Not Dead Enough

department, a sizeable office of forty people. One of their main functions was information and intelligence gathering for the detectives here.
    A plain, single girl in her mid-thirties, quiet and studious and slightly old-fashioned-looking, she had been popular because of her willingness to help, working whatever hours were needed while always remaining polite. She had reminded Grace, both in appearance and in her quietly earnest demeanour, of a dormouse.
    Janet had surprised everyone back in April, when she resigned, saying that she’d decided to spend a year travelling. Then, very secretively and coyly, she had told her two closest friends in the department that she had met and fallen in love with a man. They were already engaged, and she was emigrating with him to Australia and would get married there.
    It was Brian Cook, the Scientific Support Branch Manager and one of Grace’s friends here, who turned to him. ‘She’s been found dead, Roy,’ he said in his blunt voice. ‘Washed up on the beach on Saturday night – been in the sea some considerable time. She’s just been identified from her dental records. And it looks like she was dead before she went in the water.’
    Grace was silent for a moment. Stunned. He’d had a lot of dealings with Janet over the years and really liked her. ‘Shit,’ he said. For a moment it was as if a dark cloud had covered the windows and he felt a sudden cold swirl, deep inside him. Deaths happened, but something instinctively felt very wrong about this.
    ‘Doesn’t look like she made it to Australia,’ Cook added sardonically.
    ‘Or the altar?’
    Cook shrugged.
    ‘Has the fiancé been contacted?’
    ‘We only heard the news a few minutes ago. He could be dead too.’ Then he added, ‘You might want to pop along and say something to the team in her department – I imagine they’re all going to be extremely upset.’
    ‘I’ll do that when I get a gap. Who’s going to head the inquiry?’
    ‘Don’t know yet.’
    Grace nodded, then led his shocked MSA away from the group and back to her office. He had barely ten minutes to give her his dictation, then get over to the custody centre for the second interview with Brian Bishop.
    But he couldn’t clear the image of Janet McWhirter’s plain little face from his mind. She was the most pleasant and helpful person. Why would someone kill her? A mugger? A rapist? Something to do with her work?
    Mulling on it, he thought to himself, She spends fifteen years working for Sussex Police, much of it in the PNC unit, falls in love with a man, then goes for a career change, a lifestyle change. Leaves. Then dies.
    He was a firm believer in always looking at the most obvious things first. He knew where he would start, if he was the SIO on her investigation. But at this moment, Janet McWhirter’s death, although deeply shocking and sad, was not his problem.
    Or so he thought.

93
    ‘Jeezizzz, mon! Will you turn that fekkin’, bleedin’, soddin’ thing off! It’s been goin’ all bloody mornin’! Can’t you fekkin’ answer it or summat?’
    Skunk opened one eye, which felt as if it had been hit recently with a hammer. So did his head. It also felt as if someone was sawing through his brain with a cheese-wire. And the whole camper seemed to be pitchpoling like a small boat in a storm.
    Preeep-preeep-bnnnzzzzz-preeep-preeeep-bnnnzzzzz . His phone, he realized, was slithering around on the floor, vibrating, flashing, ringing.
    ‘Answer it yousself, you fuckwit!’ he mumbled back at his latest, unwelcome, lodger-du-jour – some scumbag he’d encountered in a Brighton bat-cave in the early hours of this morning, who’d bummed a bed off him for the night. ‘This isn’t the fucking Hilton! We don’t have fucking twenty-four-hour room service.’
    ‘If I answer it, laddie, it’s going straight up yer rectum, so fekkin’ far ye’ll have ter stick yer fingers down yer tonsils ter find it.’
    Skunk opened his other eye as well, then shut it again as blinding morning sunlight lasered into it, through his brain, through the back of his skull and deep into the Earth’s core, pinning his head to his sodden, lumpy pillow like a pin through a fly. He closed his eye and made an effort to sit up, which was rewarded by a hard crack on his head from the Luton roof above him.
    ‘Fuck! Shit!’
    This was the gratitude he got for letting fucking useless tossers crash in his home! Wide awake now, on the verge of throwing up, he