Dead Simple

an acrid tinge.
    Power-dressed in a black two-piece with a crisp white blouse, she sat behind an expanse of polished rosewood desk, in her immaculate ground-floor office in the Queen Anne police headquarters building in Lewes, with its view out across a trimmed lawn. The desk was bare except for a slim crystal vase containing three purple tulips, framed photographs of her husband (a police officer several years older but three ranks her junior) and her two children, an ammonite pen holder and a stack of the morning’s newspapers fanned out like a triumphant poker hand.
    Grace always wondered how his superiors kept their offices – and their desks – so tidy. All his working life, his own work spaces had been tips. Repositories of sprawling files, unanswered correspondence, lost pens, travel receipts and out-trays that had long given up on the struggle to keep pace with the in-trays. To get to the very top, he decided, required some kind of paperwork management skill for which he was lacking the gene.
    Rumour was that Alison Vosper had had a breast cancer operation three years ago. But Grace knew that’s all it would ever be, just rumour, because the Assistant Chief Constable kept a wall around herself. Nonetheless, behind her hard-cop carapace, there was a certain vulnerability that he connected to. In truth, at times he fancied her, and there were occasions when those waspish brown eyes of hers twinkled with humour, and when he sensed she might almost be flirting with him. This morning was not one of them.
    No handshake. No greeting. Just a curt nod for him to sit in one of the twin high-backed chairs in front of her desk. Then she launched straight in, with a look that was part reproach, part pure anger.
    ‘What the hell is this, Roy?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘ Sorry? ’
    He nodded. ‘I – look, this whole thing got taken out of context—’
    She interrupted him before he could continue. ‘You realize this could bring the whole case crashing down on us?’
    ‘I think we can contain it.’
    ‘I’ve had a dozen calls from the national press already this morning. You’ve become a laughing stock. You’ve made us look like a bunch of idiots. Why have you done this?’
    Grace was silent for some moments. ‘She’s an extraordinary woman, this medium; she’s helped us in the past. It never occurred to me anyone would find out.’
    Vosper leaned back in her chair, staring at Grace, shaking her head from side to side. ‘I had great hopes for you. Your promotion was because of me. I put myself on the line for you, Roy. You know that, don’t you?’
    Not strictly true, but this wasn’t the moment to start splitting hairs. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I appreciate it.’
    She pointed at the newspapers. ‘And this is how you show it? This is what you deliver?’
    ‘Come on, Alison, I’ve delivered Hossain.’
    ‘And now you’ve given his defence counsel a crack big enough to drive a coach and horses through.’
    ‘No,’ he said, rising to this. ‘That shoe had already been through forensics, signed out and signed back in. They can’t lay an exhibits contamination charge on me. They might be trying to take a pop at my methods, but this won’t have any material effect on the case.’
    She raised her manicured fingers and started examining them. Roy could see the tips were black from newsprint ink. Her scent seemed to be getting stronger, as if she were an animal excreting venom. ‘You’re the senior officer, it’s your case. If you let them discredit you it could have a very big effect on the outcome. Why the hell did you do it?’
    ‘We have a murder trial and we don’t have a body. We know Hossain had Raymond Cohen murdered, right?’
    She nodded. The evidence Grace had amassed was impressive and persuasive.
    ‘But with no body there’s always a weak link.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve had results in the past from mediums. Every police force in the nation’s used them at one time or another. Leslie Whittle, right?’
    Leslie Whittle was a celebrated case. Back in 1975 the seventeen-year-old heiress had been kidnapped and vanished into thin air. Unable to find any clues to her whereabouts, the police finally acted on information from a clairvoyant using dowsing techniques, who led them to a drainage shaft, where they discovered the unfortunate girl tethered and dead.
    ‘Leslie Whittle wasn’t exactly a triumph of police work, Roy.’
    ‘There have been others, since,’ he countered.
    She