Dead Simple

spiv. But whoever he was, he did not deserve to be lying here, being pecked away by blowflies, with the back of his head stove in.
    ‘Any sense of how long he’s been here?’ Grace asked.
    Churchman stood up, to his full six-foot height. ‘Tough one. Not long. No sign of first-generation larvae infestation; no discolouration on the skin – in the conditions we’ve had, several days of warm and damp air, we would expect rapid deterioration. He’s been here twenty-four hours max, possibly less.’
    Grace’s brain was churning, thinking about all the young males aged twenty to thirty who had been reported missing in the past couple of weeks. He knew the statistics only too well, from all his years of searching for Sandy. Two hundred and fifty thousand people a year in England alone went missing. Of those, one-third were never seen again. Some were dead, their bodies disposed of so efficiently they would never be found. Others had run away, beyond the reach of the best efforts of the police. Or else they had gone overseas and changed their identities.
    He only ever saw just a fraction of the missing person enquiries: those who had gone in suspicious circumstances; the ones the police were looking into and the tiny percentage of those he got asked to review.
    The timescale fitted. The looks sort of fitted. Sort of. There was only one sure way to find out.
    ‘Let’s get him to the mortuary,’ he said. ‘See if we can get someone to identify him.’

59
    Naked apart from the towel around his midriff, Mark padded out of the shower into the locker room of the sports club. He’d worked up a sweat, but it had been a lousy game of tennis. He had played badly against his regular Sunday-morning opponent, an olive-skinned half-Danish, half-American investment banker with a wiry determination called Tobias Kormind. He didn’t usually beat Tobias, but he normally took one set off him. Today, distracted and unable to focus, he had only taken a couple of games in the entire match.
    Mark liked Tobias because he had never been part of Michael’s tight clique of old friends. And Tobias, who had a creative brain and was well connected in the London banking world, had given Mark some smart ideas on how to develop Double-M Properties beyond the confines of Brighton, and build it into an international property empire. But Michael had never wanted to know. He never saw the reason to take gambles; he just wanted to continue down the plodding path they were on, doing one development at a time, selling it, then moving to the next.
    Tobias gave him a friendly pat on the back. ‘Guess your mind wasn’t on the game this morning, huh?’
    ‘I guess not, I’m sorry.’
    ‘Hey, you know, you’ve had terrible things happen to you this week. You lost four of your best friends, and your business partner has vanished.’ Tobias, standing naked, towelled his hair vigorously. ‘So what are the police doing? You have to get behind them, you know, push them – like everybody else. They are probably all overworked and will respond best to the people who push them.’
    Mark smiled. ‘Ashley’s a pretty tenacious girl – she’s giving them hell.’
    ‘How is she doing?’
    ‘Bearing up – just about. It was tough for her yesterday – some people she hadn’t been able to reach showed up for the wedding.’
    Tobias had never met either Michael or Ashley, so he was not able to add much. ‘Sounds bad, if he didn’t show for the wedding.’
    Mark nodded, inserting his key into his locker door. As he pulled it open his mobile, which he had left inside, beeped twice. The display informed him that he had four messages.
    Apologizing to Tobias, and stepping a few paces away from him, he played them back. The first was from his mother, asking if there was any news, and reminding him not to be late for Sunday lunch today as she was going to a concert in the afternoon. The next was from Ashley, sounding worried. ‘Mark? Mark? Oh, guess you are on court. Call as soon as you get this.’ Then another one from Ashley. ‘It’s me, trying you again.’ The fourth was also from Ashley. ‘Mark – please call, it’s really urgent.’
    Moving further away from Tobias, he felt the blood draining from his head. Had Michael turned up?
    All night he had been thinking, trying to figure out how Michael had got out of the coffin and what he would say to Michael if confronted by him. Would Michael believe that he did not know the plan? All it needed was