Not Dead Enough

by Peter James

  She switched on her television, channel-hopped, and found American Idol, a show she really liked. With the volume up loud, partly to drown out the sound of Mrs Harsent’s television and partly so she could hear it in her kitchenette, she took a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon from her fridge, opened it and poured herself a glass. Then she cut open the avocado, removed the stone and dropped it in her waste bin, before squeezing some lemon over the avocado.

  Half an hour later, having had a refreshing bath, she sat propped on her bed, wearing just a baggy white T-shirt, with her avocado and prawn salad, and her third glass of wine on the tray on her lap, watching a geeky-looking man in huge glasses reach sixty-four thousand pounds on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which she had recorded earlier in the week. And finally, with the sky gradually darkening outside her window, her day was starting to improve.

  She did not hear the key turning in the lock of her front door.

  �

  33

  Roy Grace stood in the empty hotel room and dialled Brian Bishop’s mobile phone number. It went straight to voicemail. ‘Mr Bishop,’ he said. ‘This is Detective Superintendent Grace. Please call as soon as you get this message.’ He left his number. Then he rang Linda Buckley down in the lobby. ‘Did our friend have any luggage?’

  ‘Yes, Roy. An overnight bag and a briefcase – a laptop bag.’

  Grace and Branson checked all the drawers and cupboards. There was nothing. Whatever he had brought here, Bishop had taken away with him. Grace turned to the duty manager. ‘Where’s the nearest fire escape?’

  The man, who wore a name tag which said Roland Wright – Duty Manager, led them along a corridor to the fire escape door. Grace opened it and stared down the metal steps into a courtyard filled mostly with wheelie bins. A strong aroma of cooking rose up. He closed the door, thinking hard. Why the hell had Bishop left again? And where had he gone to?

  ‘Mr Wright,’ he said, ‘I need to check if our guest, Steven Brown, made or received any phone calls while he was here.’

  ‘No problem – we can go down to my office.’

  Ten minutes later, Grace and Branson sat down in the lobby of the hotel with Linda Buckley. ‘OK,’ Grace said. ‘Brian Bishop received a phone call at five twenty.’ He checked his own watch. ‘Approximately two and a half hours ago. But we have no information who it was from. He made no outgoing calls from the hotel phone. Maybe he used his mobile – but we won’t know that until we get his records – which will be Monday at the earliest, from past experience with the phone companies. He’s slunk out, with his luggage, probably down the fire escape, deliberately avoiding you. Why?’

  ‘Not exactly the actions of an innocent man,’ Glenn Branson said.

  Grace, deep in thought, acknowledged the somewhat obvious comment with a faint nod. ‘He has two bags with him. So did he walk somewhere or take a taxi?’

  ‘Depends where he was going,’ Branson said.

  Grace stared at his colleague with the kind of look he normally reserved for imbeciles. ‘So where was he going, Glenn?’

  ‘Home?’ Linda Buckley said, trying to be helpful.

  ‘Linda, I want you to get on to the local taxi companies. Call all of them. See if anyone picked up a man matching Bishop’s description in the vicinity of this hotel some time around five twenty, five thirty this afternoon. See if anyone called a cab to come here. Glenn, check the staff. Ask if anyone saw Bishop get into a taxi.’

  Then he dialled Nick Nicholl. ‘What are you doing?’

  The young DC sounded in something of a state. ‘I’m – er – changing my son’s nappy.’

  How fucking great is that? Grace thought but restrained himself from saying. ‘I hate to drag you from your domestic bliss,’ he said.

  ‘It would be a relief, Roy, believe me.’

  ‘Let’s not run it by your wife,’ Grace said. ‘I need you to get down to Brighton station. Brian Bishop’s done another disappearing act on us. I want you to check the CCTVs there – see if he turns up on the concourse or any platforms.’

  ‘Right away!’ Nick Nicholl could not have sounded more cheerful if he had just won the Lottery.

  Ten minutes later, terrified out of his wits, Roy Grace sat belted into the passenger seat of the unmarked police Ford Mondeo.

  Having recently failed his Advanced Police Driving course – which would have enabled him to take part in high-speed chases – Glenn was now preparing to take it again. And although his head was full of the words of wisdom his driving instructor had imparted, Grace did not think that they had permeated his brain. As the speedometer needle reached the 100-mph mark on the approach to a gentle left-hander, on the road out of Brighton towards the North Brighton Golf Club, Grace was thinking ruefully, What am I doing, letting this maniac drive me again? This tired, hung-over, deeply depressed maniac who has no life and is suicidal?

  Flies spattered on the windscreen, like red-blooded snowdrops. Oncoming cars, each of which he was convinced would wipe them out in an explosion of metal and pulped human flesh, somehow flashed past. Hedgerows unspooled on each side at the speed of light. Vaguely, out of the furthest reach of his retina, he discerned people brandishing golf clubs.

  And finally, in defiance of all the laws of physics that Grace knew and understood, they somehow arrived in the car park of the North Brighton, intact.

  And among the cars still sitting there was Brian Bishop’s dark red Bentley.

  Grace climbed out of the Mondeo, which reeked of burning oil and was pinging like a badly tuned piano, and called the mobile of Detective Inspector William Warner at Gatwick airport.

  Bill Warner answered on the second ring. He had gone home for the night, but assured Grace he would put an alert out for sightings of Brian Bishop at the airport immediately.

  Next Grace rang the police station at Eastbourne, as it was responsible for patrolling Beachy Head, and Brian Bishop could now be considered a possible suicide risk. Then he called Cleo Morey, to apologize for having to blow out their date tonight, which he had been looking forward to all week. She understood, and asked him over for a late drink when he was finished instead, if he wasn’t exhausted.

  Finally he got one of the assistants in the office to ring each of his team, in turn, telling them that because of Brian Bishop’s disappearance, he needed them all back at the conference room at eleven p.m. Following that, he rang CG99, the call sign for the duty inspector in charge of the division, in order to update him and get extra resources. He advised that the scene guard at the Bishops’ home in Dyke Road Avenue should be vigilant, in case Bishop attempted to break in.

  As he returned to the Mondeo, he figured his next plan of action was to call the list of friends that Brian Bishop had been playing golf with that morning, to see if any had been contacted by him. But just as he was thinking about that, his phone rang.

  It was the controller from one of the local taxi companies. She told him a driver of theirs had picked up Brian Bishop from a street close to the Hotel du Vin an hour and a half ago.

  �

  34

  Chris Tarrant cradled his chin in his hand. The audience fell silent. Harsh television studio lights flared off the unfashionably large glasses of the studious, geeky-looking man in the chair. The stakes had risen rapidly. The man was going to spend the money he won – if he won – on a bungalow for his disabled wife, and was popping beads of sweat on his high forehead.

  Chris Tarrant repeated the question. ‘John, you have sixty-four thousand pounds.’ He paused and held the cheque in the air for all to see. Then he put it down again. ‘For one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, where is the resort of Monastir? Is it a) Tunisia, b) Kenya, c) Egypt or d) Morocco?’

  The camera cut to the contestant’s wife, sitting in her wheelchair among the studio audience, looking as if someone was about to hit her with a cricket bat.

  ‘Well,’ the man said. ‘I don’t think it’s Kenya.’

  On her bed watching the television, Sophie t
ook a sip of her Sauvignon. ‘It’s not Morocco,’ she said out aloud. Her knowledge of geography wasn’t that great, but she had been on holiday to Marrakech once, for a week, and had learned a fair amount about the country before going. Monastir rang no bells there.

  Her window was wide open. The evening air was still warm and sticky, but at least there was a steady breeze. She’d left the bedroom door and the windows in the sitting room and kitchen open to create a through-draught. A faint, irritating boom-boom-boom-boom of dance music shook the quiet of the night out in the street. Maybe her neighbours below, maybe somewhere else.

  ‘You still have two lifelines,’ Chris Tarrant said.

  ‘I think I’m going to phone a friend.’

  Was it her imagination, or did she just see a shadow move past the bedroom door? She waited for a moment, only one ear on the television now, watching the doorway, a faint prickle of anxiety crawling up her back. The man had decided to phone a friend called Ron. She heard the ring tone.

  Nothing there. Just her imagination. She put her glass down, picked up her fork, skewered a prawn and a chunk of avocado and put them in her mouth.

  ‘Hi, Ron! It’s Chris Tarrant here!’

  ‘Hi, Chris. How you doing?’

  Just as she swallowed, she saw the shadow again. Definitely not her imagination this time. A figure was moving towards the door. She heard a rustle of clothes or plastic. Outside a motorcycle blattered down the street.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called out, her voice a tight, anxious squeak.

  Silence.

  ‘Ron, I’ve got your mate John here. He’s just won sixty-four thousand pounds and he’s now going for one hundred and twenty-five thousand. How’s your geography?’

  ‘Yeah, well, all right.’

  ‘OK, Ron, you have thirty seconds, starting from now. For one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, where is the resort of Monastir? Is it—’

  Sophie’s gullet tightened. She grabbed the remote and muted the show. Her eyes sprang to the doorway again, then to her handbag containing her mobile phone, well out of reach on her dressing table.

  The shadow was moving. Jigging. Someone out there, motionless, but not able to stand without swaying a fraction.

  She gripped her tray for an instant. It was the only weapon she had, apart from her small fork. ‘Who’s there?’ she said. ‘Who is that?’

  Then he came into the room and all her fear evaporated.

  ‘It’s you!’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ, you gave me a fright!’

  ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d be pleased to see me.’

  ‘Of course I am. I – I’m really pleased,’ she said. ‘I so wanted to talk to you, to see you. How are you? I – I didn’t think—’

  ‘I’ve brought you a present.’

  �

  35

  When he was a child growing up here, Brighton and Hove had been two separate towns, each of them shabby in their own very different way. They were joined at the hip by a virtual border so erratic and illogical it might have been created by a drunken goat. Or more likely, in Grace’s view, by a committee of sober town planners, which would have contained, collectively, less wisdom than the goat.

  Now the two towns were enshrined together, forever, as the City of Brighton and Hove. Having spent most of the last half-century screwing up Brighton’s traffic system and ruining the fabled Regency elegance of its seafront, the moronic planners were now turning their ineptness on Hove. Every time he drove along the seafront, and passed the hideous edifices of the Thistle Hotel, the Kingswest, with its ghastly gold-foil roof, and the Brighton Centre, which had all the architectural grace of a maximum-security prison, he had to resist a desire to drive to the Town Hall, seize a couple of planning officers and shake their fillings out.

  Not that Roy Grace was against modern architecture – far from it. There were many modern buildings that he admired, the most recent one being the so-called Gherkin, in London. What he hated was seeing his home city, which he so loved, being permanently blighted by whatever mediocrity went on behind the walls of that planning department.

  To the casual visitor, Brighton became Hove at the only part of the border that was actually marked, by a rather fine statue on the promenade of a winged angel holding an orb in one hand and an olive branch in the other: the Peace Statue. Grace, in the passenger seat of the Ford Mondeo, stared at it over to his left, out of the window, silhouetted against the steadily darkening sky.

  On the opposite side of the road, two lines of traffic streamed into Brighton. With the windows down, he could hear every car. The blam-blam of show-off exhausts, the boom-boom-boom of in-car woofers, the stuttering rasp of tuc-tuc tricycle taxis. Hell was Friday night in central Brighton. Over the coming hours, the city would explode into life, and the police would be out in force, mostly down West Street – Brighton’s answer to the Las Vegas strip – doing their best, as they did every Friday night, to stop the place turning into a drug-fuelled war zone.

  From memories of his own time as a beat copper here, he did not envy the uniform crews out tonight one bit.

  The light changed to green. Branson put the car in gear and moved forward in the slow stream of traffic. Regency Square was passing by on their right. Grace peered past Branson’s bulk at the fine square of cream-painted eighteenth-century fa�es, with gardens in the middle, marred by signs for an underground car park and various letting agencies. Then Norfolk Square, a cheap-rent area. Students. Transients. Hookers. And the impoverished elderly. On Grace’s left now was coming up a part of this city he loved the most, the Hove Lawns, a large expanse of neatly mown grass behind the seafront promenade, with its green shelters and, a short distance further on, its beach huts.

  In daytime you could spot the old codgers out in force. Men in blue blazers, suede brogues, cravats, taking their constitutionals, some steadied by their walking sticks or Zimmer frames. Blue-rinse dowagers with chalky faces and ruby lips, exercising their Pekinese, holding their leads in white-gloved hands. Stooped figures in white flannels, moving in slow motion around the bowling greens. And nearby, ignoring them as if they were all already long dead, were the clusters of iPodded kids who now owned the promenade on the far side of the railings, with their roller blades and skateboards, and games of volleyball, and their sheer, raw youth.

  He wondered, sometimes, if he would make old bones. And what it would be like. To be retired, hobbling along, confused by the past, bewildered by the present and with the future mostly irrelevant. Or being pushed along in a wheelchair, with a blanket over his knees, another one over his mind.

  Sandy and he used to joke about it sometimes. Promise me you’ll never drool, Grace, no matter how gaga you get? she used to say. But it had been a comfortable joke, the kind of banter engaged in by two people content together, happy at the prospect of growing old as long as they are able to make that journey together. Another reason he just could not fathom her disappearance.

  Munich.

  He had to go. Somehow, he had to go there, and quickly. He desperately wanted to get on a plane tomorrow, but he couldn’t. He had responsibilities to this case, and the first twenty-four hours were crucial. And with Alison Vosper breathing down his neck . . . Perhaps, if things went well tomorrow, he could go over there on Sunday. Over and back in one day. He might be able to get away with that.

  There was just one more problem: what was he going to say to Cleo?

  Glenn Branson was holding his mobile phone to his ear, despite the fact that he was driving. Suddenly, glumly, he switched it off and placed it back in his top pocket. ‘Ari’s not picking up,’ he said, raising his voice above the music that was playing on the car’s stereo. ‘I just want to say goodnight to the kids. What do you think I should do?’

  The Detective Sergeant had selected a local pop station, Surf, on Grace’s car radio, shunning his own music collection. A God-awful rap song from some group Grace had never heard of was belting out, far more loudly than was comfortable for him
. ‘You could turn the bloody music down for starters!’

  Branson turned it down. ‘Do you think I should go round there – after we’re done, I mean?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Grace said. ‘I’m the last person on the planet to ask about marital advice. Look at the fuck-up of my life.’

  ‘Well, it’s different. I mean, like, I could go home, yeah?’

  ‘It’s your legal right.’

  ‘I don’t want a scene in front of the kids.’

  ‘I think you should give her space. Leave it a couple of days, see if she calls.’

  ‘You sure you’re OK about me crashing with you? I’m not cramping your style or anything? You’re cool about it?’

  ‘Totally,’ Grace said, through gritted teeth.

  Branson, picking up on the absence of enthusiasm in his voice, said, ‘I could check into a hotel or something, if you’d rather?’

  ‘You’re my mate,’ Grace said. ‘Mates look after each other.’

  Branson turned right into a wide, elegant street, lined on both sides with once-grand Regency terraced houses. He slowed down, then pulled over in front of the triple-fronted portals of the Lansdowne Place Hotel and killed the engine, mercifully, thought Grace, silencing the music. Then he switched off the lights.

  Not long back, the place had been a tired old two-star dump, inhabited by a handful of geriatric resident guests and a spattering of drab trippers on budget seaside package tours. Now it had been transformed into one of the city’s latest hip hotels.

  They climbed out of the car and went inside, to a riot of purple velour, chrome and gilded kitsch, and walked up to the front desk. A female receptionist, tall and statuesque in a black tunic and a Bettie Page black fringe, greeted them with an efficient smile. Her gold lapel badge read Greta.

  Grace showed her his police warrant card. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace of the Sussex CID. My colleague and I would like to have a word with a guest who checked in a short while ago – Mr Brian Bishop.’