Not Dead Enough

again.
    They were cruising down litter-strewn West Street, the clubs all shut now, the pavements littered with broken glass, discarded burger and kebab wrappers, all the usual detritus from Saturday night. Two road-sweeping vehicles were hard at work, grinding along the kerbs.
    ‘Course it was different then,’ Bill Norris was saying. ‘In them days we could run our own informants, see? One time when I was in the drugs squad, we staked out this deli in Waterloo Street for two months from information I’d had. I knew my man was right.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Copper’s nose, I got. You either got it or you haven’t. You’ll find out soon enough, son.’
    The sun was in their eyes, coming obliquely at them across the Channel at the end of the street. David Curtis raised his hand to shield his eyes, scanning the pavements, the passing cars. Copper’s nose . Yep, he was confident he had that all right.
    ‘And a strong stomach. Got to have that,’ Norris continued.
    ‘Cast iron, I’ve got.’
    ‘So we sat in this derelict house opposite – used to go in and out via a passage round the back. Bloody freezing it was. Two months! Froze our bollocks off! I found this old British Rail guard’s overcoat some tramp had abandoned there, and wore it. Two months we sat there, day in and night out, watching with binoculars by day and night scopes in the dark. Nothing to do, just swinging the lantern – that’s what we used to call it, you know? Telling stories – swinging the lantern . Well, anyhow, one evening this saloon car pulled up, big Jag—’
    The probationary PC was reprieved, temporarily, from this story, which he had already heard twice before, by a call from Brighton Central Control.
    ‘Sierra Oscar to Charlie Charlie 109.’
    Using his personal radio set, sitting in its plastic cradle on the clip of his stab vest, David Curtis replied, ‘109, go ahead.’
    ‘We’ve got a grade-two cause for concern on the queue. Are you free?’
    ‘Yes, yes. Go ahead with details, over.’
    ‘Address is Flat 4, 17 Newman Villas. The occupant is a Sophie Harrington. She didn’t turn up to meet a friend yesterday, and she’s not answered her phone or doorbell since yesterday afternoon, which is out of character. Can you do an address check so we can take it off the queue?’
    ‘Confirm Flat 4, 17 Newman Villas, Sophie Harrington?’ Curtis said.
    ‘Yes, yes.’
    ‘Received. En route.’
    Relieved to have something to actually do this morning, Norris swung the car around in a U-turn so hard and fast that the tyres squealed. Then he made a left turn at the top into Western Road, accelerating faster than was strictly necessary.

56
    Apologizing to Marcel Kullen, he put the phone to his ear and pressed the green button. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
    Then, when he heard the acerbic voice at the other end, he immediately wished he had left the damn phone ringing.
    ‘Where are you, Roy? It sounds like you’re abroad.’ It was his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, and she seemed a little astonished. ‘That wasn’t a UK ring tone,’ she said.
    This was one call he simply had not expected today and he had no answer prepared. When he had phoned Marcel in Germany he had noticed the ring tone was quite different, a steady, flat whine instead of the normal two-tone ring in the UK. There was no point in lying, he knew.
    Taking a deep breath, he said, ‘Munich.’
    From the other end of the phone came a sound like a small nuclear device detonating inside a corrugated-iron shed filled with ball bearings. It was followed by some moments of silence. Then Vosper’s voice again, very abrupt: ‘I’ve just spilled some coffee. I’ll have to call you back.’
    As he finished the call he cursed for not having thought this through better. Of course, in a normal world he was perfectly entitled to a day off, and to leave his deputy SIO in charge. But the world in which Alison Vosper prowled was not normal. She had taken a dislike to him, for reasons he could not figure out – but no doubt in part because of his recent unfortunate press coverage – and was looking all the time for a reason to demote him, or freeze his career path, or transfer him to the other end of the country. Taking the day off on the third day of a major murder inquiry was not going to improve her opinion of him.
    ‘Everything is OK?’ Kullen asked.
    ‘Never better.’
    His phone was ringing again now. ‘What exactly are you doing in