by Peter James
‘Even if it is her, which I doubt.’
Cleo was silent.
He stroked her back and she shrank further from him.
‘Cleo, please!’
‘What am I – something to tide you over until you find your missing wife?’
‘No way.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Totally and utterly.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
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44
There was software on the Time Billionaire’s computer screen which he had written himself. It brought up analogue clock faces for cities in every time zone in the world. He was staring at it now. ‘Taking stock,’ he suddenly said aloud, then grinned at his joke.
Through the window he could see the dawn sky slowly lightening over the city of Brighton and Hove. It was coming up to five here in England. Six in Paris. Eight a.m. in St Petersburg. Eleven in Bangladesh. One in the afternoon in Kuala Lumpur. Three in the afternoon in Sydney.
People would be getting up here soon. And going to bed in Peru. Everyone in the world was subservient to the sun, except for himself. He had been liberated. It made no difference any more to him whether it was day or night, whether the stock exchanges of the world were open or shut, or the banks, or anything else.
There was one man he had to thank for that.
But he was no longer bitter. That was all packed away in another box that was his past. You needed to be positive in life, have goals. He’d found a site on the internet which was all about living longer. People who had goals lived longer, simple as that. And those people who achieved their goals – well, their life expectancy hit the jackpot! And now he had achieved two goals! He owned even more time, to lavish on whatever he liked.
Steam curled from the cup of tea beside him. English Breakfast tea with a little milk. He picked the spoon up and stirred the tea seven times. It was very important to him always to stir tea exactly seven times.
Turning his attention back to the computer, he tapped the command for another piece of software he had created for himself. He had never been happy with any of the internet search engines – none of them were precise enough for him. All of them delivered information in the sequence they wanted. This one of his own, which linked and trawled all the major search engines, obtained quickly for him everything that he wanted.
And at this moment he wanted an original workshop manual for a 1966 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
Then he sucked the back of his right hand. The pain was getting worse, the stinging sensation deepening, which was what had woken him and prevented him from going back to sleep. Not that he was much of a sleeper anyway. He could see a slight swelling around it, which seemed to be affecting the movement of his thumb, although he might be imagining that. And his chest was still stinging.
‘Bitch,’ he said aloud.
He walked into the bathroom, switched on the light, unbuttoned his shirt and opened up the front, then peeled back the strip of Elastoplast. The fresh scratch, over an inch long, crusted with congealed blood, had been gouged from his chest some hours back by a long toenail.
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45
Shortly after five a.m. Roy Grace left Cleo’s house, in a trendy, gated development in the centre of Brighton, closing the front door as quietly as he could behind him, feeling terrible. The breaking dawn sky, a dark, marbled grey streaked with smudgy, crimson veins, was the colour of a frozen human cadaver. A few birds were beginning a tentative dawn chorus, firing off solitary tweets, briefly piercing the morning stillness. Signals to other birds, like radio signals beamed into space.
He shivered, as he pressed the red exit button on the wrought-iron gates, and let himself out of the courtyard into the street. The air was already warming up and it promised to be another blistering summer day. But it was raining in his soul.
He hadn’t slept a wink.
During the past two months of their relationship, he and Cleo had never exchanged a solitary cross word. They hadn’t really tonight either. Yet tossing and turning during these past few hours, he sensed that something had changed between them.
The street lighting was still on, useless orange glows emitting from each lamp in the rapidly encroaching daylight. A tabby cat slunk across the road ahead of him. He walked up past a line of cars, noticed a Coke can lying in the gutter, a pool of vomit, a Chinese takeaway carton. He passed Cleo’s blue MG, covered in dew, then reached his Alfa, covered in less dew. It was parked in what had become his regular spot, on a single yellow line outside an antiques dealer that specialized in retro twentieth-century furniture.
He climbed in, started the car, blipped the accelerator, the engine snuffling, running lumpily and unevenly for a few moments until the damp burned off the electrics; the wipers clopped the dew from the screen. A hiss of static belted out from the radio; he punched a button to switch stations. Someone was talking, but he didn’t listen. Instead he turned and stared at the closed gates, wondering whether to go back and say something.
Like what?
Cleo saw Sandy as a threat she could not deal with. He knew that he needed to get his head around that, to put himself in Cleo’s position. What if she’d had a husband who’d vanished and it was she who was off to Munich to try to find him on Sunday? How would he be feeling?
He had no idea, that was the honest truth. In part because he was too dog tired to think straight, and in part because he didn’t know what he was feeling about the prospect – however slim – of seeing Sandy.
Ten minutes later he passed the red pillar box on New Church Road, which had been his landmark for twelve years, and made the next left turn. Apart from a milk float halted several feet out from the pavement, Grace’s street was deserted. It was a quiet, pleasant residential avenue, lined on both sides with semi-detached mock-Tudor houses, most of them three-bedroomed, with integral garages. A few had rather ugly loft conversions and some – not his own – had hideous secondary double-glazing.
He and Sandy had bought the house just over two years before she disappeared, and sometimes he wondered if the move had had something to do with it, whether she hadn’t been happy there. They’d been so content in the small flat in Hangleton that had been their nest in those first years of marriage, but they’d both fallen in love with this house, Sandy even more so than himself because it had a good-sized rear garden and she had always longed for a garden of her own.
Buying the place and then doing it up had stretched them both financially. Grace had been a detective sergeant then, still qualifying for overtime, and had worked all the hours he could. Sandy had been a secretary at a firm of accountants and had put in extra hours there, too.
She had seemed happy enough, taking charge of gutting and modernizing the interior. The previous owners had lived there for over forty years, and it had been drab and dark when they had bought it. Sandy had transformed it into light, modern spaces, with touches of Zen here and there – and she seemed so proud of all she had done. And the garden had become her pride and joy – although it was now in an embarrassing state of neglect, Grace thought guiltily. Every weekend he promised himself he would spend some time on it, sorting things out. But in the end he never seemed to have enough time – or the inclination. He kept the grass under reasonable control, and had convinced himself that most of the weeds were flowers anyway.
On his car radio, which he had tuned out of his brain for several minutes, he now heard a man earnestly explaining EU agricultural policy. Turning into his driveway, he pulled up in front of the single garage and switched off the engine, the radio dying with it.
Then, letting himself into the house, his solemn mood was suddenly replaced by a flash of anger. All the downstairs lights were on, burning brightly. So was his original juke box.
He saw that one of his rare vinyl records, ‘Apache’ by the Shadows, was spinning round on the juke-box turntable, the needle stuck in the groove, making a steady click-scrape-click-scrape-click-scrape sound. His stereo was on also and pa
rt of his CD collection was scattered on the floor, along with several of his precious Pink Floyd LPs, out of their sleeves, an opened can of Grolsch lager, a couple of Harley-Davidson brochures, a set of dumb-bells and assorted other pieces of iron-pumping kit.
He stormed up the stairs, ready to yell blue murder at Glenn Branson, then stopped at the top, checking himself. The poor bastard was distraught. He must have gone home last night after the briefing meeting and been given his marching orders – hence the weights equipment. Let him sleep.
He looked at his watch. Five twenty. Although he felt tired, he was too wired to sleep. He decided he would go for a run, try to clear his head and energize himself for the heavy day ahead, which was starting with an eight-thirty team briefing, followed by a press conference at eleven a.m. And then he planned to have another session with Brian Bishop. The man smelled all wrong to him.
He went through to his bathroom, and immediately noticed the top was off the toothpaste. There was a large indent in the middle of the tube and some of the white paste had spewed out of the neck and on to the bathroom shelf. For some reason he could not immediately understand, this irked him even more than the mess downstairs.
Since entering this house just a few minutes ago, he was beginning to feel as if he’d slipped through a reality warp into the old TV sitcom Men Behaving Badly, with Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey playing bachelor slobs sharing a pad. And then he realized about the toothpaste: it had been one of the very few things that had irritated him about Sandy, the way she did that too. She always squeezed the damn tube in the middle rather than from the end, then left the top off so that part of the contents dribbled out.
That and the condition she always kept the interior of her car in – she treated the passenger side as a kind of permanent dustbin that never needed emptying. The rusty, battered little brown Renault was so littered with shopping receipts, discarded sweet wrappers, empty shopping bags, Lottery tickets and a whole raft of other debris that Grace used to think it looked more like something you’d want to keep chickens in than drive.
It was still in the garage now. He’d cleaned out the rubbish long ago, been through every scrap of it in search of a clue, and found none.
‘You’re up early.’
He turned and saw Branson standing behind him, wearing a pair of white underpants, a thin gold chain around his neck and his massive diver’s wristwatch. Although his body was stooped, his physique was in terrific shape, his muscles bulging through his gleaming skin. But his face was a picture of abject misery.
‘I need to be, to clear up after you,’ Grace retorted.
Either not registering this or deliberately ignoring it, Branson went on. ‘She wants a horse.’
Grace shook his head, unsure whether he had heard correctly. ‘What?’
‘Ari.’ Branson shrugged. ‘She wants a horse. Can you believe, on what I earn?’
‘More eco-friendly than a car,’ Grace replied. ‘Probably cheaper to run too.’
‘Very witty.’
‘What exactly do you mean, a horse?’
‘She used to ride – worked in stables when she was a kid. She wants to take it up again. She said if I agree to get her a horse, I can come back.’
‘Where can I buy one?’ Grace retorted.
‘I’m being serious.’
‘So am I.’
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46
Roy Grace had been right. With Parliament long closed for its summer recess and the most significant world event during the past twenty-four hours being a train crash in Pakistan, the only stories vying for the front pages, particularly the tabloids, were the shock revelations of a Premiership footballer caught in a gay threesome, a panther apparently terrorizing the Dorset countryside and Prince Harry cavorting on a beach with an enviably pretty girl. All the nation’s news editors were hungry for a big story, and what better than the murder of a wealthy, beautiful woman?
The conference room for the morning press briefing he had called had been so tightly packed that some reporters had been left out in the corridor. He kept it short and tight, because he didn’t have a lot to tell them at this stage. No new information had come in overnight, and the earlier team briefing had been more about assigning tasks for the day than assessing any developments.
The one message he did put across clearly, to the sea of forty or so faces of press and media reporters and photographers in the room, was that the police were anxious to trace Mrs Bishop’s recent movements, and they would like to hear from any members of the public who might have seen her during the previous few days. The press were to be issued with a set of photographs Grace had chosen from the Bishops’ house, most of them from a montage of action pictures. One showed the dead woman in a bikini on a powerboat, another at the wheel of her convertible BMW, and in another she wore a long dress and a hat at a smart race meeting – Ascot or Epsom, Grace guessed.
He had chosen these photographs very carefully, knowing that they would appeal to news editors. They were the kind of pictures readers liked to feast their eyes on – the beautiful woman, the fast, glamorous lifestyle. With acres of column inches to fill, Grace knew they would be used. And wide coverage just might jog the memory of one key witness out there somewhere.
He slipped away quickly at the end, anxious to call Cleo before going into a further interview with Brian Bishop, which was scheduled for midday, leaving Dennis Ponds, the senior police public relations officer, to distribute the photographs. But only yards before reaching the security door leading through to the sanctuary of his office, he heard his name called out. He turned, and was irritated to see that the young Argus crime reporter, Kevin Spinella, had followed him.
‘What are you doing here?’ Grace said.
Spinella leaned against a wall, close to a display board on which was pinned a flow chart headed Murder Investigation Model, an insolent expression on his sharp face, chewing gum, holding his black notebook open and a pen in his hand. Today he had on a cheap, dark suit that he seemed to have not quite yet grown into, a white shirt that was also too big for him and a purple tie with a large, clumsy knot. His short hair had that fashionable, mussed, just-got-up look.
‘I wanted to ask you something in private, Detective Superintendent.’
Grace held his security card up to the lock. The latch clicked and he pulled open the door. ‘I’ve just said everything I have to say to the press at the conference. I’ve no further comment at this stage.’
‘I think you have,’ Spinella said, his smug expression irritating Grace even more now. ‘Something you omitted.’
‘Then speak to Dennis Ponds.’
‘I would have raised it at the conference,’ Spinella said, ‘But you wouldn’t have thanked me for it. The thing about the gas mask?’
Grace spun round, shocked, taking a step towards the reporter, letting the door click shut again behind him. ‘What did you say?’
‘I heard there was a gas mask discovered at the murder scene – that it might have been used by the killer – some kinky ritual or something?’
Grace’s brain raced. He was seething with anger, but venting it now wasn’t going to help. This had happened before. A couple of months back on another case, a vital piece of information about something found at a crime scene and withheld from the press – in that case a beetle – had been leaked to the Argus. Now it seemed it had happened again. Who was responsible? The problem was it could have been anyone. Although the information had been withheld from the press conference, half of Sussex Police would already know about it.
Instead of shouting at Spinella, Grace stared at the man, sizing him up. He was a smart lad and crime was clearly his thing. Quite likely in a year or two he would move on from this local paper to a bigger one, maybe to a national; there was nothing to be gained from making an enemy of him.
‘OK, I appreciate your not raising it at the conference.’
‘Is it true?’
‘Are we on the record or off?’
/> Spinella shrewdly closed his notepad. ‘Off.’
Grace hesitated, still wary of how much the man could be trusted. ‘There was a Second World War gas mask found at the scene, but we don’t know that it’s connected.’
‘And you’re keeping that quiet because only the real killer will know it was there?’
‘Yes. And it would be very helpful if you didn’t print anything about it – yet.’
‘So what would be in that for me?’ Spinella retorted instantly.
Grace found himself grinning at the young man’s cheek. ‘You trying to cut a deal?’
‘If I scratch your back now, it means you’ll owe me one. Some time in the future. I’ll bank it. Deal?’
Grace shook his head, grinning again. ‘You cheeky monkey!’
‘I’m glad we understand each other.’
Grace turned back to the door.
‘Just one quick thing,’ Spinella said. ‘Is it true that you and Assistant Chief Constable Alison Vosper don’t see eye to eye?’
‘Are we still off the record?’ Grace asked.
Spinella nodded, holding up the closed notebook.
‘No comment!’ Grace delivered his most acidic smile, and this time went through the door, closing it firmly behind him.
Ten minutes later, together with Branson, Grace sat down in one of the red, bucket-shaped chairs in the Witness Interview Suite, opposite a wretched-looking Brian Bishop. He had been driven over from his hotel by WPC Maggie Campbell, who was waiting outside.
Grace, his jacket off and wearing a short-sleeved shirt, placed his notebook down on the small coffee table, then dabbed perspiration off his forehead with his handkerchief. Branson, wearing a fresh white T-shirt tight as skin, thin blue jeans and trainers, seemed in a less desolate mood today.
‘OK if we record again, to save time, sir?’ Grace asked Bishop.