Dead Simple

there Thursday night, but not last night. The coffin lid was screwed down tight. And Michael was not Houdini.
    So if Michael had been there Thursday and was not there now, someone must have let him out. And then screwed back the lid. But why?
    Michael’s humour?
    And if he had got out why didn’t he show up for the wedding?
    Shaking his head he arrived back at his starting point. Michael was not in the coffin and he had imagined the voice. Ashley was convinced of that. There were moments when he convinced himself. But not strongly enough.
    He needed to talk this through with Ashley some more. What if Michael had somehow got out and discovered their plans?
    Then surely he would have confronted one or the other of them by now.
    He stood up, wondering if he should go over to Ashley’s. She was worrying him, behaving so damned coldly towards him, as if this whole thing was his bloody fault. But he knew what she would say to him.
    He stood up and paced around the room again. If Michael was alive, if he had got out of the coffin, what could he find out from the emails on his Palm?
    Mark suddenly realized in the panic of the past few days he had overlooked one very simple way of checking. Michael always backed up the contents of his Palm onto the office server.
    He went into his study, flipped open the lid of his laptop and logged on. Then cursed. The damned server was down.
    And there was only one way to get it back up and running.

63
    Max Candille was almost impossibly good-looking, Roy Grace always thought on each occasion he met him. In his mid-twenties, with bleached blond hair, blue eyes and striking features, he was a modern Adonis. He could surely have been a top model, or a movie star. Instead, in his modest semi-detached house in the suburban town of Purley, he had chosen to make his gift, as he called it, his career. Even so, he was quietly becoming a rising media star.
    The bland exterior of the house, with its mock-Tudor beams, neat lawn and a clean Smart parked in the driveway, gave few clues about the nature of its occupant.
    The whole interior of the house – the downstairs at least, which was all Grace had ever seen – was white. The walls, the carpets, the furniture, the slender modern sculptures, the paintings, even the two cats which prowled around like bonsai versions of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers, were white. And seated in front of him, in an ornate rococo chair, with a white frame and white satin upholstery, sat the medium, dressed in a white roll-neck, white Calvin Klein jeans and white leather boots.
    He held his china demitasse of herbal tea delicately between his finger and thumb and spoke in a voice that was borderline camp.
    ‘You look tired, Roy. Working too hard?’
    ‘I apologize again for coming so late,’ Grace said, sipping the espresso Candille had made for him.
    ‘The spirit world doesn’t have the same time frames as the human one, Roy. I don’t consider myself a slave to any clock. Look!’ He put down his tea, held up both his hands, and pulled each sleeve back to reveal he wore no watch. ‘See?’
    ‘You’re lucky.’
    ‘Oscar Wilde is my hero when it comes to time. He was always unpunctual. One time when he arrived exceptionally late for a dinner party the hostess angrily pointed at the clock on the wall and said, “Mr Wilde, are you aware what the time is?” And he replied, “My dear lady, pray tell me, how can that nasty little machine possibly know what the great golden sun is up to?”’
    Grace grinned. ‘Good one.’
    ‘So, are you going to tell me what brings you here today, or should I guess? Might we be concerned with something to do with a wedding? Am I warm?’
    ‘No prizes for that one, Max.’
    Candille grinned. Grace rated the man. He didn’t always get things right, but his hit rate was high. In Grace’s long experience, he didn’t believe that any medium was capable of always getting everything right, which is why he liked to work with several, sometimes cross-checking one against another.
    No medium he had worked with so far had been able to tell him what had happened to Sandy – and he had been to many. In the months following her disappearance he visited every medium he could find who had any kind of a reputation. He had tried a few times with Max Candille, who had been honest enough at their very first meeting to tell him that he simply did not know, that he was unable to make a connection with her. Some people left a trail behind, all