Not Dead Yet

with in this branch, but if you have a bike you love that gets nicked it’s pretty distressing. Okay?’
    Both detectives nodded apologetically.
    ‘It sounds like Whiteley was pretty difficult then. I spoke to DC Liz Spence at John Street who was dealing with bicycle crime at the time. He was pretty aggressive towards her over it. Didn’t feel the police were doing enough, that they should have made it their major priority. She was sufficiently concerned back then about his level of aggression to put background checks on him.’
    ‘And?’ Grace asked.
    She shook her head. ‘Nothing came up.’
    ‘If you want my opinion, sir,’ Bella Moy said abruptly, ‘he’s just a harmless saddo.’
    Grace looked at her for some moments. ‘You may be right, Bella,but you have to remember something. Criminals escalate. The sicko who starts off as a seemingly harmless flasher can turn into a serial rapist twenty years later.’
    ‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be frivolous.’
    Grace saw his BlackBerry was flashing red at him. New emails. He tapped to check them as he asked, ‘Norman, anything back yet from the High Tech Crime Unit on Myles Royce’s computer?’
    ‘No, chief, not so far.’
    He glanced through the emails. The second was from the Chief Superintendent of Brighton Police, Graham Barrington.
     
    Roy, call me urgently after your briefing.

86
    Drayton Wheeler looked at his watch. 9.03 a.m. Time was passing slowly. Ordinarily, with just six months or so left of it, he might have been grateful. But not up here, lying on this hard wooden floor inside the dome that supported the chandelier, surrounded by mouse droppings, and goddamn seagulls screeching outside.
    The battery on his fucking Kindle was running out. In his calculations he hadn’t figured that would happen, but he’d left the thing switched on to wireless, which ate up the battery life. Great. He had about nine hours to kill, and an hour of reading time left. So much for his ambition to finish War and Peace before he died. He laughed. His own private joke. With six months to live, he had to be choosy about what he read. Did it matter what he had and hadn’t read in his life? In six months’ time would anyone care that Drayton Wheeler had not read War and Peace ?
    Nor anything by Dostoyevsky. Nor Proust. He hadn’t read much Hardy either. Just one Scott Fitzgerald. Two Hemingways. All people you were supposed to read to make you a more rounded human being. And the more rounded you were, the easier it was for some bastard to stick a pin in you and deflate you.
    Well, he sure as hell would not be fretting about it in his grave. Fade to black. Good riddance.
    At least today’s Times had downloaded. He could cheer himself up with the last of the Kindle’s battery life by reading all the shit that was going on in the world. Palestine. Libya. Iraq. Iran. North Korea. Hey, you know what, sort yourselves out, world, you’re going to have to learn to get by without me .
    Dying. With every single one of his damned ambitions unfulfilled. Thanks to people like Larry Brooker and Maxim Brody who had screwed him. Everyone had screwed him. Life itself had screwed him.
    He was a genius, he knew that. He always had the ideas first.And some other bastard always got there before him, or stole them. He’d had the idea of writing about a child wizard. Fucking JK Rowling got hers out first. He’d had the idea about a young teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. Some Mormon called Stephenie Meyer wrote her books ahead of him.
    Now The King’s Lover . This time, he knew, no one was there ahead of him. He had the surefire formula.
    And it had been stolen from under his feet.
    Sue me.
    Oh sure, Larry Fucking Brooker. I could sue you. If I had a million bucks in the bank and ten years to live, I could wipe your ass for you with legal paperwork.
    He munched angrily through his breakfast of a stale Marks and Spencer egg and bacon sandwich and an over-ripe apple, washed down by cold coffee. Breakfast of Champions !
    He had that book on his Kindle. Written by one of his favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was a cynic too. The book was all about a great visionary writer called Kilgore Trout who found one of his science fiction novels being used as toilet paper in a motel lavatory. That was pretty much how Wheeler felt about his own career. He was a genius constantly pissed on from a great height. Well, smug little baldy Larry