Not Dead Enough

windows in the sitting room and kitchen open to create a through-draught. A faint, irritating boom-boom-boom-boom of dance music shook the quiet of the night out in the street. Maybe her neighbours below, maybe somewhere else.
    ‘You still have two lifelines,’ Chris Tarrant said.
    ‘I think I’m going to phone a friend.’
    Was it her imagination, or did she just see a shadow move past the bedroom door? She waited for a moment, only one ear on the television now, watching the doorway, a faint prickle of anxiety crawling up her back. The man had decided to phone a friend called Ron. She heard the ring tone.
    Nothing there. Just her imagination. She put her glass down, picked up her fork, skewered a prawn and a chunk of avocado and put them in her mouth.
    ‘Hi, Ron! It’s Chris Tarrant here!’
    ‘Hi, Chris. How you doing?’
    Just as she swallowed, she saw the shadow again. Definitely not her imagination this time. A figure was moving towards the door. She heard a rustle of clothes or plastic. Outside a motorcycle blattered down the street.
    ‘Who’s there?’ she called out, her voice a tight, anxious squeak.
    Silence.
    ‘Ron, I’ve got your mate John here. He’s just won sixty-four thousand pounds and he’s now going for one hundred and twenty-five thousand. How’s your geography?’
    ‘Yeah, well, all right.’
    ‘OK, Ron, you have thirty seconds, starting from now.
    ‘For one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, where is the resort of Monastir? Is it—’
    Sophie’s gullet tightened. She grabbed the remote and muted the show. Her eyes sprang to the doorway again, then to her handbag containing her mobile phone, well out of reach on her dressing table.
    The shadow was moving. Jigging. Someone out there, motionless, but not able to stand without swaying a fraction.
    She gripped her tray for an instant. It was the only weapon she had, apart from her small fork. ‘Who’s there?’ she said. ‘Who is that?’
    Then he came into the room and all her fear evaporated.
    ‘It’s you !’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ, you gave me a fright!’
    ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d be pleased to see me.’
    ‘Of course I am. I – I’m really pleased,’ she said. ‘I so wanted to talk to you, to see you. How are you? I – I didn’t think—’
    ‘I’ve brought you a present.’

35
    When he was a child growing up here, Brighton and Hove had been two separate towns, each of them shabby in their own very different way. They were joined at the hip by a virtual border so erratic and illogical it might have been created by a drunken goat. Or more likely, in Grace’s view, by a committee of sober town planners, which would have contained, collectively, less wisdom than the goat.
    Now the two towns were enshrined together, forever, as the City of Brighton and Hove. Having spent most of the last half-century screwing up Brighton’s traffic system and ruining the fabled Regency elegance of its seafront, the moronic planners were now turning their ineptness on Hove. Every time he drove along the seafront, and passed the hideous edifices of the Thistle Hotel, the Kingswest, with its ghastly gold-foil roof, and the Brighton Centre, which had all the architectural grace of a maximum-security prison, he had to resist a desire to drive to the Town Hall, seize a couple of planning officers and shake their fillings out.
    Not that Roy Grace was against modern architecture – far from it. There were many modern buildings that he admired, the most recent one being the so-called Gherkin, in London. What he hated was seeing his home city, which he so loved, being permanently blighted by whatever mediocrity went on behind the walls of that planning department.
    To the casual visitor, Brighton became Hove at the only part of the border that was actually marked, by a rather fine statue on the promenade of a winged angel holding an orb in one hand and an olive branch in the other: the Peace Statue. Grace, in the passenger seat of the Ford Mondeo, stared at it over to his left, out of the window, silhouetted against the steadily darkening sky.
    On the opposite side of the road, two lines of traffic streamed into Brighton. With the windows down, he could hear every car. The blam-blam of show-off exhausts, the boom-boom-boom of in-car woofers, the stuttering rasp of tuc-tuc tricycle taxis. Hell was Friday night in central Brighton. Over the coming hours, the city would explode into life, and the police would be out in