Not Dead Enough by Peter James Read Free Book Online Page A

but they wouldn’t be long. Blowflies – or bluebottles, as they were more attractively named – could smell death from five miles away. About the same distance as newspaper reporters, of which species there was already one outside the gates, questioning the constable guarding the entrance and, from the reporter’s body language, not getting much from him.
    Roy Grace, garbed in a hooded white sterile paper suit, rubber gloves and overshoes, watched him for some moments from the front window of the room. Kevin Spinella, a sharp-faced man in his early twenties, dressed in a grey suit with a badly knotted tie, notebook in hand and chewing gum. Grace had met him before. He worked for the local paper, the Argus, and seemed to be developing an uncanny ability to reach a crime scene hours before any formal police statement was issued. And from the speed – and accuracy – with which serious crimes had been hitting the national media recently, Grace reckoned someone in the police – or the Control Centre – had to be leaking information to him. But that was the least of his problems.
    He walked across the room, keeping to the taped line across the carpet laid down by the SOCO team, making one call after another on his mobile phone. He was organizing office and desk space in the Major Incident Suite for the team of detectives, typists and indexers he was putting together, as well as arranging a meeting with an intelligence officer to plan the intelligence strategy for his policy book for this investigation. Every minute was precious at the moment, in the golden hour. What you did in that first hour of arriving at the scene of a suspicious death could greatly affect your likelihood of a successful arrest.
    And in this chilly room, pungent with the smell of classy perfume, the thought presenting itself to him between each of his calls was, Is this death an accident? A night of kinky sex gone wrong?
    Or murder?
    In almost every murder, the chances were that the perpetrator was in a much more ragged frame of mind than yourself. Roy Grace had met his share of killers over the years and not many were able to keep cool, calm and collected, not at any rate in the immediate aftermath. Most would be in what was termed a red mist. Their adrenaline out of control, their thinking confused, their actions – and whatever plan they might have had – all muzzed up by the fact that they simply had not reckoned on the chain reaction of chemicals inside their brains.
    He had seen a television documentary recently about human evolution failing to keep pace with the way humans had evolved socially. When confronted by the income tax inspector, people needed to stay cool and calm. Instead, instinctive primitive fight-or-flight reactions kicked in – those same reactions as if you had been confronted out on the savannah by a sabre-toothed tiger. You would be hit by a massive adrenaline surge that made you all shaky and clammy.
    Given time, that surge would eventually calm down. So your best chance of a result was to grab your villains while they were still in that heightened phase.
    The bedroom ran the entire width of the house – a house he knew, without any envy, that he could never afford. And even if he could, which would only happen if he won the lottery – unlikely, since most weeks he forgot to buy a ticket – he would not have bought this particular house. Maybe one of those mellow Georgian manors, with a lake and a few hundred rolling acres. Something with a bit of style, a bit of class. Yep. Squire Grace. He could see that. Somewhere in the wildest recesses of his mind.
    But not this vulgar, faux-Tudor pile behind a forbidding whitewashed wall and electric wrought-iron gates, in Brighton and Hove’s most ostentatious residential street, Dyke Road Avenue. No way. The only good thing about it, so far as he could see at this moment, was a rather beautifully restored white 3.8 Jaguar Mk2 under a dustsheet in the garage, which showed that