by Peter James
‘There we go,’ Norman Potting said, with large blotches of damp on his cream shirt. ‘The traditional English summer for you. Two fine days followed by a thunderstorm.’
Several of the team smiled, but Grace barely heard him, he was wrapped up in so many thoughts. Cleo had still not called him back. He was booked on a seven a.m. flight to Munich, tomorrow, returning at nine fifteen p.m. But at least he had some help over there. Although he hadn’t spoken to Marcel Kullen in over four years, the man had returned his call within an hour and – so far as Grace could understand from Kullen’s erratic, broken English – the German detective was insisting on collecting him in person from the airport. And he had remembered to cancel Sunday lunch at his sister’s tomorrow – much to her disappointment and Cleo’s silent anger.
‘The time is six thirty, Saturday 5 August,’ he read out formally to the assembled company, from his notes prepared by Eleanor Hodgson. ‘This is our fourth briefing of Operation Chameleon, the investigation into the death of Mrs Katherine Margaret Bishop – known as Katie – conducted on day two following the discovery of her body at eight thirty yesterday morning. I will now summarize events following the incident.’
He kept the summary short, skipping some of the details, then finished by stating angrily that someone had leaked the crucial piece of information about the gas mask to the Argus reporter, Kevin Spinella. Glaring around the room, he asked, ‘Anyone know how this information got to him?’
Blank expressions greeted him.
Irritable because of the heat, and Cleo, and every damn thing at the moment, he thumped his fist down on the table. ‘This is the second time this has happened in recent months.’ He shot a glance at his deputy, Inspector Kim Murphy, who nodded as if in confirmation. ‘I’m not saying it was anyone in this room,’ he added. ‘But by hell or high water I’m going to find out who was responsible, and I want you to all keep your ears to the ground. OK?’
There were general nods of consensus. Then a brief moment of heavy silence, broken by a flit of lightning and the sudden flicker of all the lights in the room. Moments later there was another rumble of thunder.
‘On an organizational point, I won’t be here for tomorrow’s briefings – these will be taken by DI Murphy.’
Kim Murphy nodded again.
‘I will be out of the country for a few hours,’ Grace continued. ‘But I’ll have my mobile phone and my BlackBerry, so I will be reachable at all times by phone and email. OK, so let’s have your individual reports.’ He looked down at his notes, checking the tasks that had been assigned, although he could remember most if not all of them in his head. ‘Norman?’
Potting’s voice was a deep, sometimes mumbled growl, coarsened by a rural burr. ‘I have something which may be significant, Roy,’ the Detective Sergeant said.
Grace signalled for him to continue.
Potting, a stickler for detail, related the information in the rather formal and ponderous terminology he might have used when making a statement from a witness box. ‘You asked me to check on all CCTV cameras in the area. I was looking through the Vantage log for all incidents that were reported during Thursday night, and observed that a plumber’s van, which had been reported stolen in Lewes on Thursday afternoon, had been found abandoned on the slip road of a BP petrol station, on the westbound carriageway of the A27, two miles east of Lewes, early yesterday morning.’
He paused to flick back a couple of pages of his lined notebook. ‘I made the decision to investigate because it struck me as strange—’
‘Why?’ DS Bella Moy rounded on him. Grace knew that she couldn’t stand Potting and would grab any opportunity to put him down.
‘Well, Bella, it struck me that a van full of plumbing tools would hardly be the vehicle of choice for most joyriders,’ he replied, provoking a ripple of mirth. Even Grace allowed himself a thin smile.
Stony-faced, Bella retorted, ‘But it might be for a crooked plumber.’
‘Not with what plumbers charge – they all drive Rollers.’
This time the laughter was even louder. Grace raised a silencing hand. ‘Can we just keep to business, please? We’re dealing with something very serious.’
Potting ploughed on. ‘It just didn’t feel right to me. A plumber’s van being abandoned. Around the same time Mrs Bishop was killed. I can’t explain why I made any connection – just call it a copper’s nose.’
He looked at Grace, who responded with a nod. He knew what Potting meant. The best policemen had instincts. Intuition. The ability to tell – smell – when something was right or wrong, for reasons they could never logically explain.
Bella glared childishly at Norman Potting, as if trying to stare him out. Grace made a mental note to speak to her about her attitude afterwards.
‘I went to the BP petrol station this morning and requested permission to view and interrogate the forecourt’s CCTV camera footage for the previous night. The staff were obliging, partly because they’d had two people drive off without paying them.’ Potting suddenly looked straight back at Bella smugly. ‘The camera takes one frame every thirty seconds. When I studied the images, they revealed a BMW convertible, which had pulled in just before midnight, which I later ascertained was the vehicle belonging to Mrs Bishop. I was also able to identify a woman walking to the petrol station’s shop as Mrs Bishop.’
‘This could be significant,’ Grace said.
‘It gets better.’ Now the veteran detective was looking even more pleased with himself. ‘I checked the interior of the car afterwards, at the Bishops’ residence in Dyke Road Avenue, and found a pay-and-display parking ticket, issued at five eleven p.m. on Thursday afternoon from a machine in Southover Road in Lewes. The stolen van was taken from a car park just behind Cliffe High Street – about five minutes’ walk away.’
Potting said nothing further. After some moments Grace prompted him, ‘And?’
‘I can’t add anything further at this stage, Roy. But I have a feeling that there’s a connection.’
Grace looked at him, hard. Potting, with a disastrous personal life, and enough political incorrectness to inflame half of the United Nations, had, despite all that baggage, produced impressive results before. ‘Keep on it,’ he said, and turned to DC Zafferone.
Alfonso Zafferone had been assigned to the important but tedious job of working out the time-lines. Insolently chewing gum, he reported on his work with the HOLMES team, plotting the sequence of events surrounding the discovery of Katie Bishop’s body.
The young DC reported that Katie Bishop had started the day of the night she died with a one-hour session at home with her personal trainer. Grace made a note that he was to be interviewed.
Next she had attended a beauty parlour in Brighton, where she had had her nails done. Grace jotted down that the staff there needed to be interviewed. That had been followed by lunch at Havana Restaurant in Brighton with a lady called Caroline Ash, the appeals organizer of a local charity for children, the Rocking Horse Appeal, to discuss plans for a fund-raising event that she and her husband were scheduled to host at their Dyke Road Avenue home in September. Grace wrote down that Mrs Ash was to be interviewed.
Mrs Bishop’s gruelling day, Zafferone said, with considerable sarcasm, continued with a visit to her hairdresser at three o’clock. After that the trail on her went cold. The information that Norman Potting had provided clearly filled in the gap.
The next report was from the latest recruit to Grace’s team, a tough, sharp-eyed female detective constable in her late thirties called Pamela Buckley – constantly confused by many with the family liaison officer Linda Buckley and so similar-looking, they could have been sisters. Both had blonde hair, Linda Buckley’s cropped boyishly short, Pamela’s longer, clipped up rather severely.
‘I found the taxi driver who drove Brian Bishop from the Hotel du Vin to the Lansdowne Place Hotel,’ Pamela Buckley said, and looked down at her notepad. ‘His name’s Mark Tuckwell and he drives for Hove Streamline. He ha
s no recollection of Bishop hurting his hand.’
‘Could Bishop have injured himself without this driver knowing?’
‘It’s possible, sir, but unlikely. I asked him that. He said Bishop was completely silent throughout the journey. He felt that if he had injured himself, he’d have said something.’
Grace nodded, making notes, not convinced this got them anywhere.
Bella Moy then gave a detailed character report on Katie and Brian Bishop. Katie Bishop did not come out of it particularly well. She had been married twice before, the first time to a failed rock singer, when she was eighteen. She had divorced him when she was twenty-two and then married a wealthy Brighton property developer, whom she had divorced six years later, when she was twenty-eight. Bella had been in touch with both men, who had described her, unflatteringly, as being obsessed with money. Two years later she had married Brian Bishop.
‘Why didn’t she have any children?’ Grace asked.
‘She had two abortions with her rock singer. Her property developer already had four children and didn’t want any more.’
‘Was that the reason for her divorcing him?’
‘That’s what he told me,’ she said.
‘Did she get a big settlement?’
‘About two million, he said,’ she replied.
Grace made another note. Then he said, ‘She and Brian Bishop were married for five years. And we don’t know the reason why they didn’t have children. We need to ask him. Could have been an issue between them.’
Next on Grace’s list was DS Guy Batchelor. One of the actions he had delegated to the detective sergeant was to conduct a thorough search of the Bishops’ Brighton home, once the forensic work had been finished, and to act as a coordinator in the meantime.
‘I have something which may be significant,’ Batchelor said. He held up a red file folder, with an index tab clipped to the top. He opened it and removed a bunch of A4-sized papers, clipped together, bearing the logo of the HSBC bank. ‘A SOCO found it in a filing cabinet in Bishop’s study,’ he said. ‘It’s a life insurance policy taken out six months ago in the name of Mrs Bishop. For three million pounds.’
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50
Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance or serendipity. Alexander Fleming had it when he left some bacteria out overnight in his lab and discovered penicillin as a result. Steve Jobs had it when he looked at a Swatch watch one day and realized that offering computers in a range of colours was the way forward for Apple. Bill Gates must have had one of those moments too, at some point.
These ideas sometimes come to us when we least expect it: when we are lying in the bathtub fretting about this or that, or wide awake in bed in the middle of the night, or perhaps just sitting at our desk at work. The idea that no one has ever had before us. The idea that will make us rich, get us away from all the drudgery and daily crap we have to put up with. The idea that will change our lives and set us free!
I had mine on Saturday 25 May 1996, at eleven twenty-five p.m. I was hating my job as a software engineer at a company located in Coventry that developed gearboxes for racing cars.
I was trying to figure how to get my life together – and realizing, now I was soon turning thirty-two, that it was as together as it was ever going to get. I was on a charter plane coming back from a lousy week’s holiday in Spain, and there was a sudden walk-out of staff at Malaga airport and all the planes got grounded.
The ground staff tried to put us into hotels for the night, but it was hopeless. There was one girl on the charter company desk, trying to find rooms for 280 people. And there were employees at all the other airline desks trying to do the same for their stranded passengers. There were probably three to four thousand people stranded and there was no way they were able to cope and book everyone in.
I lay down on a bench in the departure lounge. And then I had my moment! One computer software program installed in all the local hotels and in all the airlines could have solved their problems. Instant boost of profit for the hotels; instant solution to their nightmare for the airlines. Then I began to think of other applications beyond cancelled flights. Any organization that had to fit large numbers of people into places and any organization that had rooms to sell. Tour operators, prisons, hospitals, disaster relief agencies, the armed forces, were just some of the potential customers.
I had found my gold mine.
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51
The tide was coming in on the Brighton and Hove waterfront, but there was still a wide expanse of exposed mudflats between the pebble beach and the frothing surf from the breakers. Although it was almost half past eight in the evening and the sun was fast closing on the horizon, there were still plenty of people on the beach.
Sweet barbecue smoke mingled with the smells of salt, weed and tar. Strains of steel-band music from a stoned group playing on the promenade drifted through the warm, still air. Two small naked children dug plastic spades into the mud, helped by a plump, badly sunburnt man in loud shorts and a baseball cap who was adding a further layer to an already fine-looking sandcastle.
Two young lovers, in shorts and T-shirts, walked barefoot across cool, wet mud. They stepped on whorls of lugworm casts, upturned shells, strands of weed, carefully avoiding the occasional rusted can, discarded bottle or empty plastic carton. Their hands were tightly linked and they stopped every few steps to kiss, dangling their flip-flops with their free hands.
Carefree, smiling, they passed a solemn, elderly man in a crumpled white hat pulled tight down over his ears, swinging a metal detector in an arc in front of him, inches above the surface of the mud. Then they passed a youth, in gumboots and khaki trousers, with an open shirt spilled over them, a fishing bag on the ground beside him, digging out worms for bait with a garden spade and shaking them off the blade into a rubber bucket.
A short distance ahead were the blackened girders of the ruin of the West Pier, rising out of the shallows, in the fading light, like an eerie sculpture. The water seemed to be travelling faster, more urgently, every minute, the breakers getting larger, louder.
The girl squealed and tried to pull her boyfriend away, towards the shore, as water suddenly ran in further than before, covering her bare feet. ‘I’m getting wet, Ben!’
‘Tamara, you’re such a wuss!’ he replied, standing firm as another breaker, even closer, sent water shooting over their ankles, and then a third, almost up to their knees. He pointed out towards the horizon, at the crimson orb of the sun. ‘Watch the sunset. You get a green flash of light when it hits the horizon. You ever seen it?’
But she wasn’t looking at the sun. She was looking at a log that was rolling over and over in the surf. A log with long tendrils of seaweed attached to one end, trailing from it. An even bigger breaker roared, and the log was sucked back. And for one brief, fleeting instant, as the log rolled, she saw a face. Arms and legs. And realized that it wasn’t seaweed on the end of it. It was human hair.
She screamed.
Ben broke free of her hand and ran into the water, towards it. A breaker hit his knees, showering spray over his body and face, spattering the lenses of his sunglasses, blurring his vision. The body rolled again, a naked woman with her face partially eaten away, her skin the colour of tallow wax. She was being pulled back, away from Ben, reclaimed by the ocean as if she had merely been presented for a brief inspection.
The young man lunged forward, water up to his thighs now, drenched completely as another breaker exploded around him, and grabbed an arm by the wrist, then pulled hard. The skin felt cold and slimy, reptilian. He shuddered but hung on resolutely. She seemed only slightly built, but with the pull of the ocean against him she felt as heavy as lead. He pulled back, locked in a grim tug-of-war. ‘Tam!’ he shouted. ‘Call someone for help! Dial 999 on yer mob!’
Then suddenly, still gripping the wrist hard, he was falling. He landed flat on his back in the m
ud, as deafening surf from another breaker roared and sucked and gurgled over his face and around him. And there was another sound in his ears now, a dull, ragged whine, getting louder, more intense, more piercing.
It was Tamara. Standing rigid, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth open, the scream coming from deep within her.
Ben hadn’t yet fully realized that the arm he was holding had torn clean away from the rest of the body.
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52
Cleo’s phone was ringing. Her home line. She eased herself forward on her sofa so she could read the caller display. It was Grace’s mobile number.
She let it ring. Waited. Four rings. Five. Six. Then her voicemail kicked in and the ringing stopped. Must have been the fourth – maybe even the fifth – call from him today on this line. Plus all the ones on her mobile.
She was being childish not answering it, she knew, and sooner or later she was going to have to respond; but she was still not sure what she wanted to say to him.
Heavy-hearted, she picked up her wine glass and saw, to her slight surprise, that it was empty. Again. She picked up the bottle of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and saw, to her even bigger surprise, there were no more than a couple of inches left. ‘Shit,’ she said, pouring it. It barely covered the bottom of her large glass.
She was on duty this weekend, which meant she shouldn’t drink much, if anything at all, since she could be called out at any time of day or night. But today she felt badly in need of alcohol. It had been a shit day. A really shit day. After her row with Roy, and a totally sleepless remains of the night following it, she’d been called out to the mortuary at ten in the morning to receive the body of a six-year-old girl who had been hit by a car.