Not Dead Enough (15 page)

‘Any idea why not?’ Grace asked.

‘No.’ Bella seemed a little surprised by the question. ‘Bishop has two by his first marriage.’

Grace made a note on his pad. ‘OK.’

‘She spends her weeks mostly in Brighton – usually goes up to London for one night. Brian Bishop has a flat in London, where he stays Monday to Fridays.’

‘His knocking shop?’ ventured Norman Potting.

Grace didn’t respond. But Potting had a point. No children after five years of marriage, and substantially separate lives, did not indicate a particularly close relationship. Although he and Sandy had been married nine years, and they hadn’t had children – but there were reasons for that. Medical ones. He made another note.

Alfonso Zafferone, chewing gum, with his usual insolent expression, had been detailed to work with the HOLMES analyst to plot the sequence of events, list the suspects – in this case, one so far, her husband. A full time-line needed to be run on Brian Bishop to establish if he could have been present within the period that Katie was murdered. Were there any similar murders in this county, or in others, recently? Anything involving a gas mask? Zafferone leaned back in his chair; he had shoulders so massive he must have worked on them, Grace thought. And like all the men in the room, he had removed his jacket. Flashy rhinestone cufflinks and gold armbands glinted on the sleeves of his sharp, black shirt.

Another action Grace had assigned to Norman Potting was to obtain plans of the Bishops’ house, an aerial photograph of the property and surrounding area, and to ensure all routes by which someone could have got to the house were carefully searched. He also wanted from Potting, and then separately from the forensic scene manager, a detailed assessment of the crime scene, including reports from the house-to-house search of the neighbourhood, which had been started early that afternoon.

Potting reported that two computers in the house had already been taken to the High Tech Crime Unit for analysis; the house landline records for the past twelve months had been requisitioned from British Telecom, as had the mobile phone records for both the Bishops.

‘I had the mobile phone that was found in her car checked by the Telecoms Unit, Roy,’ Potting said. There was one message timed at eleven ten yesterday morning, a male voice.’ Potting looked down at his notepad. ‘It said, See you later.’

‘That was all?’ Grace asked.

‘They tried a call-back but the number was withheld.’

‘We need to find out who that was.’

‘I’ve been on to the phone company,’ Potting replied. ‘But I’m not going to be able to get the records until after the start of office hours on Monday.’

Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays were the worst days for starting a murder inquiry, Grace thought. Labs were shut and so were admin offices. Just at the very moment you needed information quickly, you could lose two or three vital days, waiting. ‘Get me a tape of it. We’ll ask Brian Bishop if he recognizes the voice. It might be his.’

‘No, I checked that already,’ Potting said. ‘The gardener turned up, so I played it to him.’

‘He on your suspect list?’

‘He’s about eighty and a bit frail. I’d put him a long way down it.’

That did elicit a smile from everyone.

‘By my calculations,’ Grace said, ‘that places him at the bottom of a list of two.’

He paused to drink some coffee, then some water. ‘Right, resourcing. At the moment all divisions are relatively quiet. I want you each to work out what assistance you need drafted in to supplement our own people. In the absence of many other major news stories, we’re likely to have the pleasure of the full attention of the press, so I want us to look good and get a fast result. We want a full dog-and-pony show.’ And it wasn’t just about pleasing the public, Grace knew but did not say. It was about, again, demonstrating his credibility to his acerbic boss, the Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper, who was longing for him to make another slip-up.

Any day soon, the man she had drafted in from the Met, and had promoted to the same rank as himself, the slimeball Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe – her new golden boy – would finish his period of convalescence after a car accident and be taking up office here at Sussex House. With the unspoken goal of eating Roy Grace’s lunch and having him transferred sideways to the back of beyond.

It was when he turned to forensics that he could sense everyone concentrate just a little bit harder. Ignoring Nadiuska De Sancha’s pages of elaborate, technical details, he cut to the chase. ‘Katie Bishop died from strangulation from a ligature around her neck, either thin cord or wire. Tissue from her neck has been sent to the laboratory for further analysis, which may reveal the murder weapon,’ he announced. He took another mouthful of coffee. ‘A significant quantity of semen was found in her vagina, indicating sexual intercourse had taken place at some point close to death.’

‘She was a dead good shag,’ Norman Potting muttered.

Bella Moy turned to face Potting. ‘You are so gross!’

Bristling with anger, Grace said, ‘Norman, that’s enough from you. I want a word after this meeting. None of us are in any mood for your bad-taste jokes. Understand?’

Potting dropped his eyes like a chided schoolboy. ‘No offence meant, Roy.’

Shooting him daggers, Grace continued, ‘The semen has been sent to the laboratory for fast-track analysis.’

‘When do you expect to have the results back?’ Nick Nicholl asked.

‘Monday by the very earliest.’

‘We’ll need a swab from Brian Bishop,’ Zafferone said.

‘We got that this afternoon,’ Grace said, smug at being ahead of the DC on this.

He looked down at Glenn Branson for confirmation. The DS gave him a gloomy nod and Grace felt a sudden tug in his heart. Poor Glenn seemed close to tears. Maybe it had been a mistake pulling him back to work early. To be going through the trauma of a marriage bust-up, on top of not feeling physically at his best, and with a hangover that still had not gone away to boot, was not a great place to be. But too late for that now.

Potting raised a hand. ‘Er, Roy – the presence of semen – can we assume there is a sexual element to the victim’s death – that she’d been raped?’

‘Norman,’ he said sharply, ‘assumptions are the mother and father of all fuck-ups. OK?’ Grace drank some water, then went on. ‘Two family liaison officers have been appointed,’ he said. ‘WPC Linda Buckley and WPC Maggie Campbell—’

He was interrupted by the loud ring-tone of Nick Nicholl’s mobile phone. Giving Roy Grace an apologetic look, the young DC stood up, bent almost double, as if somehow reducing his height would reduce the volume of his phone, and stepped a few paces away from his workstation.

‘DC Nicholl,’ he said.

Taking advantage of the interruption, Zafferone peered at Potting’s face. ‘Been away, Norman, have you?’

‘Thailand,’ Potting answered. He smiled at the ladies, as if imagining they would be impressed by such an exotic traveller.

‘Brought yourself back a nice suntan, didn’t yer?’

‘Brought myself back more than that,’ Potting said, beaming now. He held up his hand, then raised his third finger, which sported a plain gold wedding band.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zafferone said. ‘A wife?’

Bella popped a half-melted Malteser into her mouth. She spoke with a voice that Grace liked a lot. It was soft but always very direct. Despite looking, beneath her tangle of hair, like she was sometimes in another world, Bella was very sharp indeed. She never missed anything. ‘So that’s your fourth wife now, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, still beaming, as if it were an achievement to be proud of.

‘Thought you weren’t going to get married again, Norman,’ Grace said.

‘Well, you know what they say, Roy. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change a man’s mind.’

Bella smiled at him with more compassion than humour, as if he were some curious but slightly grotesque exhibit in a zoo.

‘So where did you meet her?’ Zafferone asked. ‘In a bar? A club? A massage parlour?’

Looking coy suddenly, Potting replied, ‘Actually, through an agency.’

And for a moment, Grace saw a rare flash of humility in the man’s face. A shadow of sadness. Of loneliness.

‘OK,’ Nick Nicholl said, sitting back down at the workstation and putting his phone back in his pocket. ‘We have something of interest.’ He put his notepad on the surface in front of him.

Everyone looked at him with intensity.

‘Gatwick airport’s on security alert. ANPR cameras have been installed on the approach bridges either side of the M23. A Bentley Continental car, registered to Brian Bishop, was picked up by one at eleven forty-seven last night. He was on the south-bound carriageway, heading towards Brighton. There was a technical problem with the north-bound camera, so there is no record of him returning to London – if he did.’

ANPR was the automatic number plate recognition system increasingly used by the police and security services to scan vehicles entering a particular area.

Glenn Branson looked at Grace. ‘Seems like he failed your blink test, Roy. He told us a porky. He said he was tucked up in bed in London at that time.’

But Grace wasn’t upset about this. Suddenly his spirits lifted. If they could force a confession out of Brian Bishop, tonight perhaps, then with luck the investigation would be over almost before it had begun. And he could go straight to Munich – perhaps as early as tomorrow. Another option would be to leave Kim Murphy running the inquiry, but that wasn’t the way he operated. He liked to be fully hands on, in charge of everything, overseeing every detail. It was when you had someone working with you, at almost your level, that mistakes happened. Important things could easily fall between the cracks.

‘Let’s go and have a word with the FLOs,’ he said. ‘See if we can find out more about his car. See if we can jog Bishop’s memory for him.’

30

At a quarter past seven, the sun was finally starting to quit the Sussex coast. The Time Billionaire sat at a table at a crowded outdoor cafe sipping his third Coke Zero and occasionally scraping out more remains of pecan ice cream from the glass in front of him, to help pass the time. Spending some of his time dollars, his time pounds, his time euros. Might as well spend it, you couldn’t take it with you.

He brought his right hand up to his mouth and sucked for some moments. That stinging pain was still there and, he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, the row of tiny red marks, surrounded by faint bruising the colour of a nicotine stain, seemed to be looking steadily more livid.

A steel band was playing a short distance away. ‘Island in the Sun’.

He’d been going to go to an island in the sun once. Everything had been all set and then the thing had happened. Life had pissed on him from a great height. Well, not life exactly, no, no, no.

Just one of its inhabitants.

The air tasted salty. It smelled of rope, rust, boat varnish and, every few minutes, a sudden faint but distinct reek of urine. Some time after the sun had gone, the moon would rise tonight. Men had pissed on that too.

The receipt for his bill, already paid, lay pinned under the ashtray, flapping like a dying butterfly in the light sea breeze. He was always prepared, always ready for his next move. Could never predict what that would be. Unlike the sun.

He wondered where that ochre disc of dumb, broiling gases was heading next and tried to calculate some of the world time zones in his head. Right now, thirteen and a half thousand miles away, it would be a crimson ball, slowly creeping up towards the horizon in Sydney. It would still be blisteringly bright, high in the afternoon sky in Rio de Janeiro. No matter where it was, it never had any sense of its power. Of the power it gave to people. Not like the way he could feel the power in himself.

The power of life and death.

Perspective. Everything was about perspective. One man’s darkness was another man’s daylight. How come so many people did not realize that?

Did that dumb girl, sitting on the beach just yards in front of him, staring across the bodies laid out on the beach, at the flat, shifting mass of ocean? Staring at the slack sails of dinghies and windsurfers? At the distant grey smudge of tankers and container ships sitting, motionless, high up on the horizon, like toys on a shelf? At late, stupid bathers splashing about in the filthy lavatory they imagined to be pure, clean seawater?

Did Sophie Harrington know it was the last time she would see any of this?

The last time she would smell tarred rope, boat paint or the urine of strangers?

The whole damn beach was a sewer of bare flesh. Bodies in skimpy clothing. White, red, brown, black. Flaunting themselves. Some of the women topless, bitch whores. He watched one waddling around, straggly ginger hair down to her shoulders, tits down to her stomach, stomach down to her pelvis, swigging a bottle of beer or lager – too far away to tell which – fat arse sticking out of a skein of electric blue nylon, thighs dimpled with cellulite. Wondered what she’d look like in his gas mask with her straggly ginger pubes jammed against his face. Wondered what it would smell like down there. Oysters?

Then he switched his attention back to the stupid girl who’d been sitting on the beach for the past two hours. She was standing up now, stepping over the pebbles, holding her shoes in her hands, wincing with every step she took. Why, he wondered, didn’t she just put her shoes on? Was she really that dim-witted?

He would ask her that question later, when he was alone in her bedroom with her, and she had the gas mask on her face, and her voice would come at him all mumbled and indistinct.

Not that he cared about the answer.

All he cared about was what he had written in the blank section for notes at the back of his blue Letts schoolboy’s diary, when he was twelve years old. That diary was one of the few possessions he still had from his childhood. It was in a small metal box where he kept the things that were of sentimental value to him. The box was in a lock-up garage, quite near here, which he rented by the month. He had learned as a small child the importance of finding a space in this world, however small, that is your own. Where you can keep your things. Sit and have your thoughts.

It was in a private space he had found, when he was twelve years old, that the words he wrote in his diary first came to him.

If you want to really hurt someone, don’t kill them, that only hurts for a short time. It’s much better to kill the thing they love. Because that will hurt them forever.

He repeated those words over and over like a mantra, as he followed Sophie Harrington, as ever keeping a safe distance. She stopped and put her shoes on, then made her way along the seafront promenade, past the shops in the red-brick-faced Arches on Brighton seafront, one a gallery of local artists, past a seafood restaurant, the steel band, an old Second World War mine that had been washed up and was now mounted on a plinth, and a shop that sold beach hats, buckets and spades and rotating windmills on sticks.

He followed her through the carefree, sunburnt masses, up the ramp towards busy Kings Road, where she turned left, heading west, past the Royal Albion hotel, the Old Ship, the Odeon Kingswest, the Thistle Hotel, the Grand, the Metropole.

He was getting more aroused by the minute.

The breeze tugged at the sides of his hood and for one anxious moment it nearly blew back. He snatched it down hard over his forehead, then tugged his mobile phone from his pocket. He had an important business call to make.

He waited for a police car, siren wailing, to go past before dialling, continuing to stride along, fifty yards behind her. He wondered whether she would walk the whole way to her flat, or take a bus, or a taxi. He really did not mind. He knew where she lived. He had his own key.

And he had all the time in the world.

Then, with a sudden stab of panic, he realized he had left the plastic carrier bag containing the gas mask back in the cafe.

31

Linda Buckley had positioned herself intelligently in a leather armchair in the large, smart and comfortable foyer of the Hotel du Vin, Grace thought, as he entered the building with Glenn Branson. She was close enough to hear anyone asking for Brian Bishop at the reception desk and had a good view of people entering and leaving the hotel.

The family liaison officer reluctantly put down the book she was reading, The Plimsoll Sensation, a history of the Plimsoll Line by Nicolette Jones, which she had heard serialized on the radio, and stood up.

‘Hi, Linda,’ Grace said. ‘Good book?’

‘Fascinating!’ she replied. ‘Stephen, my husband, was in the Merchant Navy, so I know a bit about ships.’

‘Is our guest in his room?’

‘Yes. I spoke to him about half an hour ago, to see how he was doing. Maggie’s gone off to make some phone calls. We’re giving him a break – it’s been fairly intensive this afternoon, particularly up at the mortuary, when he identified his wife.’

Grace looked around the busy area. All the stools at the stainless steel bar, on the far side of the room, were taken, as were all the sofas and chairs. A group of men in dinner jackets and women in evening dresses were clustered together, as if about to head off to a ball. He didn’t spot any journalists.

‘No press yet?’

‘So far, so good,’ she said. ‘I checked him in under a false name – Mr Steven Brown.’

Grace smiled. ‘Good girl!’

‘It might buy us a day,’ she said. ‘But they’ll be here soon.’

And with luck, Brian Bishop will be in a custody cell by then, he thought to himself.

Grace headed towards the stairs, then stopped. Branson was staring dreamily at four very attractive girls in their late teens, who were drinking cocktails on a huge leather sofa. He waved a hand to distract his colleague. Glenn walked over to him pensively.

‘I was just thinking . . .’ the Detective Sergeant said.

‘About long legs?’

‘Long legs?’

From his baffled look, Roy realized his friend hadn’t been looking at the girls at all; he hadn’t even clocked them. He had just been staring into space. He put an avuncular arm around Branson’s waist. Lean, and rock hard from weight training, it felt like a sturdy young tree inside his jacket, not a human midriff. ‘You’re going to be OK, mate,’ he said.

‘I feel like I’m in someone else’s life – know what I mean, man?’ Branson said, as they climbed the first flight of stairs. ‘Like I’ve stepped out of my life and into someone else’s by mistake.’

Bishop’s room was on the second floor. Grace rapped on the door. There was no answer. He rapped again, louder. Then, leaving Branson waiting in the corridor, he went downstairs and came up with the duty manager, a smartly suited man in his early thirties, who opened the room with a pass key.

It was empty. Stifling hot and empty. Closely followed by Branson, Grace strode across and opened the bathroom door. It looked pristine, untouched, apart from the fact that the lavatory seat had been raised.

‘This is the right room?’ Grace asked.

‘Mr Steven Brown’s room, absolutely, sir,’ the duty manager said.

The only clues that anyone had been in here during the past few hours were a deep indent in the purple bedcover, close to the foot of the bed, and a silver tray containing a stone-cold cup of tea, a teapot, a jug of milk and two biscuits in an unopened pack, in the centre of the bed.

32

As she walked along the teeming, wide, promenade pavement of Kings Road, Sophie was trying to remember what she had in the fridge or the freezer to make some supper. Or what tins were in her store-cupboard. Not that she had much appetite, but she knew she must eat something. A cyclist pedalled past on the track in his crash helmet and Lycra. Two youths clattered by on skateboards.

In a novel some while ago she had read a phrase that had stuck in her mind: Bad things happen on beautiful days.

9/11 had happened on a beautiful day. It was one of the things that had most struck her about all the images, that the impact of those planes striking the towers might not have had quite the strength of emotional resonance if the sky had been grey and drizzly. You kind of expected shit to happen on grey days.

Today had been a double-shit or maybe even a triple-shit day. First the news of Brian’s wife’s death, then his coldness to her when she had phoned to try to comfort him. And now the realization that all her weekend plans were down the khazi.

She stopped, walked through a gap in the row of deckchairs and rested her elbows on the turquoise metal railings overlooking the beach. Directly below her, several children were lobbing brightly coloured balls in a gravel play area that had once been a boating pond. Parents chatted a few yards away, keeping a watchful eye. She wanted to be a parent too, wanted to see her own children playing with their friends. She had always reckoned she would be a good mother. Her own parents had been good to her.

They were nice, decent people, still in love with each other after thirty years of marriage; they still held hands whenever they walked together. They had a small business, importing handmade lace doilies, napkins and tablecloths from France and from China, and selling them at craft fairs. They ran the business from their little cottage on their smallholding near Orford in Suffolk, using a barn as a warehouse. She could take the train up to see them tomorrow. They were always happy for her to come home for a weekend, but she wasn’t sure she wanted that kind of weekend.

She wasn’t sure at all what she wanted at this moment. Surprisingly, she just knew, for the first time since she had met him, that it wasn’t Brian. He was right not to see her today. And there was no way she could sit in the wings like a vulture, waiting for the funeral and a decent period of mourning. Yes, she liked him. Really liked him, actually. In fact, adored him. He excited her – in part, OK, it was the flattery of having this older, immensely attractive and successful man doting on her – but he was also an incredible lover, if a little bit kinky. Absolutely the best ever in her, admittedly limited, experience.

One thing she could just not get her head around was his denial that they had slept together last night. Was he worried that his phone was bugged? Was he in denial because of his grief? She guessed she was learning, as she grew older, that men were very strange creatures sometimes. Maybe always.

Sophie looked up, beyond the play area at the beach. It seemed filled with couples. Lovers kissing, nuzzling, walking arm in arm, hand in hand, laughing, relaxing, looking forward to the weekend. There were still plenty of boats out. Twenty past seven; it would be light for a while yet. Light evenings for a few more weeks, before the steady drawing in of the winter darkness.

Suddenly, for no reason, she shivered.

She walked on, past the remains of the West Pier. For so long she had thought it a hideous eyesore, but now she was starting to quite like it. It no longer looked like a building that had collapsed. Instead, to her the fire-blackened skeleton resembled the ribcage of a monster that had risen from the deep. One day people would gasp in shock as the whole of the sea in front of Brighton filled with these creatures, she thought for a moment.

Weird, the notions that sometimes came into her head. Maybe it was from reading too many horror scripts. Maybe it was her conscience punishing her for the bad thing she was doing. Sleeping with a married man. Yes, absolutely, totally and utterly, it was wrong.

When she’d confided to her best friend, Holly’s first reaction had been one of excitement. Conspiratorial glee. The best secret in the world. But then, as always happened with Holly – a practical person who liked to think things through – all the negatives came out.

Somewhere, in between buying a ripe avocado, some organic tomatoes and a tub of ready-made Atlantic prawn cocktail, and reaching her front door, she had made her mind up, very definitely, that she would end her relationship with Brian Bishop.