Dead Simple Read Free Page B

guilty for going on this date.
    She looked gorgeous — from her photo, at any rate. He liked her name, too. Claudine. French-sounding, it had something exotic. Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped holdups and
might
not be wearing knickers.
    They’d had just one phone conversation, in which she had practically seduced him down the line. A bunch of flowers he’d bought at a petrol station lay on the passenger seat beside him. Red roses — corny, he knew, but that was the old-fashioned romantic in him. People were right, he did need to move on, somehow. He could count the dates he’d had in the past eight and three-quarter years on just one hand. He simply could not accept there might be another Miss Right out there. That there could ever be anyone who matched up to Sandy.
    Maybe tonight that feeling would change?
    Claudine Lamont.
Nice name, nice voice.
    Turn those sodding fog lamps off!
    He smelled the sweet scent of the flowers. Hoped he smelled OK, too.
    In the ambient glow from the Alfa’s dash and the tail lights of the car in front, he stared up at the mirror, unsure what he expected to see. Sadness stared back at him.
    You have to move on.
    He swallowed more water. Yup.
    In just over two months he would be thirty-nine. In just over two months also another anniversary loomed. On 26 July Sandy would have been gone for nine years. Vanished into thin air, on his thirtieth birthday. No note. All her belongings still in the house except for her handbag.
    After seven years you could have someone declared legally dead. His mother, in her hospice bed, days before she passed away from cancer, his sister, his closest friends, his shrink, all of them told him he should do that.
    No way.
    John Lennon had said, ‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.’ That sure as hell was true.
    By thirty-six he had always assumed Sandy and he would have had a family. Three kids had always been his dream, ideally two boys and a girl, and his weekends would be spent doing stuff with them. Family holidays. Going to the beach. Out on day trips to fun places. Playing ball games. Fixing things. Helping them at nights with homework. Bathing them. All the comfortable stuff he’d done with his own parents.
    Instead he was consumed with an inner turbulence that rarely left him, even when it allowed him to sleep. Was she alive or dead? He’d spent eight years and ten months trying to find out and was still no nearer to the truth than when he had started.
    Outside of work, life was a void. He’d been unable — or unwilling — to attempt another relationship. Every date he’d been on was a disaster. It seemed at times that his only constant companion in his life was his goldfish, Marlon. He’d won the fish by target shooting at a fairground, nine years ago, and it had eaten all his subsequent attempts to provide it with a companion. Marlon was a surly, antisocial creature. Probably why they liked each other, Roy reflected. They were two of a kind.
    Sometimes he wished he wasn’t a policeman, that he did some less demanding job where he could switch off at five o’clock, go to the pub and then home, put his feet up in front of the telly. Normal life. But he couldn’t help it. There was some stubbornness or determination gene — or bunch of genes — inside him — and his father before him — that had driven him relentlessly throughout his life to pursue facts, to pursue the truth. It was those genes that had brought him up through the ranks, to his relatively early promotion to Detective Superintendent. But they hadn’t brought him any peace of mind.
    His face stared back at him again from the mirror. Grace grimaced at his reflection, at his hair cropped short, to little more than a light fuzz, at his nose, squashed and kinked after being broken in a