Not Dead Yet

personality. No girl’s ever going to fancy you. None, ever, you realize?’ He remembered how Monroe’s horsey face would then break out into a snide grin.
    After a while, he had stopped turning round. But Monroe used to keep on prodding, until Mr Leask, the teacher, spotted him and told him to stop. Five minutes later, when the teacher began drawing a diagram of soil substrates on the blackboard, Monroe’s prodding started again.

11
    Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson was struggling to insert his thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-two, nightclub bouncer’s frame into a white protective paper suit. ‘What is it with you and weekends, boss?’ he said. ‘How come you always manage to screw them up for both of us?’
    Roy Grace, perched alongside him on the rear tailgate of the unmarked silver Ford Focus estate car, was struggling equally hard to get his protective suit up over his clothes. He turned to his protégé who was dressed in a shiny brown jacket, even shinier white shirt, a dazzling tie and tassled brown loafers. ‘Lucky you never chose farming as a career option, Glenn,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have been your style.’
    ‘Yeah, well, my ancestors were cotton pickers,’ Branson retorted with a broad grin.
    Glenn was right about the weekend, Roy thought ruefully. It seemed that every damned murder he had to deal with came in just when he had his weekend all sorted out.
    Like now.
    ‘What did you have planned, matey?’
    ‘The kids. One of the few weekends Ari is letting me have them. I was going to take them to Legoland. Now she’ll have something else to use against me.’
    Glenn was going through a bitter divorce. His wife, Ari, who had once encouraged him so hard to join the police, was now using the unpredictability of his hours as part of her argument for not agreeing contact arrangements for the children to see him. Grace felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Perhaps he shouldn’t have requested Glenn join him. But he knew his marriage was doomed, whatever happened. The best favour he could do his friend was to ensure his career came out of it intact. ‘You think taking the weekend off would help save your marriage?’
    ‘Nope.’
    Grace grinned. ‘So?’
    ‘You ever see that movie, Chicken Run ?’
    He shook his head.
    ‘You’ve lived a sheltered life.’
    ‘Lot of sex in it, was there?’ Grace retorted.
    ‘Yeah, right.’
    They put on face masks, raised their hoods and snapped on protective gloves. Then the pair of them signed in on the scene guard’s pad, and ducked under the blue and white police crime scene tape. It was a fine, blustery day. They were high up on the ridge of a hill, with open farmland stretching for miles in all directions, and the glinting blue water of the English Channel visible on the horizon to the south, beyond the Downs.
    They walked towards a long, single-storey shed with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents that stretched away into the distance, two tall steel silos standing beside it. Grace pushed the door open. They went inside to the glare of artificial lighting, to the sour stench of confined animals, and the din of thousands of protesting hens.
    ‘Had eggs for breakfast, old timer?’ Branson asked.
    ‘Actually, I had porridge.’
    ‘Guess at your age, cholesterol matters. Low fat milk?’
    ‘Cleo’s put me on soya.’
    ‘You’re under her thumb.’
    ‘She has pretty thumbs.’
    ‘That’s how every relationship starts. Pretty face, pretty thumbs, pretty damned everything. You love every inch of her body and she loves every inch of yours. Ten years on, you’re struggling to remember one damned thing about each other that you once liked.’ Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘But hey, enjoy the ride.’
    Roy Grace stopped and Branson stopped beside him. ‘Matey, don’t become a cynic. You’re too good for that.’
    ‘I’m just a realist.’
    Grace shook his head.
    ‘Your wife vanished on your thirtieth birthday – after you’d been together several years, right?’ said Branson.
    ‘Uh huh. Getting on for ten years.’
    ‘You still loved her?’
    ‘As much as the day I met her. More.’
    ‘Maybe you’re an exception.’
    Grace looked at him. ‘I hope not.’
    Branson stared at him, his face full of pain. ‘Yeah, I hope not too. But it hurts. I think of Ari and the kids constantly, and it hurts so much.’
    Grace stared down the length of the shed, with its gridded steel floor, a section of which, towards the far end, had been