Peter James's Roy Grace series: Need You Dead exclusive extract part two

Best-selling crime author Peter James, who sets his work in Brighton and Hove and parts of Sussex, has allowed Argus readers an exclusive first look at the opening chapters of the latest instalment. In the final extract readers are left with a cliffhanger...

Juliet Solomon and Matt Robinson, partnered again on B Section, were an hour and a half into their eight-hour shift on lates.

It was just gone 7.30pm. After catching up on paperwork whilst waiting around at Brighton’s John Street police station for a shout – a call-out to an incident – they decided to take a car and go out hunting, as Matt called it. Cruising around, being the visible police that the Police and Crime Commissioner Nicola Roigard, and the public, wanted.

Juliet Solomon drove, heading down towards the seafront. They crossed the roundabout in front of the Palace Pier and headed along Kingsway. As they drove they were watching the streets and the occupants of cars, looking for the usual suspects – local drug dealers, criminals who had absconded from prison or failed to meet bail or probation terms, drink drivers, someone on their mobile phone whilst driving.

It was a foul night, with rain pelting down. “PC Rain”, the police jokingly called it. The streets were almost deserted. Not many people ventured out on a wet Monday night. But the overcast sky wasn’t completely dark yet.

“I like this time of year,” Juliet said. “After the clocks have gone forward and it’s suddenly lighter much longer in the evenings. Spring on its way. It always cheers me up.”

Peering at the road ahead through the wipers, then at the deserted pavements on both sides, Matt Robinson retorted, “Spring? You must have good vision!”

“Ha ha.”

As they approached The Grand and Metropole hotels she nodded at the tower coming up on their left, which rose 160 metres into the sky. A mirrored doughnut-shaped glass pod – the viewing platform – was slowly rising, like a vertical cable car. Its construction had caused much local controversy.

“What do you think now it’s finished? You didn’t like it when it first started going up, did you?” asked Juliet.

“Yeah, actually I really like it now. It’s pretty cool – took Steph and the boys on it a couple of weeks ago – awesome view! How about you?”

“I’m getting more used to it. I love the underneath of the pod, all mirrored – very UFO!” she conceded. “I guess we now have to wait for the first jumper.”

“You’re a right cynic!” he said. “Or should I say pessimist.”

“You know the definition of a pessimist?”

“I think I’m about to. What is it?”

“An optimist with experience.”

He shook his head, grinning. “I think it’s sealed – no one could get up there to jump.”

“Sure they could, there’s an inspection ladder up the inside – metal rungs.”

Matt Robinson shuddered. “I don’t have a head for heights.”

“I’m fine with them, my dad was a builder – I was always scaling ladders with him and crawling over rooftops when I was a kid.”

“Bloody hell – hadn’t he heard of health and safety?”

“Clearly not, he fell to his death when I was 18, off one of the roofs at the Pavilion.”

“Wow, I’m sorry, that’s so sad.”

They drove on along the seafront, but there was barely a soul around, and the traffic was light. They stopped a van with a tail light that was out, and Robinson hurried through the rain to the cab to advise the driver. Then as he got back in the car, and began wiping his glasses, a Grade One call came in. A man reported acting suspiciously outside an electrical goods depot on the Lewes Road.

Pleased at having some action, he leaned forward and switched on the blue lights and siren as his colleague accelerated forward, racing past two vehicles, and tapped in the address on the satnav. Then, as they turned right into Grand Avenue, they were told to stand down as two other response cars were now at the scene and the suspect was being spoken to.

They turned the car round, deciding to head back into central Brighton and cruise around there. As they drove they passed the time by discussing their favourite – and least favourite – kinds of incidents.

He loathed minor road traffic collisions, he told his work buddy, when both sides were arguing hammer and tongs with each other and you could get no sense out of anyone. She replied that what she disliked most of all were domestics – fights between couples. Not many officers enjoyed intervening in those – too often a chair would come flying at you as you went in through the door, or one or other of the parties would turn on you.

Juliet said she liked blue-light runs most of all – the money-can’t-buy adrenaline rush that was better than any fairground ride, in her view. Matt said he enjoyed getting in a roll-around in a pub fight.

As they turned left up Preston Street, a road lined with restaurants on both sides, and a regular hotspot of trouble later in the week, a swarthy man in a bomber jacket suddenly jumped into the road in front of them, flagging them down urgently.

Juliet Solomon halted the car, and Robinson lowered his window. Before he could say anything, the man, very agitated, pointed at a Ferrari parked just behind him.

“Look! Those ******* in that ****box Prius just reversed into me – and they’re saying I drove into them!”

Robinson turned to Solomon with a quizzical expression. “Want it?”

“It’s all yours,” she replied.

Pulling on his cap, Robinson opened his door and climbed out into the rain, which was coming down even harder now.

Although not tall, his hefty frame gave him the aura of a nightclub bouncer, and he had a particular glare for confronting troublemakers that he had honed to perfection over the years – and it generally worked.

Two men climbed out of the small saloon parked just up the hill from the Ferrari. One was tall, wearing a beanie, most of his face and hands covered in tattoos, the other short and mean-looking, whom Robinson recognized. A local scrote, with a barbed-wire tattoo round his neck, who had a long record of mostly petty crime – and jail.

“All right,” Robinson said calmly. “Who are the drivers of both cars?”

The swarthy man and the scrote each said they were.

Robinson could have sworn that through the windscreen, in the dry warm interior of the Ford Mondeo, he could see his colleague grinning.

He raised two fingers at her behind his back.

Monday 25 April

The Sussex Police Force Control Room is housed in a futuristic-looking red-brick structure on the headquarters campus.

Inside is a large, open-plan area, covering two floors, with rows of computer terminals, many of their screens showing multiple images – some small-scale street maps, others live images from the Sussex Police’s 850 CCTV cameras located around the county.

To the casual observer, with its atmosphere of quiet, purposeful concentration, it could be the offices of any number of different organisations – perhaps an insurance company, an online retailer, or a financial institution. But it is actually the nerve centre of policing the county, the hub where every emergency call to the force is received and responded to.

Evie Leigh looked at her watch and yawned. Two minutes to eight. Another four hours to go till the end of her 12-hour shift. She looked at the clock up on the wall, as if expecting – willing – the hands to have jumped forward to hours later. But it said the same as her watch. 7.58pm.

Slow time. That police expression had a whole new meaning at the moment. What a dull day – quieter than she could ever remember. Not that anyone in here – or in the police in general – would ever dare say the Q word, as “quiet” was known. It was an instant jinx. But she really felt like shouting it out now, just to liven things up.

She wasn’t going to need to.

Evie loved her job as an emergency controller, because you literally never knew what was going to happen in ten seconds’ time – a bank robbery, a serious accident, someone threatening to jump off a building, a pub brawl, someone breaking into a house – and normally the days shot by, often seeming too short when she was really busy and the adrenaline was pumping.

But today, she thought, you could be forgiven for thinking Sussex Police had done their job zealously and eliminated crime in the county. Sure, Mondays were never the liveliest of nights, particularly a wet one, but even so!

Fifty people worked down on this level and a further 30 on the upper level; most of them were civilians, a good third of whom were retired police officers who had returned to work, despite their pension pots, either because they needed the money or because they missed the job.

The civilians here, like herself, were identifiable by their royal blue polo shirts with the words police support staff embroidered in white on their sleeves, as opposed to the black shirts worn by the serving police officers.

They were presided over around the clock by a rota of Ops-1 Inspectors. The current duty Ops-1 was Kim Sherwood. In her early fifties, with a youthful face topped with short, fair hair, she was a year away from retirement – and dreading it. Kim loved every second of this job which carried huge responsibilities. Between the hours of 2am and 7am the Ops-1 Inspector was the most senior officer on duty in the whole of Sussex Police.

Her work station was a screened-off command centre with a battery of monitors. One, a touchscreen, operated as her eyes and ears on this whole department. Above her desk was a screen on which she could view the images from any of the county’s CCTV cameras. With the toggle lever on her desk, Kim Sherwood could rotate and zoom over half of them directly.

At the rows of desks in front of her, and to either side, as well as on the split-level floor above, sat the radio operators and the controllers, each wearing a headset. The latter’s role was to assess all emergency calls, grade them in terms of level of urgency and dispatch police officers – either in vehicles or on foot – to respond, to liaise with them until they were on the scene, and where possible follow progress on the monitors.

On an average day here they would get between 1,500 to 2,500 calls. Many of them were not emergencies at all – someone locked out of their flat, or a cat gone missing, or someone’s lawnmower stolen from their garden shed. And some were downright ridiculous, such as one she’d had yesterday from a drunk, saying he’d had too much in a pub and didn’t think he should drive so he’d like the police to send a car over to give him a lift home.

Calls like that were a menace because they could block and delay a real emergency where every second counted – and those were the ones Evie liked best, the real heart-thumping, against-the-clock emergencies. So far, she’d not had one all day. Looking at the wall clock yet again, she realised the boredom was making her hungry.

She was trying to diet, but one of her colleagues was going round collecting orders for a curry run to a balti house. The thought of eating her cold tuna salad whilst the room filled with the aroma of Indian spices, and everyone around her was munching on a poppadum, was too much, and her resolve crumbled. She added her name to the list, and as usual ordered far too much – an onion bhaji, chicken korma, garlic naan, two poppadums and basmati rice.

Then her phone warbled.

“Sussex Police, emergency, how can I help?” she answered, and immediately looked at the number and approximate location that showed on the screen. A mobile phone in the Hangleton area.

She could barely hear a response, a tiny voice, just a whisper. She wondered for an instant if it was a child playing around with a phone – that happened often.

“Hello, caller, can you speak up please, I can’t hear you.”

The terror in the woman’s voice that came back chilled her bones. It was only very slightly louder, still whispering as if fearful of being heard, but now Evie could just about make out what she was saying.

“Help me, please God, help me, help me, he’s coming up the stairs – he’s got an axe – he’s going to kill me.”

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• Need You Dead by Peter James is published by Pan Macmillan and is on sale at all good bookshops from tomorrow in hardback at £20