Not Dead Enough (31 page)

And Grace’s own leaden innards sank before Kim confirmed it.

‘Identical to Katie Bishop,’ she said.

‘We’re looking at a serial killer – whatever that description actually means?’ Grace queried.

‘On what I’ve seen so far, Roy, it’s too early to be able to say anything,’ Duigan replied. ‘And I’m not exactly an expert on serial killers. Luckily, I’ve never experienced one.’

‘That makes two of us.’

Grace was thinking hard. Two attractive women killed, apparently, in the same manner, twenty-four hours apart. ‘What do we know about her?’

‘We believe her name is Sophie Harrington,’ Murphy said. ‘She’s twenty-seven and employed by a film production company in London. I answered a phone call a little earlier, from a young woman called Holly Richardson, who claims to be her best friend. She had been trying to contact her all yesterday – they were meant to be going to a party together last night. Holly last spoke to her about five on Friday afternoon.’

‘That helps us,’ Grace said. ‘At least we know she was alive then. Has anyone interviewed Holly Richardson?’

‘Nick’s gone to find her now.’

‘And Ms Harrington clearly put up one hell of a fight,’ Duigan added.

‘The place looks smashed up,’ Grace said.

‘Nadiuska’s found something under the nail of one of her big toes. A tiny bit of flesh.’

Grace felt a sudden surge of adrenaline. ‘Human flesh?’

‘That’s what she thinks.’

‘Could it have been gouged out of her assailant in the struggle?’

‘Possibly.’

And suddenly, his memory pin-sharp now, Roy Grace remembered the injury on Brian Bishop’s hand. And that he had gone AWOL for several hours on Friday evening. ‘I want a DNA test on that,’ he said. ‘Fast-tracked.’

As he spoke, he was already using his mobile phone.

Linda Buckley, the family liaison officer, answered on the second ring.

‘Where’s Bishop?’ he asked.

‘Having supper with his in-laws. They are back from Alicante,’ she replied.

He asked for the address, then he called Branson’s mobile.

‘Yo, old-timer – wassup?’

‘What are you doing right now?’

‘I’m eating some unpleasantly healthy vegetarian cannelloni from your freezer, listening to your rubbish music and watching your antique television. Man, how come you don’t have widescreen, like the rest of the planet?’

‘Put all your problems behind you. You’re going out to work.’ Grace gave him the address.

66

The silence was fleetingly broken by the tinkle of the teaspoon, as Moira Denton stirred the tea in her delicate, bone china teacup. Brian Bishop had never found his in-laws easy to get along with. Part of the reason, he knew, was that the couple didn’t really get along with each other. He remembered a quote he had once come across, which talked about people leading lives of quiet desperation. Nothing, it seemed to him, sadly, could be a truer description of the relationship between Frank and Moira Denton.

Frank was a serial entrepreneur – and a serial failure. Brian had made a small investment in his last venture, a factory in Poland converting wheat into bio-diesel fuel, more as a token of family solidarity than from any real expectation of returns, which was just as well, as it had gone bust, like everything else Frank had touched before it. A tall man just shy of seventy, who had only just recently starting looking his age, Frank Denton was also a serial shagger. He wore his hair stylishly long, although it was now tinged a rather dirty-looking orange, from the use of some dyeing product, and his left eye had a lazy lid, making it look permanently half-closed. In the past he had reminded Brian of an amiable, raffish pirate, although at this moment, sitting silent, hunched forward in his armchair in the tiny, boiling-hot flat, unshaven, his hair unbrushed, dressed in a creased white shirt, he just looked like a sad, shabby, broken old man. His brandy snifter stood untouched with a stubby bottle of Torres 10 Gran Reserva beside it.

Moira sat opposite him on the other side of a carved-wood coffee table, on the top of which was yesterday’s Argus with its grim headline. In contrast to her husband, she had made an effort with her appearance. In her mid-sixties, she was a handsome-looking woman, and would have looked even better if she had not allowed bitterness to so line her face. Her dyed black hair, coiled abundantly above her head, was neatly coiffed, she was wearing a plain, loose grey top, a pleated navy blue skirt and flat, black shoes, and she had put make-up on.

On the television, with the sound turned down low, a moose was running across open grassland. Because the Dentons now lived most of the time in their flat in Spain, they found England, even at the height of summer, unbearably cold. So they kept the central heating in their flat, close to Hove seafront, several degrees north of eighty. And the windows shut.

Seated in a green-velour armchair, Brian was perspiring. He sipped his third San Miguel beer, his stomach rumbling, even though Moira had just served them a meal. He’d barely touched his cold chicken and salad, nor the tinned peach slices afterwards. He just had no appetite at all. And was not up to much conversation either. The three of them had been sitting in silence for much of the time since he’d come round a couple of hours earlier. They had discussed whether Katie should be buried or cremated. It was not a conversation Brian had ever had with his wife, but Moira was adamant that Katie would have wanted to be cremated.

Then they had discussed the funeral arrangements – all on hold until the coroner released the body, which both Frank and Moira had viewed yesterday at the mortuary. The talk had reduced both of them to tears.

Understandably, his in-laws were taking Katie’s death hard. She had been more than just their only child – she had been the only thing of real value in their lives, and the glue that had kept them together. One particularly uncomfortable Christmas, when Moira had drunk too much sherry, champagne and then Baileys, she had confided sourly to Brian that she’d only taken Frank back after his affairs, for Katie’s sake.

‘Like that beer, do you, Brian?’ Frank asked. His voice was posh English, something he had cultivated to mask his working-class roots. Moira had an affected voice also, except when she drank too much and then lapsed back into her native Lancastrian.

‘Yes, good flavour. Thank you.’

‘That’s Spain for you, you see? Quality!’ Suddenly becoming animated for a moment, Frank Denton raised a hand. ‘A very underrated country – their food, wines, beers. And the prices, of course. Some of it is developed out, but there are still great opportunities if you know what you’re doing.’

Despite the man’s grief, Brian could sense that Katie’s father was about to launch into a sales pitch. He was right.

‘Property prices are doubling every five years there, Brian. The smart thing is to pick the next hot spots. Building costs are cheap, and they’re jolly efficient workers, those Spaniards. I’ve identified an absolutely fantastic opportunity just the other side of Alicante. I tell you, Brian, it’s a real no-brainer.’

The last thing Brian wanted or needed at this moment was to hear the details of yet another of Frank’s plausible-sounding but ultimately fatally flawed schemes. The miserable silence had been preferable – at least that had left him to his thoughts.

He took another sip of his beer and realized he had almost drained the glass. He needed to be careful, he knew, as he was driving, and he didn’t know how the family liaison officer, waiting in her car downstairs like a sentinel, would react to the smell of alcohol on his breath.

‘What have you done to your hand?’ Moira asked suddenly, looking at the fresh plaster on it.’

‘I – just bashed it – getting out of a car,’ he said dismissively.

The doorbell rang.

The Dentons exchanged glances, then Frank hauled himself up and shuffled out into the hallway.

‘We’re not expecting anyone,’ Moira said to Brian.

Moments later Frank came back into the room. ‘The police,’ he said, giving his son-in-law a strange look. ‘They’re on their way up.’ He continued staring at Brian, as if some dark thought had entered his head during those moments he had been out of the room.

Brian wondered if there was something else the police had said that the old man was not relaying.

67

In the Witness Interview Suite, Glenn Branson switched on the audio and video recorders announcing clearly as he sat down, ‘It is twenty-one twelve, Sunday 6 August. Detective Superintendent Grace and Detective Sergeant Branson interviewing Mr Brian Bishop.’

The CID headquarters were becoming depressingly familiar to Bishop. The walk up the entrance stairs, past the displays of police truncheons on blue felt boards, then through the open-plan offices and the cream-walled corridors lined with diagrams, and into this tiny room with its three red chairs.

‘This is starting to feel like Groundhog Day,’ he said.

‘Great movie,’ Branson commented. ‘Best thing Bill Murray did. I preferred it to Lost in Translation.’

Bishop had seen Lost in Translation and was starting to empathize with the character Murray played in that movie, wandering sleep-deprived through an unfamiliar world. But he wasn’t in any mood to start discussing films. ‘Are your people finished in my house yet? When can I move back in?’

‘I’m afraid it will be a few days yet,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you for coming up here tonight. I apologize for disrupting your Sunday evening.’

‘That’s almost funny,’ Bishop said acidly. He nearly added, but didn’t, that it hadn’t been any great hardship to escape from the grim misery of his in-laws and Frank’s sales pitch for his new business venture. ‘What news do you have for me?’

‘I’m afraid we have nothing further to report at this stage, but we are expecting results from DNA analysis back during tomorrow and that may give us something. But we have some questions that our investigations have thrown up, if that’s all right with you?’

‘Go ahead.’

Grace noted Bishop’s apparent tetchiness. It was a considerable change from his sad, lost-looking state at their last interview. But he was experienced enough not to read anything into it. Anger was one of the natural stages of grief, and a bereaved person was capable of lashing out at anyone.

‘Could you start, Mr Bishop, by explaining the nature of your business?’

‘My company provides logistical systems. We design the software, install it and run it. Our core business is rostering.’

‘Rostering?’ Grace saw that Branson was frowning also.

‘I’ll give you an example. An aeroplane that should be taking off from Gatwick, for instance, gets delayed for some reason – mechanical, bad weather, whatever – and cannot take off until the following day. Suddenly the airline is faced with finding overnight accommodation for three hundred and fifty passengers. It also has a knock-on series of problems – other planes in the wrong places, the crew schedules all mucked up, with some crew going over their permitted working hours, meals, compensations. Passengers having to be put on different flights to make connections. All that kind of stuff.’

‘So you are a computer man?’

‘I’m a businessman. But yes, I have a pretty good grasp of computing. I have a degree in cognitive sciences – from Sussex University.’

‘It’s successful, I presume?’

‘We made the Sunday Times list of the hundred fastest-growing companies in Britain last year,’ Bishop said. There was a trace of pride beneath his gloom.

‘I hope all this won’t have a negative impact on you.’

‘It doesn’t really matter any more, does it?’ he said bleakly. ‘Everything I did was for Katie. I—’ His voice faltered. He pulled out a handkerchief and buried his face in it. Then suddenly, in a burst of rage, he shouted out, ‘Please catch the bastard. This creep! This absolutely fucking—’ He broke down in tears.

Grace waited some moments, then asked, ‘Would you like a drink of anything?’

Bishop shook his head, sobbing.

Grace continued to wait until he had calmed down.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bishop said, wiping his eyes.

‘You don’t need to apologize, sir.’ Grace gave him a little more time, then asked, ‘How would you describe your relationship with your wife?’

‘We loved each other. It was good. I think we complement—’ He stopped, then said heavily, ‘Complemented each other.’

‘Had you had any arguments recently?’

‘No, I can honestly say we hadn’t.’

‘Was there anything bothering your wife? Troubling her?’

‘Apart from maxing out her credit cards?’

Both Grace and Branson gave thin smiles, uncertain whether this was a lame stab at humour.

‘Could you tell us what you did today, sir?’ Grace said, changing tack.

He lowered the handkerchief. ‘What I did today?’

‘Yes.’

‘I spent the morning trying to deal with my emails. Phoned my secretary, going through a list of meetings that I needed her to cancel. I was meant to be flying to the States on Wednesday, to see a possible new client in Houston, and I got her to cancel that. Then I had lunch with a friend of mine and his wife – I went round to their house.’

‘They could vouch for that?’

‘Jesus! Yes.’

‘You’ve had a dressing put on your hand.’

‘My friend’s wife is a nurse – she thought it ought to be covered.’ Bishop shook his head. ‘What is this? Are we back to the Spanish Inquisition again?’

Branson raised both hands. ‘We’re just concerned for your welfare, sir. People in a state of bereavement can overlook things. That’s all.’

Grace would have loved to have told Bishop at this point that the taxi driver, in whose taxi he claimed to have injured his hand, remembered Bishop clearly but had absolutely no recollection of his hurting himself. But he wanted to keep his powder dry on this one for later. ‘Only a couple more questions, Mr Bishop, then we can call it a day.’ He smiled, but received a blank stare back.

‘Does the name Sophie Harrington mean anything to you?’

‘Sophie Harrington?’

‘A young lady who lives in Brighton and works in London for a film production company.’