Peter James - Not Dead Enough

She was a creature of habit, but her habits changed with her mood. For several months, day after day, she had taken an Itsu box of sushi back to her office for lunch, but then she had read an article about people getting worms from raw fish. Since then she had been hooked on a mozzarella, tomato and Parma ham ciabatta from this deli. A lot less healthy than sushi, but yummy. She’d had one for lunch almost every day for the past month – maybe even longer. And today, more than ever, she needed the comfort of familiarity.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘My darling, what’s happened? Please tell me?’

He was babbling, incoherent. ‘Golf . . . Dead . . . Won’t let me into the house . . . Police. Dead. Oh, Jesus Christ, dead.’

Suddenly the short, bald Italian behind the counter was thrusting the steaming sandwich, wrapped in paper, towards her.

She took it and, still holding her phone to her ear, stepped out into the street.

‘They think I did it. I mean . . . Oh, God. Oh, God.’

‘Darling, can I do something? Do you want me to come down?’

There was a long silence. ‘They were asking me – grilling me,’ Bishop blurted out. ‘They think I did it. They think I killed her. They kept asking me where I was last night.’

‘Well, that’s easy,’ she said. ‘You were with me.’

‘No. Thank you, but that’s not smart. We don’t need to lie.’

‘Lie?’ she replied, startled.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I feel so confused.’

‘What do you mean, We don’t need to lie ? Darling?’

A police car was roaring down the street, siren screeching. He said something, but his voice was drowned out. When the car had passed she said, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear. What did you say?’

‘I told them the truth. I had dinner with Phil Taylor, my financial adviser, then I went to bed.’ There was a long silence, then she heard him sobbing.

‘Darling, I think you missed something out. What you did after dinner with your financial adviser guy?’

‘No,’ he said, sounding a little surprised.

‘Hello! I know you are in shock. But you came down to my flat. Just after midnight. You spent the night with me – and you shot off about five in the morning, because you had to get your golf kit from your house.’

‘You’re very sweet,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want you to have to start lying.’

She froze in her tracks. A lorry rumbled past, followed by a taxi. ‘Lying? What do you mean? It’s the truth.’

‘Darling, I don’t need to invent an alibi. It’s better to tell the truth.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, suddenly feeling confused. ‘I’m not with you at all. It is the truth. You came over, we slept together, then you went off. Surely that’s the best thing, to tell the truth?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. It is.’

‘So?’

‘So?’ he echoed.

‘So you came to my flat some time after midnight, we made love – pretty wildly – and you left just after five.’

‘Except that I didn’t,’ he said.

‘Didn’t what?’

‘I didn’t come to your flat.’

She lifted the phone away from her ear for a moment, stared at it, then held it clamped to her ear again, wondering for a moment if she was going mad. Or if he was.

‘I – I don’t understand?’

‘I have to go,’ he said.

16

A small card, with a seductive photograph of an attractive-looking Oriental girl, was printed with the words ‘Pre-op transsexual’ and a phone number. Next to it was another card depicting a big-haired woman in leather, brandishing a whip. A stench of urine rose from a damp patch on the floor that Bishop had avoided standing in. It was the first time he had been in a public phone booth in years and this one didn’t exactly make him feel nostalgic. And apart from the smell, it felt like a sauna.

A chunk of the receiver had been smashed off, several of the glass panes were cracked and there was a chain with some fragments of paper attached, presumably belonging to the phone directory. A lorry had halted outside, its engine sounding like a thousand men hammering inside a tin shed. He looked at his watch. Two thirty-one p.m. It already felt like the longest day of his life.

What the hell was he going to say to his children? To Max and Carly. Would they actually care that they had lost their stepmother? That she had been murdered? They had been so poisoned against him and Katie by his ex-wife that they would probably not feel that much. And how, logistically, was he going to break the news? Over the phone? By flying to France to tell Max and Canada to tell Carly? They were going to have to come back early – the funeral – oh, Jesus. Or would they? Did they need to? Would they want to? Suddenly he realized how little he knew them himself.

Christ, there was so much to think about.

What had happened? Oh, my God, what had happened?

My darling Katie, what happened to you?

Who did this to you? Who? Why?

Why wouldn’t the damn police tell him anything? That up-his-own-backside tall black cop. And that Detective Inspector or Superintendent or whatever he was, Grace, staring at him as if he was the only suspect, as if he knew he had killed her.

His head spinning, he stepped out into the searing sunlight of Prince Albert Street, opposite the town hall, totally confused by the conversation he had just had, and wondering what he was going to do next. He had read a book in which it talked about just how much a mobile phone could give away about where you were, who you called and, for anyone who needed to know, what you said. Which was why, when he slipped out of the kitchen entrance of the Hotel du Vin, he had switched off his mobile and made for a public phone kiosk.

But the response he had got from Sophie was so utterly bizarre. Well, that’s crazy, you were with me . . . You came down to my flat, we slept together . . .

Except they hadn’t. He had parted with Phil Taylor outside the restaurant and the doorman had hailed him a cab, which he had taken back to his flat in Notting Hill, then collapsed, tired, straight into bed, wanting a decent night’s sleep before his golf game. He hadn’t gone anywhere, he was certain.

Was his memory playing tricks? Shock?

Was that it?

Then, like a massive, unseen wave, grief flooded up inside him and drew him down, into a void of darkness, as if there had been a sudden, instant, total eclipse of the sun and all the sounds of the city around him.

17

The post-mortem room at the mortuary was like nowhere else on earth that Roy Grace could imagine. It was a crucible in which human beings were deconstructed, back almost, it seemed sometimes, to their base elements. No matter how clean it might be, the smell of death hung in the air, clung to your skin and your clothes, and repeated on you wherever you were for hours after you had left.

Everything felt very grey in here, as if death leached away the colour from the surroundings, as well as from the cadavers themselves. The windows were an opaque grey, sealing the room off from prying eyes, the wall tiles were grey, as was the speckled tiled floor with the drain gully running all the way round. On occasions when he had been in here alone, with time to reflect, it even felt as if the light itself was an ethereal grey, tinged by the souls of the hundreds of victims of sudden or unexplained death who suffered the ultimate indignity here within these walls every year.

The room was dominated by two steel post-mortem tables, one fixed to the floor and the other, on which Katie Bishop lay – her face already paler than when he had seen her earlier – on castors. There was a blue hydraulic hoist and a row of steel-fronted fridges with floor-to-ceiling doors. Along one wall were sinks and a coiled yellow hose. Along another was a wide work surface, a metal cutting board and a macabre ‘trophy’ cabinet, a display case filled with grisly items – mostly pacemakers and replacement hip joints – removed from bodies. Next to it was a wall chart itemizing the name of each deceased, with columns for the weights of their brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. All that was written on it so far was: Katherine Bishop. As if she was the lucky winner of a competition, Grace thought grimly.