Read Dead Simple for Free Online Page A

felt to Roy Grace as if it had been deliberately designed to intimidate and impress. It didn’t carry any higher status than the rest of the courtrooms in this building, but it felt as if it did. Georgian, it had a high, vaulted ceiling, a public gallery up in the gods, oak-panelled walls, dark oak benches and dock, and a balustraded witness stand. At this moment it was presided over by a bewigged Judge Driscoll, way past his sell-by date, who sat, looking half asleep, in a vivid red-backed chair beneath the coat of arms bearing the legend. ‘ Dieu et mon droit ’. The place looked like a theatre set and smelled like an old school classroom.
    Now as Grace stood in the witness stand, dressed neatly as he always was for court, in a blue suit, white shirt, sombre tie and polished black lace-ups, looking good outwardly, he felt ragged inside. Part lack of sleep from his date last night – which had been a disaster – and part nerves. Holding the Bible with one hand, he rattled his way through the oath, glancing around, taking in the scene as he swore for maybe the thousandth time in his career, by Almighty God, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
    The jury looked the way all juries did, like a bunch of tourists stranded in a coach station. An untidy ragbag of a group, gaudy pullovers, open-throat shirts and creased blouses beneath a sea of blank faces, all white, ranked in two rows, behind water jugs, tumblers and a mess of loose-leaf jottings. Haphazardly stacked beside the judge were a video player, a slide projector and a huge tape recorder. Below him, the female stenographer peered primly from behind a battery of electronic equipment. An electric fan on a chair swivelled right then left, not having much impact on the muggy late-afternoon air. The public galleries were heaving with press and spectators. Nothing like a murder trial to pull the punters in. And this was the local trial of the year.
    Roy Grace’s big triumph.
    Suresh Hossain sat in the dock, a fleshy man with a pockmarked face, slicked-back hair, dressed in a brown, chalk-striped suit and purple satin tie. He observed the proceedings with a laconic gaze, as if he owned the place and this whole trial had been laid on for his personal entertainment. Slimeball, scumbag, slum landlord. He’d been untouchable for the past decade, but now Roy Grace had finally banged him to rights. Conspiracy to murder. His victim an equally unsavoury business rival, Raymond Cohen. If this trial went the way it should, Hossain was going down for more years than he would survive, and several hundred decent citizens of Brighton and Hove would be able to enjoy their lives in their homes freed from the ugly shadow of his henchmen making every hour a living hell for them.
    His mind drifted back to last night. Claudine . Claudine bloody Lamont . OK, it hadn’t helped that he’d arrived for his date an hour and three-quarters late. But it hadn’t helped either that her photograph on the U-Date website was, charitably, a good ten years out of date; nor that she’d omitted to put on her details that she was a non-drinking, cop-hating vegan, whose sole interest in life appeared to be her nine rescue cats.
    Grace liked dogs. He had nothing in particular against cats, but he’d never yet met one that he’d connected with, in the way he almost instantly bonded with any dog. After two and a half hours in a dump of a vegetarian restaurant in Tunbridge Wells, being lectured and grilled alternately about the free spirits of cats, the oppressive nature of the British police and men who viewed women solely as sex objects, he had been relieved to escape.
    Now, after a night of troubled, intermittent sleep and a day of hanging around waiting to be called, he was about to be grilled again. It was still raining this afternoon, but the air was much warmer and clammy. Grace could feel perspiration walking down the small of his back.
    The defence silk, who had surprised the