Not Dead Enough (11 page)

She dropped the newspaper back on the pile, in even more turmoil now. It had always been hard to get Brian to talk about his wife. And at the same time, although one part of her had had a burning curiosity to know everything about the woman, another part had tried to deny she existed. She had never had an affair with a married man before, never wanted to have one – she had always tried to live her life by a simple moral code. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to you.

All that had fallen over when she’d met Brian. He had, quite simply, blown her off her feet. Mesmerized her. Although it had started as an innocent friendship. And now, for the first time, she was looking at her rival. And Katie wasn’t the woman she had expected. Not that she had really known what to expect, Brian had never talked about her much. In her mind she had imagined some sour-faced biddy with her hair in a bun. Some ghastly old goat who had lured Brian into a loveless marriage. Not this quite stunning, confident and happy-looking beauty.

And suddenly she felt totally lost. And wondering what on earth she thought she was doing here. Half-heartedly, she pulled her mobile phone from her handbag – the cheap lemon-coloured canvas bag that she had bought at the start of summer because it was fashionable, but which was now looking embarrassingly grubby. Just like she was, she realized, catching sight of herself, and her grungy work clothes, in a photo-booth mirror.

She would need to go home and change, and freshen up. Brian liked her to look good. She remembered how disapproving he had seemed on one occasion when she’d been kept working late at the office and had turned up to meet him in a smart restaurant without having changed.

After some moments of hesitation, she called his number, held the phone to her ear, concentrating fiercely, still unaware of the man in the hoodie who was standing just a few feet from her, apparently browsing through a series of paperback books on a spinner at the kiosk.

As another tannoy announcement boomed and echoed around her, she glanced up at the massive, four-faced clock with its Roman numerals.

Four fifty-one.

‘Hi,’ Brian said, his voice startling her, answering before she had even heard it ring.

‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes.’ His voice was flat, porous. It seemed to absorb her own, like blotting paper.

There was a long, awkward silence. Finally, she broke it. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in a hotel. The bloody police won’t let me into my house. They won’t let me into my home. They won’t tell me what’s happened – can you believe it? They say it’s a crime scene and I can’t go in. I – Oh, Jesus, Sophie, what am I going to do?’ He started crying.

‘I’m in Brighton,’ she said quietly. ‘I came down early from work.’

‘Why?’

‘I – I thought – I thought that maybe – I don’t know – I’m sorry – I thought maybe I could do something. You know. To help.’ Her voice tailed. She stared up at the ornate clock. At a pigeon that suddenly alighted on the top of it.

‘I can’t see you,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible.’

She felt foolish now for even suggesting it. What the hell had been going through her mind?

‘No,’ she said, the sudden harshness of his voice hurting her. ‘I understand. I just wanted to say, if there was anything I could do –’

‘There isn’t anything. It’s sweet of you to call. I – I have to go and identify her body. I haven’t even told the children yet. I . . .’

He fell silent. She waited patiently, trying to understand the kinds of emotions he must be going through, and realizing how very little she really knew about him, and quite what an outsider she was in his life.

Then, in a choking voice, he said, ‘I’ll call you later, OK?’

‘Any time. Absolutely any time, OK?’ she reassured him.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry – I – I’m sorry.’

After their conversation, Sophie called Holly, desperate to talk to someone. But all she got was Holly’s latest voicemail greeting, which was even more irritatingly jolly than her previous one. She left a message.

Then she wandered aimlessly around the station concourse for some minutes, before walking out into the bright sunlight. She didn’t feel like going to her flat – she didn’t really know what she wanted to do. A steady stream of sunburned people were heading up the street towards the station, many of them in T-shirts, singlets or gaudy shirts and shorts, lugging beach bags, looking like trippers who had spent the day here and were now heading home. A lanky man, in jeans cut off at the knees, swung a massive radio blaring out rap, his face and arms the colour of a broiled lobster. The city felt in holiday mood. It was about as far from her own mood as Jupiter.

Suddenly her phone rang again. For an instant, her spirits rose, hoping it was Brian. Then she saw Holly’s name on the display. She hit the answer button. ‘Hi.’

Holly’s voice was mostly drowned out by a continuous, banshee howl. She was in the hairdresser’s, she informed her friend, under the drier. After a couple of minutes trying to explain what had happened, Sophie gave up and suggested they speak later. Holly promised to call her back as soon as she was out of the salon.

The man in the hoodie was following her at a safe distance, holding his red plastic bag and sucking the back of his free hand. It was nice to be back down here at the seaside, out of the filthy air of London. He hoped Sophie would head down to the beach; it would be pleasant to sit there, maybe eat an ice cream. It would be a good way of passing the time, of spending a few of those millions of hours he had sitting on deposit in his bank.

As he walked, he thought about the purchase he had made at lunchtime today and jiggled it in his bag. In the zippered pockets of his top, in addition to his wallet and his mobile phone, he carried a roll of duct tape, a knife, chloroform, a vial of the knockout, so-called date rape drug, Rohypnol. And a few other bits and pieces – you could never tell when they might come in handy . . .

Tonight would be a very good night. Again.

23

Cleo’s skills really came into their own when, shortly after five p.m., Nadiuska De Sancha finally finished the post-mortem on Katie Bishop.

Using a large soup ladle, Cleo removed the blood that had drained into Katie’s midriff, spoonful by spoonful, pouring it into the gully below. The blood would run into a holding tank beneath the building, where chemicals would slowly break it down, before it passed into the city’s main drainage system.

After that, as Nadiuska leaned on the work surface, dictating her summary, then in turn filling in the Autopsy sheet, the Histology sheet and the Cause of Death sheet, Darren handed Cleo a plain white plastic bag containing all the vital organs that had been removed from the cadaver and weighed on the scales. Grace watched, with the same morbid fascination he had each time, as Cleo inserted the bag into Katie’s midriff, as if she were stuffing giblets into a chicken.

He watched with the shadow of the phone call about Sandy hanging heavily over him. Thinking. He needed to call Dick Pope back, quiz him more, about exactly when he had seen Sandy, which table she had been at, whether he had talked to the staff, whether she had been alone or with anyone.

Munich. The city had always had a resonance for him, partly because of Sandy’s family connections, and partly because it was a city that was constantly, in one way or another, in the world’s consciousness. The Oktoberfest, the World Cup football stadium, it was the home of BMW, and, he seemed to remember, Adolf Hitler had lived there, before Berlin. All he wanted to do at this moment was jump on a plane and fly there. And he could just imagine how well that would go down with his boss, Alison Vosper, who was looking for any opportunity, however small, to twist the knife she had already stuck into him, and get rid of him.

Darren then went out of the room and returned with a black garbage bag containing shredded council tax correspondence from Brighton and Hove City Council, removed a handful, and started to pack the paper into the dead woman’s empty skull cavity. Meanwhile, using a heavy-duty sailcloth needle and thread, Cleo began carefully but industrially to sew up the woman’s midriff.

When she had finished, she hosed Katie down to remove all the blood streaks, and then began the most sensitive part of the procedure. With the greatest care, she was putting on make-up, adding some colouring to the woman’s cheeks, tidying her hair, making her look as if she was just having a little nap.

At the same time, Darren began the process of cleaning up the post-mortem room around Katie Bishop’s trolley. He squirted lemon-scented disinfectant on to the floor, scrubbing that in, then bleach, then Trigene disinfectant and finally Autoclave.

An hour later, laid out beneath a purple shroud, with her arms crossed and a small bunch of fresh pink and white roses in her hand, Darren wheeled Katie Bishop into the viewing room, a small, narrow area with a long window, and just enough space for loved ones to stand around the corpse. It felt a little like a chapel, with dinky blue curtains, and instead of an altar, there was a small vase of plastic flowers.

Grace and Branson stood outside the room, observing through the glass window, as Brian Bishop was led in by WPC Linda Buckley, an alert, pleasant-looking woman in her mid-thirties, with short blonde hair, dressed in a sober dark blue two-piece and white blouse.

They watched him stare at the dead woman’s face, then rummage under the shroud, pull out her hand, kiss it, then grip it tightly. Tears streamed down Bishop’s face. Then he fell to his knees, totally overcome with grief.

It was at moments like this, and Grace had experienced far too many in his long career, that he wished he was anything but a police officer. One of his mates from school had gone into banking and was now a building society branch manager in Worthing, enjoying a good salary and a relaxed life. Another operated fishing trips from Brighton Marina, without an apparent care in the world.

Grace watched, unable to switch his emotions off, unable to stop himself feeling the man’s grief in every cell of his own body. It was all he could do to stop crying himself.

‘Shit, he’s hurting,’ Glenn said quietly to him.

Grace shrugged, the cop inside him speaking, rather than his heart. ‘Maybe.’

‘Jesus, you’re a hard bastard.’

‘Didn’t used to be,’ Grace said. ‘Wasn’t until I let you drive me. Needed to be a hard bastard to survive that.’

‘Very funny.’

‘So did you pass your Advanced Police Driving test?’

‘I failed, right?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. For driving too slowly. Can you believe that?’

‘Me, believe that?’

‘Jesus, you hack me off. You’re always the same. Every time I ask you a question you answer with a question. Can’t you ever stop being a bloody detective?’

Grace smiled.

‘It’s not funny. Yeah? I asked you a simple question, can you believe I got failed for driving too slowly?’

‘Nah.’ And he really could not! Grace remembered the last time Glenn had driven him, when his friend had been practising his high-speed driving for his test. When Grace had climbed out of the car with all his limbs intact – more by luck than by anything to do with driving skills – he had decided he would prefer to have his gall bladder removed without an anaesthetic than be driven in earnest by Glenn Branson again.

‘For real, man,’ Branson said.

‘Good to know there are still some sane people in the world.’

‘Know your problem, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?’

‘Which particular problem?’

‘The one you have about my driving?’

‘Tell me.’

‘No faith.’

‘In you or in God?’

‘God stopped that bullet from doing serious harm to me.’

‘You really believe that, don’t you?’

‘You have a better theory?’

Grace fell silent, thinking. He always found it easier to park his God questions safely away and to think about them only when it suited him. He wasn’t an atheist, not even really an agnostic. He did believe in something – or at least he wanted to believe in something – but he could never define exactly what. He always fell short of being able to openly accept the concept of God. And then immediately after that he would feel guilty. But ever since Sandy had disappeared, and all his prayers had gone unanswered, much of his faith had eroded.

Shit happened.

As a policeman, a big part of his duty was to establish the truth. The facts. Like all his fellow officers, his beliefs were his own affair. He watched Brian Bishop, on the other side of the window. The man was totally grief-stricken.

Or putting on a great act.

He would soon know which.

Except, wrong though it was, because it was personal, Sandy had priority in his mind right now.

24

Skunk was tempted to call his dealer’s mobile on the phone he had stolen, because credit on his own one had just run out, but he decided it wasn’t worth risking the man’s wrath. Or worse, getting ditched as a customer, tight bastard though his dealer was. The man would not be impressed to have his number on the call list of a hot mobile – particularly one he would be selling on.

So he stepped into a payphone in front of a grimy Regency terrace on The Level and let the door swing shut against the din of the Friday afternoon traffic. It felt like an oven door closing on him, the heat was almost unbearable. He dialled, holding the door open with his foot. After two rings, the phone was answered with a curt, ‘Yeah?’

‘Wayne Rooney,’ Skunk said, giving him the password they had agreed last time. It changed each time they met.

The man spoke in an east London accent. ‘Yeah, all right then, your usual? Brown you want? Ten-pound bag or twenty?’

‘Twenty.’

‘What you got? Cash?’

‘A Motorola Razor. T-Mobile.’

‘Up to my neck in ’em. Can only give you ten for that.’

‘Fuck you, man, I’m looking for thirty.’

‘Can’t help you then, mate. Sorry. Bye.’

In sudden panic, Skunk shouted urgently, ‘Hey, no, no. Don’t hang up.’

There was a brief silence. Then the man’s voice again. ‘I’m busy. Haven’t got time to waste. Street price is going up and there’s a shortage. Going to be short for two weeks.’