Dead Simple

envying him his life, his demanding wife, his gorgeous kids, his damned normality. He washed up his breakfast things, staring out of his kitchen window at Noreen Grinstead across the street, in a brown polyester trouser suit, apron and yellow rubber gloves, a plastic hat over her head to shield her from the rain, busily soaping her silver Nissan on the driveway. A black and white cat darted across the road. On the radio the presenter, on Home Truths , was interviewing a woman whose parents had not spoken one word to each other throughout her childhood.
    Nineteen years in the police had taught him never to underestimate the weirdness of the human species. Yet barely a day went by when it didn’t seem to be getting even weirder.
    He went back into the study, dialled Brighton police station and asked if any of the Crime Scene Investigators were in. Moments later he was put through to Joe Tindall, a man he rated highly.
    Tindall was meticulous, hard-working and endlessly resourceful. A short, thin, bespectacled, man, with thinning wiry hair, he could have been a mad professor drawn straight from Central Casting. Before joining the police, Tindall had worked for several years for the British Museum as a forensic archaeologist. Joe was the man he was working with on the Tommy Lytle cold case.
    ‘Hey, Joe!’ Grace said. ‘No weekend off?’
    ‘Ha! I’m having to do the ballistics testing on the jewellery shop raid – everyone else has buggered off. And I’ve got the stabbing on Wednesday to deal with, thank you very much.’
    Grace remembered there had been a man stabbed to death in Brighton late on Wednesday night. No one knew yet whether it was a mugging or a tiff between two gay lovers.
    ‘Joe, I need some help. I have a sample of soil I’ve taken from a suspect vehicle. How can I find out, very quickly, what part of Sussex this soil is from? How specific could anyone get for me?’
    ‘How specific do you need?’
    ‘Within a few square feet.’
    ‘Very funny, Roy.’
    ‘I’m not smiling.’
    ‘Do you have a sample from the suspect area? I could get tests run and see if they match. We have chalk, clay, gravel and sand in Sussex.’
    ‘The suspect area is Ashdown Forest.’
    ‘The soil there is predominantly sand and clay. We can get matches from pollen, fossils, seeds, animal droppings, grasses, water, all kinds of stuff. How specific can you get?’
    ‘Within a few square miles.’
    ‘You’d have to do a lot better than that. There are areas all over England that would match Ashdown Forest.’
    ‘How long would it take you to get a match without a sample from the specific area?’
    ‘We’re talking weeks – and I’d need a huge team – and one hell of a budget.’
    ‘But you could do it?’
    ‘Given unlimited resources and enough time, I could give you a match in a small area.’
    ‘How small?’
    ‘That would depend. A few hundred square feet, perhaps.’
    ‘OK, thanks. I have something I want to bring over to you – are you in the office for a while?’
    ‘All day, Roy.’

44
    An hour later, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and a bright tie, Grace drove onto the sprawling, hilly Hollingbury industrial estate on the outskirts of Brighton, past an ASDA store, an ugly 1950s low-rise, and then slowed as he reached the long, low Art Deco Sussex House, headquarters of Sussex CID.
    Originally built as a factory, it had been bought by the police a few years back and transformed. If it wasn’t for the dominant police insignia on the facade, a passer-by could have mistaken it for a swanky, hip hotel. Painted gleaming white against red brickwork, with a long grass bank running its full length, it wasn’t until you passed the security guard and drove through the high, railed gates into the rear car park, filled with police vehicles, skips and with a formidable cell block beyond, that it became less glamorous.
    Grace parked underneath the building between a police off-roader and a police van, walked up to the rear entrance, held his ID card against the electronic panel to open the door and entered the building. He flashed his card at the security officer behind the front desk and made his way up the plushly carpeted stairs, past ancient truncheons in patterns mounted on blue boards and two more large blue boards halfway up the stairs on which were pinned photographs of some of the key police personnel working in this section of the building.
    He knew all the faces. Ian Steel and Verity