Read Not Dead Yet for Free Online Page B

your skin. You could scrub yourself raw, but you’d still smell it again the next morning.
    The only person he never noticed it on was Cleo. But maybe Glenn was right, and in ten years’ time he would. He hoped not.
    ‘Coq au vin for dinner, Roy?’ the Crime Scene Manager greeted him, dressed in a white protective suit, with breathing apparatus, his mask temporarily raised.
    ‘Not if it does that to you, thanks!’
    Both men stared down into the space, four foot below the grid, at the torso. The first thought in Roy Grace’s mind was whether this was some kind of gangland killing. ‘So, what do we have so far?’
    In answer to his SIO, David Green picked up a sealed polythene evidence bag from the floor, with an air of pride, and held it up with a gloved hand.
    Grace peered inside. It contained two jagged pieces of badlysoiled fabric, with an ochre checked pattern just visible. What looked like parts of a man’s suit.
    ‘Where did you find these?’ Grace asked.
    ‘Close to the body. Looks like it might have been something he was wearing – for some reason the only parts that didn’t decompose or get taken by rats for a nest. Maybe we’ll find more when we start our fingertip search.’
    ‘ He? ’
    ‘One of the few bits that weren’t cut off, chief, if you get my drift.’
    Grace nodded, uncomfortably getting his drift.
    ‘Must have been a made-to-measure suit,’ Glenn Branson said.
    Grace and Green looked at him. ‘Can you tell that from the cut of the cloth?’ Grace asked.
    ‘No, chief.’ Branson nodded down at the remains and said, drily, ‘I’m imagining they would have had a bit of a problem finding something off-the-peg to fit him.’

13
    Inside the house, just like all Gaia’s homes, the floors looked like Italian marble. Just like the stone that had been imported slab by slab from the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara that, historically, had supplied the Medicis with the marble for their palaces, and in more recent years, one of the Los Angeles landmarks, Hernando Courtright’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
    The walls were hung with Aztec artefacts and stage shots of Gaia. In pride of place, on the wall facing the sofa, was the signed monochrome photo of her with wild, just-out-of-bed hair, wearing a black negligee to promote her world tour. To the left, above one of the armchairs of the white leather three-piece suite, which was a clone of her one in LA, was another tour poster, also signed. In it she wore a green tank top and leather jeans. Gaia would have felt totally at home here! Okay, so maybe the rear aspect wasn’t as fine as in some of her residences. Gaia probably had a better view from her kitchen window than this one, an old woman’s smalls hanging on a washing line, and a disused breeze-block garage.
    Above the fireplace, with fake electric coals burning, was a blow-up of her idol’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned G AIA U P C LOSE AND P ERSONAL . Again, personally signed.
    One of her favourite items!
    She had fought a fierce bidding war on eBay for it. Securing it with just five seconds to spare for £1,750. Money she could not afford. But she had to have it.
    Had to.
    Like everything else in this small semi, with the irritating street light outside that shone an amber glow every damned night into her bedroom.
    Anna had bought the house in daytime, six years ago. It had never occurred to her that street lights might be a problem. Gaiawould not have to put up with street lights keeping her awake, that was for sure.
    Anna had written to the council, written to the Argus , the West Sussex Gazette , the Sussex Express , the Mid Sussex Times , but no one had replied, no one had done a single damned thing about that street light. So she bought an air rifle, and shot the bulb out in the middle of the night. Two bloody workmen from the bloody council replaced it two bloody days later.
    But none of that mattered right now. All forgotten for the moment, because Gaia was