Looking Good Dead

broken. And he was taking Glenn Branson because he thought it would be good training for him.
    Newly bereaved people followed an almost identical pattern. For the first few hours they would be in shock, totally vulnerable, and would say almost anything. But rapidly they would start to withdraw, and other members of the family would close ranks around them. If you wanted information, you had to tease it out within those first few hours. It was cruel but almost always effective, and otherwise you were stuffed for weeks, maybe months. Newspaper reporters knew that, too.
    He recognized the two family liaison officers, DC Maggie Campbell and DC Vanessa Ritchie, sitting in their car, a small grey unmarked Volvo parked over on the grass verge of the lane outside the entrance to the house, and pulled the Alfa up just past them. Their two faces, frosty with disapproval, stared through the Volvo’s windscreen at him.
    ‘Shit, man! How do people afford these places?’ Glenn said, staring at the steel gates between two columns topped with stone balls.
    ‘By not being cops,’ Grace retorted.
    Money had never been a big factor in Grace’s life. Sure he liked nice things, but he’d never had swanky aspirations and he had always been careful to live within his means. Sandy had been terrific at saving here and there. It always amused him that she used to buy the next winter’s Christmas cards in the January sales.
    But from these savings she was always buying them little treats , as she liked to call them. During the first few years of their marriage, when she worked for a travel agent and could get discounted holidays, she had twice saved enough for an entire fortnight abroad.
    But no amount of scrimping and saving on his salary, even with all the overtime bonuses in the world that he used to get as a junior officer, would ever buy him anything close to the magnitude of the spread he was looking at now.
    ‘Remember that film, The Great Gatsby ?’ Branson said. ‘The Jack Clayton version, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, right?’
    Grace nodded. He remembered it vaguely, or at least the title.
    ‘Well that’s what this place is, innit? That’s a fuck-off house you’re looking at.’
    And it was: a dead straight tree-lined drive, several hundred yards long, opening into a circular car park with an ornamental pond in the middle, in front of a substantial white Palladian – or at least Palladian-style – mansion.
    Grace nodded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the doors of the Volvo open. ‘Here comes trouble,’ he said quietly. The DCs climbed out of their car.
    Maggie Campbell, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties, and Vanessa Ritchie, a tall thin redhead, two years her senior, with a harder face – and demeanour – strode up to them, both in smart but sombre plain clothes.
    ‘There’s no way four of us can go in, Roy,’ DC Ritchie said. ‘It’s too many.’
    ‘I’ll go in first with Glenn, and break the news. Then I’ll phone you when I think you should come in and take over.’
    He saw Maggie Campbell frown. Ritchie shook her head. ‘It’s the wrong way round – you know that.’
    ‘Yes, I do, but that’s the way I want to play this.’
    ‘ Play this?’ she responded angrily. ‘This isn’t some kind of a bloody experiment. It’s wrong.’
    ‘What’s wrong, Vanessa, is that a father shouldn’t have to find out that part of his daughter has been found, short of a few important bits such as her head, in a bloody field with a beetle up her rectum. That’s what’s bloody wrong.’
    The FLO tapped her chest. ‘That is what we did our training for. We are specialists in all aspects of bereavement.’
    Grace looked at the women in turn. ‘I know all about your training and I know both of you – I’ve worked with you before and I respect you. This has nothing to do with your abilities. Your training gives you guidance, but at the end of the day there’s also the policing aspect. On this occasion I have my reasons for wanting to break the news, and as the SIO on this case I set the rules, OK? I don’t want any more sour faces from you, I want cooperation. Understood?’
    The two FLOs nodded but still did not look comfortable.
    ‘Have you decided how much you are going to tell the father?’ Vanessa Ritchie said tartly.
    ‘No, I’m going to play it by ear. I’ll bring you up to speed before I call you in, OK?’
    Maggie Campbell smiled in a half-hearted, conciliatory way. DC