Dead Simple

on desks, silent fax machines, screensavers playing their eternal loops. Sometimes – at moments like this when he felt so disconnected from the real world – he wondered if this was what it was like to be a ghost, drifting unseen past everyone else’s lives.
    Holding his security card up to the panel at the end of the room, he pushed open the door, entering a long, silent, grey-carpeted corridor that smelled of fresh paint. He passed a large red felt-faced noticeboard headed ‘OPERATION LISBON’ beneath which was the photograph of an oriental-looking man, with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocky beach at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn on it.
    This unidentified man had been found dead four weeks ago at the bottom of the cliff. At first he was assumed to be another jumper, until the post-mortem had revealed to the pathologist that he was already dead at the time he took his plunge.
    On the opposite wall was ‘OPERATION CORMORANT’, with a photograph of a pretty teenage brunette who had been found raped and strangled on the outskirts of Brighton.
    Grace passed the Outside Enquiry Team office on his left, a large room where detectives drafted in on major incidents would base themselves for the duration, then entered the door immediately opposite, marked ‘INTEL ONE’.
    The Intelligence Office Room was the new nerve centre for all major incidents. As he entered it, everything about it felt new, smelled new, even the attitude of the people working in here – apart from a distinct odour of Chinese food tonight. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, the room, with its fresh white walls, had an airy feel, good light, good energy, very different to the messy buzz of police station incident rooms that Grace had grown up with.
    It had an almost futuristic feel, as if it could as easily have housed Mission Control at Houston, and was a large, L-shaped room, divided up by three principal work stations, each comprising a curved, light-wood desk with space for up to eight people to sit, and massive whiteboards, one marked ‘OPERATION CORMORANT’, one marked ‘OPERATION LISBON’ and one ‘OPERATION SNOWDRIFT’, each covered in crime scene photographs and progress charts. Another would shortly be labelled ‘OPERATION SALSA’, the random name the police headquarters computer in Scotland Yard had thrown out for his Michael Harrison investigation.
    Mostly the names had nothing to do with the investigations themselves, and occasionally they had to be changed. He remembered one time when the name ‘OPERATION CAUCASIAN’ had been given to the investigation of a black man who had been found dismembered in the boot of a car. It had been changed to something less controversial. But with Operation Salsa, the dumb computer had by chance struck a right chord. Grace had the very definite feeling of being involved in a song and dance.
    Unlike the work stations in most police offices, there was no sign of anything personal on the desks or up on the walls. No pictures of families, footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Every single object in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, was related to the matters under investigation. Apart from the Pot Noodle a weary-looking, long-haired Detective Inspector Michael Cowan was tucking into with a plastic fork at the end of one of the work stations.
    Heading another of the work stations, glued to a flat computer screen, with a beaker of Coke in his hand, sat Jason Piette, one of the shrewdest Detective Inspectors that Grace had ever worked with. He would have been happy to place money on Piette one day becoming head of the Met – the top police job in the country.
    Each of the work stations was manned by a minimum team of an office manager, normally a Detective Sergeant or Detective Inspector, a system supervisor, normally a lesser-ranking police officer, an analyst, an indexer and a typist.
    Michael Cowan, wearing a loose checked shirt over jeans, greeted Grace cordially. ‘How you doing, Roy? You’re looking a bit smart.’
    ‘Thought I should dress up for you boys – obviously I didn’t need to bother.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah!’
    ‘What crap are you eating?’ Grace responded. ‘You have any idea what’s in that stuff?’
    Michael Cowan rolled his eyes, grinning. ‘Chemicals, they keep me going.’
    Grace shook his head. ‘Smells like a