Not Dead Enough

skittered past his eyes. He watched the first police car arrive. Two fire engines, then a third. An ambulance.
    He watched everything. He didn’t have anything else to spend his time on tonight. He was still there, watching, as dawn was breaking, and the low-loader arrived and craned the MG, its interior all blackened but the exterior looking fine, considering, out of its space and carted it away.
    Suddenly the street seemed quiet. But inside his car the Time Billionaire was raging.

103
    The alarm was due to go off in a few minutes, at five thirty, but Roy Grace was already wide awake, listening to the dawn chorus, thinking. Cleo was awake too. He could hear the scratching of her eyelashes on the pillow each time she blinked.
    They lay on their sides, two spoons. He held her naked body tightly in his arms. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.
    ‘I love you so much,’ she whispered back. Her voice was full of fear.
    He had still been in the office at one a.m., preparing for his meeting with the CPS solicitor, when she’d rung him, sounding truly terrible. He’d gone straight over to her house and then, in between comforting her, had spent much of the next hour on the phone, tracking down the two officers who had first arrived on the scene. Eventually he had got through to an undercover PC on the Car Crime Unit called Trevor Sallis, who explained what they had been doing. It had been a sting to catch the ringleader of a gang.
    According to Sallis, a local lowlife villain had been cooperating with the police and, in one of life’s coincidences, it had been Cleo’s car that was targeted. Something had gone badly wrong, it appeared, in the thief’s attempt to hot-wire it. MG TF cars were, it appeared, notoriously hard to steal.
    The explanation had calmed Cleo down. But something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on bothered Grace deeply about the incident. The would-be thief was now in the intensive care unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – God help him in that place, he thought privately – and was due to be transferred, if he survived the next few hours, to the burns unit at East Grinstead. The other officer, Paul Packer, was also in the same hospital, with severe, but not life-threatening, burns.
    What could make a car catch fire? A lowlife jerk, fiddling with wires he did not understand, rupturing a fuel pipe?
    The thoughts were still churning through his tired brain when the alarm started beeping. He had exactly one hour to get home, shower, put on a fresh shirt – there was another press conference scheduled for later this morning – and get to the office.
    ‘Take the day off,’ he said.
    ‘I wish.’
    He kissed her goodbye.

    Chris Binns, the CPS solicitor who had been allocated to the Katie Bishop case, was in Grace’s opinion – which was one shared by a good many other officers – several miles up his own backside. The two of them had had plenty of encounters in the past, and there wasn’t a huge amount of love lost.
    Grace viewed his own job as, principally, to serve decent society by catching criminals and bringing them to justice. Binns viewed his priority as saving the Crown Prosecution Service unwarranted expense in pursuing cases where they might not secure a conviction.
    Despite the early hour, Binns entered Grace’s office looking – and smelling – as fresh as a rose. A tall, trim man in his mid-thirties, sporting a bouffant hairstyle, he had a large, aquiline nose, giving his face the hawkish look of a bird of prey. He was dressed in a well-cut dark grey suit that was too heavy for this weather, Grace thought, a white shirt, sharp tie and black Oxfords that he must have spent the whole night buffing.
    ‘So nice to see you, Roy,’ he said in his supercilious voice, giving Grace’s hand a limp, moist shake. He sat down at the small, round conference table and placed his upright black calfskin attaché case down on the floor beside him, giving it a stern look for a moment, as if it was a pet dog he had commanded to sit. Then he opened the case and produced a large, hard-bound notebook from it, and a Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket.
    ‘I appreciate your coming in so early,’ Grace said, stifling a yawn, his eyes heavy from tiredness. ‘Can I get you any tea, coffee, water?’
    ‘Some tea. Milk, no sugar, thanks.’
    Grace picked up the phone and asked Eleanor, who had also come in early, at his request, to get them one tea, and a coffee that was as strong