Looking Good Dead

he smiled at her, and her heart leapt. He had come to help her – he was going to get her out of here, take her home to Tom and Jessica and Max!
    Suddenly his tongue slipped out of his lips and gave a quick flick, like a snake’s, wiping all the way round them, moistening them. Then he said in an American accent, ‘You look like a woman who takes it up the ass.’
    He put his hand in his pocket and Kellie heard the clink of metal. As fear squeezed her, crushing every cell in her body, she saw a delicate silver chain swing from his fingers.
    ‘I’ve brought you a present, Kellie,’ he said in a voice that told herhe was her new best friend. He held it up in front of her face; there was a small pendant hanging from the chain, and in the poor light she couldn’t quite make out the design engraved on it. It looked like some kind of beetle.
    ‘You can relax,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to take a few pictures for your family album!’
    ‘Grnnnngwg,’ she responded.
    ‘If you’re a good girl and do exactly what I tell you, I might even let you have a drink. Stoli vodka’, he said. ‘That’s your favourite, isn’t it?’
    In his other hand he held up a bottle.
    ‘I wouldn’t want you to die of thirst,’ he added. ‘That would really be a waste.’

50
    ‘So, an appropriate name for him then,’ Norman Potting said. ‘D’Eath.’ Pronouncing it death.
    Grace, Potting and Nicholl were seated in the oak-timbered saloon of the Black Lion in Rottingdean, each with a pint tumbler in front of him. Grace took a mouthful, holding the wide rim of the glass to his nose, breathing in the aroma of the hops, trying to get the reek of the sulphuric acid out of his nostrils.
    His hand was shaking, he realized. From his hangover? From what he had seen this morning?
    He remembered early on in his career when he had been a beat copper, out in a patrol car on nights, being called to attend a suicide on the London–Brighton railway line. A man had lain down on the track by the entrance to a tunnel, and the wheels had gone over his neck. He’d had to walk along the track and recover the head.
    He would never forget the surreal sight of it lying there in the beam of his torch, barely any blood at all leaking and the almost surgically precise cut. The dead man had been about fifty, with a ruddy, outdoor complexion. Grace had picked the head up by the shaggy thatch of ginger hair, and had been surprised by just how heavy it was. D’Eath’s head had been just as heavy.
    He watched the kaleidoscope of lights on a fruit machine, which no one was using, go through their routine. He could hear the faint chimes that went with them. It was still early; there was just a handful of people in the place. A trendy-looking man, a media type, was seated by the fireplace, drinking what looked like a Bloody Mary and reading the Observer . An elderly, shapeless couple sat a couple of tables away, slouched over their drinks in silence, like two sacks of vegetables.
    Thinking through the day’s agenda – which had been thrown badly by D’Eath’s murder – he was worrying about Nick Nicholl meeting the SIO of the murder investigation in Wimbledon, where a headless young woman wearing a bracelet with a scarab motif hadbeen discovered two months earlier. It might be better to go himself, one SIO to another, rather than send a junior member of his team.
    Turning to Nicholl, Grace asked, ‘What time are you meeting the SIO of the murder in Wimbledon?’
    ‘He’s going to call me this afternoon. He has a brother in Brighton; he’s coming down to have lunch with him.’
    ‘Let me know and I’ll come with you.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Despite being in his late twenties, Nick still had something of a socially clumsy youth about him. And he still could not get his head around calling him Roy, as Grace liked all his team to do.
    Grace checked the growing list of notes on his Blackberry. The smell of roasting meat coming from the kitchen was churning his already very queasy stomach. It would be a while, he thought, before he could swallow a morsel of food again. He wasn’t even sure if drinking with all the paracetamol he had taken was very smart. But this was one of those moments when he needed a drink. On duty or not.
    He took his phone out of his pocket and checked it was still on – just in case it had somehow got switched off and he had missed a call back from Cleo.
    He wondered briefly how Glenn Branson was getting on, worrying a