Not Dead Enough (43 page)

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.’

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. Dozens 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.

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 fiance been 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 in 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.

93

‘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.’

‘If I answer it, laddie, it’s going straight up yer rectum, so fekkin’ far ye’ll have ter stick yer fingers down yer tonsils ter find it.’

Skunk opened his other eye as well, then shut it again as blinding morning sunlight lasered into it, through his brain, through the back of his skull and deep into the Earth’s core, pinning his head to his sodden, lumpy pillow like a pin through a fly. He closed his eye and made an effort to sit up, which was rewarded by a hard crack on his head from the Luton roof above him.

‘Fuck! Shit!’

This was the gratitude he got for letting fucking useless tossers crash in his home! Wide awake now, on the verge of throwing up, he reached out an arm that felt totally disembodied from the rest of him, as if someone had attached it to his shoulder by a few threads during the night. Numb fingers fumbled around on the floor until they found the phone.

He lifted it up, hand shaking, his whole body shaking, thumbed the green button and brought it to his ear. ‘Urr?’ he said.

‘Where the hell have you been, you piece of shit?’

It was Barry Spiker.

And suddenly he was really wide awake, a whole bunch of confused thoughts colliding inside his brain.

‘It’s the middle of the fucking night,’ he said sullenly.

‘Maybe on your planet, shitface. On mine it’s eleven in the morning. Missed holy communion again, have you?’

And then it came to Skunk. Paul Packer. Detective Constable Paul Packer!

Suddenly, his morning was feeling a bit better. Recollections of a deal he had made with DC Packer were now surfacing through the foggy, drug-starved maelstrom of pain that was his mind. He was on a promise to Packer. To let him know the next time Barry Spiker gave him a job. It would be cutting his nose off to spite his face, to shop Spiker. But the pleasure the thought gave him overrode that. Spiker had stiffed him on their last deal. Packer had promised him a payment.

Cash payments from the police were crap. But if he was really smart, he could do a deal, get paid by Spiker and the police. That would be cool!

Ching. Ching. Ching.

Al, his hamster, was busy on his treadmill, going round and round, as usual, despite his paw in its splint. Al needed another visit to the vet. He owed money to Beth. Two birds with one stone! Spiker and DC Packer. Al and Beth! It was a done deal!

‘Just got back from mass, actually,’ he said.

‘Good. I’ve a job for you.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘That’s your fucking problem. All ears, no brains.’

‘So what you got for me?’

Spiker briefed him. ‘I need it tonight,’ he said. ‘Any time. I’ll be there all night. One-fifty if you get the spec right this time. Are you capable of it?’

‘I’m fit.’

‘Don’t fuck up.’

The phone went dead.

Skunk sat up in excitement. And nearly split his skull open, again, on the roof.

‘Fuck!’ he said.

‘Fek you, Jimmy!’ came the voice from the far end of his van.

94

Glenn Branson terminated the second interview with Brian Bishop at twelve twenty p.m. Then, leaving Bishop alone with his solicitor in the interview room for a lunch break, the interviewing team regrouped in Grace’s office.

Branson had kept to the script. They had held back, as planned, the really big questions for the third interview, this afternoon.

As they sat down at the small round table in Grace’s office, the Detective Superintendent gave Branson a pat on the back. ‘Well done, Glenn, good stuff. OK, now, as I see it –’ and he used a phrase of Alison Vosper’s which he rather liked – ‘here’s the elephant in the room.’

All three of them looked at him expectantly.

‘Bishop’s alibi. His evening meal at the Wolseley restaurant in London with this Phil Taylor character. That’s the elephant in the room.’

‘Surely the DNA result kicks his alibi into touch,’ Nicholl said.

‘I’m thinking about a jury,’ Grace replied. ‘Depends how credible this Taylor man is. You can be sure Bishop’s going to have a top brief. He’ll milk the alibi for all it’s worth. An honest citizen versus the vagaries of science? Probably with evidence from British Telecom, showing the time Bishop booked his alarm call, to back his timeframe up?’

‘I think we should be able to nail Bishop in this third interview, Roy,’ Jane Paxton said. ‘We’ve got a lot to hit him with.’

Grace nodded, thinking hard, not yet convinced they had everything they needed.

They started again shortly after two. Roy Grace was conscious, as he sat back down in the slightly unstable chair in the observation room, that they had just six hours left before they would have to release Brian Bishop, unless they applied for an extension or charged him. They could of course go to court for a Warrant of Further Detention, but Grace did not want to do that unless it was absolutely necessary.

Alison Vosper had already rung him to find out how close they were to charging Bishop. When he related the facts to date to her, she sounded pleased. Still in sweet mode.

The fact that a man had been arrested so quickly after Katie Bishop’s murder was making the force look good in the eyes of the media, and it was reassuring for the citizens of Brighton and Hove. Now they needed to charge him. That, of course, would do Grace’s career prospects no harm at all. And with the positive DNA results, they had sufficient evidence to secure consent from the Crown Prosecution Service to charge Bishop. But it wasn’t just charging the man that Grace needed. He needed to ensure a conviction.

He knew he should be elated at the way it was all going, but something was worrying him, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

Suddenly, Glenn Branson’s voice sounded loud and clear, followed an instant later by the image of the four men in the interview room appearing back on the monitor. Brian Bishop was sipping a glass of water, looking sick as a parrot.

‘It is three minutes past two p.m., Tuesday 8 August,’ Branson was saying. ‘Present at this interview, interview number 3, are Mr Brian Bishop, Mr Leighton Lloyd, DC Nicholl and myself, DS Branson.’ He then looked directly at Bishop.

‘Mr Bishop,’ he said. ‘You’ve told us that you and your wife were happily married and that you made a great team. Were you aware that Mrs Bishop was having an affair? A sexual relationship with another man?’

Grace watched Bishop’s eyes intently. They moved to the left. From his memory of last watching Bishop, this was to truth mode.

Bishop shot a glance at his lawyer, as if wondering whether he should say anything, then looked back at Branson.

‘You’re not obliged to answer,’ Lloyd said.

Bishop was pensive for some moments. Then he spoke, the words coming out heavily. ‘I suspected she might have been. Was it this artist fellow in Lewes?’

Branson nodded, giving Bishop a sympathetic smile, aware the man was hurting.

Bishop sank his face into his hands and was silent.

‘Do you want to take a break?’ his solicitor asked.

Bishop shook his head, then removed his hands. He was crying. ‘I’m OK. I’m OK. Let’s just get on with all this bloody stuff. Jesus.’ He shrugged, staring miserably down at the table, dabbing his tears with the back of his hand. ‘Katie was the loveliest person but there was something inside driving her. Like a demon that always made her dissatisfied with everything. I thought I could give her what she wanted.’ He started crying again.

‘I think we should take a break, gentlemen,’ Leighton Lloyd said.

They all stepped out, leaving Bishop alone, then resumed the interview after ten minutes. Nick Nicholl, playing good cop, asked the first question.

‘Mr Bishop, could you tell us how you felt when you first suspected your wife was being unfaithful?’

Bishop looked at the DC sardonically. ‘Do you mean, did I want to kill her?’