Not Dead Enough

114

An hour and a half later, shortly before eight o’clock, Nick Nicholl drove a marked police Vauxhall Vectra slowly up Sackville Road. Grace was in the front seat, wearing a bullet-proof vest beneath his jacket, and Glenn Branson, also in a bullet-proof vest, sat behind him. Both men were counting down the house numbers on the grimy Edwardian terraced buildings. Following right behind them were two marked police Ford Transit vans, each containing a team of uniformed officers from the Local Support Team.

‘Two-five-four!’ Glenn Branson read out. ‘Two-five-eight. Two-six-zero. Two-six-two! We’re here!’

Nicholl double-parked alongside a dusty Ford Fiesta, the other vehicles pulling up behind him.

Grace radioed the second LST van to drive round and cover the back entrance, and to let him know when they were in position.

Two minutes later he got the call back that they were ready.

They climbed out of the car. Grace instructed the SOCO to stay in his vehicle for the moment, then led the way down the concrete steps, past two dustbins, then a grimy bay window with net curtains drawn. It was still daylight, although fading fast now, so the absence of any interior light did not necessarily mean the flat was empty.

The tatty grey front door, with two opaque glass panes in it, was in bad need of a lick of paint, and the plastic bell-push had seen better times. Nonetheless, he pressed it. There was no sound. He pressed it again. Silence.

He rapped sharply on the panes. Then he called out, ‘Police! Open up!’

There was no response.

He rapped again, even more loudly. ‘Police! Open up!’ Then he turned to Nicholl and told him to get the LST team to bring the battering ram.

Moments later two burly LST officers appeared, one of them holding the long, yellow, cylindrical door-busting ram.

‘OK, Chief ?’ he said to Grace.

Grace nodded.

He swung the ram at one of the glass panes. To everyone’s amazement, it bounced off. He swung it again, harder, and again it bounced off.

Both Branson and Nicholl frowned at him. ‘Didn’t eat enough spinach when you were a kid?’ the LST officer’s colleague joked.

‘Fuck this!’

His colleague, who was even more heavily built, took the implement and swung it. Moments later he was looking sheepish too, as it bounced back from the glass again.

‘Shit!’ the constable said. ‘He’s got armour-plated glass!’ He swung it at the door lock. The door barely moved. He swung it again, then again, breaking out into a sweat. Then he looked at Grace. ‘I don’t think he likes burglars.’

‘Obviously been taking advice from his local crime prevention officer,’ Nick Nicholl quipped, in a rare display of humour.

The constable signalled them to move out of the way, then took an almighty swing at the centre of the door, low down. It buckled, with wood splinters flying off.

‘Reinforced,’ he said grimly. He swung again, then again, until the wood was sheared away and he could see the steel plate behind it. It took another four swings of the ram before the plate had been bent back enough for someone to crawl through.

Six LST officers went in first, to establish if anyone was in the flat. After a couple of minutes one of them unlocked the damaged door from the inside and came back out. ‘The flat’s empty, sir.’

Grace thanked the LST team, then asked them to leave, explaining that he wanted to limit the number of officers on the premises in order to conduct a forensic search.

As Grace went in, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he found himself in a small, gloomy basement room, almost every inch of the shabbily carpeted floor covered in partially dismembered computer equipment, piles of motoring magazines and car manuals. It smelled damp.

At the far end of the room was a workstation, with a computer and keyboard. The entire wall in front of it was covered in newspaper cuttings and what looked like flow charts of family trees. To the right was an open door, with a dark passageway beyond.

He crossed the room, threading a careful path through the stuff on the floor, until he reached the ancient swivel chair at the workstation. Then he saw what was pinned up on the wall.

And he froze in his tracks.

‘Shit!’ Glenn Branson, now standing right beside him, said.

It was a gallery of news cuttings. Most of the pages, cut or torn from the Argus and from national newspapers, appeared to track Brian Bishop’s career. There were several photographs of him, including a wedding photograph of his marriage to Katie. Alongside was an article, on a pink page from the Financial Times, on the meteoric rise of his company, International Rostering Solutions PLC, talking about its entry, last year, into the Sunday Times list of the UK’s hundred fastest-growing companies.

Grace was vaguely aware of Branson, and other people, moving past him, pulling on rubber gloves, doors and drawers opening and closing, but his attention was riveted by another article sellotaped to the wall. It was the front page of a late edition of Monday’s Argus newspaper, carrying a large photograph of Brian Bishop and his wife, and a smaller, inset photograph of himself. In one of the columns beneath was a red ink ring around his words: Evil creature.

He read the whole passage:

‘This is a particularly nasty crime,’ Detective Superintendent Grace, the SIO, said. ‘. . . we will work around the clock to bring the evil creature who did this to justice.’

Nick Nicholl suddenly waved a flimsy, legal-looking document in front of him. ‘Just found this lease. He’s got a lock-up! Two in fact – in Westbourne Villas.’

‘Phone the incident room,’ Grace said. ‘Get someone to type up a new warrant and get it down to the same magistrate, then bring it here. And tell them to shift!’

Then, as he was staring, again, at the red ring around the words Evil creature he heard Glenn Branson call out, in a very worried voice, ‘Boss man, I think you’d better take a look in here.’

Grace walked down a short passageway into a dank, windowless bedroom, with a narrow borrowed light high up. The room was lit by a solitary, naked, low-wattage bulb hanging from a cord above a bed, neatly made, with a cream candlewick counterpane.

Lying on the counterpane was a long, brown-haired wig, a moustache, a beard, a black baseball cap, and a pair of dark sunglasses.

‘Jesus!’ he said.

Glenn Branson’s response was simply to point with his finger past him. Grace turned. And what he saw chilled every cell in his body.

Taped to the wall were three blown-up photographs, each taken, he reckoned, from his limited knowledge of the craft, through a long lens.

The first was of Katie Bishop. She was wearing a bikini swimsuit, leaning back against what looked like the cockpit rail of a yacht. A large red-ink cross was scrawled over her. The second was of Sophie Harrington. It was of her face, in close-up, with what looked like a blurred London street behind her. There was also a red-ink cross scrawled over her.

The third was a picture of Cleo Morey, turning away from the front entrance door of the Brighton and Hove Mortuary.

There was no cross.

Grace pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and dialled her home number. She answered on the third ring.

‘Cleo, are you OK?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Never better.’

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m being serious.’

‘I’m listening to you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace,’ she slurred. ‘I’m hanging on to every word.’

‘I want you to lock your front door and put the safety chain on.’

‘Lock the front door,’ she echoed. ‘And put the safety chain on.’

‘I want you to do it now, OK? While I’m on the phone.’

‘You’re so bossy shometimes, Detective Shuperintendent! OK, I’m getting up from the sofa and now I’m walking over to the front door.’

‘Please put the safety chain on.’

‘S’ham doing it now!’

Grace heard the clank of a chain. ‘Do not open the door to anybody, OK? Nobody at all until I get to you. OK?’

‘Do not open the door to anybody, until you get to me. I’ve got that.’

‘What about your roof terrace door?’ he asked.

‘That’s always locked.’

‘Will you check it?’

‘Right away.’ Then, jokingly repeating the instruction back to him, she said, ‘Go up to roof terrace. Check door is locked.’

‘There’s no outside door, is there?’

‘Not last time I looked.’

‘I’ll be there as quickly as I can.’

‘You’d better!’ she slurred, and hung up.

‘That’s very good advice you’ve been given,’ a voice behind her said.