Dead Simple

– it was an age when people took stock of their lives. He’d read somewhere that when you reached forty you’d reached the shape your life was going to be for good. Somehow, being thirty-eight was OK. But thirty-nine meant you were very definitely nudging forty. And it wasn’t so long ago that he’d considered people who were forty to be old. Shit.
    He looked again at the list of files on the screen. Sometimes he felt closer to these people than to anyone else. Twenty murder victims who were dependent on him to bring their killers to justice. Twenty ghosts who haunted most of his waking thoughts – and sometimes his dreams, as well.

14
    He had the use of a pool car, but he chose to drive his own Alfa Romeo 147 saloon. Grace liked the car; he liked the hard seats, the firm ride, the almost spartan functionality of the interior, the fruity noise the exhaust made, the feeling of precision, the bright, sporty dials on the dash. There was a sense of exactness about the vehicle that suited his nature.
    The big, meaty wipers swung across the screen, clopping the rain from the glass, the tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, a wild Elvis Costello song playing on the stereo. The bypass swept up over a ridge and down into the valley. Through the mist of rain he could see the buildings of the coastal resort of Brighton and Hove sprawling ahead, and beyond the single remaining landmark chimney from the old Shoreham power station, the shimmering strip of grey, barely distinguishable from the sky, that was the English Channel.
    He’d grown up here among its streets and its villains. His dad used to reel off their names to him, the families that ran the drugs, the massage parlours, the posh crooked antique dealers who fenced stolen jewels, furniture, the fences who handled televisions and CD players.
    It had been a smugglers’ village, once. Then George IV had built a palace just a few hundred yards from his mistress’s house. Brighton had somehow never managed to shake off its criminal antecedents nor its reputation as a place for dirty weekends. But these gave the city of Brighton and Hove its edge over any other provincial resort in England, he thought, flicking his indicator and turning off the bypass.
    Grassmere Court was a red-brick block of flats about thirty years old, in an upmarket area of Hove, the city’s genteel district. It fronted onto a main road and overlooked a tennis club at the rear. The residents were a mixture of ages, mostly twenty- and thirty-something career singles and comfortably off elderly people. On an estate agent’s brochure it would probably have rated highly des res.
    Glenn Branson was waiting in the porch, wrapped in a bulky parka, tall, black, and bald as a meteorite, talking into his mobile. He looked more like a drug dealer than a copper at this moment. Grace smiled – his colleague’s massive, muscular frame from years of serious body-building reminded him of the broadcaster Clive James’s description of Arnie Schwarzenegger: that he looked like a condom filled with walnuts.
    ‘Yo, old wise man!’ Branson greeted him.
    ‘Cut it out, I’m only seven years older than you. One day you’ll get to this age too and you won’t find it funny.’ He grinned.
    They slapped high fives, then Branson, frowning, said, ‘You look like shit. Really, I mean it.’
    ‘Not all publicity agrees with me.’
    ‘Yup, well I couldn’t help noticing you grabbed yourself a few column inches in the rags this morning…’
    ‘You and just about everyone else on the planet.’
    ‘Man, you know, for an old-timer you’re pretty dumb.’
    ‘Dumb?’
    ‘You don’t wise up, Grace. Keep sticking your head above the parapet and one day someone’s going to shoot it clean off. There are some days when I think you are just about the biggest dickhead I know.’
    He unlocked the front door of the block and pushed it open.
    Following him in, Grace said, ‘Thanks, you really know how to cheer someone up.’ Then he wrinkled his nose. Blindfolded you would always know if you were in an ageing apartment building. The universal smell of worn carpets, tired paint, vegetables boiling behind one of the closed doors. ‘How’s the missus?’ he asked as they waited for the lift.
    ‘Great.’
    ‘And your kids?’
    ‘Sammy’s brilliant. Remi’s turning into a terror.’ He pressed the button for the lift.
    After a few moments, Grace said, ‘It wasn’t how the press made it seem, Glenn.’
    ‘Man, I know