Not Dead Enough

112

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.’