Looking Good Dead

with a starched collar, and a tie that looked like it had been designed by a colour-blind chimpanzee on crack.
    ‘Yo, old timer!’ Glenn Branson said, in a voice loud enough to cause everyone in the room to look up for a moment.
    Grace glanced down at the rest of his eight core team members with a brief smile. He had taken most of them straight from his last case, which meant they hadn’t had much of a break, if any, but they were a good bunch and had worked well together. From years of experience he had learned that if you had a good team, it was worth keeping it intact if at all possible.
    The most senior was Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, cheery-faced beneath a tangle of hennaed brown hair, an open box of Maltesers, as ever, inches from her keyboard. He watched her typing in deep concentration, every few moments her right hand moving from the keyboard as if it were some creature with a life of its own to pluck a chocolate and deliver it to her mouth. She was a slim woman yet ate more than any human being Grace had ever come across.

    Next to her sat Detective Constable Nick Nicholl, in his late twenties, short-haired and tall as a beanpole, a zealous detective and a fast football forward who Grace was encouraging to take up rugby, thinking he would be perfect to play in the police team he had been asked to be president of this coming autumn.
    Opposite him, reading her way through a thick wodge of computer printout, was rookie DC Emma-Jane Boutwood. A pretty young woman with long blonde hair and a perfect figure, Grace had initially thought her a lightweight when she had first joined his team on the last case. But she had rapidly proved herself a feisty officer, and he had a feeling she had a brilliant future in the force, if she stayed.
    ‘So?’ Glenn Branson said. ‘I’ve changed my hunch. How do I convince you my new hunch is right? Teresa Wallington.’
    ‘Who she?’ Grace asked.
    ‘A Peacehaven girl. Engaged. Never turned up to her engagement party last night.’
    The words twisted something cold deep inside Grace. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘I spoke to her fiancé. He’s real.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Grace said. His instincts told him it was too soon, but he did not want to dampen Glenn Branson’s enthusiasm. He studied the photographs of the crime scene on the wall, which had been rushed through at his request. He looked at a close-up of the severed hand, then the grisly shots of the butchered torso in the black bag.
    ‘Trust me, Roy.’
    Still looking at the photographs, Grace said, ‘Trust you?’
    ‘There you go doing it again!’ Branson said.
    ‘Doing what?’ Grace asked, puzzled.
    ‘Doing what you always do to me, man. Answering with a question.’
    ‘That’s because I never understand what the hell you are on about!’
    ‘Bulllllll-shit!’
    ‘How many missing women do we have who are not yet eliminated?’
    ‘No change from yesterday. Still five. From a reasonable radius of our area. More if we include nationwide.’
    ‘No word from the lab on the DNA yet?’ Grace asked.

    ‘Tonight, by six o’clock, they hope they’ll know whether the victim is on their database,’ DC Boutwood interjected.
    Grace glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes then he needed to go straight on to the mortuary. He did some quick mental arithmetic. According to Frazer Theobald’s best guess in the field yesterday, the woman had been dead for less than twenty-four hours. It was not uncommon for someone to go AWOL for one day. But two days would start causing real concern among friends, relatives and work colleagues. Today was likely to be productive in at least establishing a shortlist of who the victim might be.
    Addressing DC Nicholl he said, ‘Have we got a cast of the footprints?’
    ‘It’s being done.’
    ‘ Being done is not good enough,’ Grace said a little testily. ‘I said at this morning’s briefing I wanted two officers out with casts, going round outdoor clothing stores in the area seeing if there’s a match. Chances are someone bought boots for the occasion. If they did, they may be on a CCTV camera. There can’t be that many stores that sell heavy-duty boots in the area – make sure I have a report for our sixty thirty p.m. briefing.’
    DC Nicholl nodded and immediately picked up his phone.
    ‘It’s the second day she hasn’t contacted him,’ Branson pressed.
    ‘Who?’ Grace said distractedly.
    ‘Teresa Wallington. She’s living with her fiancé. There doesn’t sound like