Peter James - Not Dead Enough

All the watches were different. The pink with the white face was the prettiest, the most delicate. ‘I don’t know what’s in and out with watches – would a nine-year-old girl consider this one cool?’

‘This one rocks, man. Totally. This is what they’re all wearing. You ever see that show on Saturday morning, Channel Four?’

Grace shook his head.

‘There was a kid on it last week wearing one of these. My daughter went mental!’

‘How much is it?’

‘Thirty quid. Comes in a nice box.’

Grace nodded, pulling out his wallet. At least that was one problem solved. Albeit, the smallest of the current crop.

There were some much bigger problems presented to him at the six-thirty briefing in the conference room at Sussex House that evening, the stifling heat in the room being the least of them. All twenty-two of the team present had their jackets off, and most of the men, like Grace, wore short-sleeved shirts. They kept the door open, creating the illusion that cooler air was wafting in from the corridor, and two electric fans whirred away noisily and uselessly. Everyone in the room was perspiring. Just as the last of them sat down, there was a rumble of thunder in the darkening sky.

‘There we go,’ Norman Potting said, with large blotches of damp on his cream shirt. ‘The traditional English summer for you. Two fine days followed by a thunderstorm.’

Several of the team smiled, but Grace barely heard him, he was wrapped up in so many thoughts. Cleo had still not called him back. He was booked on a seven a.m. flight to Munich, tomorrow, returning at nine fifteen p.m. But at least he had some help over there. Although he hadn’t spoken to Marcel Kullen in over four years, the man had returned his call within an hour and – so far as Grace could understand from Kullen’s erratic, broken English – the German detective was insisting on collecting him in person from the airport. And he had remembered to cancel Sunday lunch at his sister’s tomorrow – much to her disappointment and Cleo’s silent anger.

‘The time is six thirty, Saturday 5 August,’ he read out formally to the assembled company, from his notes prepared by Eleanor Hodgson. ‘This is our fourth briefing of Operation Chameleon, the investigation into the death of Mrs Katherine Margaret Bishop – known as Katie – conducted on day two following the discovery of her body at eight thirty yesterday morning. I will now summarize events following the incident.’

He kept the summary short, skipping some of the details, then finished by stating angrily that someone had leaked the crucial piece of information about the gas mask to the Argus reporter, Kevin Spinella. Glaring around the room, he asked, ‘Anyone know how this information got to him?’

Blank expressions greeted him.

Irritable because of the heat, and Cleo, and every damn thing at the moment, he thumped his fist down on the table. ‘This is the second time this has happened in recent months.’ He shot a glance at his deputy, Inspector Kim Murphy, who nodded as if in confirmation. ‘I’m not saying it was anyone in this room,’ he added. ‘But by hell or high water I’m going to find out who was responsible, and I want you to all keep your ears to the ground. OK?’

There were general nods of consensus. Then a brief moment of heavy silence, broken by a flit of lightning and the sudden flicker of all the lights in the room. Moments later there was another rumble of thunder.

‘On an organizational point, I won’t be here for tomorrow’s briefings – these will be taken by DI Murphy.’

Kim Murphy nodded again.

‘I will be out of the country for a few hours,’ Grace continued. ‘But I’ll have my mobile phone and my BlackBerry, so I will be reachable at all times by phone and email. OK, so let’s have your individual reports.’ He looked down at his notes, checking the tasks that had been assigned, although he could remember most if not all of them in his head. ‘Norman?’

Potting’s voice was a deep, sometimes mumbled growl, coarsened by a rural burr. ‘I have something which may be significant, Roy,’ the Detective Sergeant said.

Grace signalled for him to continue.

Potting, a stickler for detail, related the information in the rather formal and ponderous terminology he might have used when making a statement from a witness box. ‘You asked me to check on all CCTV cameras in the area. I was looking through the Vantage log for all incidents that were reported during Thursday night, and observed that a plumber’s van, which had been reported stolen in Lewes on Thursday afternoon, had been found abandoned on the slip road of a BP petrol station, on the westbound carriageway of the A27, two miles east of Lewes, early yesterday morning.’

He paused to flick back a couple of pages of his lined notebook. ‘I made the decision to investigate because it struck me as strange—’

‘Why?’ DS Bella Moy rounded on him. Grace knew that she couldn’t stand Potting and would grab any opportunity to put him down.

‘Well, Bella, it struck me that a van full of plumbing tools would hardly be the vehicle of choice for most joyriders,’ he replied, provoking a ripple of mirth. Even Grace allowed himself a thin smile.

Stony-faced, Bella retorted, ‘But it might be for a crooked plumber.’

‘Not with what plumbers charge – they all drive Rollers.’

This time the laughter was even louder. Grace raised a silencing hand. ‘Can we just keep to business, please? We’re dealing with something very serious.’

Potting ploughed on. ‘It just didn’t feel right to me. A plumber’s van being abandoned. Around the same time Mrs Bishop was killed. I can’t explain why I made any connection – just call it a copper’s nose.’

He looked at Grace, who responded with a nod. He knew what Potting meant. The best policemen had instincts. Intuition. The ability to tell – smell – when something was right or wrong, for reasons they could never logically explain.

Bella glared childishly at Norman Potting, as if trying to stare him out. Grace made a mental note to speak to her about her attitude afterwards.

‘I went to the BP petrol station this morning and requested permission to view and interrogate the forecourt’s CCTV camera footage for the previous night. The staff were obliging, partly because they’d had two people drive off without paying them.’ Potting suddenly looked straight back at Bella smugly. ‘The camera takes one frame every thirty seconds. When I studied the images, they revealed a BMW convertible, which had pulled in just before midnight, which I later ascertained was the vehicle belonging to Mrs Bishop. I was also able to identify a woman walking to the petrol station’s shop as Mrs Bishop.’

‘This could be significant,’ Grace said.

‘It gets better.’ Now the veteran detective was looking even more pleased with himself. ‘I checked the interior of the car afterwards, at the Bishops’ residence in Dyke Road Avenue, and found a pay-and-display parking ticket, issued at five eleven p.m. on Thursday afternoon from a machine in Southover Road in Lewes. The stolen van was taken from a car park just behind Cliffe High Street – about five minutes’ walk away.’

Potting said nothing further. After some moments Grace prompted him, ‘And?’

‘I can’t add anything further at this stage, Roy. But I have a feeling that there’s a connection.’

Grace looked at him, hard. Potting, with a disastrous personal life, and enough political incorrectness to inflame half of the United Nations, had, despite all that baggage, produced impressive results before. ‘Keep on it,’ he said, and turned to DC Zafferone.

Alfonso Zafferone had been assigned to the important but tedious job of working out the time-lines. Insolently chewing gum, he reported on his work with the HOLMES team, plotting the sequence of events surrounding the discovery of Katie Bishop’s body.