Not Dead Enough (32 page)

‘Sophie Harrington? No,’ he said decisively. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘You’ve never heard of this young lady?’ Grace persisted.

Both Grace and Branson clocked his hesitation.

‘I haven’t, no.’

The man was lying, Grace knew. The swing of his eyes towards construct had been unmistakable. Twice.

‘Should I know her?’ he asked clumsily, fishing.

‘No,’ Grace responded. ‘Just a question, on the off-chance. The last thing I’d like to talk to you about tonight is a life insurance policy you took out for Mrs Bishop.’

Bishop shook his head, looking genuinely astonished. Or making a good act of it.

‘Six months ago, sir,’ Grace said. ‘You took out a life insurance policy with HSBC bank, in your wife’s name, for the amount of three million pounds.’

Bishop grinned inanely, shaking his head vigorously. ‘No way. I’m sorry, I don’t believe in life insurance. I’ve never taken out a policy in my life!’

Grace studied him for some moments. ‘Can I get this straight, sir? You are telling me that you didn’t take out any life insurance policy on Mrs Bishop?’

‘Absolutely not!’

‘There’s one in place. I suggest you take a look at your bank statements. You are paying for it in monthly instalments.’

Bishop shook his head, looking stunned.

And this time, from the movement of his eyes, Grace saw that he was not lying.

‘I don’t think I should say any more,’ Bishop said. ‘Not without my solicitor present.’

‘That’s probably a good idea, sir.’

68

A few minutes later Roy Grace stood with Glenn Branson outside the front of Sussex House, watching the tail lights of Bishop’s dark red Bentley disappear around the right-hand bend, below them, past the massive warehouse of British Bookstores.

‘So what do you think, old-timer?’ Branson asked him.

‘I think I need a drink.’

They drove down to the Black Lion pub at Patcham, went in and stood at the bar. Grace bought Glenn a pint of Guinness and ordered a large Glenfiddich on the rocks for himself, then they installed themselves in a booth.

‘I can’t figure this guy out,’ Grace said. ‘He’s smart. There’s something very cold about him. And I have a feeling that he does know Sophie Harrington.’

‘His eyes?’

‘You saw that?’ Grace said, pleased at the way his protege learned from him.

‘He knows her.’

Grace drank a little whisky and suddenly craved a cigarette. Hell. One more year and smoking in pubs was going to be banned. Might as well take advantage. He went over to the machine and bought himself some Silk Cut. Ripping off the cellophane, he took out a cigarette and then went to get a light from the young female bartender. He inhaled deeply, loving every sweet second of the sensation as he drew the smoke in.

‘You should quit. Those things don’t do you any good.’

‘Living doesn’t do you any good,’ he replied. ‘It kills us all.’

Branson’s face descended into gloom. ‘Tell me about it. That bullet. Yeah? One inch to the right and it would have taken out my spine. I’d have been in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.’ He shook his head, then drank a long gulp of his beer. ‘I go through all that goddamn recovery, get home, and instead of finding a loving, nurturing wife, what do I get? Fucking shit!’

He leaned forward, cradling his face in his hands.

‘I thought you just had to get her a horse,’ Grace probed gently.

His friend did not respond.

‘I don’t know how much a horse costs to buy or keep, but you’ll get compensation for your injury – quite a lot of money. More than enough, I would have thought, to buy a horse.’

The young barmaid who had given him the light was suddenly standing over them. ‘Can I get you anything else? We’re going to be closing up soon.’

Grace smiled at her. ‘We’re done, thanks.’ He put an arm around Branson, feeling the soft suede of his bomber jacket.

‘You know the irony?’ the Detective Sergeant said. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I joined the force so my kids could be proud of me. Now I’m not even allowed to kiss them goodnight.’

Grace drank some more whisky and took another drag on his cigarette. It still tasted good, but not so good as before. ‘Matey, you know the law. She can’t stop you.’

He stared at the long wooden counter of the bar. At the upturned bottles and the optics beyond; at the empty bar stools and the empty tables around them. It had been a long day. Hard to believe he’d had lunch beside a lake in Munich.

‘You,’ Glenn Branson said suddenly. ‘I didn’t even ask you how it went. What happened?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t do what I did, Roy. Don’t screw it all up. You’ve got a good thing going with Cleo. Cherish her. She’s well lovely.’

Cleo was smashed when he got to the wrought-iron gates of her townhouse, shortly after half past eleven.

‘Need your help,’ she said through the intercom. ‘God, I’m pisshed!’

The electronic lock opened with a sharp click, like a pistol being cocked. Grace went in, walking across stone slabs that were lit by a faint neon glow, towards Cleo’s house. As he neared the front door, it opened. Cleo was standing there, beside what looked like the upturned shell of a giant, mutant blue crab.

She turned her cheek towards him as he attempted to kiss her on the lips, signalling through her inebriated state that she was still angry with him. ‘The hard top for my MG. Some bastard slashed my roof open today. Can you help me put the hard top on?’

He could not remember ever lifting anything so heavy in his life. ‘You OK?’ he asked, grunting repeatedly as they staggered out into the street with it. He was disappointed by her frostiness.

‘Much lighter than a body!’ she replied breezily, then nearly fell over sideways.

They walked down the dark, silent street, past his Alfa Romeo, until they reached her MG, then they put it down. Grace looked at the clean slit in her roof.

‘Bastards!’ he said. ‘Where was it done?’

‘At the mortuary this afternoon. No point getting it repaired. It will just happen again.’

With an unsteady hand she fumbled with the key fob, then unlocked the car, climbed inside and lowered the soft roof. Struggling, sweating, cursing, they proceeded to manoeuvre the hard top into place.

All their concentration was taken up by the task in hand. Neither Roy Grace nor Cleo Morey noticed the figure standing in the shadow of an alley a short distance away, watching them with a smile of satisfaction.

69

Roy Grace began his Monday morning with a seven-thirty meeting in his office with DI Kim Murphy, DCI Brendan Duigan, Crime Scene Manager Joe Tindall and Glenn Branson. He was heaping as much responsibility on his friend as possible to take his mind off his domestic problems. Eleanor, his Management Support Assistant, was also there. Duigan agreed to schedule his morning and evening briefing meetings half an hour apart from Murphy’s, so that Grace could preside over both, but for this morning they would combine them, to give both teams a complete overview of events to date.

Shortly before eight Grace went to get his second coffee of the morning. Returning to his office, he downloaded from his mobile phone the three photographs he had taken yesterday of the blonde German woman in the Englischer Garten, then typed an email to Dick Pope, who would be back at work today.

Dick, is this the woman you and Lesley saw in the Englischer Garten last week? Roy

Then he checked the photographs. A full-on shot of her face and one of each profile. All in reasonable close-up. He sent them.

Next he fired off a quick email, with the same photographs, to Marcel Kullen. He had already shown them to him on the tiny screen of his mobile, but they would be clearer on his computer screen. Then he opened the incident serials and ran his eye down the overnight incidents log. Sunday nights tended to be quiet, apart from the roads in summer, with day trippers tired, and some boozed up, heading home. There were a number of minor RTAs, some street crimes, car crimes, a domestic in Patcham, a hit-and-run involving an elderly pedestrian, a break-in at an angling club and a fight in a restaurant among the dozens of incidents he scanned. Nothing immediately apparent that was relevant to Katie Bishop’s death or Sophie Harrington’s.

He sent another couple of emails, then collected the agenda for the eight-thirty briefing from Eleanor, and headed along the corridors to the conference room, where the combined team numbered over forty.

He began by welcoming everybody and explaining, particularly for the benefit of the new team, the structure of the investigation. He told them that he would be the officer in overall command of both investigations, with DI Kim Murphy the SIO for the investigation into the murder of Katie Bishop and DCI Duigan the SIO for the investigation into the murder of Sophie Harrington. Next he informed them that he would be showing the video taken at the Sophie Harrington murder scene, and then run through both investigations to bring everybody up to date.

When the video finished there was a brief silence, broken by Norman Potting, sitting with his elbows on the table, hunched up in his crumpled, food-stained cream linen suit.

‘Seems like we’re hunting a killer with smelly feet, if you ask me,’ he growled, then looked around with a broad smirk on his face. The only person to smile back was Alfonso Zafferone. But there was no humour in the young detective’s expression; it was more a smile of pity.

‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace said coldly, annoyed with Potting for being so crass and insensitive. He did not want to digress from the typed agenda in front of him, which he had carefully prepared with Kim Murphy and his MSA earlier that morning, but he decided to seize the moment to put Norman back in his box. ‘Perhaps you’d like to start this morning off for us with your evidence to back up this assertion.’

Potting straightened the clumsy knot of his Sussex County Cricket Club tie, which was as frayed as his hair, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Well, I think I’ve got a bit of a result in another direction.’ He continued working on his knot.

‘We’re all ears,’ Grace said.

‘Katie Bishop was having an affair!’ the veteran DS announced triumphantly.

And now forty pairs of eyes were on him in sharp focus.

‘As some of you may recall,’ Potting continued, glancing down at his notepad for reference, ‘I had ascertained that a BMW convertible, registered to Mrs Bishop, was recorded by CCTV camera. It was at a BP petrol station on the A27, two miles east of Lewes, just before midnight last Thursday – the night she was killed,’ he reminded them all needlessly. ‘And I subsequently identified Mrs Bishop on the video footage at the petrol station. Then, in an examination of said vehicle at the Bishops’ residence on Friday afternoon, I found a pay-and-display parking ticket, with a time of –’ he checked his notes again – ‘five eleven on Thursday afternoon, issued from a machine in Southover Road, Lewes.’

He paused and fiddled with his knot again. Grace glanced at the window. Outside the sky was blue and clear. Summer was back again. As if yesterday afternoon had been a small glitch in the weather, a wrong lever pulled by someone.

‘I called in a favour owed to me by John Smith in the Telecoms Unit here at the CID HQ,’ Potting continued. ‘Got him to come in yesterday to examine the mobile phone belonging to Mrs Bishop. As a result of a Lewes number found stored in the mobile phone’s speed-dial memory, I was able to identify a Mr Barty Chancellor – a portrait painter of some international standing, I understand – at an address in Southover Street, Lewes.’

Potting now looked even more pleased with himself. ‘I went to question Mr Chancellor at four yesterday afternoon, at his premises, where he admitted that he and Mrs Bishop had been seeing each other for about a year. He was in a state of considerable distress, having read the news of Mrs Bishop’s death, and seemed quite pleased – if that’s the right way to say it – to have someone to pour his heart out to.’

‘What did you learn from him?’ Grace asked.

‘Seems like the Bishops weren’t quite the happy golden couple that the little local world thought they were. According to Chancellor, Bishop was obsessed with work and was never around. He didn’t seem to understand that his wife was lonely.’

‘Excuse me,’ Bella Moy interrupted angrily. ‘Norman, that’s just so typical of a man trying to justify an affair. Oh, her husband doesn’t bloody understand her, that’s why she fell into my arms, that’s the truth, gov!’ The young DS looked around at the team, her face flushed. ‘Honestly, how many times has everyone heard that? It’s not always the husband who’s at fault – there are plenty of women who are real slappers out there!’

‘Tell me about it,’ Potting said. ‘I married three of them.’

‘Did Bishop know?’ Glenn Branson interrupted.

‘Chancellor doesn’t think so,’ the DS replied.

Grace wrote the name down on his pad thoughtfully. ‘So now we have another potential suspect.’

‘He’s quite a good painter. Mind you, he should be,’ Potting said. ‘Charges between five to twenty grand for a painting. Could buy a bloody car for that! Or a house, where my new missus comes from.’

‘Is that significant, Norman?’ Grace queried.

‘These arty types, some of ’em can be a bit kinky, that’s what I’m thinking. Read about Picasso still shagging women in his nineties.’

‘Oh, he’s a painter, so he must be a pervert. Is that what you are saying?’ Bella Moy was in a seriously bad mood with Potting today. ‘So he must have stuck a gas mask on Katie Bishop’s head and strangled her, right? So why don’t we stop wasting time – let’s go along to the Crown Prosecution Service with our evidence, get an arrest warrant for Chancellor and have done with it?’

‘Bella!’ Grace said firmly. ‘Thank you, that’s enough!’

She glared at Potting, her face flushed. Grace wondered for a moment whether her hostility towards the Detective Sergeant had something deep-rooted behind it. Had they ever been an item? He doubted it, looking at them now, contrasting the plug-ugly old warhorse with the fresh-faced, attractive thirty-five-year-old brunette divorcee. No way.