Not Dead Enough

shoulders, tits down to her stomach, stomach down to her pelvis, swigging a bottle of beer or lager – too far away to tell which – fat arse sticking out of a skein of electric blue nylon, thighs dimpled with cellulite. Wondered what she’d look like in his gas mask with her straggly ginger pubes jammed against his face. Wondered what it would smell like down there. Oysters?
    Then he switched his attention back to the stupid girl who’d been sitting on the beach for the past two hours. She was standing up now, stepping over the pebbles, holding her shoes in her hands, wincing with every step she took. Why, he wondered, didn’t she just put her shoes on? Was she really that dim-witted?
    He would ask her that question later, when he was alone in her bedroom with her, and she had the gas mask on her face, and her voice would come at him all mumbled and indistinct.
    Not that he cared about the answer.
    All he cared about was what he had written in the blank section for notes at the back of his blue Letts schoolboy’s diary, when he was twelve years old. That diary was one of the few possessions he still had from his childhood. It was in a small metal box where he kept the things that were of sentimental value to him. The box was in a lock-up garage, quite near here, which he rented by the month. He had learned as a small child the importance of finding a space in this world, however small, that is your own. Where you can keep your things. Sit and have your thoughts.
    It was in a private space he had found, when he was twelve years old, that the words he wrote in his diary first came to him.
    If you want to really hurt someone, don’t kill them, that only hurts for a short time. It’s much better to kill the thing they love. Because that will hurt them forever.
    He repeated those words over and over like a mantra, as he followed Sophie Harrington, as ever keeping a safe distance. She stopped and put her shoes on, then made her way along the seafront promenade, past the shops in the red-brick-faced Arches on Brighton seafront, one a gallery of local artists, past a seafood restaurant, the steel band, an old Second World War mine that had been washed up and was now mounted on a plinth, and a shop that sold beach hats, buckets and spades and rotating windmills on sticks.
    He followed her through the carefree, sunburnt masses, up the ramp towards busy Kings Road, where she turned left, heading west, past the Royal Albion hotel, the Old Ship, the Odeon Kingswest, the Thistle Hotel, the Grand, the Metropole.
    He was getting more aroused by the minute.
    The breeze tugged at the sides of his hood and for one anxious moment it nearly blew back. He snatched it down hard over his forehead, then pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. He had an important business call to make.
    He waited for a police car, siren wailing, to go past before dialling, continuing to stride along, fifty yards behind her. He wondered whether she would walk the whole way to her flat, or take a bus, or a taxi. He really did not mind. He knew where she lived. He had his own key.
    And he had all the time in the world.
    Then, with a sudden stab of panic, he realized he had left the plastic carrier bag containing the gas mask back in the café.

31
    Linda Buckley had positioned herself intelligently in a leather armchair in the large, smart and comfortable foyer of the Hotel du Vin, Grace thought, as he entered the building with Glenn Branson. She was close enough to hear anyone asking for Brian Bishop at the reception desk and had a good view of people entering and leaving the hotel.
    The family liaison officer reluctantly put down the book she was reading, The Plimsoll Sensation , a history of the Plimsoll Line by Nicolette Jones, which she had heard serialized on the radio, and stood up.
    ‘Hi, Linda,’ Grace said. ‘Good book?’
    ‘Fascinating!’ she replied. ‘Stephen, my husband, was in the Merchant Navy, so I know a bit about ships.’
    ‘Is our guest in his room?’
    ‘Yes. I spoke to him about half an hour ago, to see how he was doing. Maggie’s gone off to make some phone calls. We’re giving him a break – it’s been fairly intensive this afternoon, particularly up at the mortuary, when he identified his wife.’
    Grace looked around the busy area. All the stools at the stainless-steel bar, on the far side of the room, were taken, as were all the sofas and chairs. A group of men in dinner jackets and women in evening dresses were