by Peter James
Grace ducked down, picked up the bin and plonked it outside the door. The smell didn’t clear, but at least it made him feel a little better. Then he sat in front of the monitor, refamiliarized himself with the controls of the video machine and hit the play button.
Thinking. Thinking all the time. Sandy loved curries. Chicken korma. That was her favourite.
Brian Bishop’s interview from earlier began to play on the screen. Grace fast-forwarded, watching the dark-haired man in his tan designer jacket with its flashy silver buttons and his two-tone brown and white golfing shoes.
‘Look like spats, those shoes,’ Branson said, sitting down next to him. ‘You know, like those 1930s gangsters films. Ever see Some Like It Hot?’ His voice was flat, lacking its usual energy, but he seemed to be making a superhuman effort to be cheerful.
Grace realized this must be a difficult time of day for him. Early evening. Normally, if he were home, he’d be helping get his two children ready for bed. ‘That the one with Marilyn Monroe?’
‘Yeah, and Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft. Well brilliant. That scene, right, when they wheel the cake in and the man steps out from inside it with a machine gun and blows everyone away, and George Raft says, “There was summin’ in that cake that didn’t agree wid him!”’
‘A modern spin on the Trojan Horse,’ Grace said.
‘You mean it was a remake?’ Branson said, puzzled. ‘The Trojan Horse? Don’t remember it.’
Grace shook his head. ‘Not a movie, Glenn. What the Greeks did, in Troy!’
‘What did they do?’
Grace stared hard at his friend. ‘Did you get all your bloody education from watching movies? Didn’t you ever learn any history?’
Branson shrugged defensively. ‘Enough.’
Grace slowed the tape. On the screen Glenn Branson said, ‘May I ask when you last saw your wife, Mr Bishop?’
Grace paused the tape. ‘Now, I want you to concentrate on Bishop’s eyes. I want you to count his blinks. I want the number of blinks per minute. You got a second hand on that NASA control tower on your wrist?’
Branson peered down at his watch as if thrown by the question. It was a fashionably large Casio chronometer, one of the kind that had so many dials and buttons Grace wondered if his friend had any idea what half of them did. ‘Somewhere,’ he said.
‘OK, start timing now.’
Glenn messed it up a couple of times. Then, on the screen, Roy Grace entered the room and began questioning Bishop.
‘Where did you sleep last night, Mr Bishop?’
‘In my flat in London.’
‘Could anyone vouch for that?’
‘Twenty-four!’ Glenn Branson announced, his eyes switching from his watch, to the screen, then back again.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Do it again.’
On the screen Grace asked Bishop, ‘What time were you on the tee at the golf club this morning?’
‘Just after nine.’
‘And you drove down from London?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘About half-six.’
‘Twenty-four again!’
Grace froze the tape. ‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘What exactly?’ Branson asked.
‘It’s an experiment. I’m trying out something I read the other day in a psychology newsletter I subscribe to. The writer said they’d established in a lab at a university – I think it was Edinburgh – that people blink more times a minute when they are telling the truth than when they are lying.’
‘For real?’
‘They blink 23.6 times a minute when they are telling the truth and 18.5 times a minute when they are lying. It’s a fact that liars sit very still – they have to think harder than people telling the truth – and when we think harder we are stiller.’ He ran the tape on.
Brian Bishop seemed to be getting increasingly agitated, finally standing up and gesticulating.
‘A constant twenty-four,’ Branson said.
‘And his body language tallies,’ Grace said. ‘He looks like a man who is telling the truth.’
But, he knew only too well, it was only an indicator. He had misread someone’s body language before and been badly caught out.
�
26
The press called August the silly season. With Parliament in its summer recess and half the world on holiday, it tended to be a quiet news month. Papers often made major items out of minor stories which, at other times, might never have even reached their pages at all; and they liked nothing better than a serious crime, the grimmer and more horrific the better. The only people who didn’t seem to go on holiday, in the same way that they didn’t stick to conventional office hours, were criminals.
And himself, Roy Grace contemplated.
His last proper holiday had been over nine years ago, when he and Sandy had flown to Spain and stayed in a rented flat near Malaga. The flat had been cramped and, instead of the advertised sea view, it overlooked a multi-storey car park. And it rained for most of the week.
Unlike this current August heatwave here in Brighton, which brought even more holidaymakers and trippers flooding into the city than usual. The beaches were packed, as were all the bars and caf� Brighton and Hove had a hundred thousand vertical drinking spaces, and Grace reckoned every single one of them was probably taken at this moment. It was a paradise for the street criminals. More like open season than silly season for them.
And he was well aware that, with the lack of news to go around, a murder inquiry such as the one he now had on his hands was going to be subject to even closer press scrutiny than normal. A rich woman found dead, a swanky house, possibly some kinky sex involved, a flash, good-looking husband. A slam-dunk for every editor looking to fill column inches.
From the getgo, he needed to plan the handling of the press and media with extra caution, and to try, as he always did, to make the coverage work for, rather than against, his investigation. Tomorrow morning he would be holding the first of what would become a regular series of press conferences. Before then, he had two briefing meetings with the team he was assembling, to get prepared.
And somehow, despite all that was going on, he had to find a space to get on a plane to Munich. Had to.
Absolutely had to.
So many thoughts swirled through his head about Sandy. Sitting in a beer garden. With a lover? With memory loss? Or was it just mistaken identity? If it had been anyone else who’d told him he would probably have dismissed it. But Dick Pope was a good detective, a thorough man, with a fine memory for faces.
A few minutes before six thirty, accompanied by Glenn Branson, Grace left the Witness Interview Suite viewing room, grabbed them both a coffee from the vending machine in the tiny kitchen area, and walked along the corridor to MIR One, which his investigation had been allocated by Tony Case. He passed a large red-felt board headed Operation Lisbon, beneath which was a photograph of a Chinese-looking man with a wispy beard, surrounded by several different photographs of the rocks at the bottom of the tall cliffs of local beauty spot Beachy Head, each with a red circle drawn around them.
Beachy Head, a dramatic and beautiful white chalk headland, had the unwelcome reputation as England’s most popular suicide spot. It offered jumpers a sheer, and grimly tantalizing, 570-foot plunge on to the shore of the English Channel. The list of people who had stepped, dived, rolled or driven over its grassy edge and survived was short.
This unfortunate, unidentified man had been found dead in May. At first he had been assumed to be just another jumper, until the post-mortem indicated that he’d probably had some assistance, on account of the fact he had been dead for some considerable while before he took his plunge. It was an ongoing investigation, but getting scaled down all the time as each successive line of inquiry hit a blank.
Every major incident was allocated a name thrown up at random by the Sussex Police computer. I
f any of the names had any bearing on the case to which they related, it was entirely coincidental. And they rarely did.
Unlike the workstations in the rest of Sussex House – and in all the other police stations in the county – there was no sign of anything personal on the desks here in MIR One. No pictures of families, or footballers, no fixture lists, no jokey cartoons. Everything in this room, apart from the furniture and the business hardware, related to the investigation. There wasn’t much banter either, just fierce concentration. The warble of phones, the clack of keyboards, the shuffle of paper ejecting from laser printers. The silence of concentration.
He surveyed his initial team with mixed feelings as he walked across the room. There were several familiar faces he was happy to see. Detective Sergeant Bella Moy, an attractive woman of thirty-five with hennaed brown hair, had, as ever, an open box of Maltesers, to which she was addicted, in front of her. Nick Nicholl, short-haired, tall as a beanpole, in an open-throat short-sleeved shirt, had the pasty-faced, worn-out look of the father of a six-week-old baby. The indexer, a young, plump woman with long brown hair called Susan Gradley, who was extremely hard-working and efficient. And the long-serving Norman Potting, whom he would need to keep an eye on.
Detective Sergeant Potting was fifty-three. Beneath a thinning comb-over he had a narrow, rather rubbery face criss-crossed with broken veins, protruding lips and tobacco-stained teeth. He was dressed in a crumpled fawn linen suit and a frayed yellow short-sleeved shirt, on which he appeared to be wearing most of his lunch. Unusually, he was sporting a serious suntan, which, Grace had to admit, did improve his looks. Because he was totally politically incorrect, and most women on the force found him offensive, Potting tended to get shunted around the county, filling in gaps when a division was desperately short of manpower.
The team member Grace was least happy about of all was DC Alfonso Zafferone. A sullen, arrogant man in his late twenties, with Latino good looks and gelled, mussed-about hair, he was slickly dressed in a black suit, black shirt and cream tie. The last time he had worked with him, Zafferone had proved to be sharp, but had had a serious attitude problem. It was partly due to lack of choice, because it was the holiday season, but equally from a desire to teach the runt a lesson in manners that Grace had pulled him on to his team.
As he greeted each person in turn, Grace thought about Katie Bishop on the bed in her house in Dyke Road Avenue this morning. He thought about her on the post-mortem slab this afternoon. He could feel her, as if he carried her spirit in his heart. The weight of responsibility. This lot here in this room, and the others who would be joining his team in the conference room shortly, had a huge responsibility.
Which was why he had to push all thoughts of Sandy into a separate compartment of his mind, and lock them in there, for the time being. Somehow.
Over the course of the following hours and days he would get to know more about Katie Bishop than anybody else on earth. More than her husband, her parents, her siblings, her best friends. They might think they knew her, but they would only have ever known what she let them know. Inevitably something would have been held back. Every human being did that.
And inevitably, for Roy Grace, it would become personal. It always did.
But he had no way of knowing, at this moment, quite how personal the case was going to become.
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27
Skunk was feeling a whole lot stronger. The world was suddenly a much better place. The heroin was doing its stuff – he felt all kind of warm and fuzzy, everything was good, his body awash with endorphins. This was how life should feel; this was how he wanted to stay feeling forever.
Bethany had turned up, with a chicken and some potato salad and a tub of cr� caramel she had taken from her mother’s fridge, and all the shit-heads had left his camper, and he’d boned her from behind, the way she liked it – and the way he liked it too, with her massive ass pushing into his stomach.
And now she was driving him along the seafront in her mother’s little Peugeot, and he lounged in the passenger seat, tilted back, staring out through his purple lenses at his office. Clocking each of the parked cars in turn. Every kind of car you could think of. All dusty and sun-baked. Their owners on the beach. He was looking for one that matched the make and model that were written on the damp, crumpled sheet of lined notepaper on his lap, his shopping list, which he had to keep looking back at because his memory was crap.
‘Have to get home soon. My mum needs the car. She’s going out to bridge tonight,’ Bethany said.
Every fucking make of car in the world was parked along the seafront this evening. Every fucking make except the one he was looking for. A new-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.
‘Head up to Shirley Drive,’ he said.
The clock on the dash read six fifteen p.m.
‘I really have to get home by seven. She needs the car – she’ll kill me if I’m late,’ Bethany replied.
Skunk looked at her for a moment appreciatively. She had short black hair and thick arms. Her breasts bulged out of the top of a baggy T-shirt and her plump brown thighs were scantily covered by a blue denim miniskirt. He kept one hand up under the elastic of her knickers, nestling in her soft, damp pubes, two fingers probing deep inside her.
‘Turn right,’ he instructed.
‘You’re making me horny again!’
He pushed his fingers even further up.
She gasped. ‘Skunk, stop it!’
He was feeling horny again too. She turned right at traffic lights, past a statue of Queen Victoria, then suddenly he shouted out. ‘Stop!’
‘What?’
‘There! There! There!’ He grabbed the wheel, forcing her over to the kerb, ignoring the squeal of brakes and the blast of the horn of the car behind them.
As she pulled the car up, Skunk extracted his fingers, then his hand. ‘Fucking brilliant! See ya!’
He opened the car door, stumbled out and was gone without even a backward glance.
There, halted at the traffic lights on the opposite side of the road was a dark metallic blue Audi A4 convertible. Skunk pulled a biro out of his pocket, wrote down the licence plate on his sheet of paper, then tugged his mobile phone out of his trouser pocket and dialled a number.
‘GU 06 LGJ,’ he read out. ‘Can you have them for me in an hour?’
He was so pleased he didn’t even see the Peugeot driving off, the wave of Bethany’s hand, nor hear her brief toot of the horn.
Brilliant! he thought. Yeah!
Nor did he see the small grey Ford, sitting at the kerb a couple of hundred yards behind him. It was one of a five-car surveillance team that had been tailing him for the past half-hour, since he had left his camper.
�
28
Brian Bishop sat on the edge of the large bed, his chin cupped in his hands, staring at the television in his hotel room. A cup of tea on a tray beside him had long gone cold, while the two biscuits in their cellophane wrapper remained untouched. He had turned the air conditioning off because it was too cold and now, still wearing his golfing clothes beneath his jacket, he was dripping with perspiration.
Outside, despite the double-glazing, he could hear the wail of a siren, the faint chunter of a lorry engine, the intermittent parp-parpparp of a car alarm. A world out there that he felt totally disconnected from as he stared at his house – his home – on bloody Sky News. It felt totally surreal. As if he had suddenly become a stranger in his own life. And not just a stranger. A pariah.
He’d felt something like this before, during his separation and then divorce from Zo�hen his children, Carly and Max, had taken her side, after she had done a successful job of poisoning them against him, and refused to speak to him for nearly two years.
A mediagenic newscaster with perfect hair and great teeth was standing outside his house, in front of a strip of blue and white Police – Crime Scene – Do Not Cross – tape, brandishing a microphone. �
��A post-mortem was carried out this afternoon. We will be returning to this story in our seven o’clock news. I’m David Wiltshire, Sky News.’
Brian was feeling totally and utterly bewildered.
His mobile phone started ringing. Not recognizing the number, he let it ring on. Almost every call this afternoon had been from the press or media, who had picked up his mobile number off his company’s website, he presumed. Interestingly, other than Sophie, only two friends had phoned him, his mate, Glenn Mishon and Ian Steel, and his business partner, Simon Walton, had also called. Simon had sounded genuinely concerned for him, asked him if there was anything he could do, and told him not to worry about the business, he would take care of everything for as long as Brian needed.
Brian had spoken several times to Katie’s parents, who were in Alicante, in Spain, where Katie’s father was setting up yet another of his – almost certainly doomed – business ventures. They were flying back in the morning.
He wondered whether he should call his lawyer, but why? He didn’t have anything to be guilty about. He just did not know what to do, so he sat there, motionless and mesmerized, staring at the screen, vaguely taking in the cluster of police vehicles jamming his driveway and parked out on the street. A steady stream of cars crawled by, their drivers and passengers rubber-necking, every one of them. He had work to do. Calls to make, emails to answer and send. So damn much, but at this moment he was incapable of functioning.
Restless, he stood up, paced around the room for some moments, then he walked through into the gleaming, clean bathroom, stared at the towels, lifted the lavatory seat, wanting to pee. Nothing happened. He closed the lid. Stared at his face in the mirror above the basin. Then his eye was caught by a row of toiletries. Small, imitation-marble plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, shower gel and body lotion. He moved them until they were evenly spaced out, but then he didn’t like their position on the shelf, and he moved them several inches to the right, carefully ensuring they were evenly spaced.