Dead Simple by Peter James Page B

around inside his mind. Richard bloody Charwell. Pompous sodding bastard. Worse, Grace knew he had been outsmarted by the man. Outmanoeuvred and outsmarted. And that really stung.
    He picked up the remote again and punched up the news on Teletext. Nothing beyond the same stories that had been around for a couple of days now and were getting stale. No breaking political scandal, no terrorist outrage, no earthquake, no air disaster. He didn’t wish ill on anyone, but he had been hoping for something to fill up the morning’s headlines and airwaves. Something other than the murder trial of Suresh Hossain.
    His luck was out.
     
     
12
     
    Two national tabloids and one broadsheet led with front-page splashes on the murder trial of Suresh Hossain, and all the rest of the British morning papers had coverage inside.
    It wasn’t the trial itself that was the focus of their interest, but the remarks in the witness box made by Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who at 8.30 in the morning found himself on the carpet in front of his boss, Alison Vosper, feeling as if the clock had been wound back three decades, and he was back at school, trembling in front of his headmistress.
    One of Grace’s colleagues had nicknamed her ‘No. 27’, and it had stuck. No. 27 was a sweet and sour dish on the local Chinese takeaway menu. Conversely, when ordering the dish, it was always referred to as an Alison Vosper. That’s exactly what she was, sweet and sour.
    In her early forties, with wispy blonde hair cut conservatively short, and framing a hard but attractive face, Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper was very definitely sour this morning. Even the powerful floral scent she was wearing had an acrid tinge.
    Power-dressed in a black two-piece with a crisp white blouse, she sat behind an expanse of polished rosewood desk, in her immaculate ground-floor office in the Queen Anne police headquarters building in Lewes, with its view out across a trimmed lawn. The desk was bare except for a slim crystal vase containing three purple tulips, framed photographs of her husband (a police officer several years older but three ranks her junior) and her two children, an ammonite pen holder and a stack of the morning’s newspapers fanned out like a triumphant poker hand.
    Grace always wondered how his superiors kept their offices — and their desks — so tidy. All his working life, his own work spaces had been tips. Repositories of sprawling files, unanswered correspondence, lost pens, travel receipts and out-trays that had long given up on the struggle to keep pace with the in-trays. To get to the very top, he decided, required some kind of paperwork management skill for which he was lacking the gene.
    Rumour was that Alison Vosper had had a breast cancer operation three years ago. But Grace knew that’s all it would ever be, just rumour, because the Assistant Chief Constable kept a wall around herself. Nonetheless, behind her hard-cop carapace, there was a certain vulnerability that he connected to. In truth, at times he fancied her, and there were occasions when those waspish brown eyes of hers twinkled with humour, and when he sensed she might almost be flirting with him. This morning was not one of them.
    No handshake. No greeting. Just a curt nod for him to sit in one of the twin high-backed chairs in front of her desk. Then she launched straight in, with a look that was part reproach, part pure anger.
    ‘What the hell is this, Roy?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘
Sorry?
’
    He nodded. ‘I — look, this whole thing got taken out of context—’
    She interrupted him before he could continue. ‘You realize this could bring the whole case crashing down on us?’
    ‘I think we can contain it.’
    ‘I’ve had a dozen calls from the national press already this morning. You’ve become a laughing stock. You’ve made us look like a bunch of idiots. Why have you done this?’
    Grace was silent for some moments. ‘She’s an extraordinary woman,