Not Dead Yet

upon a time – incredibly – his blushing bride, had made him go on an anger management course.
    There were all kinds of anger. Like the frustration you got at a damned parking machine that took your coin and didn’t give you a ticket back. Like the silent fury you felt when you saw a lout toss litter from a car window. Like the neighbour below you throwing a party that went on playing loud music into the night.
    But nothing he had learned on that course taught him how to deal with the rage that burned inside him now. The anger of being screwed, right royally, totally and utterly. Of having the one big break in your life taken away from you.
    People couldn’t do that and get away with it.
    But the thing was, they did, all the time.
    When that happened some people shrugged their shoulders in defeat. Some went to lawyers, and all that happened then was they got more broke and the lawyers got more rich. He didn’t have that kind of money. Maybe it was the kind of case that a lawyer might take pro bono.
    But he didn’t have the time.
    He wasn’t going to sit back and accept it and let them get away with it. He wasn’t going to bend over and hold out a pot of Vaseline to them. He was going to do something about it. He didn’t know what yet. Nor how.
    Don’t get angry, get even.
    He had made a start. He’d bought a plane ticket.
    He was going to make the bastards regret this.
    They taught him an old Chinese proverb at the anger management course. Before you seek revenge, first dig two graves.
    He’d dig as many graves as he needed. If one was for himself, that was fine by him. Shovels were easy to buy. And he was going to need it anyway, he didn’t have long to live.

18
    At 8 a.m. Roy Grace sat in his office, with his Policy Book open in front of him. Every Senior Investigating Officer kept one, and if at any point they were required to account for their actions on a major crime investigation, by any subsequent review of their case, they could refer back to it.
    An important part of the entries into Grace’s Policy Book was his hypothesis for the motives of any murder and how the victim came to meet his or her death.
    His first note today was:
    1. No arms, no legs/head. Organized crime? Killed by unknown person.
    2. Drugs deal reprisal?
    3. Person known to police – get rid of identity?
    There was a whole raft of other motives, but in his view, none that led to this kind of mutilation of a corpse.
    When he had finished, he just had time to make himself a coffee, then hurry through to the morning briefing.

    ‘The time is 8.30 a.m., Saturday, June the fourth,’ Roy Grace read out from his typed notes. ‘This is the second briefing of Operation Icon , the enquiry into the death of an unknown man whose headless, armless and legless torso was discovered at Stonery Farm, Berwick, East Sussex, yesterday.’
    ‘Legless, chief?’ interrupted Norman Potting. ‘Was he pissed?’
    There was a titter of laughter, which Grace silenced with a glare. His good mood from last night remained with him this morning, and Potting wasn’t going to spoil that. He’d got up early, done a five-mile run along Brighton seafront in glorious early morning sunshine, with Humphrey loping happily alongside him, and hadarrived in his office in the CID HQ, on the edge of the city, an hour ago.
    From his early days as a Senior Investigating Officer, Roy Grace had learned the value of cultivating the friendship of the Senior Support Officer Tony Case, who allocated the Major Incident Suites – of which, since the budget cuts, there were now only two in this county and two in neighbouring Surrey – to the enquiry teams. Case knew that Grace favoured this one in Brighton, MIR-1, in the same building as his office, and had managed, yet again, to secure it for him.
    The two Major Incident Rooms at Sussex House, MIR-1 and MIR-2 were the nerve centres for major crime enquiries. Despite opaque windows too high to see out of, MIR-1 had an airy feel, good light, good vibes. Grace always felt energized here.
    Already some wit – Glenn Branson he suspected – had stuck a cartoon on the inside of the door. It was an image from the film Chicken Run .
    Seated attentively at the curved desks around him were the twenty members of his team he had assembled since leaving the farm shortly after midday yesterday. The regulars he had present were Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, in her mid-thirties and still living with her mother; even at this early hour