‘What time did your witness reckon she saw Bishop outside Sophie Harrington’s house?’ Grace asked.
Duigan replied, ‘Eight o’clock almost exactly. She knew because a television programme she wanted to watch was just starting.’
‘And she’s now formally identified him?’
‘Yes, this afternoon she came in and carried out an identification procedure. She is absolutely certain it was him.’
‘What clothes does she say Bishop was wearing?’ Grace asked.
‘She says he was in a dark tracksuit – a shell suit of some kind.’
Grace stared at the image of Bishop on the screen. ‘What does anyone think? Could that black blouson jacket and those dark blue chinos be mistaken for a tracksuit?’
Alfonso Zafferone said, ‘It was eight o’clock when she saw Bishop. Old people don’t see dark colours so well, in poor light. I think that blouson jacket could easily be mistaken for a tracksuit top, at that time of day.’
‘Or,’ Guy Batchelor said, ‘Bishop could have pulled on a tracksuit over his clothes, to protect them.’
‘Both good points,’ Grace said. Then he turned his mind back to the time-line. ‘He could have got from Kings Parade to Ms Harrington’s address in ten minutes by taxi.’
Duigan pressed the remote and a second image of Bishop appeared. Now he was down on the seafront itself, with part of the Arches clearly visible in the background, several kayaks on trestles outside the front of one.
Reading on, DC Corbin said, ‘Bishop was sighted again at eight fourteen by a CCTV camera in front of the Arches. The phone mast log indicates Bishop remained static in this area during the next forty-five minutes, and then headed back, west, to his hotel. Two staff members at a seafront bar, Pebbles, have confirmed that he was in their bar from approximately eight twenty to about eight fifty. They said he drank a beer and an espresso and seemed deeply distracted. On several occasions he got up and paced around, then returned and sat down again. They had been concerned he was going to walk off without paying.’
Bella Moy cut in when the DC paused. ‘Roy,’ she said, ‘it almost seems as if he was deliberately trying to get himself noticed.’
‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘Could be. But equally it’s typical behaviour of someone in a highly agitated state.’
Duigan clicked the remote again. It was darker on the screen now. The image was a rear view of a man who strongly resembled Bishop, in the same place as the earlier photograph, passing along the Arches.
‘At eight fifty-four,’ DC Corbin read on, ‘Bishop was again recorded on the same CCTV camera as at eight fourteen, this time walking in the opposite direction. From the phone mast log we have the information that he headed west again, in the direction of the Lansdowne Place Hotel. A member of the hotel reception staff recalls that Bishop returned to the hotel at approximately nine twenty-five, when she gave him the message that Detective Superintendent Grace had left for him.’ She looked up at Grace. ‘He then rang you at nine thirty.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then he drove up to Sussex House, where Detective Superintendent Grace and DS Branson interviewed him, the interview commencing at ten twenty-two. According to the phone mast plot, Bishop did not leave the hotel until nine forty-nine.’
‘He’d have driven almost past Sophie Harrington’s door on his way from the hotel to here,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘The drive here would have been at least fifteen minutes – I only live half a dozen streets along from the Lansdowne,’ Grace replied. ‘I do the drive every day, at all times of the day and night. It always takes fifteen to twenty minutes. So that would have left him eighteen minutes to kill Sophie Harrington. Impossible, not with what was done to her, all those holes drilled in her back. He couldn’t have done that and cleaned himself up in that time frame.’
‘I agree,’ Duigan said.
‘Which means we have a problem,’ Grace said. ‘Either Bishop didn’t kill Sophie Harrington or he had an accomplice. Or . . .’
He fell silent.
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106
Grace went straight from the briefing meeting, past his office, past the mostly empty desks and offices of the detectives’ room and put his head around the door of Brian Cook’s office. He was relieved to see the Scientific Support Branch Manager was still at work.
Cook was on the phone, making what sounded like a private call, but waved him in, cheerily told the person at the other end that he would hold him to that drink and hung up. ‘Roy, has John Pringle contacted you yet about Cleo Morey’s car?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘I put him on it today – told him to report to you.’
‘Thanks, Brian.’ Changing the subject, Grace said, ‘Tell me something, what do you know about the DNA of twins?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘How close would the DNA of identical twins be?’
‘It would be identical.’
‘Completely?’
‘One hundred percent. The fingerprints would be different, interestingly. But the DNA would be an exact match.’
Grace thanked him and walked along to his own office. He went and closed the door, then sat quietly at his desk for some moments, planning what he was going to say very carefully before he rang the mobile number in front of him.
‘Leighton Lloyd,’ the man answered, his voice crisp and ready for a fight, as if he already knew who his caller was.
‘It’s Detective Superintendent Grace, Mr Lloyd. Can we have this conversation off the record?’
There was some surprise in the solicitor’s tone. ‘Yes. OK. We’re off the record. Do you have some new information?’
‘We have some concerns,’ Grace said, remaining guarded. He still didn’t trust the man. ‘Would you happen to know if your client has a twin?’
‘He hasn’t mentioned anything. Do you want to elaborate on this?’ Lloyd asked.
‘Not at this stage. It might be helpful to all of us if we could establish or eliminate this. Could you ask your client urgently?’
‘It’s after visiting hours. Can you authorize Lewes prison to let me speak to my client on the phone?’
‘Yes, I’ll get that done now.’
‘Would you like me to call you back tonight?’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
As Grace hung up, his phone rang again, almost immediately. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered. The voice at the other end sounded very serious and pensive.
‘Detective Superintendent, it’s John Pringle. I’m with SOCO and I was asked to look at a fire-damaged MG motor car that was brought into the pound this morning. Brian Cook told me to report my findings to you.’
‘Yes, thank you. He said you’d be calling.’
‘I’ve just completed my examination of the vehicle, sir. Extensive fire damage to the interior has caused some of the wiring to melt, so I cannot give as complete a report as I would have liked.’
‘Understood.’
‘What I can say, sir, is that the fire wasn’t caused by anyone trying to steal the vehicle or by vandalism.’ There was a long silence.
Grace clamped the phone tighter to his ear and hunched over his desk. ‘I’m listening. What did cause it?’
‘The vehicle had been tampered with. Deliberate sabotage without any question. An extra set of fuel injectors had been added and positioned to spray petrol directly into the driver footwell when the ignition was switched on. A wiring loop had been connected from the starter motor so as to send out sparks into the footwell when it activated. Combined with that, although it is hard to be certain, because so much of the wiring has melted, it looks to me as if the wiring of the central door locking had been altered, so that once locked the doors could not be unlocked.’
Grace felt a cold prickle crawl down his spine.
‘This has been done by someone very clever, someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It wasn’t about harming the car, Detective Superintendent. In my view, they were i
ntending to kill the driver.’
Grace sat on one of the two large red sofas in the downstairs room of Cleo’s house, with Cleo snuggled up beside him, the empty fish tank sitting on the table still filled with water. He had one arm draped around her and he was holding a large glass of Glenfiddich and ice with his free hand. Her hair smelled freshly washed and fragrant. She felt warm, alive, so intensely, beautifully alive. And so vulnerable.
He was scared as hell for her.
Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers was playing on the hi-fi. It was exquisite music, but it was too poignant, too sad for this moment. He needed silence, or something cheerful, but he didn’t know what. He suddenly felt that he didn’t know anything. Except for this. That he loved this beautiful, warm, funny creature he was holding. He loved her truly and deeply, more than he had ever imagined he could love anyone after Sandy. And that somehow he had to let Sandy go. He did not want her shadow destroying this relationship.
And he could not stop thinking what would have happened if that sad little villain, who was still fighting for his life, had not beaten her to her car.
If there had been no police stakeout. Nobody around to pull her out.
The thought was almost unbearable. Some psycho had planned to kill her and had gone to great trouble.
Who?
Why?
And if that person had tried once and failed, then was he – or she – going to try again?
His mind went back to Sunday, when someone had sliced open the soft-top of the MG. Was that just a coincidence or was there a connection?
Tomorrow a detective would sit down with her and go through a list of all the people she might have upset during her work. There were plenty of relatives of victims who got angry about their loved ones having post-mortems – and invariably they took their anger out on Cleo rather than on the coroner, who was actually the person responsible for that decision.
Cleo had initially greeted the news with disbelief, but during the past hour, since he had arrived home, it was starting to sink in, and the shock was now hitting her.
She leaned down, picked up her wine glass and drained it. ‘What I don’t understand is—’ She stopped in mid-sentence, as if a thought had struck her. ‘If someone was going to wire my car to blow up, wouldn’t they do it to make it look like an accident? They’d know that forensics would be crawling all over it afterwards. It sounds like what this person did made it look very obvious.’
‘You’re right. Whoever it was, they did, they made it very obvious. Although I doubt they could have easily disguised what was done. I’m not a mechanic, but it was a lot more elaborate than just crossing a couple of wires.’ It was vicious, sadistic, he thought but did not say. He hadn’t yet told her that her car was now being treated as a crime scene, the event categorized as a major incident, with a senior investigating officer being appointed and a full inquiry team.
She turned and looked at him with round, worried eyes. ‘I just can’t think of anyone who could have done this, Roy.’
‘What about your ex?’
‘Richard?’
‘Yes.’
She shook her head. ‘No, he wouldn’t go this far.’
‘He stalked you for months. You had to threaten him with a court order at one point – that was when he backed off, you said. But some stalkers don’t go away.’
‘I just cannot imagine him doing this.’
‘Didn’t you say he raced cars?’
‘He did, until God started occupying his weekends.’
Grace’s mobile rang. He put his glass down and disentangled himself from Cleo, to retrieve it from his jacket pocket. Glancing at the caller display, he saw it was Lloyd.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
‘OK, I’ve spoken to my client,’ the solicitor said. ‘He was adopted. He doesn’t know anything about his birth parents.’
‘Does he know anything about his background at all?’
‘He only found out he was adopted after the death of his parents. After his mother died he was going through her papers and found his original birth certificate. It was a big shock – he didn’t know.’
‘Has he made any attempt to find his birth parents?’
‘He says he had been planning to quite recently, but hadn’t yet done anything about it.’
Grace thought for a moment. ‘Did he by any chance tell you where his birth certificate is?’
‘Yes. It’s in a filing cabinet in his office at Dyke Road Avenue. It’s in a folder marked Personal. Would you like to tell me any more?’
‘Not at this stage,’ Grace replied. ‘But thank you. I’ll let you know what I find.’
He ended the call, then immediately dialled the number of the Operation Chameleon incident room.
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107
Despite being desperately tired, Grace slept fitfully, woken by the slightest noise and not settling again each time until he was certain that it had come from outside Cleo’s house, not from inside.
His mind was a jumble of dark thoughts. A burning MG. A tattoo. A gas mask. A body with crabs falling off it, rolling through the surf on a Brighton beach, Janet McWhirter’s smiling, cheerful face in her PNC office.
Clear the ground under your feet.
The words of his own mentor, the recently retired Chief Superintendent Dave Gaylor, were rolling around like surf inside his head. Gaylor had been a detective inspector when Grace had first met him. The youngest ever DI in Sussex. Twelve years his senior, Gaylor had taught him much that he knew today. In a sense, his own attempts at helping Glenn Branson were his way of passing that knowledge on.
Clear the ground under your feet. It was an old CID expression. Gaylor had always impressed on him the importance of looking at what was immediately around you when you were at a crime scene. Of not ignoring anything, however irrelevant it might seem at the time. He had also told Grace that if something felt wrong, then it probably was wrong.
Janet McWhirter’s death felt wrong to him.
The words of one of his own personal mantras, cause and effect, were also tumbling around in his mind. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.
After fifteen years in the police PNC department, Janet McWhirter falls in love. She goes for a career change, a lifestyle change, plans to move to Australia. Was the cause of her lifestyle change the man she met? And the effect for her to end up dead?
It was really troubling him.
Dawn was breaking outside. Grace had never been afraid of the dark, even as a child, perhaps because he knew his policeman dad was there, in the next room, to protect him. But he had been worried during these past hours of darkness now. Concerned who might be out there wanting to harm Cleo. Her insanely jealous ex-fianc�Richard?
Richard Northrop-Turner.
The man who had stalked Cleo relentlessly and increasingly nastily, until she had threatened to go to court. Then he had gone away, or so it seemed. Richard Northrop-Turner, who raced cars and did the mechanics himself. Despite all Cleo’s protestations that she did not believe her ex would go as far as trying to kill her, the first call he would make this morning, when he left here, would be to the SIO on the investigation into her attempted murder, a competent DI called Roger Pole, and suggest they concentrate on Richard Northrop-Turner as the prime suspect.
Cleo stirred and he kissed her lightly on the forehead, feeling her warm, sour breath on his face. He wanted to move her out of here and into his own house for the next few days, which would, ideally, mean getting rid of his lodger. For some moments, as he lay awake, he wondered whether he could do a swap with Cleo. Let Glenn Branson come and stay here – and act as a guard – while she stayed with him.
But when he suggested it to her as he was getting dressed a while later, she was less than enthusiastic.
‘It’s safe here,’ she said. ‘There’s only one way in and out, through the front gates. I feel secure here.’
‘You’re not secure when you leave here. How many more nights are you on ca
ll-out?’
‘All this week.’
‘If you have to go out again in the middle of the night, I’m coming with you.’
‘You’re sweet. Thank you.’
‘How secure are you at the mortuary?’
‘The doors are always locked. I have Darren there all the time, and Walter Hordern most of the time, as well.’
‘I’m going to get extra patrols around here, at night, and also have patrols keep an extra vigilant eye around the mortuary. Do you have a reasonably recent photograph of Richard?’
‘Loads,’ Cleo said. ‘On my computer.’
‘Email me one this morning – something that’s a good likeness. I’m going to get it circulated to the local police – in case they see him anywhere.’
‘OK.’
‘How will you get to work today?’
‘Darren’s picking me up.’
‘Good.’
Grace told Cleo he would bring round a Chinese takeaway tonight, as soon as he could get away, and a bottle of wine. She kissed him goodbye, telling him she thought that was a very good plan.
It was a quarter to six when he left the house and he just about had time to dash back to his home to shower, shave and change. He entered as quietly as possible so as not to wake up Glenn Branson – more to avoid having to endure another round of early-morning soul-searching from his friend than from any concern for the Detective Sergeant getting his requisite hours of beauty sleep.
As usual, Glenn had left the living room looking like a tip. CDs and DVDs, pulled from their sleeves, were spread around everywhere, and the detritus of some reheated ready meal in a foil box – fish pie, it smelled like – was lying on and around a tray on the carpet, along with two empty cans of Coke and an ice-cream carton.
Grace got himself ready and fled, pausing only to slip a CD, from a rapper he had never heard of, into the living room hi-fi and switch it on, turning the volume up high enough to shake a man’s fillings out five miles away.