the front door, swung it hard and the door flew open.
    Grace went in first. ‘Police!’ he shouted. ‘Hello? Police!’
    The silent, winking lights of the hi-fi system greeted him. Followed by the rest of his team, he walked up the stairs and paused on the first-floor landing. ‘Hello!’ he called out again. ‘Miss Harper?’
    Silence.
    He opened one door, onto a small bathroom. The next door was to a small, bland spare bedroom that didn’t look as if it had ever been used. He hesitated, then pushed the remaining door, which opened onto a master bedroom, with a double bed that had clearly not been slept in. The curtains were drawn shut. He found the light switch and turned it on, and several ceiling spots lit up the room.
    The place had a deserted feel, like a hotel room waiting for its next occupant. He saw an immaculate duvet over a queen-size bed, a flat-screen television, a clock radio plus a couple of Hockney swimming pool prints on the wall.
    No Ashley Harper.
    So where the hell was she?
    Feeling a stab of panic, Grace exchanged glances with Glenn Branson. They both knew that somewhere along the line they had been outsmarted, but where and how? For a moment all he could think of was the bollocking he would get from Alison Vosper if it turned out he had woken a JP in the middle of the night to get a search warrant for no good reason.
    And there could be all kinds of good reasons why Ashley Harper wasn’t here tonight. For a moment he felt angry at his friend. This was all Glenn’s fault. He’d suckered him into this damned case. It wasn’t anything to do with him, not his problem. Now he owned the fucking problem and it was getting deeper.
    He tried to recap, to think how he would cover his arse if No. 27 hauled him in. There was Mark Warren’s death. The note. The finger in the fridge. Emma-Jane’s findings. There was a whole ton of things that were not right. Mark Warren, so belligerent at the wedding reception. Bradley Cunningham, so smooth, so upmarket at the wedding.
    ‘Actually the pants are killing me…rented this lot from your wonderful Moss Bros, but I think I got given the wrong pants!’
    From the time he had spent in the United States and in Canada, and the conversations Grace had had about the differences in their language, he knew that classy Americans and Canadians might call ordinary trousers ‘pants’, but they would called dressier trousers ‘trousers’. It had been an instant giveaway that Bradley Cunningham might not be who he made himself out to be.
    Not that that slender hypothesis would satisfy Alison Vosper.
    ‘Take this place apart,’ he told his team wearily. ‘Look under every bloody stone. Find out who owns this place. Who owns the televisions, the hi-fi, the Audi outside, the carpets, the wall sockets. I want to know every damned detail about Ashley Harper. I want to know more about her than she knows herself. Everybody understand?’
    *
    After two hours of searching, so far no one had found anything. It was as if Ashley Harper had been through the place with some kind of super-Hoover. There was nothing other than the furniture, a bio yoghurt pot in the fridge together with some soya milk, a bunch of radishes