Dead Simple

darkness.

10
    Friday 26 December
    Suited and booted and proudly wearing the smart red paisley tie that Sandy had given him yesterday for Christmas, Roy passed on his left the blue door marked Superintendent and on his right the one marked Chief Superintendent. Roy often wondered whether he’d ever get to make Chief Superintendent.
    The whole building felt deserted this Boxing Day morning, apart from a few members of the Operation Houdini team in the Incident Room on the top floor. They were still working around the clock to try to catch the serial rapist known as the Shoe Man.
    As he waited for the kettle to boil, he thought for a moment about the Chief Superintendent’s cap. With its band of silver to distinguish it from the lesser ranks, it was, no question, very covetable. But he wondered if he was smart enough to rise to such a rank – and doubted it.
    One thing Roy Grace had learned about Sandy, in their years of marriage, was that she had at times a perfectionist view of how she wanted her particular world to be – and a very short fuse if any aspect failed her expectations. On a number of occasions, her sudden flare of temper at an inept waiter or shop assistant had left him feeling acutely embarrassed. But that spirit in her was part of what had attracted him to her in the first place. She had all the support and enthusiasm in the world for success, however big or small, but he just had to remember that, for Sandy, failure was never an option.
    Which explained, in part, her deep resentment, and occasional outbursts of anger, that, after years of trying almost every fertility treatment possible, she was still unable to conceive the baby they both so desperately wanted.
    Humming the words of Eric Clapton’s ‘Change the World’ – which for some reason had popped into his head – Roy Grace carried his mug of coffee down to his desk in the deserted open-plan Detectives’ Room on the second floor of Brighton’s John Street police station, with its rows of partitioned desks, its manky blue carpet, its crammed pigeonholes and its view to the east of the white walls and gleaming blue windows of the American Express headquarters. Then he logged on to the clunky, slow computer system to check the overnight serials. While he waited for it to load, he took a sip of coffee and fancied a cigarette, silently cursing the ban on smoking in police offices which had recently been introduced.
    An attempt had been made, as it was every year, to bring some Christmas cheer into the place. There were paper-chains hanging from the ceiling. Bits of tinsel draped along the tops of the partitions. Christmas cards on several desks.
    Sandy was deeply unimpressed that this was the second Christmas in three years that he had found himself on duty. And, as she quite rightly pointed out, it was a lousy week to be working. Even most of the local villains, off their trolleys with drink or off their faces with drugs, were in their homes or their lairs.
    Christmas was the peak period for sudden deaths and for suicides. It might be a happy few days for those with friends and families, but it was a desperate, wretched time for the lonely, particularly the elderly lonely ones who didn’t even have enough money to heat their homes properly. But it was a quiet period for serious crimes – the kind that could get an ambitious young detective sergeant like himself noticed by his peers and give him the chance to show his abilities.
    That was about to change.
    Very unusually, the phones had been quiet. Normally they rang all around the room constantly.
    As the first serials appeared, his internal phone suddenly rang.
    ‘CID,’ he answered.
    It was a Force Control Room operator, from the centre which handled and graded all enquiries.
    ‘Hi, Roy. Happy Christmas.’
    ‘You too, Doreen,’ he said.
    ‘Got a possible misper,’ she said. ‘Rachael Ryan, twenty-two, left her friends on Christmas Eve at the cab rank on East Street to walk home. She did not show up for Christmas lunch at her parents and did not answer her home phone or mobile. Her parents visited her flat in Eastern Terrace, Kemp Town, at 3 p.m. yesterday and there was no response. They’ve informed us this is out of character and they are concerned.’
    Grace took down the addresses of Rachael Ryan and her parents and told her he would investigate.
    The current police policy was to allow several days for a missing person to turn up before assigning any resources, unless