Looking Good Dead

Sandy had created, with its skewed-oval shape and its large, flat stones, and then at all the plants she had put around the borders of the lawn. A lot had died, and the ones that remained were wildly out of control.
    He had no idea about gardening; that had always been Sandy’s domain. But he’d enjoyed helping her create her own special garden out of the boring eighth of an acre rectangle of lawn and borders that they had started with. He dug in places she told him to dig, fertilized, watered, lugged bags of peat up and down, weeded, planted, a willing skivvy to Sandy as foreman.
    Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, making their home, their nest, cementing their life together.
    The garden that Sandy had created and loved so much was neglected now. Even the lawn looked ragged and weed-strewn, and he felt guilty about that, sometimes wondering what she would say if she returned.
    Saturday mornings. He remembered how he used to go off for his early run, and come back bringing Sandy an almond croissant from the bakery in Church Road and her Daily Mail .
    He drew the curtains right back, and light flooded in. And suddenly, for the first time in almost nine years, he saw the room differently.
    He saw a woman’s bedroom, decorated mostly in different shades of pink. He saw a Victorian mahogany dressing table – which they had picked up for a song at a stall in the Gardner Street market – very definitely covered in a woman’s things: hairbrushes, combs, make-up and scent bottles. There was a framed photograph of Sandy in evening dress and himself in black tie finery, standing beside the captain of the SS Black Watch on the only cruise they had ever been on.
    He saw her slippers still on the floor, her nightdress on a hook on the wall beside the bed. What would any woman make of this if he brought her back here? he thought suddenly.
    What would Cleo think?
    And, he realized, these thoughts had never occurred to him before. The house was a time warp. Everything was exactly the way it had been that day, that Tuesday, 26 July, when Sandy had vanished into thin air.
    And he could still remember it so damned vividly.
    On the morning of his thirtieth birthday Sandy had woken him with a tray on which was a tiny cake with a single candle, a glass of champagne and a very rude birthday card. He’d opened the presents she had given him, then they had made love.
    He’d left the house later than usual, at nine fifteen, and reached his office at Brighton police station shortly after half past for a briefing on the murder of a Hell’s Angel biker who had been dumped in Shoreham Harbour with his hands tied behind his back and a breeze block chained to his ankles. He’d promised to be home early, to go out for a celebratory meal with another couple, his then best friend Dick Pope, also a detective, and his wife Leslie, who Sandy got on well with. There had been developments on the case, and he’d arrived home almost two hours later than he had intended. There was no sign of Sandy.
    At first he’d thought she was angry at him for being so late and was staging a protest. The house was tidy; her car and handbag were gone; there was no sign of a struggle.
    Then, twenty-four hours later, her elderly black VW Golf was found in a bay in the short-term car park at Gatwick Airport. There had been two transactions on her credit card on the morning of her disappearance, one from Boots, and one from Tesco. She had taken no clothes and no other belongings of any kind.
    His neighbours in this quiet, residential street just off the seafront had not seen a thing. On one side of him was an exuberantly friendly Greek family who owned a couple of cafes in the town, but they had been away on holiday. On the other side was an elderly widow with a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 6.18 a.m., he could hear a muffled American voice through the party wall between their semi-detached houses; itsounded like John Wayne, addressing a bunch of bums he had just rounded up.
    He went downstairs into the kitchen, wondering whether to make a cup of tea or go for his run first. His goldfish was drifting aimlessly around his circular bowl, as ever.
    ‘Morning, Marlon!’ he said breezily. ‘Having your morning swim? Are you hungry?’
    Marlon’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist.
    He filled the kettle, pulled up a chair and sat down