‘I’m sorry about that, sir.’ He wanted to add, shit happens. But tactfully, he left it at that.
�
10
Blinding Light were in pre-production on a horror movie they were going to be shooting in Malibu and Los Angeles. It was about a group of young, rich kids in a house party in Malibu who get eaten by hostile micro-organisms from outer space. In her original script report, Sophie Harrington had written, ‘Alien meets The OC.’
Ever since watching The Wizard of Oz as a child, she had wanted, in some way, however small her role, to be involved with movies. Now she was in her dream job, working with a bunch of guys who between them had made dozens of movies, some of which she had seen, either on a cinema screen or on video or DVD, and some, in development, which she was sure were destined for, if not Oscars, at least some degree of commercial success.
She handed a mug of coffee, milky, with two sugars to Adam and a mug of jasmine tea, neat, to Cristian, then sat down at her desk with her own mug of builder’s tea (milk, two sugars), logged on and watched a whole bunch of emails invade her inbox.
All of them needed dealing with but – shit – there was only one priority. She pulled her mobile phone to her ear and dialled his number again.
It went straight to voicemail.
‘Call me,’ she said. ‘As soon as you can. I’m really worried.’
An hour later, she tried again. Still voicemail.
There were even more emails now. Her tea sat on her desk in reception, untouched. The script she had been reading on the tube was at the same page as when she had got off. So far this morning, she had achieved nothing. She had failed to get a lunch reservation at the Caprice for tomorrow for another one of her bosses, Luke Martin, and she had forgotten to tell Adam that his meeting this afternoon, with film accountant Harry Hicks, had been cancelled. In short, her whole day was a total mess.
Then her phone rang and it suddenly got a whole lot worse.
�
11
The woman had not yet started to smell, which indicated she hadn’t been dead for very long. The air conditioning in the Bishops’ bedroom helped, doing an effective job of keeping the corrosive August heat at bay.
The blowflies hadn’t arrived yet either, but they wouldn’t be long. Blowflies – or bluebottles, as they were more attractively named – could smell death from five miles away. About the same distance as newspaper reporters, of which species there was already one outside the gates, questioning the constable guarding the entrance and, from the reporter’s body language, not getting much from him.
Roy Grace, garbed in a hooded white sterile paper suit, rubber gloves and overshoes, watched him for some moments from the front window of the room. Kevin Spinella, a sharp-faced man in his early twenties, dressed in a grey suit with a badly knotted tie, notebook in hand and chewing gum. Grace had met him before. He worked for the local paper, the Argus, and seemed to be developing an uncanny ability to reach a crime scene hours before any formal police statement was issued. And from the speed – and accuracy – with which serious crimes had been hitting the national media recently, Grace reckoned someone in the police – or the Control Centre – had to be leaking information to him. But that was the least of his problems.
He walked across the room, keeping to the taped line across the carpet laid down by the SOCO team, making one call after another on his mobile phone. He was organizing office and desk space in the Major Incident Suite for the team of detectives, typists and indexers he was putting together, as well as arranging a meeting with an intelligence officer to plan the intelligence strategy for his policy book for this investigation. Every minute was precious at the moment, in the golden hour. What you did in that first hour of arriving at the scene of a suspicious death could greatly affect your likelihood of a successful arrest.
And in this chilly room, pungent with the smell of classy perfume, the thought presenting itself to him between each of his calls was, Is this death an accident? A night of kinky sex gone wrong?
Or murder?
In almost every murder, the chances were that the perpetrator was in a much more ragged frame of mind than yourself. Roy Grace had met his share of killers over the years and not many were able to keep cool, calm and collected, not at any rate in the immediate aftermath. Most would be in what was termed a red mist. Their adrenaline out of control, their thinking confused, their actions – and whatever plan they might have had – all muzzed up by the fact that they simply had not reckoned on the chain reaction of chemicals inside their brains.
He had seen a television documentary recently about human evolution failing to keep pace with the way humans had evolved socially. When confronted by the income tax inspector, people needed to stay cool and calm. Instead, instinctive primitive fight-or-flight reactions kicked in – those same reactions as if you had been confronted out on the savannah by a sabre-toothed tiger. You would be hit by a massive adrenaline surge that made you all shaky and clammy.
Given time, that surge would eventually calm down. So your best chance of a result was to grab your villains while they were still in that heightened phase.
The bedroom ran the entire width of the house – a house he knew, without any envy, that he could never afford. And even if he could, which would only happen if he won the lottery – unlikely, since most weeks he forgot to buy a ticket – he would not have bought this particular house. Maybe one of those mellow Georgian manors, with a lake and a few hundred rolling acres. Something with a bit of style, a bit of class. Yep. Squire Grace. He could see that. Somewhere in the wildest recesses of his mind.
But not this vulgar, faux-Tudor pile behind a forbidding whitewashed wall and electric wrought-iron gates, in Brighton and Hove’s most ostentatious residential street, Dyke Road Avenue. No way. The only good thing about it, so far as he could see at this moment, was a rather beautifully restored white 3.8 Jaguar Mk2 under a dustsheet in the garage, which showed that the Bishops had at least some taste, in his view.
The other two of the Bishops’ cars in the driveway didn’t impress him so much. One was a dark blue cabriolet BMW 3-series and the other a black Smart. Behind them, crammed into the circular, gravelled area in front of the house, was the square hulk of the mobile Major Incident Room vehicle, a marked police car and several other cars of members of the SOCO team. And shortly they would be joined by the yellow Saab convertible belonging to one of the Home Office pathologists, Nadiuska De Sancha, who was on her way.
On the far side of the room, to the left – and right – of the bed, the view from the windows was out over rooftops towards the sea, a mile or so away, and down on to a garden of terraced lawns, in the centre of which, and more prominent than the swimming pool beyond, was an ornamental fountain topped with a replica of the Mannequin Pis, the small, cherubic stone boy urinating away, and no doubt floodlit in some garish colours at night, Grace thought, as he made yet another call.
This one was to an old sweat of a detective, Norman Potting – not a popular man among the team, but one Grace had learned, from a previous successful investigation, was a workhorse he could trust. Seconding Potting to the case, he instructed him to coordinate the task of obtaining all CCTV footage from surveillance cameras within a two-mile radius of the murder scene, and on all routes in and out of Brighton. Next, he organized a uniformed house-to-house inquiry team for the immediate neighbourhood.
Then he turned his attention, once more, to the grim sight on the canopied, king-sized, two-poster bed. The motionless woman, arms splayed out, each strapped by a man’s necktie to one of the two posts, revealing freshly shaven armpits. Apart from a thin, gold necklace, with a tiny orange ladybird secured in a clasp, a gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a massive rock of a diamond, she was naked, her attractive face framed by a tangle of long, red hair, and a black rim around her eyes, probably caused by the Second World War gas mask that lay beside her, he surmised, thinking the words that had become a mantra to him at murder inv
estigations over the years.
What is the body at the scene telling you?
Her toes were short and stubby, with chipped pink varnish. Her clothes were strewn on the floor, as if she had undressed in a hurry. An ancient teddy bear lay in their midst. Apart from an alabaster-white bikini line around her pubic area, she was tanned all over, from either the current hot English summer or an overseas holiday, or both. Just above the necklace, there was a crimson line around her neck, more than likely a ligature mark, indicating the probable cause of death, although Grace had learned, long ago, never to jump to conclusions.
And staring at the dead woman, he was struggling not to keep thinking about his missing wife, Sandy.
Could this be what happened to you, my darling?
At least the hysterical cleaning lady had been removed from the house. God alone knew how much she had already contaminated the crime scene, by ripping off the gas mask and running around like a headless chicken.
After he’d managed to calm her down, she’d provided him with some information. She knew that the dead woman’s husband, Brian Bishop, spent most of the week in London. And that this morning he was playing in a golf tournament at his club, the North Brighton – a club far too expensive for most police officers to afford, not that Grace was a golfer anyway.
The SOCO team had arrived a while ago and were hard at work. One officer was on his hands and knees on the carpet, searching for fibres; one was dusting the walls and every surface for fingerprints; and their forensic scene manager, Joe Tindall, was carrying out a room-to-room survey.
Tindall, who had recently been promoted from Scene of Crime Officer to Scientific Support Officer, which gave him responsibility for the management of several different crime scenes simultaneously if the need arose, appeared now out of the en-suite bathroom. He had recently left his wife for a much younger girl and had had a complete makeover. Grace never ceased to be amazed at the man’s transformation.
Only a few months ago, Tindall had resembled a mad scientist, with a paunch, wiry hair and bottle-lensed glasses. He now sported a completely shaven head, a six-pack, a quarter-inch-wide vertical strip of beard running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin, and hip rectangular glasses with blue-tinted lenses. Grace, who was going out with a woman again for the first time in many years, had recently tried to sharpen up his own image. But, a tad enviously, he realized he was nowhere close to the hip, cooler-than-thou Tindall.
Every few moments the dead woman was suddenly, vividly, illuminated for a millisecond by the flash of a camera. The photographer, an irrepressibly cheerful silver-haired man in his late forties called Derek Gavin, used to have a portrait studio in Hove, before the world of home digital photography had dented his profits enough to make him pack it in. He joked, darkly, that he preferred crime-scene work, because he never had to worry about making corpses sit still or smile.
The best news of the morning, so far, was that his favourite Home Office pathologist had been assigned to this case. Spanish-born, of Russian aristocratic descent, Nadiuska De Sancha was fun, irreverent at times, but brilliant at her work.
He stepped carefully around the body of the woman, and there were moments when he felt the marks of the ligature around his own neck, then inside his gut. Everything inside him tightened. What goddamn sadist had done this? His eyes dropped to the tiny stain on the white sheet just below her vagina. Where semen had leaked out?
Christ.
Sandy.
It was always a problem for him, whenever a young woman died. He wished desperately that someone else had been on duty today.
There was a phone on one of the gilded, reproduction Louis XIV bedside tables. Grace nearly picked it up, old habits dying hard. Under new Best Practice guidelines, police officers had recently been reminded that the best way to secure potential evidence from phones was for them to be recovered and forensically examined by an expert, rather than the old method of dialling 1471. He called out to a scene of crime officer in the next room and reminded him to ensure all the phones were collected up.
Then he did what he always liked to do at a potential crime scene, which was to wander around the area, immersed in his thoughts. His eye was caught, momentarily, by a striking modern painting on the wall. He peered at the artist’s name, Helen Steele, wondering if she was famous, and realizing again how little he knew about the art world. Then he went into the vast, en-suite bathroom and opened the glass door of a shower big enough to live in. He clocked the soap, the gels hanging on hooks, the shampoos. The mirrored cabinet door was open and he checked out the pills. Thinking all the time about the cleaning lady’s words.
Missa Bishop no here wik time. No here lass night. I know no here lass night, I have to make supper Missy Bishop. She jus salad. When Missa Bishop here, he like meat or fish. I make big food.
So if Brian Bishop wasn’t here last night, having kinky sex with his wife, who was?
And if he killed her – why?
An accident?
The ligature mark shouted a very distinctive ‘No.’
As did his instinct.
�
12
Like many of the products of the early post-war building boom, Sussex House, a sleek, rectangular, two-storey building, was not ageing particularly well. The original architect had clearly been influenced by the Art Deco period and the place looked from some angles like the superstructure of a small, tired cruise liner.
Originally constructed in the early 1950s as a hospital for contagious diseases, at that time it had occupied a commanding, isolated position on a hill on the outskirts of Brighton, just beyond the suburb of Hollingbury, and the architect could no doubt have seen his vision in its full, stand-alone glory. But the ensuing years had not been kind. As the urban sprawl encroached, the area around the building became designated as an industrial estate. For reasons no one today was clear about, the hospital closed down and the building was bought by a firm that manufactured cash registers. Some years later it was sold to a freezer company, which subsequently sold it to American Express, which in turn, in the mid-1990s, sold it to the Sussex Police Authority.
Refurbished and modernized, it was opened in a blaze of publicity as the flagship, high-tech headquarters for Sussex CID, positioning the county’s force at the very cutting edge of modern British policing. More recently, it had been decided to move the custody centre and cell block out there also, so these were built on and annexed to the building. Now, despite the fact that Sussex House was bursting at the seams, some of the uniformed divisions were also being moved here. And with just ninety parking spaces for a workforce that had expanded to 430 people, not everyone found the place lived up to its original promise.
The Witness Interview Suite was a rather grand name for two small boxrooms, Glenn Branson thought. The smaller, which contained nothing but a monitor and a couple of chairs, was used for observation. The larger, in which he was now seated with DC Nick Nicholl and the very distressed Brian Bishop, had been decorated in a manner designed to put witnesses, and potential suspects, at their ease – despite two wall-mounted cameras pointing straight down at them.
It was brightly lit, with a hard, grey carpet and cream walls, a large south-facing window giving partial views of Brighton and Hove across the slab-like roof of an ASDA supermarket, three bucket-shaped chairs upholstered in cherry-red fabric, and a rather characterless coffee table with black legs and a fake pine top, which looked like it might have been the last item to go in a Conran shop sale.
The room smelled new, as if the carpet had just been laid minutes before and the paint on the walls was still drying, yet it had smelled like this for as long as Branson could remember. He had only been in here a few minutes and was perspiring already, as were DC Nicholl and Brian Bishop. That was the problem with this building: the air conditioning was crap and half the windows did not open.
Announcing the date and time, Branson activated the wall switch for the recording apparatus. He
explained that this was standard procedure to Bishop, who responded with an acquiescent nod.
The man appeared totally wretched. Dressed in an expensive-looking tan jacket with silver buttons, pulled on untidily over his blue, open-throat Armani polo shirt, sunglasses sticking out of his top pocket, he sat all hunched up, broken. Away from the golf course, his tartan trousers and two-tone golfing shoes seemed a little ridiculous.
Branson couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. And try as he might, the DS could not get the image of Clive Owen in the movie Croupier out of his mind. In other circumstances he might have asked Bishop if they were related. And although it had no bearing on the task he was here to carry out, he could also not help wondering why golf clubs, which always seemed to him to have ludicrously formal and outdated dress codes, such as wearing ties in clubhouses, allowed their members to go out on the course looking like they were starring in a pantomime.
‘May I ask when you last saw your wife, Mr Bishop?’
He clocked the hesitation before the man answered.
‘Sunday evening, about eight o’clock.’ Bishop’s voice was suave, but deadpan, and totally classless, as if he had worked on it to lose whatever accent he might once have had. Impossible to tell whether he came from a privileged background or was self-made. The man’s dark red Bentley, which was still parked at his golf club, was the kind of flash motor Branson associated more with footballers than class.
The door opened and Eleanor Hodgson, Roy Grace’s prim, nervy, fifty-something Management Support Assistant, came in with a round tray containing three mugs of coffee and a cup of water. Bishop drained the water before she had left the room.
‘You hadn’t seen your wife since Sunday?’ Branson said, with an element of surprise in his voice.