Want You Dead by Peter James Read Free Book Online Page B

voice of the caller, but was unable to. As Bella stepped away her whole demeanour changed. Her face was alive, animated. ‘I’m just attending a rural suicide with Glenn. Call you later, depending on what time we get finished?’
    Glenn watched the pathologist take a ruler measurement on the upper part of the victim’s right leg. It never ceased to amaze him quite how different all the pathologists he worked with were. Short, tubby and jolly. Slender and beautiful. Tall and cynical. Wiry and deadly serious. This particular one, Dr Frazer Theobald, was a short, stockily built man in his mid-fifties, with beady nut-brown eyes; he sported a thick Adolf Hitler style moustache beneath a massive hooter of a nose and an untidy, threadbare thatch of wiry hair on his head. It was Roy Grace who had first mentioned it, and he totally agreed: Theobald would not have needed much more than a large cigar in his mouth, to have gone to a fancy dress party as a passable Groucho Marx.
    After Bella had hung up, Glenn gave her a quizzical look, but she deliberately avoided eye contact. ‘Glenn,’ she said, ‘if you need to go home, don’t worry – I can stay on.’
    ‘I’m okay,’ he said.
    ‘What about your kids?’
    ‘Ari’s sister is babysitting. They adore her, it’s all cool.’
    Then she looked at him tenderly. ‘And you’re okay, are you? It must have been terrible for you – your wife—’
    She was interrupted by his phone ringing.
    ‘Glenn Branson,’ he answered.
    It was quiet, methodical Ray Packham from the High Tech Crime Unit, who had stayed late in his office, with another colleague, to work on the charred phone that had been recovered from the victim.
    ‘We’ve got lucky, Glenn,’ he said, ‘with the phone. If it had been an iPhone, which are encrypted, we’d have been stuffed. But this one’s a Galaxy S11, and we’re able to read the chip off the main board. We’re still working on it, but I thought it might be helpful to you to know that someone has called this number several times in the past twenty-four hours.’
    ‘Do you have the caller’s number?’
    Sounding very pleased with himself, Packham said, ‘I do!’

16
    Thursday evening, 24 October
    There was a cool blast of air in the downstairs room of Cleo’s townhouse, where Roy Grace sat around the makeshift card table with his poker buddies. Like some of the others, he had a cigar smouldering in the ashtray beside him. He checked the two cards in front of him – an ace of diamonds and a nine of clubs – as Sean Mcdonald, a recently retired Public Order Specialist Constable, dealt the flop.
    The queen of hearts, ace of clubs and nine of spades.
    Two pairs, aces on nines. This was potentially a good hand.
    A pile of gambling chips lay in the centre of the table. Alongside each of the six players were tumblers of whisky or glasses of wine, piles of cash and chips, and a couple of overflowing ashtrays surrounded by fragments of crisps and nuts. There was a fug of smoke in the room which the draught from the open window was helping to clear. Cleo was upstairs, working on her Open University philosophy degree, with Noah asleep, his door shut against the cigar fumes, up in his bedroom.
    Grace stared ruefully at his diminished pile of chips. He was too distracted to focus tonight. But with a hand like this he had to play. He tentatively put down two one-pound chips.
    Bob Thornton, to his left, a long-time retired DI in his mid-seventies, was by a wide margin the oldest of the group of regular players. They took it in turns to host an evening every Thursday, week in week out, year in year out.
    The game had been going on long before Grace had joined the force. Bob was a frequent winner and, true to form, there was a mountain of chips and cash in front of the man right now.
    Grace watched Bob hunch his shoulders as he checked his two hole cards, keeping them close to his chest, peering at them through his glasses with alert, greedy eyes. He opened