Not Dead Enough

destroying this relationship.
    And he could not stop thinking what would have happened if that sad little villain, who was still fighting for his life, had not beaten her to her car.
    If there had been no police stakeout. Nobody around to pull her out.
    The thought was almost unbearable. Some psycho had planned to kill her and had gone to great trouble.
    Who?
    Why?
    And if that person had tried once and failed, then was he – or she – going to try again?
    His mind went back to Sunday, when someone had sliced open the soft-top of the MG. Was that just a coincidence or was there a connection?
    Tomorrow a detective would sit down with her and go through a list of all the people she might have upset during her work. There were plenty of relatives of victims who got angry about their loved ones having post-mortems – and invariably they took their anger out on Cleo rather than on the coroner, who was actually the person responsible for that decision.
    Cleo had initially greeted the news with disbelief, but during the past hour, since he had arrived, it was starting to sink in, and the shock was now hitting her.
    She leaned down, picked up her wine glass and drained it. ‘What I don’t understand is—’ She stopped in mid-sentence, as if a thought had struck her. ‘If someone was going to wire my car to blow up, wouldn’t they do it to make it look like an accident? They’d know that forensics would be crawling all over it afterwards. It sounds like what this person did made it look very obvious.’
    ‘You’re right. Whoever it was, they did, they made it very obvious. Although I doubt they could have easily disguised what was done. I’m not a mechanic, but it was a lot more elaborate than just crossing a couple of wires.’ It was vicious, sadistic, he thought but did not say. He hadn’t yet told her that her car was now being treated as a crime scene, the event categorized as a major incident, with a senior investigating officer being appointed and a full inquiry team.
    She turned and looked at him with round, worried eyes. ‘I just can’t think of anyone who could have done this, Roy.’
    ‘What about your ex?’
    ‘Richard?’
    ‘Yes.’
    She shook her head. ‘No, he wouldn’t go this far.’
    ‘He stalked you for months. You had to threaten him with a court order at one point – that was when he backed off, you said. But some stalkers don’t go away.’
    ‘I just cannot imagine him doing this.’
    ‘Didn’t you say he raced cars?’
    ‘He did, until God started occupying his weekends.’
    Grace’s mobile rang. He put his glass down and disentangled himself from Cleo, to retrieve it from his jacket pocket. Glancing at the caller display, he saw it was Lloyd.
    ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
    ‘OK, I’ve spoken to my client,’ the solicitor said. ‘He was adopted. He doesn’t know anything about his birth parents.’
    ‘Does he know anything about his background at all?’
    ‘He only found out he was adopted after the death of his parents. After his mother died he was going through her papers and found his original birth certificate. It was a big shock – he didn’t know.’
    ‘Has he made any attempt to find his birth parents?’
    ‘He says he had been planning to quite recently, but hadn’t yet done anything about it.’
    Grace thought for a moment. ‘Did he by any chance tell you where his birth certificate is?’
    ‘Yes. It’s in a filing cabinet in his office at Dyke Road Avenue. It’s in a folder marked Personal . Would you like to tell me any more?’
    ‘Not at this stage,’ Grace replied. ‘But thank you. I’ll let you know what I find.’
    He ended the call, then immediately dialled the number of the Operation Chameleon incident room.

107
    Despite being desperately tired, Grace slept fitfully, woken by the slightest noise and not settling again each time until he was certain that it had come from outside Cleo’s house, not from inside.
    His mind was a jumble of dark thoughts. A burning MG. A tattoo. A gas mask. A body with crabs falling off it, rolling through the surf on a Brighton beach, Janet McWhirter’s smiling, cheerful face in her PNC office.
    Clear the ground under your feet.
    The words of his own mentor, the recently retired Chief Superintendent Dave Gaylor, were rolling around like surf inside his head. Gaylor had been a detective inspector when Grace had first met him. The youngest ever DI in Sussex. Twelve years his senior, Gaylor had taught him