Peter James - Not Dead Enough

40

I have read that devastating news has a strange impact on the human brain. It freezes time and place together, indelibly. Perhaps it is part of the way we humans are wired, to give us a warning signal marking a dangerous place in our lives or in the world.

I wasn’t born then, so I cannot vouch for this, but people say they can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, on 22 November 1963, that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas.

I can remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news, on 8 December 1980, that John Lennon had been shot dead. I can also remember, very clearly, that I was sitting at my desk in my den, searching on the internet for the wiring loom for a 1962 Mark II Jaguar 3.8 saloon, on the morning of Sunday 31 August 1997, when I heard the news that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris.

Above all I can remember where I was and exactly what I was doing on that July morning, eleven months later, when I received the letter that ruined my life.

41

Roy Grace sat at his desk in his small, airless office in Sussex House, waiting for any news of Brian Bishop and filling in time before the eleven o’clock briefing. He was staring gloomily at the equally gloomy face of the seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout, stuffed and mounted in a glass case fixed to a wall in his office. It was positioned just beneath a round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in the The Bill , which Sandy bought for him in happier times in an auction.

He had bought the fish on a whim some years back, from a stall in the Portobello Road. He referred to it occasionally when briefing young, fresh-faced detectives, making an increasingly tired joke about patience and big fish.

On his desk in front of him was a pile of documents he needed to go through carefully, part of the preparations for the trial, some months ahead, of a man called Carl Venner, one of the most odious creeps he had ever encountered in his career. Hopefully, if he didn’t screw up on the preparations, Venner would be looking at the wrong end of several concurrent life sentences. But you could never be sure with some of the barmy judges that were around.

His evening meal, which he had chosen a few minutes ago from the ASDA superstore, also lay on his desk. A tuna sandwich still in its clear plastic box, stickered in yellow with the word Reduced! , an apple, a Twix chocolate bar and a can of Diet Coke.

He spent several minutes scanning the waterfall of emails, answering a few and deleting a load. It didn’t seem to matter how quickly he dealt with them, more poured in, and the number of unanswered ones in his inbox was rising towards the two hundred mark. Fortunately, Eleanor would deal with most of them herself. And she had already cleared his diary – an automatic process whenever he began a major crime investigation.

All she had left in was Sunday lunch with his sister, Jodie, whom he had not seen in over a month, and a reminder to buy a card and birthday present for his goddaughter, Jaye Somers, who would be nine next week. He wondered what to buy her – and decided that Jodie, who had three children either side of that age, would know. He also made a mental note that he would have to cancel the lunch if he went to Munich.

Over fifteen emails related to the police rugby team, which he had been made president of for this coming autumn. They were a sharp reminder that although it was gloriously warm today, in less than four weeks it would be September. Summer was coming to an end. Already the days were getting noticeably shorter.

He clicked on his keyboard to bring up the Vantage software for the force’s internal computer system and checked the latest incident reports log to see what had happened during the past couple of hours. Scanning down the orange lettering, there was nothing that particularly caught his eye. It was still too early – later there would be fights, assaults and muggings galore. An RTA on the London Road coming into Brighton. A bag-snatch. A shoplifter in the Boundary Road Tesco branch. A stolen car found abandoned at a petrol station. A runaway horse reported on the A27.

Then his phone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Guy Batchelor, a new recruit to his inquiry team, whom he had dispatched to talk to Brian Bishop’s golfing partners from this morning.

Grace liked Batchelor. He always thought that if you asked a casting agency to provide a middle-aged police officer for a scene in a film, the man they sent would look like Batchelor. He was tall and burly, with a rugger-ball-shaped head, thinning hair and a genial but businesslike demeanour. Although not huge, he had an air of the gentle giant about him – more in his nature than his physical mass.

‘Roy, I’ve seen all three people Bishop played golf with today. Just something I thought might be of interest – they all said he seemed in an exceptionally good mood, and that he was playing a blinder – better than any of them had ever seen him play.’

‘Did he give them any explanation?’

‘No, he’s quite a loner apparently, unlike his wife, who was very gregarious, they say. He doesn’t have any really close friends, normally doesn’t say much. But he was cracking jokes today. One of the men, a Mr Mishon, who seems to know him quite well, said it was as if he had taken a happy pill.’

Grace was thinking hard. Dead wife, big weight off his mind?

‘Not the sort of reaction of man who’s just killed his wife, is it, Roy?’

‘Depends how good an actor he is.’

After Batchelor had finished his report, adding little further, Grace thanked him and said he would see him at the eleven p.m. briefing. Then, thinking hard about what Batchelor had just said, he tore away the film covering of the sandwich, levered it out and took a bite. Instantly, he wrinkled his nose at the taste; it was some new exotic kind of bread he’d never tried before – and regretted trying now. It had a strong caraway flavour he did not like. He’d have been much happier with an egg and bacon all-day-breakfast sandwich, but Cleo had been trying to wean him on to a healthier diet by getting him to eat more fish – despite his regaling her with a detailed account of an article he’d read earlier in the year, in the Daily Mail , about the dangerous mercury levels in fish.

He exited Vantage, launched the website of expedia.com and entered a search for flights to Munich on Sunday, wondering whether it was possible to get out there and back on the same day. He had to go, no matter how slender the information from Dick Pope. Had to go and see for himself.

It was all he could do to stop himself from getting the next possible plane. Instead, he glanced at his watch. It was nine fifty. Ten fifty in Germany. But hell, Dick Pope would be up and about, he was on holiday. Sitting in some café or bar in Bavaria with a beer in his hand. He dialled Pope’s mobile, but it went straight to voicemail.

‘Dick,’ he said. ‘Roy again. Sorry to be a pest, but I just want to ask you a few more details about the beer garden where you think you saw Sandy. Call me when you can.’

He hung up and stared for a moment at his prize collection of three dozen vintage cigarette lighters, hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window, with its view down on the parking area and the cell block. They reflected how much Sandy loved trawling antiques markets, bric-à-brac shops and car-boot sales. Something he still did, when he had the time, but it had never been the same. Part of the fun had always been seeing Sandy’s reaction to something he picked up. Whether she would like it too, in which case they would haggle the price, or whether she would reject it with a single, disapproving scrunch of her face.