Dead Simple by Peter James Page A

a hearing problem, who slept with the television on, volume at maximum. Right now, at 3.45 a.m., he could hear an American cop drama through the party wall between their semi-detached houses. Guns banged, tyres squealed, sirens
whup-whupped
. She’d seen nothing.
    Noreen Grinstead, who lived opposite, was the one person he might have expected to have noticed something. A hawk-eyed, jumpy woman in her sixties, she knew everyone’s business in the street. When she wasn’t tending to her husband, Lance, who was steadily going downhill with Alzheimer’s, she was forever out front in yellow rubber gloves, washing her silver Nissan car, or hosing and scrubbing the driveway, or the windows of the house, or anything else that did or did not need washing. She even brought stuff out of the house to clean it in the driveway.
    Very little escaped her eye. But, somehow, Sandy’s disappearance had.
    He switched the light on and got out of bed, pausing to stare at the photograph of himself and Sandy on the dressing table. It had been taken in a hotel in Oxford during a conference on DNA fingerprinting, a few months before she disappeared. He was lounging back in a suit and tie, on a chaise longue. Sandy, in an evening dress, was lying back against him, hair up in blonde ringlets, beaming her constant irrepressible grin at a waiter they had sequestered to take the picture.
    He went over, picked up the frame, kissed the photo then set it down again, and went into the bathroom to urinate. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee was a recent affliction, a result of the health fad he was on, drinking the recommended minimum eight glasses of water a day. Then he padded, clad only in the T-shirt he slept in, downstairs.
    Sandy had such great taste. Their house itself was modest, like all the ones in the street, a three-bedroom mock-Tudor semi, built in the 1930s, but she had made it beautiful. She loved browsing the Sunday supplements, women’s magazines and design magazines, ripping out pages and showing him ideas. They’d spent hours together, stripping wallpaper, sanding floors, varnishing, painting.
    Sandy got into Feng Shui, and built a little water garden. She filled the house with candles. Bought organic food whenever she could. She thought about everything, questioned everything, was interested in everything, and he loved that. Those had been the good times, when they were building their future, cementing their life together, making all their plans.
    She was a good gardener, too. She understood about flowers, plants, shrubs, bushes, trees. When to plant, how to prune. Grace liked to mow the lawn but that was about where his skills ended. The garden was neglected now and he felt guilty about that, sometimes wondering what she would say if she returned.
    Her car was still in the garage. Forensics had been through it with a toothcomb after it had been recovered, then he’d brought it back home and garaged it. For years he kept the battery on trickle charge, just in case … The same way he kept her slippers out on the bedroom floor, her dressing gown hanging on its peg, her toothbrush in its mug.
    Waiting for her return.
    Wide awake, he poured himself two fingers of Glenfiddich, then sat down in his white armchair in the all-white lounge with its wooden floor and pressed the remote. He flicked through three movies in succession, then a bunch of other Sky channels, but nothing grabbed his attention for more than a few minutes. He played some music, switching restlessly from the Beatles to Miles Davis to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, then back to silence.
    He picked one of his favourite books, Colin Wilson’s
The Occult
, from the rows of books on the paranormal that filled every inch of his bookshelves, then sat back and turned the pages listlessly, sipping his whisky, unable to concentrate on more than a couple of paragraphs.
    That damned defence barrister strutting around in court today had got under his skin, and was now strutting