Not Dead Enough

her late forties, in nursing uniform, was standing over him. The badge on her lapel read B ARBARA L EACH – A&E N URSE .
    ‘Hello!’ she said breezily. ‘Would you come with me?’
    She led him into a small booth and asked him to sit down.
    ‘What seems to be the problem?’
    He raised his hand. ‘I hurt it working on a car.’
    ‘How long ago?’
    Thinking for a moment, he said, ‘Thursday afternoon.’
    She examined it carefully, turning it over, then comparing it to his left hand. ‘It looks infected,’ she said. ‘Have you had a tetanus injection recently?’
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    She studied it again for a while thoughtfully. ‘Working on a car?’ she said.
    ‘An old car. I’m restoring it.’
    ‘I’ll get the doctor to see you as soon as possible.’
    He went back to his chair in the waiting room and turned his attention back to his BlackBerry. He logged on to the web and then clicked on his bookmark for Google.
    When that came up, he entered a search command for MG TF.
    That was the car Cleo Morey drove.
    Despite his pain, despite his muzzy thoughts, a plan was forming. Really quite a good plan.
    ‘Fucking brilliant!’ he said out loud, unable to control his excitement. Then immediately he shrank back into his shell.
    He was shaking.
    Always a sign that the Lord approved.

65
    Reluctantly cutting short his precious hours in Munich, Grace managed to board an earlier flight. The weather in England had changed dramatically during the day, and shortly after six o’clock in the evening, as he went to get his car from the short-stay multi-storey car park at Heathrow, the sky was an ominous grey and a cold wind was blowing, flecking the windscreen with rain.
    It was the kind of wind that you forgot even existed during the long, summer days they’d had recently, he reflected. It was like a stern reminder from Mother Nature that summer was not going to last much longer. The days were already getting shorter. In little over a month it would be autumn. Then winter. Another year.
    Feeling flat and tired, he wondered what he had achieved today, apart from earning another black mark in Alison Vosper’s book. Anything at all?
    He pushed his ticket into the machine and the barrier rose. Even the rorty sound of the engine as he accelerated, which ordinarily he liked listening to, seemed off-key tonight. Definitely not firing on all cylinders. Like its owner.
    Sort yourself out in Munich. Call me when you get back home.
    As he headed towards the roundabout, taking the direction for the M25, he stuck his phone in the hands-free cradle and dialled Cleo’s mobile. It started ringing. Then he heard her voice, a little slurred, and hard to decipher above a raucous din of jazz music in the background.
    ‘Yo! Detective Shhuperintendent Roy Grace! Where are you?’
    ‘Just left Heathrow. You?’
    ‘I’m getting smashed with my little sister, we’re on our third Sea Breezes – no – sorry – correct that! We’re on our fifth Sea Breezes, down by the Arches. It’s blowing a hooley, but there’s a great band. Come and join us!’
    ‘I have to go to a crime scene. Later?’
    ‘Don’t think we’ll be conscious much longer!’
    ‘So you’re not on call today?’
    ‘Day off!’
    ‘Can I swing by later?’
    ‘Can’t guarantee I’ll be awake. But you can try!’

    When he was a kid, Church Road, Hove, was the dull backwater that Brighton’s busy, buzzy, shopping street, Western Road, morphed into, somewhere west of the Waitrose supermarket. It had perked up considerably in recent years, with trendy restaurants, delis and shops displaying stuff that people under ninety might actually want to buy.
    Like most of this city, many of the familiar names from his past along Church Road, such as the grocer’s Cullens, the chemist’s Paris and Greening, the department stores Hills of Hove and Plummer Roddis, had now gone. Just a few still remained. One was Forfars the baker’s. He turned right shortly past them, drove up a one-way street, made a right at the top, then another right into Newman Villas.
    As with most lower-rent residential areas of this transient city, the street was a riot of letting-agency boards. Number 17 was no exception. A R AND & C O . sign, prominently displayed, advertised a two-bedroom flat to let. Just inches below it, a burly uniformed police constable, holding a clipboard, stood in front of a barrier of blue and white crime-scene tape that was cordoning off some of the