Peter James - Not Dead Enough

There was a cheer on the television, followed by clapping. He glanced at the screen and saw a helmeted batsman walking away from the crease, the middle stump behind him bent sharply back.

‘Should have just blocked it,’ the man who appeared to be asleep beside him said. ‘Silly idiot tried to hit it through the covers. You a cricketing man?’

‘Not really. Rugger’s my game.’

The man grunted and fell silent.

The woman came back into the room with a tray containing a china teapot, milkjug, sugar bowl, cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. She had removed her gardening gloves and replaced her gum boots with pompom slippers. ‘Would you like tea, Derek?’ she asked, raising her voice.

‘Got a bloody rugger bugger in the house,’ he grumbled, then appeared to fall asleep again.

‘Milk and sugar?’ she asked Grace, setting the tray down. He eyed the plate of biscuits on the tray hungrily, realizing it was lunch time and he’d barely had any breakfast.

‘Milk, no sugar, please.’

She handed the plate over to him. It was laden with digestives, Penguins and marshmallows. He took a Penguin gratefully and unwrapped it.

She poured his tea and passed it to him, then pointed at the silver-framed photograph. ‘We didn’t like the name Frederick, did we, Derek?’

A small, negative-sounding moan came from the man’s mouth.

‘So we renamed him Richard,’ she said.

‘Richard,’ the old man echoed, with a grunt.

‘After Richard Chamberlain, the actor. Dr Kildare . Did you ever see Dr Kildare?’

‘Before his bloody time,’ her husband mumbled.

‘I remember it vaguely,’ Grace confessed. ‘My mum was a fan.’ He stirred his tea, anxious to get to the point of this visit.

‘We adopted two children,’ Joan Tripwell said. ‘Then our own came along. Geoffrey. He’s doing well – he does research for a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. Working on cancer drugs for them.’

Grace smiled. ‘Good.’

‘Laura’s the problem one. That’s what I thought you had come about. She’s always been in trouble. Drugs. It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it, our Geoffrey doing so well with a drugs company and Laura in and out of homes, always in trouble with the police.’

‘And Richard – how is he doing?’ Grace asked.

Her little mouth closed, her eyes all over the place again suddenly, and Grace realized he had touched a nerve. She poured her own tea and added two lumps of sugar, using silver tongs. ‘What exactly is your interest in talking about Richard?’ she asked, her voice suddenly full of suspicion.

‘I was hoping you could tell me where I can find him. I need to speak to him.’

‘To speak to him?’ She sounded astonished.

‘Plot 437, row 12,’ the old man suddenly said.

‘Derek!’ she admonished.

‘Well, that’s where he bloody well is. What’s the matter with you, woman?’

‘Excuse my husband,’ she said, picking her cup up daintily by the handle. ‘He’s never really got over it. I suppose neither of us has.’

‘Got over what?’ Grace probed, as gently as he could.

‘He was a premature baby, like his brother, poor little soul. He was born with a congenital weakness – malformed lungs. They never developed properly. He had a weak chest, you know? Always getting infections as a child. And really bad asthma.’

‘What do you know about his brother?’ Grace asked, too interested now to take a bite of his Penguin.

‘That he passed away in the incubator, poor little mite. That’s what they told us.’

‘What about their mother?’

The woman shook her head. ‘The Social Services were terrible on giving out information.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Grace said bitterly.

‘It took us a long time to find out that she was a single parent – of course that was a bad thing in those days. She was killed in a car crash, but we never really knew the details.’

‘Are you sure that Frederick – I’m sorry, Richard,’ he corrected himself, ‘that Richard’s brother died?’

‘You can’t be certain of anything the Social Services say. But that’s what they told us at the time.’

Grace nodded sympathetically. There was another roar on the television. Grace glanced at it and saw a replay of a silly-mid-on fielder making a catch. ‘Can you tell me where I can find your son, Richard?’

‘Already bloody told yer,’ the old man grumbled. ‘Plot 437, row 12. She goes there every year.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What my husband is trying to tell you is that you are twenty years too late,’ she said.

‘Too late?’ Grace was getting all kinds of bad, confused signals.

‘When he was twenty-one,’ Joan Tripwell said. ‘Richard went to a party and forgot to take his Ventolin inhaler – he always had to carry it with him. He had a particularly bad asthma attack.’ Her voice was faltering. She sniffed and dabbed her eyes. ‘His heart gave out.’

Grace stared at her in astonishment.

As if reading some uncertainty in his face, Joan Tripwell said emphatically, ‘Poor soul, he died. He never really had his life.’

112

After an hour’s drive back, a very despondent Roy Grace reported his findings to the Operation Chameleon team in MIR One, then he sat down and began reviewing all the evidence that they had for Brian Bishop.

Convinced that Joan Tripwell had been telling the truth, he was left with a number of anomalies that did not quite fit together. It was like trying to hammer pieces into a jigsaw that looked sort of right but were not the exact shape.

He was bothered by the details of the twin that the Superintendent Registrar had read out to him. Grace re-read the notes he had written down in the town hall, then rechecked Bishop’s birth certificate and his adoption certificate. He had been born on 7 September at three forty-seven – eighteen minutes earlier than his brother, Frederick Roger Jones, who was renamed Richard, and died at the age of twenty-one.

So why had Social Services told Joan Tripwell that the other twin had died?

He rang the post-adoption counsellor, Loretta Leberknight. She responded cheerily that in those days it was exactly the kind of thing that Social Services might do. They didn’t like to split up twins, but there was, even back then, a long list of people waiting to adopt. If one had been sickly, in an incubator for a period of time, they might have made the decision to put the healthy one out for adoption, then, if the other survived, tell a white lie in order to satisfy another couple desperate for a child.

It had happened to her, she added. She had a twin yet her adoptive parents were never informed of that.

From his experiences with the hag earlier, he could well believe they were capable of anything.

Grace put the CCTV footage up on the monitor in the room and stared at it, checking it against the detailed mobile phone log that DC Corbin had prepared. That man up on the screen was Brian Bishop. He was absolutely certain, unless the man had an exact double. But the fact that the log showed him leaving the immediate vicinity of the Lansdowne Place Hotel and then returning to it made the chance of an accidental double, in exactly the right place at the right time, too big a coincidence to accept.

On his pad he wrote down the word complicity , followed by a big question mark.

Had someone gone to the trouble of having surgery to make himself look like Brian Bishop? Then somehow obtained fresh semen from the man?

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of his name being called, and he turned his head. He saw the heavily bearded figure of George Erridge, from the Photographic Unit. Erridge, who always looked like an explorer just returned from an expedition, was walking towards him excitedly, holding a sheaf of what looked like photographic paper in his hand.