Dead Simple

openly could harm his promotion prospects.
    ‘Everyone knows you’re a special case, Roy – having lost Sandy. No one’s going to criticize you for turning over every stone on the damned planet. We’d all do the same in your shoes. But you have to keep that in your box, you can’t bring it to work.’
    There were times when he thought he was getting over her, when he was getting strong again. Then there were moments like now when he realized he had barely progressed at all. He just wished so desperately he could have put an arm around her, cuddled up against her, talked through the problem. She was a glass-half-full person, always positive, and so savvy. She’d helped steer him through a disciplinary tribunal in his early days in the Force which could have ended his career, when he’d been accused by the Police Complaints Authority of using excessive force against a mugger he’d arrested. He’d been exonerated then, largely through following Sandy’s advice. She would have known exactly what he should do now.
    He wondered sometimes if these dreams were attempts by Sandy to communicate with him. From wherever she was.
    Jodie, his sister, told him it was time to move on, that he needed to accept that Sandy was dead, to replace her voice on the answering machine, to remove her clothes from the bedroom and her things from the bathroom, in short – and Jodie could be very short – to stop living in some kind of a shrine to Sandy, and start all over again.
    But how could he move on? What if Sandy was alive, being held captive by some maniac? He had to keep searching, to keep the file open, to keep updating the photographs showing how she might look now, to keep scanning every face he passed in the street or saw in a crowd. He would go on until—
    Until.
    Closure.
    On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Sandy had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love. He’d left the house later than usual, at 9.15, and reached his office in Brighton shortly after half past, late for a briefing on a murder case. He’d promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple – his best friend at the time, Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife, Lesley, who Sandy got on well with – but it had been a hectic day and he’d arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.
    At first he’d thought she was angry with him for being so late and was making a protest. The house was tidy, her car and handbag were gone, there was no sign of a struggle.
    Then, twenty-four hours later, her car was found in a bay of the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There were two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one for £7.50 at Boots, and £16.42 for petrol from the local branch of Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.
    His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday, and on the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 3.45 a.m., he could hear an American cop drama through the party wall between their semi-detached houses. Guns banged, tyres squealed, sirens whup-whupped . She’d seen nothing.
    Noreen Grinstead, who lived opposite, was the one person he might have expected to have noticed something. A hawk-eyed, jumpy woman in her sixties, she knew everyone’s business in the street. When she wasn’t tending to her husband, Lance, who was steadily going downhill with Alzheimer’s, she was forever out front in yellow rubber gloves, washing her silver Nissan car, or hosing and scrubbing the driveway, or the windows of the house, or anything else that did or did not need washing. She even brought stuff out of the house to clean it in the driveway.
    Very little escaped her eye. But, somehow, Sandy’s disappearance had.
    He switched the light on and got out of bed, pausing to stare at the photograph of himself and Sandy on the dressing table. It had been taken in a hotel in Oxford during a conference on DNA fingerprinting, a few months before she disappeared. He was lounging back in a suit and tie, on a