by Peter James
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ she said, and left the room.
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Grace was driving his Alfa up the hill, past ASDA and British Bookstores, about to turn in through the gates of Sussex House, when DC Pamela Buckley rang him. He stopped.
‘I’m not sure if it’s good news or bad, Detective Superintendent,’ she said. ‘I’ve checked the phone directory and the electoral register. There are no Tripwells in Brighton and Hove. I’ve done a broader sweep. There is one in Horsham, there are two in Southampton, one in Dover and one in Guildford. The one in Guildford matches your names, Derek and Joan.’
‘Let me have their address.’
He wrote it down. 18 Spencer Avenue. ‘Can you get me directions?’
The traffic system in the centre of Guildford, Grace decided, had been designed by an ape, out of its mind on hallucinogenic mushrooms, who had tried to copy the Hampton Court maze in tarmac. He had got lost every time he had ever come to Guildford previously, and he got lost again now, stopping to check his street map twice and vowing to buy himself a SatNav system at the next opportunity. After several frustrating minutes, his temper worsening along with his driving, he finally found Spencer Avenue, a cul-de-sac near the cathedral, and turned into it.
It was a narrow road on a steep hill, with cars parked on both sides. There were small houses above him to the right and below him to the left. He saw the number 18 on a low fence to his left, pulled his car into a gap a little further on, parked and walked back.
He went down the steps to the front door of a tiny, semi-detached house, with a trim front garden, nearly tripping over a black and white cat which shot across his path, and rang the doorbell.
After some moments the door was opened by a small, grey-haired woman in a strap-top vest, baggy jeans and gum boots, wearing gardening gloves. ‘Hello?’ she said cheerily.
He showed her his warrant card. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace of Sussex CID.’
Her face dropped. ‘Oh dear, is it Laura again?’
‘Laura?’
‘Is she in trouble again?’ She had a tiny mouth that reminded him of the spout of a teapot.
‘Forgive me if I’ve come to the wrong address,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a Mr Derek and Mrs Joan Tripwell, who adopted a boy called Frederick Jones in September 1964.’
She looked very distressed suddenly, her eyes all over the place. After a few moments she said, ‘No, you haven’t – haven’t come to the wrong address. Would you like to come in?’ She raised her arms. ‘Excuse my appearance – wasn’t expecting visitors.’
He followed her into a tiny, narrow hallway, which had a musty smell of old people and cats, then through into a small living and dining room. The living area was dominated by a three-piece suite and a large television set on which a cricket match was playing. An elderly man, with a tartan blanket over his thighs, a sparse thatch of white hair and a hearing aid, was slumped in one of the armchairs in front of it, asleep, although from the colour of his face he could have been dead.
‘Derek,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a visitor. A police officer.’
The man opened one eye, said, ‘Ah,’ then closed it again.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked Grace.
‘If it’s no trouble, that would be very nice, thank you.’
She indicated the sofa. Grace stepped over the slumbering man’s legs and sat down as she went out of the room. Ignoring the cricket, he concentrated on looking around the room, searching for photographs. There were several. One showed a much younger Joan and Derek with three children, two boys and a rather sullen-looking girl. Another, on top of a display cabinet filled with Capo Di Monte porcelain figures, was in a silver frame. It contained a picture of a teenage boy with long, dark hair in a suit and tie, posing for the camera with what appeared to be some reluctance. But he saw in the boy’s looks what resembled, very definitely, a young Brian Bishop.
There was a cheer on the television, followed by clapping. He glanced at the screen and saw a helmeted batsman walking away from the crease, the middle stump behind him bent sharply back.
‘Should have just blocked it,’ the man who appeared to be asleep beside him said. ‘Silly idiot tried to hit it through the covers. You a cricketing man?’
‘Not really. Rugger’s my game.’
The man grunted and fell silent.
The woman came back into the room with a tray containing a china teapot, milkjug, sugar bowl, cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. She had removed her gardening gloves and replaced her gum boots with pompom slippers. ‘Would you like tea, Derek?’ she asked, raising her voice.
‘Got a bloody rugger bugger in the house,’ he grumbled, then appeared to fall asleep again.
‘Milk and sugar?’ she asked Grace, setting the tray down. He eyed the plate of biscuits on the tray hungrily, realizing it was lunch time and he’d barely had any breakfast.
‘Milk, no sugar, please.’
She handed the plate over to him. It was laden with digestives, Penguins and marshmallows. He took a Penguin gratefully and unwrapped it.
She poured his tea and passed it to him, then pointed at the silver-framed photograph. ‘We didn’t like the name Frederick, did we, Derek?’
A small, negative-sounding moan came from the man’s mouth.
‘So we renamed him Richard,’ she said.
‘Richard,’ the old man echoed, with a grunt.
‘After Richard Chamberlain, the actor. Dr Kildare. Did you ever see Dr Kildare?’
‘Before his bloody time,’ her husband mumbled.
‘I remember it vaguely,’ Grace confessed. ‘My mum was a fan.’ He stirred his tea, anxious to get to the point of this visit.
‘We adopted two children,’ Joan Tripwell said. ‘Then our own came along. Geoffrey. He’s doing well – he does research for a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. Working on cancer drugs for them.’
Grace smiled. ‘Good.’
‘Laura’s the problem one. That’s what I thought you had come about. She’s always been in trouble. Drugs. It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it, our Geoffrey doing so well with a drugs company and Laura in and out of homes, always in trouble with the police.’
‘And Richard – how is he doing?’ Grace asked.
Her little mouth closed, her eyes all over the place again suddenly, and Grace realized he had touched a nerve. She poured her own tea and added two lumps of sugar, using silver tongs. ‘What exactly is your interest in talking about Richard?’ she asked, her voice suddenly full of suspicion.
‘I was hoping you could tell me where I can find him. I need to speak to him.’
‘To speak to him?’ She sounded astonished.
‘Plot 437, row 12,’ the old man suddenly said.
‘Derek!’ she admonished.
‘Well, that’s where he bloody well is. What’s the matter with you, woman?’
‘Excuse my husband,’ she said, picking her cup up daintily by the handle. ‘He’s never really got over it. I suppose neither of us has.’
‘Got over what?’ Grace probed, as gently as he could.
‘He was a premature baby, like his brother, poor little soul. He was born with a congenital weakness – malformed lungs. They never developed properly. He had a weak chest, you know? Always getting infections as a child. And really bad asthma.’
‘What do you know about his brother?’ Grace asked, too interested now to take a bite of his Penguin.
‘That he passed away in the incubator, poor little mite. That’s what they told us.’
‘What about their mother?’
The woman shook her head. ‘The Social Services were terrible on giving out information.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Grace said bitterly.
‘It took us a long time to find out that she was a single parent – of course that was a bad thing in those days. She was killed in a car crash, but we never really knew the details.’
‘Are you sur
e that Frederick – I’m sorry, Richard,’ he corrected himself, ‘that Richard’s brother died?’
‘You can’t be certain of anything the Social Services say. But that’s what they told us at the time.’
Grace nodded sympathetically. There was another roar on the television. Grace glanced at it and saw a replay of a silly-mid-on fielder making a catch. ‘Can you tell me where I can find your son, Richard?’
‘Already bloody told yer,’ the old man grumbled. ‘Plot 437, row 12. She goes there every year.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What my husband is trying to tell you is that you are twenty years too late,’ she said.
‘Too late?’ Grace was getting all kinds of bad, confused signals.
‘When he was twenty-one,’ Joan Tripwell said. ‘Richard went to a party and forgot to take his Ventolin inhaler – he always had to carry it with him. He had a particularly bad asthma attack.’ Her voice was faltering. She sniffed and dabbed her eyes. ‘His heart gave out.’
Grace stared at her in astonishment.
As if reading some uncertainty in his face, Joan Tripwell said emphatically, ‘Poor soul, he died. He never really had his life.’
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After an hour’s drive back, a very despondent Roy Grace reported his findings to the Operation Chameleon team in MIR One, then he sat down and began reviewing all the evidence that they had for Brian Bishop.
Convinced that Joan Tripwell had been telling the truth, he was left with a number of anomalies that did not quite fit together. It was like trying to hammer pieces into a jigsaw that looked sort of right but were not the exact shape.
He was bothered by the details of the twin that the Superintendent Registrar had read out to him. Grace re-read the notes he had written down in the town hall, then rechecked Bishop’s birth certificate and his adoption certificate. He had been born on 7 September at three forty-seven – eighteen minutes earlier than his brother, Frederick Roger Jones, who was renamed Richard, and died at the age of twenty-one.
So why had Social Services told Joan Tripwell that the other twin had died?
He rang the post-adoption counsellor, Loretta Leberknight. She responded cheerily that in those days it was exactly the kind of thing that Social Services might do. They didn’t like to split up twins, but there was, even back then, a long list of people waiting to adopt. If one had been sickly, in an incubator for a period of time, they might have made the decision to put the healthy one out for adoption, then, if the other survived, tell a white lie in order to satisfy another couple desperate for a child.
It had happened to her, she added. She had a twin yet her adoptive parents were never informed of that.
From his experiences with the hag earlier, he could well believe they were capable of anything.
Grace put the CCTV footage up on the monitor in the room and stared at it, checking it against the detailed mobile phone log that DC Corbin had prepared. That man up on the screen was Brian Bishop. He was absolutely certain, unless the man had an exact double. But the fact that the log showed him leaving the immediate vicinity of the Lansdowne Place Hotel and then returning to it made the chance of an accidental double, in exactly the right place at the right time, too big a coincidence to accept.
On his pad he wrote down the word complicity, followed by a big question mark.
Had someone gone to the trouble of having surgery to make himself look like Brian Bishop? Then somehow obtained fresh semen from the man?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of his name being called, and he turned his head. He saw the heavily bearded figure of George Erridge, from the Photographic Unit. Erridge, who always looked like an explorer just returned from an expedition, was walking towards him excitedly, holding a sheaf of what looked like photographic paper in his hand.
‘This CCTV footage you gave me yesterday, Roy, from the Royal Sussex County Hospital? The bearded guy in sunglasses and long hair who was in there, creating a scene on Sunday?’
Grace had almost forgotten about it. ‘Yes?’
‘Well, we’ve got something! I’ve been running it through some software they’ve developed at the Missing Persons Helpline. Yep? To detect changes of identity in people – how they might look in five, ten, twenty years’ time? Yep? With hair, without hair, with beards, without beards, all that stuff. I’ve been trying to persuade Tony Case we need to invest in it for here.’
‘Tell me?’ Grace said.
Erridge put the first photograph down. Grace saw a man with a heavy beard and moustache, long, straggly hair that hung low over his forehead and large, tinted glasses, dressed in a baggy shirt over a string vest, slacks and sandals.
‘We’ve had the computer remove the long hair, the beard, the sunglasses, yep?’
‘OK,’ Grace replied.
Erridge slapped down a second photograph on Grace’s desk. ‘Recognize him?’
Grace was staring at Brian Bishop.
For some moments he said nothing. Then he said, ‘Bloody hell. Well done, George. How the hell did you get the eyes behind the glasses?’
Erridge grinned. ‘We got lucky. There’s also a CCTV camera in the men’s room. Your guy took his glasses off in there to wipe them. We got footage of his eyes!’
‘Thank you,’ Grace said. ‘This is ace work!’
‘Tell that tight bastard Tony Case, will you? We need this kit here. Could have got this back to you yesterday if we had it in-house.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Grace said, standing up and looking around for Adrienne Corbin, the young detective constable who had been working on the phone log. Addressing no one in particular, he asked, ‘Anyone know where DC Corbin is?’
‘Taking a break, Roy,’ Bella Moy said.
‘Can you get hold of her – ask her to come back here quickly?’
He sat down, staring at each of the photographs in turn, thinking. The transformation was extraordinary. A total metamorphosis, from a suave, good-looking man into someone you’d want to cross the road to avoid.
Sunday, he was thinking. Bishop was at the hospital late on Sunday morning. So he was out and about.
It was Sunday morning when Cleo had the roof of her car ripped open.
He leafed through the time-line report until he reached Sunday morning. According to Bishop’s own statement, in his first interview, he had spent the morning in his hotel room, catching up on his emails and then had gone to some friends for Sunday lunch. There was a note that the friends, Robin and Sue Brown, had been contacted and confirmed that Bishop had arrived at half past one and stayed with them until just after four. They lived in the village of Glynde, a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive from the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Grace estimated.
The time showing on the CCTV footage on the first photograph was twelve fifty-eight. Tight, but possible. Very possible.
He looked back at the time-line for earlier that morning. The duty FLO, Linda Buckley, reported that Bishop had remained in his hotel room until noon, then had left in his Bentley, telling her that he was going to the lunch and would be back later. She had logged his return at four forty-five.
The concern inside him was growing. Bishop could easily have diverted on his route to the hospital and gone via the mortuary. But why? What on earth would have been the point? His motive?
But then again he had no motive yet for the death of Sophie Harrington.
Adrienne Corbin came hurrying into the room, puffing from exertion and perspiring, her dumpy frame clearly not suited to this hot weather. ‘Sir, you wanted to see me?’
Grace apologized for cutting short her break and told her what he needed from the phone mast records and from the CCTV records. He wanted to plot Bishop’s movements from midday on Sunday, when he left the hotel, to the time he arrived at the Browns’ home in Glynde.
‘Old-timer?’ Branson, who had been sitting quietly at his workstation, suddenly spoke.
‘What
?’
‘If Bishop was treated in A&E at the hospital, he’d have had to sign the register, right?’
And suddenly Grace realized just how tired he was and what an addling effect it was having on his mind. How on earth could he have overlooked that? ‘You know what?’ he replied.
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Sometimes I actually think you do have a brain.’
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Finding a route through the red tape of Social Services had been a doddle compared to the phone marathon that now ensued with the Brighton Health Care Trust, Grace rapidly discovered. It took Glenn Branson over an hour and a half of being shunted from official to official, and waiting for people to come out of meetings, before he finally got through to the one manager who was in a position to sanction the release of confidential patient information. And then only after Grace had been put on the line and pleaded his case.
The next problem was that no one by the name of Bishop had been seen at the A&E department on Sunday, and seventeen people had been treated for hand injuries during that day. Fortunately Dr Raj Singh was on duty, and Grace dispatched Branson to the hospital with the photograph from the CCTV in the hope that Singh would recognize him.
Just after four thirty, he stepped out of MIR One and phoned Cleo, to see how she was.
‘Quiet day,’ she said, sounding tired but reasonably cheerful. ‘I’ve had two detectives here all the time, going through the register. I’m just tidying up with Darren, then he’s driving me home. How’s you?’
Grace relayed the conversation with DI Pole he’d had earlier.
‘I didn’t think it was Richard,’ she said, sounding strangely relieved, which annoyed him. He was being irrational, he knew, but there was a warmth in her voice whenever she mentioned her ex, which concerned him. As if it was over, but not really over completely. ‘Are you going to be working late?’ she asked.