by Peter James
As he set his mug down, the speaker crackled and the monitor flickered into life. Now he could see the four men in the interview room, Branson, Nicholl, Bishop and Lloyd. Three of them had removed their jackets. The two detectives had their ties on but their shirt sleeves rolled up.
In the observation room they had a choice of two cameras and Grace switched to the one that gave him the best view of Bishop’s face.
Addressing Bishop, with the occasional deferential glance at the man’s solicitor, Glenn Branson started with the standard opening of all interview sessions with suspects: ‘This interview is being recorded on tape and video, and this can be monitored remotely.’
Grace caught his fleeting, cheeky, upward glance.
Branson again cautioned Bishop, who nodded.
‘It is ten fifteen p.m., Monday 7 August,’ he continued. ‘I am Detective Sergeant Branson. Can each of you identify yourselves for the benefit of the tape?’
Brian Bishop, Leighton Lloyd and DC Nicholl then introduced themselves. When they had finished, Branson continued, ‘Mr Bishop, can you run us through, in as much detail as possible, your movements during the twenty-four hours leading up to the time when DS Nicholl and myself came to see you at the North Brighton Golf Club on Friday morning?’
Grace watched intently as Brian Bishop gave his account. He prefaced it by stating that it was normal for him to take the train to London early on Monday mornings, spend the week alone at his flat in Notting Hill, working late, often with evening meetings, and return to Brighton on Friday evenings for the weekend. Last week, he said, because he had a golf tournament that began early on Friday morning, as part of his club’s centenary celebrations, he had driven to London late on Sunday evening, in order to have his car up there, so that he could drive straight down to the golf club on Friday morning.
Grace noted this exception to Bishop’s normal routine down on his pad.
Bishop related his day at work, at the Hanover Square offices of his company, International Rostering Solutions PLC, until the evening, when he had walked down to Piccadilly to meet his financial adviser, Phil Taylor, for dinner at a restaurant called the Wolseley.
Phil Taylor, he explained, organized his personal annual tax planning. After dinner, he had left the restaurant and gone home to his flat, a little later than he had planned and having drunk rather more than he had intended. He had slept badly, he explained, partly as a result of two large espressos and a brandy, and partly because he was worried about oversleeping and arriving late at the golf club the next morning.
Keeping rigidly to his script, Branson went back over the account, asking for specific details here and there, in particular regarding the people he had spoken to during the day. He asked him if he could recall speaking to his wife, and Bishop replied that he had, at around two p.m., when Katie had rung him to discuss the purchase of some plants for the garden, as Bishop was planning a Sunday lunch garden party early in September for his executives.
Bishop added that he had phoned British Telecom for a wake-up call at five thirty a.m. when he had arrived home after his dinner with Phil Taylor.
As Grace was in the middle of writing that down, his mobile phone rang. It was a young-sounding officer, who introduced himself as PC David Curtis, telling him they were outside the Brighton and Hove Mortuary, that the lights of the premises were off, and everything looked quiet and in order.
Grace stepped outside the room and asked him if he could see a blue MG sports car outside. PC Curtis told him that the parking area was empty.
Grace thanked him and hung up. Immediately he dialled Cleo’s home number. She answered on the second ring.
‘Hi!’ she said breezily. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Are you OK?’ he asked, relieved beyond belief at hearing her voice.
‘Me? Fine! I’ve got a glass of wine in my hand and I’m about to dive into my bath!’ she said sleepily. ‘How are you?’
‘I’ve been worried out of my wits.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Jesus! You said there was someone outside the mortuary! You were going to call me straight back! I was – I thought—’
‘Just a couple of drunks,’ she said. ‘They were looking for Wood-vale Cemetery – mumbling about going to pay their respects to their mother.’
‘Don’t do this to me!’ he said.
‘Do what?’ she asked, all innocence.
He shook his head, smiling in relief. ‘I have to get back.’
‘Of course you do. You’re an important detective, on a big case.’
‘Now you’re taking the piss.’
‘Already had one of those, when I got home. Now I’m going to have my bath. Night-night!’
He walked back into the observation room, smiling, exasperated and relieved. ‘Have I missed anything?’ he asked Jane Paxton.
She shook her head. ‘DS Branson’s good,’ she said.
‘Tell him that later. He needs a boost. His ego’s on the floor.’
‘What is it with you men and ego?’ she asked him.
Grace looked at her head, poking out of her tent of a blouse, her double chin and her flat-ironed hair, and then at the wedding band and solitaire ring on her podgy finger. ‘Doesn’t your husband have an ego?’
‘He wouldn’t bloody dare.’
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91
The Time Billionaire knew all about happy pills. But he had never taken one. No need. Hey, who needed happy pills when you could come home on a Monday night to find the postman had delivered to your doormat the workshop manual for a 2005 MG TF sports car that you had ordered on Saturday?
It was the last year that this model was manufactured before MG ceased production and were bought up by a Chinese company. It was the model that Cleo Morey drove. Navy blue. Now fitted with its matching blue hardtop, despite the blistering hot weather, because some jerk had vandalized the soft-top roof with a knife. What a son of a bitch! What a creep! What a goddamn piece of lowlife shit!
And it was Tuesday morning! One of the days that the stupid, grumpy cleaning woman with the ungrateful daughter didn’t come! She had told him that herself, yesterday.
Best of all, Brian Bishop had been arrested. It was the front-page splash of the morning edition of the Argus. It was on the local radio! It would be on the local television news, for sure. Maybe even the national news! Joy! What goes around comes around! Like the wheels of a car! Cleo Morey’s car!
Cleo Morey had the top of the range, the TF 160, with its variable valve controlled engine. He listened to it now, 1.8 litres revving up sweetly in the cool, early-morning air. Eight o’clock. She worked long hours, had to credit her that.
Now she was pulling out of her parking space, driving up the street, holding first gear too long, but maybe she was enjoying the echoing blatter of the exhaust.
Getting in through the front gates of the courtyard development where Cleo Morey lived was a no-brainer. Just four numbers on a touch pad. He’d picked those up easily enough by watching other residents returning home through his binoculars, from the comfort of his car.
The courtyard was empty. If any nosy neighbour was peeking from behind their blinds, they would have seen the same neatly dressed man with his clipboard, the Seeboard crest on his jacket pocket, as yesterday and assumed he had come to recheck the gas meter. Or something.
His freshly cut key turned sweetly in the lock. Thanks to God’s help! He stepped inside, into the large, open-plan downstairs area, and shut the door behind him. The silence smelled of furniture polish and freshly ground coffee beans. He heard the faint hum of a fridge.
He looked around, taking everything in, which he had not had the time to do yesterday, not with the grumpy woman on his back. He saw cream walls hung with abstract paintings that he did not understand. Modern rugs scattered on a shiny oak floor. Two red sofas, black lacquered furniture, a big television, an expensive stereo system. A copy of Sussex Life magazine on a side table. And unlit candles. Dozens of them. Doze
ns and bloody dozens, on silver sticks, in opaque glass pots, in vases – was she a religious freak? Did she hold black masses? Another good reason why she had to go. God would be happy to be rid of her!
Then he saw the square glass fish tank on a coffee table, with a goldfish swimming around what looked like the remains of a miniature Greek temple.
‘You need releasing,’ the Time Billionaire said. ‘It’s wrong to keep animals imprisoned.’
He wandered across to a wall-to-ceiling row of crammed bookshelves. He saw Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Then a James Herbert novel, Nobody True. A Natasha Cooper crime novel. Several Ian Rankin books and an Edward Marston historical thriller.
‘Wow!’ he said aloud. ‘We have the same taste in literature! Too bad we’ll never get a chance to discuss books! You know, in different circumstances you and I might have been pretty good friends.’
Then he opened the drawer in a table. It contained elastic bands, a book of parking vouchers, a broken garage-opener remote control, a solitary battery, envelopes. He rummaged through but did not find what he was looking for. He closed it. Then he looked around, opened two more drawers, closed them again, without luck. The drawers in the kitchen yielded nothing either.
His hand was still hurting. Stinging all the time, getting worse, despite the pills. And he had a headache. His head throbbed constantly and he was feeling a little feverish, but it was nothing he couldn’t cope with.
He wandered upstairs slowly, taking his time. Cleo Morey had only just gone to work. He had all the time in the world. Hours of the stuff if he wanted!
On the second floor he found a small bathroom. Opposite was her den. He went in. It was a chaotically untidy room, lined again with crammed bookshelves; almost all of the books seemed to be on philosophy. A desk piled with papers, with a laptop in the middle of them, sat in front of a window overlooking the rooftops of Brighton, towards the sea. He opened each drawer of the desk, tidily inspecting the contents before closing them carefully. Then he opened and shut each of the four drawers of the metal filing cabinet.
Her bedroom was on the next floor, on the other side of a spiral staircase that appeared to lead up to the roof. He went in and sniffed her bed. Then he pulled back the purple counterpane and pressed his nose into her pillows, inhaling deeply. The scents tightened his groin. Carefully he peeled back the duvet, sniffing every inch of the sheet. More of her! More of her still! No scents of Detective Superintendent Grace! No semen stains from him on the sheet! Just her scents and smells! Hers alone! Left there for him to savour.
He replaced the duvet, then the counterpane carefully. So carefully. No one would ever know he had been here.
There was a modern, black lacquered dressing table in the room. He opened its one drawer and there, nestling in between her jewellery boxes, he saw it! The black leather fob with the letters MG embossed in gold. The two shiny, unused keys, and the ring that was hooped through them.
He closed his eyes and said a brief prayer of thanks to God, who had guided him to them. Then he held up the keys to his lips and kissed them. ‘Beautiful!’
He closed the drawer, pocketed the keys and went back downstairs, then made his way straight over to the fish tank. He pushed up the cuff of his jacket, then the sleeve of his shirt, and sank his hand into the tepid water. It was like trying to grab hold of soap in the bathtub! But finally he managed to grip the wriggling, slippery goldfish, closing his fingers around the stupid creature.
Then he tossed it on to the floor.
He heard it flipping around as he let himself back out of the front door.
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92
The joint morning briefing for Operations Chameleon and Mistral ended shortly after nine o’clock. There was a mood of optimism now that a suspect was in custody. And this was heightened by the fact that there was a witness, the elderly lady who lived opposite Sophie Harrington and had identified Brian Bishop outside her house around the time of the murder. With luck, Grace hoped, that DNA analysis on semen present in Sophie Harrington’s vagina would match Bishop’s. Huntington was fast-tracking the analysis and he should get the results later today.
There was now little doubt in anyone’s mind that the two murders were linked, but they were still keeping the exact details back from the press.
Names of people and times given by Bishop in his first interview were being checked out, and Grace was particularly interested to see whether the British Telecom phone records would confirm that Bishop had requested an early-morning alarm call after he had returned to his flat on Thursday night. Although, of course, that call could have been made by an accomplice. With three million pounds to be gained from the life insurance policy on his wife, the possibility that Bishop had an accomplice – or indeed more than one – had to be carefully explored.
He left the conference room, anxious to dictate a couple of letters to Eleanor, his MSA, one regarding preparations for the trial of the odious character Carl Venner, who had been arrested on the last murder case Grace had run. He walked hurriedly along the corridors and through into the large, green-carpeted, partially open-plan area that housed all the senior officers of the CID and their support staff.
To his surprise as he went through the security door that separated this area from the Major Incident Suite, he saw a large crowd of people gathered around a desk, including Gary Weston, who was the Chief Superintendent of Sussex CID and technically his immediate boss – although in reality it was Alison Vosper to whom he answered mostly.
He wondered for a moment if it was a raffle draw. Or someone’s birthday. Then, as he got closer, he saw that no one seemed to be in a celebratory mood. Everyone looked as if they were in shock, including Eleanor, who tended to look that way most of the time.
‘What’s up?’ he asked her.
‘You haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘About Janet McWhirter?’
‘Our Janet, from the PNC?’
Eleanor nodded at him encouragingly, through her large glasses, as if she was helping him to a solution in a game of charades.
Janet McWhirter had, until four months ago, held a responsible position here in Sussex House as head of the Police National Computer department, a sizeable office of forty people. One of their main functions was information and intelligence gathering for the detectives here.
A plain, single girl in her mid-thirties, quiet and studious and slightly old-fashioned-looking, she had been popular because of her willingness to help, working whatever hours were needed while always remaining polite. She had reminded Grace, both in appearance and in her quietly earnest demeanour, of a dormouse.
Janet had surprised everyone back in April, when she resigned, saying that she’d decided to spend a year travelling. Then, very secretively and coyly, she had told her two closest friends in the department that she had met and fallen in love with a man. They were already engaged, and she was emigrating with him to Australia and would get married there.
It was Brian Cook, the Scientific Support Branch Manager and one of Grace’s friends here, who turned to him. ‘She’s been found dead, Roy,’ he said in his blunt voice. ‘Washed up on the beach on Saturday night – been in the sea some considerable time. She’s just been identified from her dental records. And it looks like she was dead before she went in the water.’
Grace was silent for a moment. Stunned. He’d had a lot of dealings with Janet over the years and really liked her. ‘Shit,’ he said. For a moment it was as if a dark cloud had covered the windows and he felt a sudden cold swirl, deep inside him. Deaths happened, but something instinctively felt very wrong about this.
‘Doesn’t look like she made it to Australia,’ Cook added sardonically.
‘Or the altar?’
Cook shrugged.
‘Has the fianc�een contacted?’
‘We only heard the news a few minutes ago. He could be dead too.’ Then he added, ‘You might want to pop along and say something to the team i
n her department – I imagine they’re all going to be extremely upset.’
‘I’ll do that when I get a gap. Who’s going to head the inquiry?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
Grace nodded, then led his shocked MSA away from the group and back to her office. He had barely ten minutes to give her his dictation, then get over to the custody centre for the second interview with Brian Bishop.
But he couldn’t clear the image of Janet McWhirter’s plain little face from his mind. She was the most pleasant and helpful person. Why would someone kill her? A mugger? A rapist? Something to do with her work?
Mulling on it, he thought to himself, She spends fifteen years working for Sussex Police, much of it in the PNC unit, falls in love with a man, then goes for a career change, a lifestyle change. Leaves. Then dies.
He was a firm believer in always looking at the most obvious things first. He knew where he would start, if he was the SIO on her investigation. But at this moment, Janet McWhirter’s death, although deeply shocking and sad, was not his problem.
Or so he thought.
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‘Jeezizzz, mon! Will you turn that fekkin’, bleedin’, soddin’ thing off! It’s been goin’ all bloody mornin’! Can’t you fekkin’ answer it or summat?’
Skunk opened one eye, which felt as if it had been hit recently with a hammer. So did his head. It also felt as if someone was sawing through his brain with a cheese-wire. And the whole camper seemed to be pitchpoling like a small boat in a storm.
Preeep-preeep-bnnnzzzzz-preeep-preeeep-bnnnzzzzz. His phone, he realized, was slithering around on the floor, vibrating, flashing, ringing.
‘Answer it yousself, you fuckwit!’ he mumbled back at his latest, unwelcome, lodger-du-jour – some scumbag he’d encountered in a Brighton bat-cave in the early hours of this morning, who’d bummed a bed off him for the night. ‘This isn’t the fucking Hilton! We don’t have fucking twenty-four-hour room service.’