Dead Simple

chaise longue. Sandy, in an evening dress, was lying back against him, hair up in blonde ringlets, beaming her constant irrepressible grin at a waiter they had sequestered to take the picture.
    He went over, picked up the frame, kissed the photo then set it down again, and went into the bathroom to urinate. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee was a recent affliction, a result of the health fad he was on, drinking the recommended minimum eight glasses of water a day. Then he padded, clad only in the T-shirt he slept in, downstairs.
    Sandy had such great taste. Their house itself was modest, like all the ones in the street, a three-bedroom mock-Tudor semi, built in the 1930s, but she had made it beautiful. She loved browsing the Sunday supplements, women’s magazines and design magazines, ripping out pages and showing him ideas. They’d spent hours together, stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, varnishing, painting.
    Sandy got into Feng Shui, and built a little water garden. She filled the house with candles. Bought organic food whenever she could. She thought about everything, questioned everything, was interested in everything, and he loved that. Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, cementing their life together, making all their plans.
    She was a good gardener, too. She understood about flowers, plants, shrubs, bushes, trees. When to plant, how to prune. Grace liked to mow the lawn but that was about where his skills ended. The garden was neglected now and he felt guilty about that, sometimes wondering what she would say if she returned.
    Her car was still in the garage. Forensics had been through it with a toothcomb after it had been recovered, then he’d brought it back home and garaged it. For years he kept the battery on trickle charge, just in case…The same way he kept her slippers out on the bedroom floor, her dressing gown hanging on its peg, her toothbrush in its mug.
    Waiting for her return.
    Wide awake, he poured himself two fingers of Glenfiddich, then sat down in his white armchair in the all-white lounge with its wooden floor and pressed the remote. He flicked through three movies in succession, then a bunch of other Sky channels, but nothing grabbed his attention for more than a few minutes. He played some music, switching restlessly from the Beatles to Miles Davis to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, then back to silence.
    He picked one of his favourite books, Colin Wilson’s The Occult , from the rows of books on the paranormal that filled every inch of his bookshelves, then sat back and turned the pages listlessly, sipping his whisky, unable to concentrate on more than a couple of paragraphs.
    That damned defence barrister strutting around in court today had got under his skin, and was now strutting around inside his mind. Richard bloody Charwell. Pompous sodding bastard. Worse, Grace knew he had been outsmarted by the man. Outmanoeuvred and outsmarted. And that really stung.
    He picked up the remote again and punched up the news on Teletext. Nothing beyond the same stories that had been around for a couple of days now and were getting stale. No breaking political scandal, no terrorist outrage, no earthquake, no air disaster. He didn’t wish ill on anyone, but he had been hoping for something to fill up the morning’s headlines and airwaves. Something other than the murder trial of Suresh Hossain.
    His luck was out.

12
    Two national tabloids and one broadsheet led with front-page splashes on the murder trial of Suresh Hossain, and all the rest of the British morning papers had coverage inside.
    It wasn’t the trial itself that was the focus of their interest, but the remarks in the witness box made by Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who at 8.30 in the morning found himself on the carpet in front of his boss, Alison Vosper, feeling as if the clock had been wound back three decades, and he was back at school, trembling in front of his headmistress.
    One of Grace’s colleagues had nicknamed her ‘No. 27’, and it had stuck. No. 27 was a sweet and sour dish on the local Chinese takeaway menu. Conversely, when ordering the dish, it was always referred to as an Alison Vosper. That’s exactly what she was, sweet and sour.
    In her early forties, with wispy blonde hair cut conservatively short, and framing a hard but attractive face, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was very definitely sour this morning. Even the powerful floral scent she was wearing had