Peter James: Not Dead Enough

Branson and Nicholl watched in silence as Bishop sat, cradling his face in his hands, rocking backward and forward on the sofa.

‘Why can’t I go to the house? To my home? Our home!’ he suddenly blurted.

Branson looked at Nicholl, who was conveniently staring out of the wide window at four golfers putting out the ninth. What the hell was the tactful way of saying this? Staring back hard at Bishop, watching his face, in particular his eyes, he said, ‘We can’t go into detail, but we are treating your house as a crime scene.’

‘Crime scene?’ Bishop looked bewildered.

‘I’m afraid so, sir,’ Branson said.

‘What – what kind of a crime scene do you mean?’

Branson thought for some moments, really focusing his mind. There just wasn’t any easy way to say this. ‘There are some suspicious circumstances about your wife’s death, sir.’

‘Suspicious? What do you mean? What? In what way?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say. We will have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’

‘Pathologist?’ Bishop shook his head slowly. ‘She’s my wife. Katie. My wife. You can’t tell me how she died? I’m – I’m her husband.’ His face dropped back into his hands. ‘She’s been murdered? Is that what you are saying?’

‘We can’t go into detail, sir, not at this moment.’

‘Yes, you can. You can go into detail. I’m her husband. I have a right to know.’

Branson stared back at him levelly. ‘You will know, sir, as soon as we do. What we would appreciate is for you to come to our headquarters in order that we can talk to you about what has happened.’

Bishop raised his hands. ‘I – I’m in the middle of a golf tournament. I . . .’

This time Branson made eye contact with his colleague and each clocked the other’s raised eyebrows. It was an odd priority. But in fairness, when in shock people often said strange things. It wasn’t necessarily worth reading anything into it. Besides, Branson was partially preoccupied with trying to remember how long it was since he had last swallowed any paracetamols. Whether it was safe to take a couple more now. Deciding it was OK, he surreptitiously dug his hand into his pocket, popped a couple of capsules from their foil wrapper and slung them into his mouth. Attempting to swallow them with just saliva, it felt as if they had lodged halfway down his throat.

‘I’ve explained the situation to your friends, sir. They are carrying on.’ He tried swallowing again.

Bishop shook his head. ‘I’ve screwed up their chances. They’ll be disqualified.’

‘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.