Not Dead Enough

49

Roy Grace didn’t leave a message. He had already left one earlier on Cleo’s home phone, as well as on her mobile, and he’d also left one on the mortuary’s answering machine. Now he was listening to her breezy voicemail intro on her mobile for the third time today. He hung up. She was clearly avoiding him, still in her strop over Sandy.

Shit, shit, shit.

He was angry with himself for handling it so bloody clumsily. For lying to Cleo and breaking her trust in him. OK, it was a white lie, yadda yadda yadda. But that question she asked, that one simple question, was one he just could not answer, not to her, not to himself. Always the killer question.

What happens if you find her?

And the truth was he really did not know. There were so many imponderables. So many different reasons why people disappeared, and he knew most of them. He had been over this ground so many times with the team at the Missing Persons Helpline, and the shrink he had been seeing on and off for years. In his heart he clung to the slim hope that, if Sandy was alive, she was suffering from amnesia. That had been a realistic possibility in those first days and weeks after she had disappeared, but now, with so many years gone by, it was a straw almost too thin to clutch.

A pink-faced Swatch wristwatch with white letters and a white strap dangled in front of his face. ‘I got my nine-year-old one of these. She was over the moon, like, totally wow, know what I mean?’ the shop assistant said helpfully. He was a pale Afro-Caribbean, in his early thirties, smartly dressed and friendly, with hair that looked like a bunch of broken watch springs.

Grace focused back on his task. His sister had suggested he buy his goddaughter a watch for her birthday tomorrow, and he had phoned her mother to check they were not giving her one. There were ten laid out on the glass counter. His problem was that he had no idea what a nine-year-old would consider cool or horrid. Memories of the disappointment of opening dreary presents thrust on him by his own well-meaning godparents haunted him. Socks, a dressing gown, a jumper, a wooden replica of a 1920s Harrods delivery van where the wheels wouldn’t even turn.

All the watches were different. The pink with the white face was the prettiest, the most delicate. ‘I don’t know what’s in and out with watches – would a nine-year-old girl consider this one cool?’

‘This one rocks, man. Totally. This is what they’re all wearing. You ever see that show on Saturday morning, Channel Four?’

Grace shook his head.

‘There was a kid on it last week wearing one of these. My daughter went mental!’

‘How much is it?’

‘Thirty quid. Comes in a nice box.’

Grace nodded, pulling out his wallet. At least that was one problem solved. Albeit, the smallest of the current crop.

There were some much bigger problems presented to him at the six-thirty briefing in the conference room at Sussex House that evening, the stifling heat in the room being the least of them. All twenty-two of the team present had their jackets off, and most of the men, like Grace, wore short-sleeved shirts. They kept the door open, creating the illusion that cooler air was wafting in from the corridor, and two electric fans whirred away noisily and uselessly. Everyone in the room was perspiring. Just as the last of them sat down, there was a rumble of thunder in the darkening sky.

‘There we go,’ Norman Potting said, with large blotches of damp on his cream shirt. ‘The traditional English summer for you. Two fine days followed by a thunderstorm.’

Several of the team smiled, but Grace barely heard him, he was wrapped up in so many thoughts. Cleo had still not called him back. He was booked on a seven a.m. flight to Munich, tomorrow, returning at nine fifteen p.m. But at least he had some help over there. Although he hadn’t spoken to Marcel Kullen in over four years, the man had returned his call within an hour and – so far as Grace could understand from Kullen’s erratic, broken English – the German detective was insisting on collecting him in person from the airport. And he had remembered to cancel Sunday lunch at his sister’s tomorrow – much to her disappointment and Cleo’s silent anger.

‘The time is six thirty, Saturday 5 August,’ he read out formally to the assembled company, from his notes prepared by Eleanor Hodgson. ‘This is our fourth briefing of Operation Chameleon, the investigation into the death of Mrs Katherine Margaret Bishop – known as Katie – conducted on day two following the discovery of her body at eight thirty yesterday morning. I will now summarize events following the incident.’

He kept the summary short, skipping some of the details, then finished by stating angrily that someone had leaked the crucial piece of information about the gas mask to the Argus reporter, Kevin Spinella. Glaring around the room, he asked, ‘Anyone know how this information got to him?’

Blank expressions greeted him.

Irritable because of the heat, and Cleo, and every damn thing at the moment, he thumped his fist down on the table. ‘This is the second time this has happened in recent months.’ He shot a glance at his deputy, Inspector Kim Murphy, who nodded as if in confirmation. ‘I’m not saying it was anyone in this room,’ he added. ‘But by hell or high water I’m going to find out who was responsible, and I want you to all keep your ears to the ground. OK?’

There were general nods of consensus. Then a brief moment of heavy silence, broken by a flit of lightning and the sudden flicker of all the lights in the room. Moments later there was another rumble of thunder.

‘On an organizational point, I won’t be here for tomorrow’s briefings – these will be taken by DI Murphy.’

Kim Murphy nodded again.

‘I will be out of the country for a few hours,’ Grace continued. ‘But I’ll have my mobile phone and my BlackBerry, so I will be reachable at all times by phone and email. OK, so let’s have your individual reports.’ He looked down at his notes, checking the tasks that had been assigned, although he could remember most if not all of them in his head. ‘Norman?’

Potting’s voice was a deep, sometimes mumbled growl, coarsened by a rural burr. ‘I have something which may be significant, Roy,’ the Detective Sergeant said.

Grace signalled for him to continue.

Potting, a stickler for detail, related the information in the rather formal and ponderous terminology he might have used when making a statement from a witness box. ‘You asked me to check on all CCTV cameras in the area. I was looking through the Vantage log for all incidents that were reported during Thursday night, and observed that a plumber’s van, which had been reported stolen in Lewes on Thursday afternoon, had been found abandoned on the slip road of a BP petrol station, on the westbound carriageway of the A27, two miles east of Lewes, early yesterday morning.’

He paused to flick back a couple of pages of his lined notebook. ‘I made the decision to investigate because it struck me as strange—’

‘Why?’ DS Bella Moy rounded on him. Grace knew that she couldn’t stand Potting and would grab any opportunity to put him down.

‘Well, Bella, it struck me that a van full of plumbing tools would hardly be the vehicle of choice for most joyriders,’ he replied, provoking a ripple of mirth. Even Grace allowed himself a thin smile.

Stony-faced, Bella retorted, ‘But it might be for a crooked plumber.’

‘Not with what plumbers charge – they all drive Rollers.’

This time the laughter was even louder. Grace raised a silencing hand. ‘Can we just keep to business, please? We’re dealing with something very serious.’

Potting ploughed on. ‘It just didn’t feel right to me. A plumber’s van being abandoned. Around the same time Mrs Bishop was killed. I can’t explain why I made any connection – just call it a copper’s nose.’

He looked at Grace, who responded with a nod. He knew what Potting meant. The best policemen had instincts. Intuition. The ability to tell – smell – when something was right or wrong, for reasons they could never logically explain.

Bella glared childishly at Norman Potting, as if trying to stare him out. Grace made a mental note to speak to her about her attitude afterwards.

‘I went to the BP petrol station this morning and requested permission to view and interrogate the forecourt’s CCTV camera footage for the previous night. The staff were obliging, partly because they’d had two people drive off without paying them.’ Potting suddenly looked straight back at Bella smugly. ‘The camera takes one frame every thirty seconds. When I studied the images, they revealed a BMW convertible, which had pulled in just before midnight, which I later ascertained was the vehicle belonging to Mrs Bishop. I was also able to identify a woman walking to the petrol station’s shop as Mrs Bishop.’

‘This could be significant,’ Grace said.

‘It gets better.’ Now the veteran detective was looking even more pleased with himself. ‘I checked the interior of the car afterwards, at the Bishops’ residence in Dyke Road Avenue, and found a pay-and-display parking ticket, issued at five eleven p.m. on Thursday afternoon from a machine in Southover Road in Lewes. The stolen van was taken from a car park just behind Cliffe High Street – about five minutes’ walk away.’

Potting said nothing further. After some moments Grace prompted him, ‘And?’

‘I can’t add anything further at this stage, Roy. But I have a feeling that there’s a connection.’

Grace looked at him, hard. Potting, with a disastrous personal life, and enough political incorrectness to inflame half of the United Nations, had, despite all that baggage, produced impressive results before. ‘Keep on it,’ he said, and turned to DC Zafferone.

Alfonso Zafferone had been assigned to the important but tedious job of working out the time-lines. Insolently chewing gum, he reported on his work with the HOLMES team, plotting the sequence of events surrounding the discovery of Katie Bishop’s body.

The young DC reported that Katie Bishop had started the day of the night she died with a one-hour session at home with her personal trainer. Grace made a note that he was to be interviewed.

Next she had attended a beauty parlour in Brighton, where she had had her nails done. Grace jotted down that the staff there needed to be interviewed. That had been followed by lunch at Havana Restaurant in Brighton with a lady called Caroline Ash, the appeals organizer of a local charity for children, the Rocking Horse Appeal, to discuss plans for a fund-raising event that she and her husband were scheduled to host at their Dyke Road Avenue home in September. Grace wrote down that Mrs Ash was to be interviewed.

Mrs Bishop’s gruelling day, Zafferone said, with considerable sarcasm, continued with a visit to her hairdresser at three o’clock. After that the trail on her went cold. The information that Norman Potting had provided clearly filled in the gap.

The next report was from the latest recruit to Grace’s team, a tough, sharp-eyed female detective constable in her late thirties called Pamela Buckley – constantly confused by many with the family liaison officer Linda Buckley and so similar-looking, they could have been sisters. Both had blonde hair, Linda Buckley’s cropped boyishly short, Pamela’s longer, clipped up rather severely.

‘I found the taxi driver who drove Brian Bishop from the Hotel du Vin to the Lansdowne Place Hotel,’ Pamela Buckley said, and looked down at her notepad. ‘His name’s Mark Tuckwell and he drives for Hove Streamline. He has no recollection of Bishop hurting his hand.’

‘Could Bishop have injured himself without this driver knowing?’

‘It’s possible, sir, but unlikely. I asked him that. He said Bishop was completely silent throughout the journey. He felt that if he had injured himself, he’d have said something.’

Grace nodded, making notes, not convinced this got them anywhere.

Bella Moy then gave a detailed character report on Katie and Brian Bishop. Katie Bishop did not come out of it particularly well. She had been married twice before, the first time to a failed rock singer, when she was eighteen. She had divorced him when she was twenty-two and then married a wealthy Brighton property developer, whom she had divorced six years later, when she was twenty-eight. Bella had been in touch with both men, who had described her, unflatteringly, as being obsessed with money. Two years later she had married Brian Bishop.

‘Why didn’t she have any children?’ Grace asked.

‘She had two abortions with her rock singer. Her property developer already had four children and didn’t want any more.’

‘Was that the reason for her divorcing him?’

‘That’s what he told me,’ she said.

‘Did she get a big settlement?’

‘About two million, he said,’ she replied.

Grace made another note. Then he said, ‘She and Brian Bishop were married for five years. And we don’t know the reason why they didn’t have children. We need to ask him. Could have been an issue between them.’

Next on Grace’s list was DS Guy Batchelor. One of the actions he had delegated to the detective sergeant was to conduct a thorough search of the Bishops’ Brighton home, once the forensic work had been finished, and to act as a coordinator in the meantime.

‘I have something which may be significant,’ Batchelor said. He held up a red file folder, with an index tab clipped to the top. He opened it and removed a bunch of A4-sized papers, clipped together, bearing the logo of the HSBC bank. ‘A SOCO found it in a filing cabinet in Bishop’s study,’ he said. ‘It’s a life insurance policy taken out six months ago in the name of Mrs Bishop. For three million pounds.’