Not Dead Enough

25

The Major Incident Suite at Sussex House occupied much of the first floor of the building. It was accessed by a door with a swipe pad at the end of a large, mostly open-plan area housing the force’s senior CID officers and their support staff.

Roy Grace felt there was always a completely different atmosphere in this part of the CID headquarters from elsewhere in the building – and indeed any of the other police buildings in and around Brighton and Hove. The corridors and offices of most police stations had a tired, institutional look and feel, but here everything always seemed new.

Too new, too modern, too clean, too damn tidy. Too – soulless. It could have been the offices of a chartered accountancy practice, or the admin area of a bank or insurance company.

Diagrams on white cards, which also looked brand new, were pinned to large, red-felt display boards at regular intervals along these walls. They charted all the procedural information that every detective should know by heart; but often at the start of an investigation Grace would take the time to read them again.

He had always been well aware of how easy it was to become complacent and forget things. And he had read an article recently which reinforced that view. According to the paper, most of the world’s worst air disasters during the past fifty years were due to pilot error. But in many cases it wasn’t an inexperienced junior, it was the senior pilot of the airline who had slipped up. The article went so far as to say that if you were sitting on an aeroplane and discovered your pilot was going to be the senior captain of the airline, then get off that plane at once!

Complacency. It was the same with medicine. Not long back, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Sussex had amputated the wrong leg of a male patient. Just a simple error. Caused, almost certainly, by complacency.

Which was why, at a few minutes to six p.m., Grace stopped in the hot, stuffy corridor at the entrance of the Major Incident Suite, his shirt clinging to his chest from the savage afternoon heat, the sighting of Sandy in Munich clinging to his mind. He nodded to Branson and pointed at the first diagram on the wall, just past the door of the HOLMES system manager’s office, which was headed Common Possible Motives.

‘What does maintain active lifestyle actually mean?’ Branson asked, reading off the diagram.

In an oval in the centre was a single word: motive. Arranged around it, at the end of spokes, were the words jealousy, racism, anger/fright, robbery, power/control, desire, gain, payment, homopho bia, hate, revenge, psychotic, sexual and maintain active lifestyle.

‘Killing to inherit someone’s money,’ Grace answered.

Glenn Branson yawned. ‘There’s one missing.’ Then he frowned. ‘Actually, two,’ he said gloomily.

‘Tell me?’

‘Kicks. And kudos.’

‘Kicks?’

‘Yeah. Those kids who set fire to an old bag lady in a bus shelter last year. Poured petrol over her while she was sleeping. They didn’t hate her, it was just something to do, right? Kicks.’

Grace nodded. His mind really wasn’t in gear. He was still thinking about Sandy. Munich. Christ, how was he going to get through this? All he wanted to do right now was to take a plane to Munich.

‘And kudos, right?’ Glenn said. ‘You join a gang, it’s one way to get street cred, right?’

Grace moved on to the next board. It was headed Developing Forensic Overview. He glanced down the list, the words a meaningless blur at this moment. Assess potential information, intelligence, witnesses. Reassess. Develop and implement forensic strategy. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dapper, energetic-looking man in his early fifties, wearing smart fawn suit trousers, a beige shirt and a brown tie, striding up to them. Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer for this building.

‘Hi, Roy,’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ve got MIR One all set up for you, and the tape’s ready for you to rock and roll.’ Then he turned to the Detective Sergeant and shook his hand vigorously. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Welcome back! I thought you weren’t going to be working for a while yet.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘Have to be careful when you drink now, do you? So it doesn’t come squirting out the holes in your belly?’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ responded Glenn, missing the joke, either deliberately or because his mind was elsewhere – Grace couldn’t tell which.

‘I’ll be around for a while,’ Case said breezily. ‘Anything you need, let me know.’ He tapped the mobile phone jammed in his shirt’s breast pocket.

‘A fresh-water dispenser? Going to need it with this heat,’ Grace said.

‘Already done that.’

‘Good man.’ He looked at his watch. Just over twenty minutes to the six-thirty pre-briefing he had called. There should be enough time. He led Glenn Branson along, past the SOCO evidence rooms and the Outside Inquiry Team rooms, then doglegged right towards the Witness Interview Suite, where they had been earlier this afternoon.

They went into the small, narrow viewing room, adjoining the main interview room. Two mismatched chairs were pulled up against a work surface, running the width of the room, on which sat the squat metal housing of the video recording machinery, and a colour monitor giving a permanent, dreary colour picture of the coffee table and three red chairs in the empty Witness Interview Room on the other side of the wall.

Grace wrinkled his nose. It smelled as if someone had been eating a curry in here, probably from the deli counter of the ASDA supermarket across the road. He peered in the wastepaper bin and saw the evidence, a pile of cartons. It always took him a while after leaving a post-mortem before he was comfortable at the thought of food, and at this moment, having just seen the remnants of what appeared to be a shrimp rogan josh among the contents of Katie Bishop’s stomach, the sickly reek of the curry in here was definitely not doing it for him.

Grace ducked down, picked up the bin and plonked it outside the door. The smell didn’t clear, but at least it made him feel a little better. Then he sat in front of the monitor, refamiliarized himself with the controls of the video machine and hit the play button.

Thinking. Thinking all the time. Sandy loved curries. Chicken korma. That was her favourite.

Brian Bishop’s interview from earlier began to play on the screen. Grace fast-forwarded, watching the dark-haired man in his tan designer jacket with its flashy silver buttons and his two-tone brown and white golfing shoes.

‘Look like spats, those shoes,’ Branson said, sitting down next to him. ‘You know, like those 1930s gangsters films. Ever see Some Like It Hot?’ His voice was flat, lacking its usual energy, but he seemed to be making a superhuman effort to be cheerful.

Grace realized this must be a difficult time of day for him. Early evening. Normally, if he were home, he’d be helping get his two children ready for bed. ‘That the one with Marilyn Monroe?’

‘Yeah, and Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft. Well brilliant. That scene, right, when they wheel the cake in and the man steps out from inside it with a machine gun and blows everyone away, and George Raft says, “There was summin’ in that cake that didn’t agree wid him!”’

‘A modern spin on the Trojan Horse,’ Grace said.

‘You mean it was a remake?’ Branson said, puzzled. ‘The Trojan Horse? Don’t remember it.’

Grace shook his head. ‘Not a movie, Glenn. What the Greeks did, in Troy!’

‘What did they do?’

Grace stared hard at his friend. ‘Did you get all your bloody education from watching movies? Didn’t you ever learn any history?’

Branson shrugged defensively. ‘Enough.’

Grace slowed the tape. On the screen Glenn Branson said, ‘May I ask when you last saw your wife, Mr Bishop?’

Grace paused the tape. ‘Now, I want you to concentrate on Bishop’s eyes. I want you to count his blinks. I want the number of blinks per minute. You got a second hand on that NASA control tower on your wrist?’

Branson peered down at his watch as if thrown by the question. It was a fashionably large Casio chronometer, one of the kind that had so many dials and buttons Grace wondered if his friend had any idea what half of them did. ‘Somewhere,’ he said.

‘OK, start timing now.’

Glenn messed it up a couple of times. Then, on the screen, Roy Grace entered the room and began questioning Bishop.

‘Where did you sleep last night, Mr Bishop?’

‘In my flat in London.’

‘Could anyone vouch for that?’

‘Twenty-four!’ Glenn Branson announced, his eyes switching from his watch, to the screen, then back again.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Do it again.’

On the screen Grace asked Bishop, ‘What time were you on the tee at the golf club this morning?’

‘Just after nine.’

‘And you drove down from London?’

‘Yes.’

‘What time would that have been?’

‘About half-six.’

‘Twenty-four again!’

Grace froze the tape. ‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘What exactly?’ Branson asked.

‘It’s an experiment. I’m trying out something I read the other day in a psychology newsletter I subscribe to. The writer said they’d established in a lab at a university – I think it was Edinburgh – that people blink more times a minute when they are telling the truth than when they are lying.’

‘For real?’

‘They blink 23.6 times a minute when they are telling the truth and 18.5 times a minute when they are lying. It’s a fact that liars sit very still – they have to think harder than people telling the truth – and when we think harder we are stiller.’ He ran the tape on.

Brian Bishop seemed to be getting increasingly agitated, finally standing up and gesticulating.

‘A constant twenty-four,’ Branson said.

‘And his body language tallies,’ Grace said. ‘He looks like a man who is telling the truth.’

But, he knew only too well, it was only an indicator. He had misread someone’s body language before and been badly caught out.