by Peter James
‘Sorry about last night!’ she said. ‘Didn’t mean to pass out on you, honest!’
He smiled back. ‘Do you always get that wrecked when you go out with your sister?’
‘She’s just been dumped by her dickhead boyfriend and wanted to get smashed. It seemed rude not to join her.’
‘Quite. How are you feeling?’
‘Only marginally better than Sophie Harrington looks. I had the roundabouts earlier!’
‘Coca-Cola, full strength – the best thing,’ he said.
‘I’ve already drunk two cans.’ She again gave him a look he could not read. ‘I don’t think I asked you how Germany went. Did you find your wife? Have a cosy reunion?’
‘You did ask, about five times.’
She looked astonished. ‘And you told me?’
‘How about we have a meal tonight and I’ll give you the full low down.’
She looked hard at him again and, for a sudden, panicky moment, he thought she was going to tell him to get lost. Then she gave him a thin smile – but with no warmth. ‘Come over to me. I’ll cook something very simple and non-alcoholic. Comfort food. I think we need to talk.’
‘I’ll come over as soon as I can after the evening briefing.’ He took a step towards her and gave her a quick kiss.
At first she pulled away sharply. ‘I’m very hurt and I’m very angry with you, Roy.’
‘I like it when you are angry,’ he said.
Suddenly she melted a little. ‘Bastard,’ she said and grinned.
He gave her another quick kiss, which turned into a longer kiss. Their gowns rustled as they held each other tighter, Grace keeping one eye on the door in case anyone came in.
Then Cleo broke away and looked down at herself, grinning again. ‘We’re not meant to be doing this. I’m still angry with you. Turns you on, this gear, does it?’
‘Even more than black silk underwear!’
‘Better get back in and do some work, Detective Superintendent. A centre-spread in the Argus that you got caught shagging in the mortuary changing room wouldn’t be the best thing for your image.’
He followed her down the tiled corridor, his mind a maelstrom of thoughts, about Cleo, about Sandy and about work. The press had given them a rough ride this morning and he could understand where they were coming from. One murder of an attractive young woman could be an isolated incident, something personal. Two could put a city, or an entire county, into a state of panic. If the press got hold of the information on the gas mask there would be a feeding frenzy.
He hadn’t released the information that Sophie Harrington had made a call to Brian Bishop, the prime suspect in Katie Bishop’s murder. And that Brian Bishop, behind his veneer of respectability as a successful businessman, respected citizen of Brighton and Hove, golf club committee member and charity benefactor, whose equally outwardly respectable Rotarian wife had been having an affair, had a deeply unpleasant criminal record.
At the age of fifteen, according to the information on the PNC – the Police National Computer database – Bishop had been sentenced to two years in a young offenders’ institute for raping a fourteen-year-old girl at his school. Then, at the age of twenty-one, he was given two years’ probation for violently assaulting a woman, causing her grievous bodily harm.
It seemed that the deeper his team dug into Bishop’s life, the stronger the evidence against the man was becoming. Earlier today Alison Vosper had talked about his alibi in London being the elephant in the room. But there was another elephant in the same room at this moment. And that was Bishop’s vehement denial of any knowledge of the insurance policy taken out on his wife’s life. Because he appeared to be telling the truth about that, and that was bothering Grace.
Still, it was equally clear that Brian Bishop was a sharp operator. Not many people achieved his level of financial success by being a nice guy, in Grace’s view – something now borne out by the man’s ugly, violent past. And he knew he shouldn’t read too much into Bishop’s ignorance – or feigned ignorance – of the life insurance policy.
The complexities were starting to hurt his brain. He wanted to go somewhere and sit in a quiet, dark corner and run through every element of the Bishop and Harrington cases. The SOCO team would be in the Bishops’ house for a good few days yet, and Grace was glad about that. He wanted the man to be uncomfortable, out of his natural habitat. In a hotel room, like a caged animal, he would be insecure and therefore would respond better to questioning.
They were definitely stacking up material against Bishop, but it was too early to arrest the man. If they did that, they could only keep him inside for twenty-four hours – with an extension of a further twelve hours – without charging him. There wasn’t enough hard evidence yet, and although the man’s alibi wasn’t watertight, there was enough room for doubt. Two independent witnesses to say he had been in London either side of the time of the murder, against one Automatic Number Plate Recognition camera, which said he hadn’t. There had been far too many cases of villains using copied number plates – particularly these days, to avoid speeding fines from cameras; a clever brief could easily sow doubt in a jury’s mind about whether this number plate was real or a fake.
He was also very interested in the artist that Katie Bishop had been seeing. At this point the man was a potential suspect, for sure.
Deep in thought, he entered the stark, bright glare of the post-mortem room. Sophie Harrington’s body was obscured from his view, crowded by green-gowned figures peering intently, like students in a classroom, as Nadiuska De Sancha pointed out something.
In the room, in addition to the pathologist, Cleo and Darren, were DCI Duigan and the lean figure of the Coroner’s Officer, Ronnie Pearson, a retired police officer in his early fifties.
Grace walked over to the pathologist’s side, and experienced the same uncomfortable surprise he got every time he saw a cadaver in here or anywhere else. They always looked almost ethereal, the skin of Caucasians – except for burnt or badly decomposed victims – a ghostly alabaster colour. It was as if the process of death made them appear in black and white, while everything around them remained in colour.
Sophie Harrington had been turned over on to her stomach. Nadiuska was pointing her latex-gloved finger at dozens of tiny dark crimson holes on the dead woman’s back. It was like a tattoo all the way down her torso, covering much of the skin.
‘Can you all read what it spells out?’ she asked.
As he looked closer, all Grace could see at first was an indecipherable pattern.
‘I would say, from the neatness and consistency of the holes, that it has been done with something like a power drill,’ the pathologist continued.
‘While the victim was alive?’ DI Murphy asked. ‘Or after she was dead?’
‘I would say post-mortem,’ Nadiuska responded, leaning over and peering closely at a section of the dead woman’s back. ‘These are deep holes and there’s very little bleeding. Her heart wasn’t pumping when they were made.’
Some small mercy for the poor woman, Grace thought. Then, like suddenly being able to read the hidden writing inside a visual puzzle, he could see the words clearly, now.
Because You Love Her.
�
76
The grumpy cleaning woman left Cleo Morey’s house just after twelve thirty. The Time Billionaire made a note of this, from behind the wheel of his Toyota Prius. It was good timing, just minutes before his parking voucher expired. As she stomped off up the hill, talking angrily into her mobile phone, he wondered if she had spent the whole of the last three and a half hours on the phone. He was sure Cleo Morey would be interested to know what she was getting for the money she paid this woman. Although of course that wasn’t really his business.
He put the car in gear and, running silently on the electric motor, glided up past her, then threaded his way through the complex network of streets up to Queens Road, then down past the clock tower, and turned right along the seafront.
He parked outside number 11 and got out of his car. He then unlocked the garage door and hauled it up, went inside, switched on the light, then pulled the door back down hard. It closed with a loud, echoing clang. Then silence. Just the faintest whir from the two humidifiers.
Peace!
He breathed in the warm smells he loved in here: engine oil, old leather, old bodywork. This was his home. His temple! In this garage – and sometimes in the one next door, where he kept the covered trailer – he used up so many of those hours he had stashed away in the bank. Dozens of them at a time! Hundreds of them every month! Thousands of them every year!
He stared lovingly at the fitted dust cover, at the flowing contours of the car it was protecting, the gleaming moonstone-white 1962 3.8 Jaguar Mk2 saloon, which took up so much of the floor space that he had to edge past it sideways.
The walls were hung with his tools, arranged in patterns, each item so spotless it might have been fresh out of its box, all in their correct places. His hammers formed one display. His ring spanners, his wrenches, his feeler gauges, his screwdrivers – each formed a separate artwork. On the shelves were laid out his tins and bottles of polish, wheel cleaner, chrome cleaner, window cleaner, leather polish, his sponges, chamois leathers, bottle brushes, pipe cleaners – all looking brand new.
‘Hello, baby!’ he whispered, caressing the top of the dust cover, running his hand over the curved hard roof he could feel beneath. ‘You are beautiful. So, so beautiful.’
He edged along the side of the car, running his hand along the cover, feeling the windows, then the bonnet. He knew every wire, every panel, every nut and bolt, every inch of her steel, chromium, leather, glass, walnut and Bakelite. She was his baby. Seven years of painstaking reassembly from a wreck inhabited by rats and mice in a derelict farmyard barn. She was in better condition now than the day, well over forty years ago, she had left the factory. Ten Concours d’El�nce rosettes for First Place pinned to the garage wall attested to that. They had come from all over the country. He had won dozens of second-, third- and even fourth-place rosettes as well. But they always went straight into the bin.
Later today, he reminded himself, he needed to work on the insides of the bumpers, which were invisible to the normal observer. Judges looked behind them sometimes and caught you out, and there was an important Jaguar Drivers’ Club concourse coming up at the end of this month.
But at this moment he had something more important on his mind. It was a key-cutting machine, complete with a wide set of blanks – for any lock, the advertisement on the internet had said – that had been sitting in the brown packaging marked FRAGILE on the floor beside his workbench since its arrival a couple of months ago.
That was the big advantage of being a Time Billionaire. You were able to plan ahead. To think ahead. He had read a quotation in a newspaper from someone called Victor Hugo, who had said, ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.’
He patted the tin full of wax, with the indentation of Cleo Morey’s front door key, that sat heavily in his jacket pocket. Then he began to open the package with a smile on his face. Ordering this had definitely been a very good idea.
Its time had come.
�
77
Grace pulled his Alfa Romeo into the front car park of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where he had come to visit an injured officer, and cruised slowly along, looking for a space. Then he patiently waited for an elderly lady to unlock the door of her little Nissan Micra, climb in, do up her seat belt, get her ignition key in the slot, fiddle with the interior mirror, start the engine, figure out what the round wheel in front of her did, remember where the gear stick was and finally find reverse. Then she backed out with the speed of a torpedo propelled from a tube, missing the front of his car by an inch. He drove into the space she had vacated and switched off the engine.
It was shortly before half past two and his stomach rumbled, reminding him he needed some food, although he had no appetite. Visits to the mortuary seldom left him feeling like eating, and the image of the grim tattoo on Sophie Harrington’s back was still vividly with him, puzzling and disturbing.
Because You Love Her.
What the hell did that mean? Presumably her referred to the victim, Sophie Harrington. But who was you? Her boyfriend?
His phone rang. It was Kim Murphy to update him on the day’s progress so far. The most important news was that the Huntington laboratory had confirmed they would have the DNA test results by late afternoon. As he was finishing the call, the phone beeped with a caller-waiting signal. It was DCI Duigan, also calling in with a progress report on Sophie Harrington, and he was sounding pleased.
‘An elderly neighbour living opposite went over and spoke to the scene guard officer about an hour ago. She said she had noticed a man acting strangely in the street outside Sophie Harrington’s building at about eight on Friday night. He was holding a red carrier bag and wearing a hoodie. Even so, it sounds like she had a good look at him.’
‘Was she able to give a description of his face?’
‘We’ve someone on their way to interview her now. But what she has said so far fits Bishop, in terms of height and build. And am I right in understanding from the time-line report he has no alibi for his whereabouts around that time?’
‘Correct. Could she pick him out in an identity parade?’
‘That’s right at the top of the list.’
Grace asked Duigan if they’d managed to find out if Sophie had had a boyfriend. The SIO responded that there was no information on that yet, but they would shortly be interviewing the friend who had reported her missing.
When his colleague had finished, Grace checked his emails on his BlackBerry, but there was nothing relevant to either of the two investigations. He slotted the gadget back in its holster on his belt and thought for some moments. Duigan’s news was potentially very good indeed. If this woman could positively identify Bishop, then that was another significant piece of evidence stacked up against the man.
His stomach rumbled again. Fierce sunlight burned through his opened sunroof and he pulled it shut, grateful for the momentary shade. Then he picked up the bacon and egg sandwich he had bought in a petrol station on the way here, tore off the cellophane wrapper and levered the sandwich out. The first bite tasted vaguely of bacon-flavoured cardboard. Chewing slowly and unenthusiastically, he picked up the copy of the latest edition of the Argus newspaper he had bought at the same time, and stared at the front-page splash, amazed how fast, as so often, they managed to get a story out. At some point he was going to have to get to the bottom of Spinella’s insider sources. But right now this was the bottom of his list of priorities.
Brighton Serial Killer Claims Second Victim.
There was a particularly attractive head and shoulders photograph of Sophie Harrington, wearing a T-shirt and simple beaded necklace, her long brown hair billowing in sunlight. She was smiling brightly at the camera, or the person behind it.
Then he read the article, bylined Kevin Spinella, which spilled over into the second and third pages. It was well dressed up with a series of lifestyle photographs of Katie Bishop, as well as all the usual grief-stricken sound-bites from Sophie Harrington’s parents and her best friend that he would have expected to see. And the small photograph of himself that the paper always wheeled out.
It was typical Spinella, sensational reporting intended to create maximum possible panic in the city, and boost the circulation of the paper over the coming days, as well as to enhance Spinella’s CV and the oily creep’s undoubted
ambitions for a position with a national paper. Grace supposed he could not blame the man, or his editor – he would probably have done the same in their positions. But all the same, deliberate misquotes such as ‘Brighton Police Divisional Commander, Chief Superintendent Ken Brickhill, advised all women in the city of Brighton and Hove to lock their doors,’ were not helpful.
Part of the purpose of carefully managed press conferences, such as the one earlier today, was to inform the public of the crimes that had been committed, with the hope of getting leads. But all scaremongering like this did was to jam the police switchboards with hundreds of calls from frightened women.
He ate as much of the sandwich as he could manage, washed it down with a tepid Diet Coke, then climbed out and dumped the remnants of his meal and its packaging into a bin. He dutifully bought a pay-and-display ticket and stuck it on the windscreen. Then he walked over to the pre-fab Hospitality Flowers booth and chose a small bouquet from the stall. He walked along in front of the sprawling front fa�e of the hospital, some of it painted white, some cream and some grey, and entered under the large Perspex awning, past an ambulance with the wording on its bonnet in large green letters in mirror-image.
Roy hated this place. It angered and embarrassed him that a city of Brighton and Hove’s stature had such a disgusting, run-down dump of a hospital. It might have a grand name, and an impressive, sprawling complex of buildings, and sure, some departments, such as the cardiac unit, were world class, but in general the average makeshift shack of a medical centre in a Third World nation put this place to shame.
He had read once that the Second World War was the first time in history that more soldiers died from their actual wounds than from infections they picked up in hospitals while being treated for their wounds. Half of the citizens of Brighton and Hove were terrified to come into this place because, rumour was rife, you were more likely to die from something you picked up inside, than from whatever brought you in here in the first place.