Looking Good Dead

time, breathing in the musky scent, something stirring deep in his heart that he had thought, until these past few days, was long dead.

    Then he felt a twinge of guilt. Sandy . But he ignored it, shut it out of his mind, determined not to go there, not to let it spoil this moment.
    He looked at the clock again to double-check the time, his brain turning, reluctantly, to work. To the 8.30 a.m. briefing. Then he remembered he needed to collect his car.
    If he got up now, he worked out, he would just have time to run to the underground car park where he had left the Alfa last night – the fresh air might help his head. Except that his body was telling him it did not need a run, it needed about eight hours more sleep. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to crush the pain like cheese-wire cutting through his skull – and to ignore that sodding bird which he could happily have shot if he’d had a gun – and drifted for a few delicious moments back into thoughts about Cleo Morey.
    It seemed barely a few seconds before the alarm started beeping again. Reluctantly, he hauled himself out of bed, opened the curtains the rest of the way, and padded naked into the bathroom to brush his teeth. The face that stared back at him out of the mirror over the basin wasn’t a pleasant sight.
    Roy Grace had never been a vain man but had until recently considered himself still young, or youngish, not handsome but OK-looking, with his best feature being his blue eyes (his Paul Newman eyes, Sandy used to tell him) and his worst his small but very broken nose. Now, increasingly, the face he stared at early in the morning seemed to belong to some much older guy – a complete stranger with a wrinkled forehead, slackening jowls and bags the size of oyster shells beneath his eyes.
    It wasn’t the beer or the fags or the fast-food diet or the crazy work schedule that got you in the end, it was gravity, he decided. Gravity made you a little bit shorter every day. It slackened your skin a little more, pulling it relentlessly downward. Half your waking life was a struggle against gravity but it always got you. It would be gravity that banged the lid down on top of you in your coffin. And if you had your ashes scattered to the winds, gravity would eventually bring them back down, every single bit of them.
    He worried about his thoughts sometimes, which were becoming increasingly morbid of late. Maybe his sister was right; maybe he wasspending too much time alone? But after all this time he was used to solitude. It was what he knew as normality.
    It wasn’t the kind of life he’d planned, nor the kind he’d ever remotely imagined he would be living, seventeen years back, when he had proposed to Sandy on a warm September day on the end of the Palace Pier, telling her that he’d taken her there because if she had said no, he would have jumped off. She’d smiled that beautiful, warm smile, tossed her blonde hair from her eyes, and told him – with her typical gallows humour – that she’d have considered it a much stronger test of their love if he had taken her to Beachy Head.
    He downed a glass of tap water, screwing up his face at the taste of the fluoride, which seemed heavier than usual this morning. Drink more plain water , his fitness instructor, Ian, at the police gym told him repeatedly. He was trying, but the stuff just didn’t taste as good as a Starbucks latte. Or a Glenfiddich on the rocks. Or just about anything else. He hadn’t really worried about his appearance until now.
    Until Cleo.
    These years since Sandy’s disappearance had taken a heavy toll on him. Police work was hard, but at least most coppers had someone to go home to at the end of their shift, and talk to. And Marlon, although company of sorts, just didn’t do it for him.
    He put on his jogging kit, gave Marlon some breakfast in case he forgot later, and eased himself out of the front door into the deserted street. It was a deliciously cool summer morning, with a clear sky holding all the promise of the day being a corker. And suddenly, despite his hangover and lack of sleep, he felt energized. With his heart humming, he set off down the street at a brisk pace.
    Roy Grace lived in Hove, a residential district that had until recent years been a separate town to Brighton, although joined at the hip. Now both came under the joint umbrella of the City of Brighton and Hove. The Greek, from which the name Hove came – or Hove, Actually, as it had been nicknamed –