Looking Good Dead

which now housed the headquarters of Sussex CID, Grace sat down in his swivel chair. Like almost every item of furniture in the room it was almost fresh out of its box, and didn’t yet feel familiar or comfortable.
    He wriggled around in the chair for a moment, played with the toggle levers, but it still wasn’t great. He had liked his old office down at Brighton police station much better. The room had been bigger, the furniture beat-up, but the place was in the centre of town and had a buzz. These new premises were on an industrial estate on the edge of the city and felt soulless. Miles of long, silent, freshly carpeted and painted corridors, office after office filled with new furniture, and no canteen! Nowhere to get a cuppa apart from a do-it-yourself or a bloody vending machine. Nowhere to even get a sandwich – you had to walk across the road to the Asda hypermarket. So much for design committees.
    He stared fondly for a moment at his prized collection of three dozen vintage cigarette lighters hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window, and reflected that for weeks his work schedule had prevented him from pursuing one of his favourite pastimes – something he used to share with his wife, Sandy, and in which he now found great solace – trawling antique markets and car boot sales in search of old gadgets.
    Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill , which Sandy had bought in happier times at an auction, for his twenty-sixth birthday.
    Mounted in glass beneath it was a seven-pound, six-ounce browntrout he’d picked up at a stall in the Portobello Road. Its location beneath the clock was no accident – it enabled him to use a tired old joke when briefing new detectives about patience and big fish.
    The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of loose paperwork, his holdall containing his crime-scene kit, and small towers of files.
    Each file on the floor stood for an unsolved murder. He stared at one green envelope, its corner obscured by a whorl of carpet fluff. It represented a pile of about twenty boxes of files either stacked on an office floor, or bulging out of a cupboard, or locked up, gathering mould in a damp police garage in a station in the area where the murder had happened. It was the open file on a gay vet called Richard Ventnor, battered to death in his surgery twelve years ago.
    It contained scene-of-crime photographs, forensic reports, bagged evidence, witness statements, transcripts – all separated into orderly bundles and secured with coloured ribbon. This was part of his current brief, to dig back into the county’s unsolved murders, liaise with the CID division where the crime had happened, looking for anything that might have changed in the intervening years that could justify reopening the case.
    He knew most of each file’s contents by heart – a benefit of the memory that had propelled him through exams both at school and in the force. To him, each stack represented more than just a human life that had been taken – and a killer who was still free – it symbolized something very close to his own heart. It meant that a family had been unable to lay its past to rest because a mystery had never been solved, justice had never been done. And he knew that with some of these files being more than thirty years old, he was the last hope the victims and their relatives probably had. There was just one case where he was currently making some real progress. Tommy Lytle’s.
    Tommy Lytle was Grace’s oldest cold case. At the age of eleven, twenty-seven years ago, Tommy had set out from school on a February afternoon, to walk home. He’d never been seen again. The only lead at the time had been a Morris van, seen by a witness who had had the presence of mind to write down the number. But no link between the owner, a weirdo loner with a history of sex offences on minors, hadever been established. And then, two months ago, by complete coincidence, the van had showed up on Grace’s radar when the classic car enthusiast who now owned it got stopped for drunken driving.
    The advances in forensics from twenty-seven years back were beyond quantum. With modern DNA testing police forensic scientists boasted, not without substance, that if a human being had ever been in a room, no matter how long ago, that