Not Dead Enough

the county, filling in gaps when a division was desperately short of manpower.
    The team member Grace was least happy about of all was DC Alfonso Zafferone. A sullen, arrogant man in his late twenties, with Latino good looks and gelled, mussed-about hair, he was slickly dressed in a black suit, black shirt and cream tie. The last time he had worked with him, Zafferone had proved to be sharp, but had had a serious attitude problem. It was partly due to lack of choice, because it was the holiday season, but equally from a desire to teach the runt a lesson in manners that Grace had pulled him on to his team.
    As he greeted each person in turn, Grace thought about Katie Bishop on the bed in her house in Dyke Road Avenue this morning. He thought about her on the post-mortem slab this afternoon. He could feel her, as if he carried her spirit in his heart. The weight of responsibility. This lot here in this room, and the others who would be joining his team in the conference room shortly, had a huge responsibility.
    Which was why he had to push all thoughts of Sandy into a separate compartment of his mind, and lock them in there, for the time being. Somehow.
    Over the course of the following hours and days he would get to know more about Katie Bishop than anybody else on earth. More than her husband, her parents, her siblings, her best friends. They might think they knew her, but they would only have ever known what she let them know. Inevitably something would have been held back. Every human being did that.
    And inevitably, for Roy Grace, it would become personal. It always did.
    But he had no way of knowing, at this moment, quite how personal the case was going to become.

27
    Skunk was feeling a whole lot stronger. The world was suddenly a much better place. The heroin was doing its stuff – he felt all kind of warm and fuzzy, everything was good, his body awash with endorphins. This was how life should feel; this was how he wanted to stay feeling forever.
    Bethany had turned up, with a chicken and some potato salad and a tub of crème caramel she had taken from her mother’s fridge, and all the shit-heads had left his camper, and he’d boned her from behind, the way she liked it – and the way he liked it too, with her massive ass pushing into his stomach.
    And now she was driving him along the seafront in her mother’s little Peugeot, and he lounged in the passenger seat, tilted back, staring out through his purple lenses at his office . Clocking each of the parked cars in turn. Every kind of car you could think of. All dusty and sun-baked. Their owners on the beach. He was looking for one that matched the make and model that were written on the damp, crumpled sheet of lined notepaper on his lap, his shopping list , which he had to keep looking back at because his memory was crap.
    ‘Have to get home soon. My mum needs the car. She’s going out to bridge tonight,’ Bethany said.
    Every fucking make of car in the world was parked along the seafront this evening. Every fucking make except the one he was looking for. A new-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.
    ‘Head up to Shirley Drive,’ he said.
    The clock on the dash read six fifteen p.m.
    ‘I really have to get home by seven. She needs the car – she’ll kill me if I’m late,’ Bethany replied.
    Skunk looked at her for a moment appreciatively. She had short black hair and thick arms. Her breasts bulged out of the top of a baggy T-shirt and her plump brown thighs were scantily covered by a blue denim mini-skirt. He kept one hand up under the elastic of her knickers, nestling in her soft, damp pubes, two fingers probing deep inside her.
    ‘Turn right,’ he instructed.
    ‘You’re making me horny again!’
    He pushed his fingers even further up.
    She gasped. ‘Skunk, stop it!’
    He was feeling horny again too. She turned right at traffic lights, past a statue of Queen Victoria, then suddenly he shouted out, ‘Stop!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘There! There! There!’ He grabbed the wheel, forcing her over to the kerb, ignoring the squeal of brakes and the blast of the horn of the car behind them.
    As she pulled the car up, Skunk extracted his fingers, then his hand. ‘Fucking brilliant! See ya!’
    He opened the car door, stumbled out and was gone without even a backward glance.
    There, halted at the traffic lights on the opposite side of the road was a dark metallic blue Audi A4 convertible. Skunk pulled a