Looking Good Dead

any reason why she failed to turn up.’
    ‘And the other four on our list?’
    ‘None of those have been seen today either,’ he admitted grudgingly.
    Although thirty-one, Branson had only been a cop for six years, after a somewhat false start in life as a nightclub bouncer.
    Grace liked him a lot; he was smart and caring, and he had great hunches. Hunches were important in police work but they had a downside – they could lead officers to jump to conclusions too quickly, without properly analysing other possibilities, and then subconsciously select evidence to fit their hunch. Sometimes Grace had to curb Branson’s enthusiasm for his own good.

    But at this moment it wasn’t just Branson’s hunch on the case that Grace needed him for. It was on something distinctly extracurricular.
    ‘Want to take a drive to the mortuary with me?’
    Branson stared at him with raised eyebrows. ‘Shit, man, is that where you take all your dates?’
    Grace grinned. Branson was closer to the mark than he realized.

15
    Tom Bryce was seated in a long, narrow ground-floor boardroom in a small office block on an industrial estate close to Heathrow airport – so close that the jumbo he could see out of the window seemed to be on a flight path that would land it slap in the middle of this room. It screamed overhead, flaps lowered, wheels down, passing over the roof like the shadow of a giant fish, with what seemed like inches to spare.
    The room was tacky. It had brown suede walls decorated with framed posters of horror and science fiction films, a twenty-seater bronze meeting table that looked as if it had been looted from a Tibetan temple, and extremely uncomfortable high-back chairs, no doubt designed to keep meetings short.
    His customer, Ron Spacks, was a former rock promoter, wheezy and nudging sixty. Sporting a toupee that looked as if it hadn’t been put on properly and teeth that were far too immaculate for his age and his substance-ravaged face, Spacks sat opposite Tom, dressed in a very faded and threadbare Grateful Dead T-shirt, jeans and sandals, sifting through the BryceRight catalogue and muttering ‘Yeah’ to himself every few moments when he alighted on something of interest.
    Tom sipped his beaker of coffee and waited patiently. Gravytrain Distributing was one of the largest DVD distributors in the country. The gold medallion around Ron Spacks’s neck, the rhinestone rings on his fingers, the black Ferrari in the lot outside, all testified to his success.
    Spacks, as he had proudly told Tom on previous occasions, had started with a stall off the Portobello Road, flogging second-hand DVDs when no one even knew what DVDs were. Tom had little doubt that much of the man’s empire had been founded on pirated merchandise, but he was in no state to make moral choices about his customers. In the past Spacks had ordered large, and always paid on the nail.

    ‘Yeah,’ Spacks said. ‘You see, Tom, my customers don’t want nothing fancy. What you got new this year?’
    ‘CD beer mats – on page forty-two, I think. You can have them overprinted.’
    Spacks turned to the page. ‘Yeah,’ he said, in a tone of voice that said quite the reverse. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘So how much would a hundred thousand cost – get ’em down to a quid, could yer?’
    Tom felt lost without his computer. It was at the office, once more being resuscitated by Chris Webb. All the costings for his products were on that machine, and without them he daren’t start discounting – particularly on a potential order of this size.
    ‘I’ll have to get back to you. I can email you later today.’
    ‘Have to be a quid max, yeah,’ Spacks said, and popped open a can of Coke. ‘I’m really looking for close to seventy pence.’
    Tom’s mobile rang. Glancing at the display he saw it was Kellie and pressed to terminate the call.
    Seventy pence was no go, he knew that for sure – they cost him more than that – but he decided not to tell Spacks for the moment. ‘I think that would be tight,’ he said tactfully.
    ‘Yeah. Tell you something else I’m interested in. About twenty-five gold Rolexes, yeah.’
    ‘Gold Rolexes? Real ones?’
    ‘Don’t want no copy rubbish – the real deal. Want ’em etched with a logo. Can you get me a price? Need ’em quickly. Middle of next week.’
    Tom tried not to show his surprise, particularly after Spacks had told him he didn’t want anything fancy. Now he was talking about watches that