Looking Good Dead

flinched at his swear word, then smiled nervously. ‘Everyone’s being a bit harsh on you, I think.’
    He glanced at his water, suddenly craving a cup of coffee. And a cigarette. And a drink. It was nearly lunchtime and he usually tried to avoid drinking until the evening, but he had a feeling he was going to break that rule today. The Independent Police Complaints Commission. Terrific. How many hours of his life was that going to consume over the coming months? He had known it was inevitable they would get involved, but having it confirmed seemed, suddenly, to make everything worse.
    His phone rang. He answered it as Eleanor stood there, and heard the Chief Superintendent’s crisp Mancunian accent.
    ‘Well done, Roy,’ Gary Weston said, sounding even more like his superior than ever. ‘You handled yourself well.’
    ‘Thanks. We’ve now got the IPCC to deal with.’
    ‘We’ll sort them. Are you free at three?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Come to my office – we’ll work on a report for them.’
    Grace thanked him. The moment he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was the Force Control Room. A civilian dispatcher called Betty Mallet, who had been there as long as he could remember, said, ‘Hello, Roy, how you doing?’
    ‘Been better,’ he said.
    ‘I’ve a request from Peacehaven CID for a senior officer to attend an investigation scene right away; are you free?’
    Grace groaned silently. Why couldn’t she have called someone else? ‘What can you tell me about it?’
    ‘A local resident was walking her dog this morning up on farmland between Peacehaven and Piddinghoe village. The dog ran off and came back with a human hand in its mouth. The CID have gone upthere with tracker dogs and they’ve located more human body parts – apparently very recent.’
    Like all detectives, Grace kept a leather holdall at the ready containing a protective suit, overshoes, gloves, torch and other essential items of crime-scene kit. ‘OK,’ he said, resignedly staring at his bag on the floor, not needing this, not needing it at all. ‘Give me the exact location – I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

7
    They were laughing at him as he walked up the street. The Weatherman could feel it in his bones, the way some people could feel the cold or the damp in their bones. Which was why he avoided eye contact with all and everyone.
    He could sense them all stopping, staring, turning, pointing, whispering, but he did not care. He was used to it; they’d been laughing at him all his life, or certainly for as far back into his twenty-eight years on this particular planet that he could remember. He was pretty sure it had been different on his previous planet, but they had blocked his memory of that.
    ‘Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, south-west four or five, veering north-west five to seven for a time, occasionally,’ he said to himself as he walked, indignant at being summoned out of the office and having to give up his lunch hour. ‘Gale eight in Viking, showers, dying out. Moderate or good. Forties, cyclonic five to seven, becoming north-west seven to severe gale nine, backing south-west four or five later. Showers then rain later. Moderate or good,’ he continued.
    He talked quickly, his mind not really on the forecast and his brain busy crunching through algorithms for a new program he was designing for work. It would make half the current system redundant, and there were people who would be pissed off at that. But then they shouldn’t have spent all that taxpayers’ money on crap hardware without knowing what they were doing in the first place.
    Life was a learning curve, you had to understand how to deal with it. Q in Star Trek had it sussed. ‘If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.’
    The Man Who Was Not Timid continued his journey, marching uphill through the lunchtime throng of Brighton’s West Street, past a Body Shop, a Woolwich Building Society, then SpecSavers.

    Thin and pasty-faced, he had a gawky frame, a clumsy haircut and eyebrows furrowed in fierce concentration behind unfashionably large glasses. Dressed in a fawn anorak, a white nylon shirt over a string vest, grey flannel trousers and vegan sandals, he carried a small rucksack on his back containing his laptop and his lunch. He walked,