Read Want You Dead for Free Online

men.
    ‘So what have we got?’
    ‘Single body, heavily burnt. There’s a petrol can nearby. We’re conducting a search of the immediate area.’
    ‘Do we have a name?’ Grace asked.
    ‘No, not yet.’
    Grace and Branson went into the tent, sat on plastic chairs and wormed their way into protective oversuits and then overshoes.
    Branson sniffed several times. ‘Long pig,’ he said.
    ‘ Long pig ?’ Grace replied.
    ‘You don’t know about long pig ?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You mean, I actually know something you don’t?’ He grinned.
    ‘What is it?’
    Branson shook his head. ‘It’s what cannibals in Papua New Guinea call white men. Apparently you taste like pork.’
    ‘Thanks a lot. And what do you taste of?’
    ‘They don’t eat black men.’
    The pair signed the scene guard’s log and ducked under the blue and white police crime scene tape. They then followed DI Hazeldine along the route that was marked by more tape, through the brambles to the edge of a ditch.
    And looked down.
    ‘Shit!’ Glenn Branson said.
    Roy Grace said nothing, absorbing the sheer horror of what he was staring at.
    ‘Did you ever see A Nightmare on Elm Street ?’ Glenn asked, a touch irreverently.
    Grace knew what he meant. What lay in the ditch was like a prop from a horror movie.
    He so wished it was a prop.
    The body lay on mud, with burnt undergrowth all around, fists raised in the air as if about to punch some unseen adversary.
    With the blackened skin, hairless skull and empty eye sockets, it looked like some gruesome modern sculpture that had been stolen from an art gallery.
    Except for the smell of cooked meat. And the petrol can nearby.
    Bile rose up in Roy Grace’s throat and he took a step back. He’d not thrown up at the sight of a corpse since his very first post-mortem as a fledgling police constable at Brighton and Hove Mortuary. It had been when the mortician had held the rotary bandsaw, ground its teeth through the skullcap of the deceased lying on the steel table, severed the optic nerves with a Sabatier carving knife, and lifted out the brain.
    He’d done then what over half of police officers attending their first post-mortem do. Turned bright green and staggered out of the room. After a cup of sugary tea and a digestive biscuit he’d regained his composure and seen the rest of the post-mortem through. But that evening when he had gone home, he had gulped down three whiskies in a row, and when his then wife, Sandy, had arrived home, he’d looked at her with X-ray eyes, seeing her coiled intestines, as well as the rest of her internal organs. It had been a good two weeks before he had been able to make love to her again.
    In the ensuing years, he had got over it. But there were some homicide victims that still got to him. One had been the remains of a man in a burnt-out car on Ditchling Common – the victim of a gay hate crime. He had found it really hard to get his head around the knowledge that the twisted, charred, hairless sculpture had once been a living human being.
    Like this one below him now.
    He stared at one detail, the large wristwatch, charred and melted beyond recognition. Fixating on this inanimate possession as a way of avoiding looking at the body itself, he turned to Hazeldine. ‘Who found this person?’ he asked.
    ‘Some members playing a round of golf, Roy.’
    Grace had taken up golf some years back, but had not found it easy. Sandy had resented the amount of time it took on top of the long hours he worked and, in fairness to her, he had agreed and given up, deciding reluctantly that it wasn’t his game. ‘Where are they?’
    ‘In the clubhouse. I asked them to wait. They’re not too happy.’
    ‘The person in the ditch isn’t either,’ Grace retorted drily. He resisted the temptation to climb down and take a closer look, not wanting to contaminate the scene any further. And besides, what he could see confirmed what he had been told.
    Hazeldine’s radio crackled. He spoke