Daily Quotes 7

TWO SIMON GRANT MYSTERIES

Hiding the Elephant – Chapter 7

‘She must have been very happy that night,’ she started, then checked herself. What could she say that would be even remotely appropriate? She was the medical examiner who’d attended the crime scene. That had somehow put her on the wrong side of mourning. Simon’s side. Maybe Philip was right. Maybe she really shouldn’t have come.

‘You are thinking of this morning, aren’t you. Couldn’t have been easy for you.’ John quietly removed the picture from her hand and stared at it for a moment before placing it back on the table.

‘May I keep this?’ Without waiting for permission Simon deftly released the picture out of its frame. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know where it was taken? ‘

‘No, Inspector, I don’t. Probably some Riverside do. Is it important? I could ask someone.’

‘Was she into amateur dramatics?Riverside is an amateur dramatic society, isn’t it?’

Lock Up Your Daughters – Chapter 7

She nodded and checked her mobile. ‘Ring me if you need anything.’

‘Promise.’ Simon followed her out though the French window. ‘And I promise not to play with matches, let any strangers in or stick my fingers into electric sockets.’

* * *

But he didn’t promise not to make any phonecalls, so after some consideration, he called Matthew.

‘Have you got their e-mail address?’ Matthew asked even before Grant had finished talking. ‘I could contact them straight off by e-mail.Brazil’s just about getting ready for lunch break now.’

Grant looked at the piece of paper Pippa had given him. ‘What does an e-mail address look like?’ Young Matthew was probably grinning from ear to ear at the other end, but he didn’t care.

‘If you see a string of numbers or letters, or both, written in the way you’ve never seen before and with an “@” sign in between, that’ll be it.’ The boy sounded deadly serious.

Everything Grant could see looked perfectly normal. He didn’t recognise the name of the Brazilian town and there were letters with accents on top of them and below them, as one would expect to find in Portuguese, but otherwise there was nothing out of the ordinary. He turned the note to the other side. At the bottom of the page, along the rugged edge where Pippa must have torn the rest of the sheet off, there were two lines of writing that seemed completely meaningless. But they both contained the “@” sign.

‘I think I’ve got it. Two, it seems. Two e-mail addresses. One must be Brazilian, the other American. No idea which is which.’

‘Leave it with me, Sir. I’ll have something for you in the morning.’

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Daily Quotes 6

TWO SIMON GRANT MYSTERIES

Hiding the Elephant – Chapter 6

The line goes dead and something curled tightly within her dissolves with it. Jesus, what a mess. Emma reaches for the ignition key but turns it over just enough for the radio to come on. The football match is still in progress. The local radio reporter doesn’t sound too happy. Without looking, she presses another button. The frivolous charm of Dvorák’s Humoresque, incongruous and mocking, makes her laugh. She should do the simple and the obvious – go home and get drunk. It’s almost ten o’clock.  It’s been a bitch of a night and there’s nothing more she can do now. She can tell Simon what she knows tomorrow, once he re-surfaces. It can’t be that urgent. Sergeant Tully was right. Simon is perfectly capable of looking after himself.  She overreacted back at the hospital. Lost her sense of proportion. The Branton estate did that to her. And Elaine. That’s all. That’s all, Phil. Honest. There’s no more to it. Tomorrow, she’ll make Phil his breakfast again, bring it upstairs and slip into bed next to him, and one day a miracle will happen, she knows it will and they’ll have kids, lots of them and everything will be fine. She’ll find Simon tomorrow and tell him what she’s learned, and he can make his arrest and then…then what. Oh, who the hell cares? It’ll all work out one way or another. Things always do.

Lock Up Your Daughters – Chapter 6

It all went downhill from there. The next morning it transpired that the phoney Miss Hunt’s hotel reservation was made over the phone by a Mr. R.G. Soames who gave his address as 36c Richmond Drive in Hendon and a contact telephone number. Mr. Boot Junior, the hotel owner’s son, took the call himself. Remembered it quite clearly even, said Warner. Only, when checked, the telephone number matched an entirely different address in south London, a tattoo parlour that specialised in exotic birds, and 36 Richmond Drive, no “c”, in Hendon was shared by two widowed sisters in their eighties with poor eyesight and very little English.

‘I’ve identified Hunt’s fingerprints,’ said Brendan Shea. He popped to the Station in person. His report typed out in large font covered less than a full page.

‘And, apart from very few items of clothing, and her hair on the hairbrush, that’s about all she’s left behind. Must have had her handbag containing any ID with her when she went riding. The murderer must have taken it away with him.’

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Daily Quotes 5

TWO SIMON GRANT MYSTERIES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiding the Elephant – Chapter 5

‘You know,’ Simon averted his gaze from the conjugal kiss, ‘you’ve got something there. XY may be a code of some sort, an inside joke as the letter says or whatever, but those are actually initials. I can think of a number of last names starting with Y, but for the life of me I can’t think of a single first name starting with X. Can you?’

‘Xavier,’ suggested Phil dubiously. ‘Sounds like a comic strip character.’

‘Maybe it is,’ Emma said thoughtfully, her fingers playing with the hair at the back of Philip’s head again. ‘A nickname, possibly known only to the two of them. Like his real name might be Joe Bloggs but he reminds her of Xavier Yungenspiel, the hero of a Swiss comic strip.’

Lock Up Your Daughters – Chapter 5

Well, he had to agree with the Branton militants on that point at least. He was covering up for that bastard Tibb. Taking the flack. At the same time, Tibb, clean conscience and all, lectured at the police college three days a week at a higher salary and ten o’clock am start, no later than four pm finish, some evening and weekend work required at exam times. Tibb may not have been responsible for little Kylie’s death, but he was responsible for something. There was bad smell about, and it had Tibb’s DNA stamped all over it. If only Grant could put his finger on what it was.

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Daily Quotes 4

Two Simon Grant Mysteries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiding the Elephant – Chapter 4

Dinner was late. There had been a fatal accident in Hallbrook main street, right by the shops. A boy of four was knocked over and the driver didn’t stop. By the time Simon arrived, Emma was kneeling on the wet pavement, her hair hanging down her face in heavy, rain-soaked strands, holding a small lifeless hand. Later, when all the formalities were over and she was hanging about even though there was nothing for her to do there, he followed her car home, home to the Willows. Somewhere in between her grief for the baby boy dead on the pavement and his own unreturned phone calls, among the clank of dinner plates he’d helped to set out before Philip came home, there was a germ of something foreign and careless, a seed that was never meant to grow, a beginning that had never started because there was never to be any after.

Lock Up Your Daughters – Chapter 4

The phone rang just as Grant had expected it to. The long, thin sound told him he was wanted on the internal line.

‘If you could possibly sign off the claim forms by the close of play today, Sir, we’ll have them paid out with the next cheque run. I know you’re busy. I apologise.’ Sergeant Malcolm who’d been moved to desk duties after nearly losing a leg in the line of duty didn’t sound apologetic.

Grant quickly pulled his hand away from the trolley and promised. ‘Before you rang, Malc, did you hear the small voice of the guardian angel of police officers’ expense accounts urge you to give me a prod?’

‘Aye, I did, Sir. Only it wasn’t an angel and the voice wasn’t small. Barbara Cunningham, all the five feet of her, and we’re talking her waist measurement here, Sir, Barbara was here only five minutes ago and said that a right shitty one’s turned up and that if we didn’t get you to sign the claims now we never will. Not for the next cheque run, anyroad.’

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Daily Quotes 3

Two Simon Grant Mysteries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiding the Elephant – Chapter 3

In the name of restitution for his failings Grant’s nostrils flare out, grasping for smells, the stench of sweat, fetor of blood, the heat of life. He’s rewarded with nothing, not even what was there when he first arrived, when all his senses were fresh and searched for the signs of Emma. He forces himself into remembering the faint musk of dust and forgotten food, closed windows and trapped heat.

‘Is he here?’ he asks. ‘Or you’ve dumped him somewhere along the way?’

‘You and I have more important things to worry about,’ Dancer says indifferently. It’s not a threat, not malicious. If there’s any reality left in all this, Dancer is the one in control of it.

Lock Up Your Daughters – Chapter 3

The next four years old reel was ready for screening. In it Simon was wrapped in a maroon coloured bed sheet in Pippa’s dingy basement in Venice, the basement that smelled of other people’s cooking, echoed with other people’s noises, and with a view of a patch of waste-ground that Pippa called her lawn. That was all she could afford on her trainee wages.

‘I’m lucky they’re paying me at all,’ she’d said while she was driving him there from his hotel in a car that must have had a large number of careless previous owners. ‘And it costs money to have one’s lips augmented.’

‘Augmented?’ Simon was only just starting his collection ofCaliforniaspeak. To show it off to Emma later when he returned to Hallbrook. To amuse Emma. Make her laugh. Make her ask him to another dinner. ‘What are your lips augmented with?’

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