Friday 26 December

‘Thermometer says tonight!’ Sandy said, with that twinkle in her brilliant blue eyes that got to Roy Grace every time.

They were sitting in front of the television. Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation had become a kind of ritual, a movie they traditionally watched every Boxing Day night. The sheer stupidity of the disasters normally made Roy laugh out aloud. But tonight he was silent.

‘Hello?’ Sandy said. ‘Hello, Detective Sergeant! Anyone home?’

He nodded, crushing out his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re not thinking about work, are you, my darling? Not tonight. We didn’t have a proper Christmas, so let’s at least enjoy what’s left of Boxing Day. Let’s make something special out of it.’

‘I know,’ Roy said. ‘It’s just-’

‘It’s always, It’s just…’ she said.

‘I’m sorry. I had to deal with a family who didn’t have a Christmas or a Boxing Day celebration, OK? Their daughter left her friends early on Christmas morning and never arrived home. Her parents are frantic. I – I have to do what I can for them. For her.’

‘So? She’s probably busy shagging some bloke she met in a club.’

‘No. Not her pattern.’

‘Oh, sod it, Detective Sergeant Grace! You told me yourself about the number of people who get reported missing by loved ones every year. Around two hundred and thirty thousand in the UK alone, you said, and most of them turn up within thirty days!’

‘And eleven thousand, five hundred don’t.’

‘So?’

‘I have a feeling about this one.’

‘Copper’s nose?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Sandy stroked his nose. ‘I love yours, Copper!’ She kissed it. ‘We have to make love tonight. I checked my temperature and it seems like I might be ovulating.’

Roy Grace grinned and stared into her eyes. When colleagues, off duty, got wrecked in the bar upstairs at Brighton nick or out in pubs, and talk turned, as it always did among men, to football – something in which he had little interest – or to birds, the girls got divided fifty-fifty into those that blokes fancied because of their tits and those that blokes fancied because of their legs. But Roy Grace could honestly say that the first thing he had fancied about Sandy was her mesmerizing blue eyes.

He remembered the first time they met. It was a few days after Easter and his father had died a month before from bowel cancer. His mother had just been diagnosed with secondaries from breast cancer. He was a probationary police officer and feeling about as low as it was possible to feel. Some colleagues had encouraged him to join them for an evening at the dogs.

With little enthusiasm he’d turned up to the Brighton and Hove greyhound stadium and found himself seated across from a beautiful, bubbly young woman whose name he failed to clock. After some minutes busily chatting to a guy sitting beside her, she had leaned across the table to Grace and said, ‘I’ve been given a tip! Always bet on any dog that does its business before it races!’

‘You mean watch and see if it has a crap?’

‘Very sharp,’ she’d said. ‘You must be a detective!’

‘No,’ he’d replied, ‘not yet. But I’d like to be one day.’

So, while eating his prawn cocktail, he’d carefully watched the dogs for the first race being paraded out towards the starting gate. No. 5 had stopped for a serious dump. When the woman from the Tote had come round, the girl had bet a fiver on it and, to show off, he’d bet a tenner on it that he could ill afford to lose. The dog had romped home last by about twelve lengths.

On their first date, three nights later, he had kissed her in the darkness to the sound of the echoing roar of the sea beneath Brighton’s Palace Pier. ‘You owe me a tenner,’ he’d then said.

‘I think I got a bargain!’ she replied, fumbling in her handbag, pulling out a banknote and dropping it down the inside of his shirt.

He looked at Sandy now, in front of the television. She was even more beautiful than when they had first met. He loved her face, the smells of her body and of her hair; he loved her humour, her intelligence. And he loved the way she took all life in her stride. Sure, she had been angry that he’d been on duty over Christmas, but she understood because she wanted him to succeed.

That was his dream. Their dream.

Then the phone rang.

Sandy answered it, said coldly, ‘Yes he is,’ and handed the receiver to Roy.

He listened, jotted down an address on the back of a Christmas card, then said, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

Sandy glared at him and shook a cigarette out of the packet. Chevy Chase continued his antics on the screen.

‘It’s Boxing Night, for Christ’s sake!’ she said, reaching for the lighter. ‘You don’t make it easy for me to quit, do you?’

‘I’ll be back as quickly as I can. I have to go and see this witness – a man who claims he saw a man pushing a woman into a van in the early hours.’

‘Why can’t you see him tomorrow?’ she demanded petulantly.

‘Because this girl’s life may be at risk, OK?’

She gave him a wry smile. ‘Off you go, Detective Sergeant Grace. Go and save the sodding world.’

Thursday 1 January

‘You seem very distracted tonight. Are you OK, my love?’ Cleo said.

Roy Grace was sitting on one of the huge red sofas in the living room of her town house in a converted warehouse development, and Humphrey, getting larger and heavier by the day, was sitting on him. The black puppy, nestled comfortably in his lap, was pulling surreptitiously at the strands of wool of his baggy jumper as if his game plan was to unravel it entirely before his master noticed. The plan was working, because Roy was so engrossed in the pages of case-file notes on Operation Houdini he was reading that he had not noticed what the dog was doing.

The first reported sexual assault in Operation Houdini had been on 15 October 1997. It was a botched attack on a young woman late one evening in a twitten – a narrow alleyway – in the North Laine district of Brighton. A man walking his dog had come to her rescue before her assailant had removed her panties, but he had run off with one of her shoes. The next was, unfortunately, more successful. A woman who had attended a Halloween ball at the Grand Hotel at the end of the month had been seized in the corridor of the hotel by a man dressed as a woman and was not found by hotel staff until the morning, bound and gagged.

Cleo, curled up on the sofa opposite him, wrapped in a camel poncho over woollen black leggings, was reading a tome on the ancient Greeks for her Open University philosophy degree studies. Pages of her typed and handwritten notes, all plastered with yellow Post-its, were spread out around her. Her long blonde hair tumbled across her face and every few minutes she would sweep it back with her hand. Grace always loved watching her do that.

A Ruarri Joseph CD was playing on the hi-fi and on the muted television screen Sean Connery, in Thunderball, held a beautiful woman in an urgent clinch. During the past week, since Christmas, Cleo had developed a craving for king prawn kormas and they were waiting for the delivery of tonight’s meal – their fourth curry in five days. Grace didn’t mind, but tonight he was giving his system a rest with some plain tandoori chicken.

Also on the table sat one of Grace’s Christmas presents to Cleo, a big new goldfish bowl, replacing the one that had been smashed by an intruder the previous year. Its incumbent, which she had named Fish-2, was busily exploring its environment of weed and a miniature submerged Greek temple in sharp, nervy darts. Next to it was a stack of three books that had been Glenn Branson’s Christmas present to him. Bloke’s 100 Top Tips for Surviving Pregnancy, The Expectant Father and You’re Pregnant Too, Mate!