Not Dead Enough (48 page)

‘Roll him!’ yelled Cleo, desperate to do something to help him. ‘Roll him over to get the flames out!’

Both officers knelt, nodding, and rolled him, then over again, then one more time, away from the burning car, the stocky one ignoring or oblivious to his own singed brows and burnt face.

The burning hood had partially melted into the victim’s face and head, and his shell-suit trousers had melted around his legs. Through the stench of molten plastic, Cleo suddenly caught a momentarily tantalizing smell of roasting pork, before revulsion kicked in, at the realization of what it actually was. ‘Water!’ she said, her first aid course from years ago coming back to her. ‘He needs water and he needs covering, seal the air off.’ Her eyes jumped from the terrible suffering of the man in the road to the fiercely burning interior of her car, frantically trying to think if she had anything she needed in the glove compartment or boot, not that there was much she could do about it. ‘There’s a blanket in the boot!’ she said. ‘A picnic blanket – could wrap him – need to stop the air—’

One of the officers sprinted up the road. Cleo stared down at the writhing, blackened figure. He was shaking, vibrating, as if he was plugged into an electrical socket. She was scared that he was dying. She knelt beside him. She wanted to hold his hand, to comfort him, but it looked so painfully blackened. ‘You’ll be OK,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll be OK. Help’s coming. There’s an ambulance coming! You’re going to be fine.’

He was rolling his head from side to side, his mouth open, the lips blistered, making pitiful croaking sounds.

He was just a kid. Maybe not even twenty. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him gently.

He was barely able to focus on her.

‘You’ll be OK. You will!’

The officer came running back, holding two coats. ‘Help me wrap these around him.’

‘He’s covered in molten fabric – do you think we should try and get it off?’ she asked.

‘No, just get these around him, tight as we can.’

She heard a siren in the distance, faint at first, but rapidly getting louder. Then another. Followed by a third.

From the darkness of the interior of his Prius, the Time Billionaire watched Cleo Morey and the two police officers kneeling on the ground. He heard the sirens. A splinter of blue light skittered past his eyes. He watched the first police car arrive. Two fire engines, then a third. An ambulance.

He watched everything. He didn’t have anything else to spend his time on tonight. He was still there, watching, as dawn was breaking, and the low-loader arrived and craned the MG, its interior all blackened but the exterior looking fine, considering, out of its space and carted it away.

Suddenly the street seemed quiet. But inside his car the Time Billionaire was raging.

103

The alarm was due to go off in a few minutes, at five thirty, but Roy Grace was already wide awake, listening to the dawn chorus, thinking. Cleo was awake too. He could hear the scratching of her eyelashes on the pillow each time she blinked.

They lay on their sides, two spoons. He held her naked body tightly in his arms. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

‘I love you so much,’ she whispered back. Her voice was full of fear.

He had still been in the office at one a.m., preparing for his meeting with the CPS solicitor, when she’d rung him, sounding truly terrible. He’d gone straight over to her house and then, in between comforting her, had spent much of the next hour on the phone, tracking down the two officers who had first arrived on the scene. Eventually he had got through to an undercover PC on the Car Crime Unit called Trevor Sallis, who explained what they had been doing. It had been a sting to catch the ringleader of a gang.

According to Sallis, a local lowlife villain had been cooperating with the police and, in one of life’s coincidences, it had been Cleo’s car that was targeted. Something had gone badly wrong, it appeared, in the thief’s attempt to hot-wire it. MG TF cars were, it appeared, notoriously hard to steal.

The explanation had calmed Cleo down. But something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on bothered Grace deeply about the incident. The would-be thief was now in the intensive care unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – God help him in that place, he thought privately – and was due to be transferred, if he survived the next few hours, to the burns unit at East Grinstead. The other officer, Paul Packer, was also in the same hospital, with severe, but not life-threatening, burns.

What could make a car catch fire? A lowlife jerk, fiddling with wires he did not understand, rupturing a fuel pipe?

The thoughts were still churning through his tired brain when the alarm started beeping. He had exactly one hour to get home, shower, put on a fresh shirt – there was another press conference scheduled for later this morning – and get to the office.

‘Take the day off,’ he said.

‘I wish.’

He kissed her goodbye.

Chris Binns, the CPS solicitor who had been allocated to the Katie Bishop case, was in Grace’s opinion – which was one shared by a good many other officers – several miles up his own backside. The two of them had had plenty of encounters in the past, and there wasn’t a huge amount of love lost.

Grace viewed his own job as, principally, to serve decent society by catching criminals and bringing them to justice. Binns viewed his priority as saving the Crown Prosecution Service unwarranted expense in pursuing cases where they might not secure a conviction.

Despite the early hour, Binns entered Grace’s office looking – and smelling – as fresh as a rose. A tall, trim man in his mid-thirties, sporting a bouffant hairstyle, he had a large, aquiline nose, giving his face the hawkish look of a bird of prey. He was dressed in a well-cut dark grey suit that was too heavy for this weather, Grace thought, a white shirt, sharp tie and black Oxfords that he must have spent the whole night buffing.

‘So nice to see you, Roy,’ he said in his supercilious voice, giving Grace’s hand a limp, moist shake. He sat down at the small, round conference table and placed his upright black calfskin attache case down on the floor beside him, giving it a stern look for a moment, as if it was a pet dog he had commanded to sit. Then he opened the case and produced a large, hard-bound notebook from it, and a Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket.

‘I appreciate your coming in so early,’ Grace said, stifling a yawn, his eyes heavy from tiredness. ‘Can I get you any tea, coffee, water?’

‘Some tea. Milk, no sugar, thanks.’

Grace picked up the phone and asked Eleanor, who had also come in early, at his request, to get them one tea, and a coffee that was as strong as she could possibly make it.

Binns read through the notes in his book for a moment, then looked up. ‘So you arrested Brian Desmond Bishop at eight p.m. on Monday?’

‘Yes, correct.’

‘Can you recap on your grounds for charging him? Any issues we should be concerned about?’

Grace summarized the key evidence as being the presence of Bishop’s DNA in the semen found in Katie Bishop’s vagina, the insurance policy taken out on her life just six months previously, and her infidelity. He also pointed out Bishop’s two previous convictions for violent acts against women. He raised the issue of Bishop’s alibi, but then showed the solicitor the time-line sheet he had typed up last night, after getting back from London, demonstrating that Bishop would have had enough leeway to get to Brighton and murder his wife – and then return to London.

‘I imagine he would have been a bit tired on the golf course on Friday morning,’ Chris Binns said drily.

‘Apparently he was playing a blinder,’ Grace said.

Binns raised an eyebrow and for a moment Grace’s spirits sank, wondering if Binns was now going to nitpick and request witness statements from Bishop’s golfing partners. But to his relief, all he added was, ‘Could have been on an adrenaline rush. From the excitement of the kill.’

Grace smiled. For a welcome change, the man was on his side.

The CPS solicitor shot his cuff, revealing elegant gold links, and frowned at his watch. ‘So, how are we doing now?’

Grace had been keeping a tight eye on the time. It was five to seven. ‘Following our conversation last night, Bishop’s solicitor was contacted. He’s meeting with his client at seven. DS Branson, accompanied by DC Nicholl, will charge him.’

At seven thirty Glenn Branson and Nicholl, accompanied by a custody sergeant, entered the interview room, where Brian Bishop was already seated with his solicitor.

Bishop, in his paper suit, had dark rings under his eyes and his skin had already taken on a prison pallor. He had shaved, but clearly in a poor light or in a hurry, and had missed a couple of spots, and his hair was not looking as neat as before. After just thirty-six hours he was already looking like an old lag. That’s what prison did to people, Glenn knew. It institutionalized them more quickly than they realized.

Leighton Lloyd looked up at Branson and Nicholl. ‘Good morning, gentlemen. I hope you are now going to release my client.’

‘I’m afraid, sir, that following inquiries made last night, we have sufficient evidence to charge your client.’

Bishop’s whole body sagged; his mouth fell open and he turned to his solicitor, bewildered.

Leighton Lloyd jumped to his feet. ‘What about my client’s alibi?’

‘Everything has been looked into,’ Branson said.

‘This is preposterous!’ the solicitor protested. ‘My client has been completely open with you. He’s answered everything you’ve asked him.’

‘That will be noted at trial,’ Branson responded. Then, cutting to the chase, he addressed Bishop directly. ‘Brian Desmond Bishop, you are charged that on or about 4 August of this year, at Brighton in the county of East Sussex, you did unlawfully kill Katherine Margaret Bishop. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Is that clear?’

Bishop glanced at his solicitor again, then back at Branson. ‘Yes.’ The word came out as a whisper.

Branson turned to Leighton Lloyd. ‘We will be making arrangements to put your client before Brighton Magistrates’ Court at two o’clock this afternoon, when we will be requesting a remand in custody.’

‘We will be making an application for bail,’ Lloyd said resolutely, then shot a comforting smile at Bishop. ‘My client is an upstanding member of the community and a pillar of society. I’m sure that he would be prepared to surrender his passport, and he is in a position to offer a substantial surety.’

‘That will be for the magistrates to decide,’ Branson replied. Then he and Nick Nicholl returned to Sussex House, leaving Bishop in the hands of his lawyer and his jailer.

104

After the CPS solicitor had departed, Grace made an internal call to his friend and colleague Brian Cook, the Scientific Support Branch Manager, and asked him what he knew about the burnt-out MG that had been taken to the police pound last night.

‘Haven’t allocated that to anyone from SOCO yet, Roy,’ he said. ‘Got so many people on holiday, everyone here is worked off their feet on the two murder cases. Why, do you think there’s a link?’

‘No, I’m just curious about what happened.’ Despite indiscretions by Glenn Branson, his relationship with Cleo Morey was not yet public knowledge and Grace was happy to keep it that way, worried that some people, for whatever reason, might look on it as unprofessional.

‘I understand it belonged to Cleo Morey at the mortuary,’ Cook said.

Grace was unsure if there was deliberate innuendo in the man’s voice or not. Then, dispelling any doubt, Cook added, with very definite innuendo now, ‘She’s your friend, isn’t she?’

‘We’re friendly, yes.’

‘So I hear. Good on you! Look, I’ll keep you posted. We’ve got an officer in hospital, and I gather there’s a man connected with it who’s on life support, so I’m going to have to do a full report. Just double my budget and give me ten more SOCOs!’

Grace thanked him, then checked the briefing notes that Eleanor had typed up. When he had finished, he opened the diary on his BlackBerry and glanced through his schedule for the day. At least they had some good news to give out at this morning’s press conference. At two p.m. he needed to attend Bishop’s remand hearing, in case there were any problems. Later he had the six-thirty briefing meeting. And perhaps an early night if there were no major new developments. He badly needed to catch up on some sleep, before he became so tired he started making mistakes. He felt precariously close to that state now.

Three magistrates – two women and a man – sat at the bench in Court 3 in the Edward Street courthouse. It was a small, plain room, with tiered rows of wooden seats and a small public and press area to the side. With the exception of the Dieu et Mon Droit crest displayed solemnly on the back wall, it had more the feel of a school classroom than the inquisitional air of some of the grander courtrooms in this part of Sussex.

Brian Bishop, changed back into his own clothes now, a camel-coloured jacket over a polo shirt and navy slacks, was standing in the dock, still looking utterly wretched.

Facing the bench were the CPS solicitor, Chris Binns, Bishop’s own solicitor, Leighton Lloyd, Grace and Branson, as well as about thirty journalists, packing out the side gallery.

To Grace’s dismay, the chairman of the bench today was peroxide-haired Hermione Quentin, lording it in an expensive-looking dress. She was the one magistrate in the city that he really disliked, having had a run-in with her earlier this year, in this same court, over a suspect he had wanted to hold in custody and she had, totally illogically – and dangerously, in his view – refused. Was she going to do the same today?

The appearance was brief. Leighton Lloyd delivered a passionate and cogent argument why Bishop should be released on bail. Chris Binns did a swingeing demolition job on it. It took the magistrates only a few moments of conferring before Hermione Quentin spoke.

‘Bail is denied,’ she said haughtily, enunciating each word with the precision of an elocution teacher, alternately addressing Bishop and his solicitor. ‘The reason is the seriousness of the offence. We believe Mr Bishop presents a flight risk. We are aware that the police are inquiring into a second serious offence, and custody would prevent Mr Bishop from interfering with any witnesses. We feel it is important to protect the public.’ Then, as if doing Bishop a huge favour, she said, ‘Because you are a local man, we think it would be helpful all round for you to be detained in Lewes prison until your trial. You are to be remanded in custody until next Monday, when you will appear before this court again.’