Dead Tomorrow

officer, long practised, put his face up close to hers, much closer than he needed just to hear her. He wanted to smell her, or, more particularly, smell her breath. He had a keen nose and he could frequently detect last night’s alcohol on someone who had been on a bender. There might be just the faintest trace now, but it was hard to tell, as it was so heavily masked by minty chewing gum and the reek of cigarette tobacco.
    ‘Would you step into my car, front passenger seat? I’ll be with you in a few minutes,’ Upperton said.
    ‘She pulled straight out!’ a man in an anorak said to him, almost incredulously. ‘I was right behind him.’
    ‘I’d appreciate your name and address, sir,’ the PC said.
    ‘Of course. She just pulled straight out. Mind you, he was travelling,’ the man admitted. ‘I was in my Range Rover.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘He absolutely flew past me.’
    Upperton could see the ambulance arriving. ‘I’ll be right back, sir,’ he said, and hurried down to meet the paramedics.
    How they handled thescene from here would very much depend on their initial assessment. If in their view it looked likely to be a fatality, then they would have to close the road until the Crash Scene Investigators had carried out their survey. In the meantime he radioed the controller and asked for two more units.

7
    Festive parties hadstarted early this year. At just after quarter to nine on Wednesday morning Detective Superintendent Roy Grace was sitting in his office nursing a hangover. He never used to suffer from hangovers, or at least very rarely, but recently they seemed to have become a regular occurrence. Maybe it was an age thing–he would be forty next August. Or maybe it was…
    What exactly?
    He should be feeling more settled in himself, he knew. For the first time in coming up to ten years since his wife, Sandy, had vanished, he was in a steady relationship, with a woman he really adored. He had recently been promoted to head up Major Crime, and the biggest obstacle to his career, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, who had never liked him, was moving to the other end of the country to take up a Deputy Chief Constable position.
    So why, he kept wondering, did he so often wake up feeling like shit? Why was he drinking so recklessly suddenly?
    Was it the knowledge that Cleo, who was about to turn thirty, was subtly–and sometimes not so subtly–angling for commitment? He had already effectively moved in with her and Humphrey, her mongrel rescue puppy–at least on a semi-permanent basis. The reason was in part that he really did want to be with her, but also because his mate and colleague Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, whose marriage was on the rocks, had become an increasingly permanent lodger in his house. Much though he loved this man, they were too much of an odd couple to live together, and it was easier to leave Glenn to his own devices, although it pained Roy to see the mess he kept the place in–and in particular the mess he had made of Roy’s prized vinyl and CD music collection.
    He drained his secondcoffee of the morning, then unscrewed the cap of a bottle of sparkling water. Last night he had attended the Christmas dinner of the staff of Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, in a Chinese restaurant on the Marina, and then, instead of doing the sensible thing and going home afterwards, he had gone on with a crowd to the Rendezvous Casino, where he had drunk several brandies–which always gave him the worst hangovers–lost a rapid £50 on roulette and a further £100 at a blackjack table, before Cleo had–fortunately for him–dragged him away.
    Normally at his desk by seven in the morning, he had just arrived in the office ten minutes ago, and so far the only task he had been able to perform, other than making himself coffee, was logging on to his computer. And tonight he had to go out again, to the retirement party of a chief superintendent called Jim Wilkinson.
    He stared out of the window, at the car park and the ASDA supermarket across the road, then at the urban landscape of his beloved city beyond. It was a fine, crisp morning, the air so clear he could see the distant tall white chimney of the power station at Shoreham Harbour, with the blue-grey ribbon of the English Channel beyond, before it blended into the sky on the distant horizon. He’d only been in this office for a short while, after moving across from the other side of the building, where his view had been