Dead Simple

more likely, Grace thought, deliberately ignoring it.
    Sandy used to drive fast too. That was part of her natural recklessness. He used to be so scared that Sandy would have a bad accident one day, because she never seemed to be able to get her head around the natural laws of physics that determined when a car would make it around a corner and when it would not. Yet in all the seven years they were together she never once crashed, or even scratched, her car.
    Ahead of them, to his relief, he saw the sign – ‘ BOLNEY CAR POUND ’ – fixed to tall sheet-metal fencing, topped with barbed wire. Branson braked hard and turned in, past a guard dogs warning sign, into the forecourt of a large modern warehouse building.
    Grabbing an umbrella from the boot, and huddling beneath it, they rang the bell on the entryphone beside a grey door. Moments later it was opened by a plump, greasy-haired man of about thirty, wearing a blue boiler suit over a filthy T-shirt, and holding a half-eaten sandwich in a tattooed hand.
    ‘Detective Sergeant Branson and Detective Superintendent Grace,’ Branson said. ‘I rang earlier.’
    Chewing a mouthful, the guy looked blank for a moment. Behind him, several badly wrecked cars and vans sat in the warehouse. His eyes rolled pensively. ‘The Transit, yeah?’
    ‘Yup’, Branson said.
    ‘White? Came in Tuesday from Wheeler’s?’
    ‘That’s the one.’
    ‘It’s outside.’
    They signed in, then followed him across the warehouse floor and out through a side door, into an enclosure that was a good acre in size, Grace estimated, filled with wrecked vehicles as far as the eye could see. A few were under tarpaulins, but most were exposed to the elements.
    Holding the umbrella high, just clearing the top of Branson’s head, he looked at a Rentokil van that was burnt out after a bad frontal collision – it was hard to imagine anyone had survived in it. Then he noticed a Porsche sports car, compacted to little more than ten feet in length. And a Toyota saloon with its roof cut off.
    The place always gave him the heebie-jeebies. Grace had never worked in the Traffic Division, but in his days as a beat copper he’d attended his share of traffic accidents and it was impossible not to be affected by them. It could always happen to anyone. You could set out on a journey, happy, full of plans, and moments later, in the blink of an eye, maybe through no fault of your own, your car was turned into a monster that smashed you to pieces, cut your limbs off and maybe even broiled you alive.
    He shuddered. The vehicles that ended up in this place, under secure lock and key, were the ones in the region that had been involved in serious or fatal accidents. They were kept here until the Crash Investigation Unit and sometimes Crime Scene Investigators had obtained all the information they required, before going to a breaker’s yard.
    The fat man in the boiler suit pointed at a twisted mass of white, with part of its roof cut away, the cab, with the windscreen gone, sheared jaggedly away from the rest of the van, and much of the interior was covered in white plastic sheeting. ‘That’s the one.’
    Both Grace and Branson stared at it in silence. Grace couldn’t help his mind dwelling for several uncomfortable moments on the sheer horror of the image. The two of them walked around the van. Grace noticed mud caked on the wheel hubs, and more, heavy mud on the sills and splashes of it up the paintwork, slowly dissolving in the rain.
    Handing the umbrella to his colleague, he wrenched open the buckled driver’s door, and immediately was hit by the cloying, heavy stench of putrefying blood. It didn’t matter how many times he experienced it, each new occasion was just as bad. It was the smell of death itself.
    Holding his breath to try to block it out, he pulled back the sheeting. The steering wheel had been hacked off and the driver’s part of the front bench seat was bent right back. There were blood stains all over the front seat, the floor and the dash.
    Covering them with the sheeting, he climbed in. It felt dark and unnaturally silent. It gave him the creeps. Part of the engine had come through the flooring and the pedals were raised in an unnatural position. Reaching across, he opened the glove compartment, then pulled out an owner’s manual, a pack of parking vouchers, some fuel receipts and a couple of unlabelled tape cassettes. He handed the cassettes to Glenn.
    ‘Better have a listen to