Peter James - Not Dead Enough

Potting straightened the clumsy knot of his Sussex County Cricket Club tie, which was as frayed as his hair, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Well, I think I’ve got a bit of a result in another direction.’ He continued working on his knot.

‘We’re all ears,’ Grace said.

‘Katie Bishop was having an affair!’ the veteran DS announced triumphantly.

And now forty pairs of eyes were on him in sharp focus.

‘As some of you may recall,’ Potting continued, glancing down at his notepad for reference, ‘I had ascertained that a BMW convertible, registered to Mrs Bishop, was recorded by CCTV camera. It was at a BP petrol station on the A27, two miles east of Lewes, just before midnight last Thursday – the night she was killed,’ he reminded them all needlessly. ‘And I subsequently identified Mrs Bishop on the video footage at the petrol station. Then, in an examination of said vehicle at the Bishops’ residence on Friday afternoon, I found a pay-and-display parking ticket, with a time of –’ he checked his notes again – ‘five eleven on Thursday afternoon, issued from a machine in Southover Road, Lewes.’

He paused and fiddled with his knot again. Grace glanced at the window. Outside the sky was blue and clear. Summer was back again. As if yesterday afternoon had been a small glitch in the weather, a wrong lever pulled by someone.

‘I called in a favour owed to me by John Smith in the Telecoms Unit here at the CID HQ,’ Potting continued. ‘Got him to come in yesterday to examine the mobile phone belonging to Mrs Bishop. As a result of a Lewes number found stored in the mobile phone’s speed-dial memory, I was able to identify a Mr Barty Chancellor – a portrait painter of some international standing, I understand – at an address in Southover Street, Lewes.’

Potting now looked even more pleased with himself. ‘I went to question Mr Chancellor at four yesterday afternoon, at his premises, where he admitted that he and Mrs Bishop had been seeing each other for about a year. He was in a state of considerable distress, having read the news of Mrs Bishop’s death, and seemed quite pleased – if that’s the right way to say it – to have someone to pour his heart out to.’

‘What did you learn from him?’ Grace asked.

‘Seems like the Bishops weren’t quite the happy golden couple that the little local world thought they were. According to Chancellor, Bishop was obsessed with work and was never around. He didn’t seem to understand that his wife was lonely.’

‘Excuse me,’ Bella Moy interrupted angrily. ‘Norman, that’s just so typical of a man trying to justify an affair. Oh, her husband doesn’t bloody understand her, that’s why she fell into my arms, that’s the truth, gov! ’ The young DS looked around at the team, her face flushed. ‘Honestly, how many times has everyone heard that? It’s not always the husband who’s at fault – there are plenty of women who are real slappers out there!’

‘Tell me about it,’ Potting said. ‘I married three of them.’

‘Did Bishop know?’ Glenn Branson interrupted.

‘Chancellor doesn’t think so,’ the DS replied.

Grace wrote the name down on his pad thoughtfully. ‘So now we have another potential suspect.’

‘He’s quite a good painter. Mind you, he should be,’ Potting said. ‘Charges between five to twenty grand for a painting. Could buy a bloody car for that! Or a house, where my new missus comes from.’

‘Is that significant, Norman?’ Grace queried.

‘These arty types, some of ’em can be a bit kinky, that’s what I’m thinking. Read about Picasso still shagging women in his nineties.’

‘Oh, he’s a painter, so he must be a pervert. Is that what you are saying?’ Bella Moy was in a seriously bad mood with Potting today. ‘So he must have stuck a gas mask on Katie Bishop’s head and strangled her, right? So why don’t we stop wasting time – let’s go along to the Crown Prosecution Service with our evidence, get an arrest warrant for Chancellor and have done with it?’

‘Bella!’ Grace said firmly. ‘Thank you, that’s enough!’

She glared at Potting, her face flushed. Grace wondered for a moment whether her hostility towards the Detective Sergeant had something deep-rooted behind it. Had they ever been an item? He doubted it, looking at them now, contrasting the plug-ugly old warhorse with the fresh-faced, attractive thirty-five-year-old brunette divorcee. No way.

‘So did you discover anything in his premises to indicate he might be kinky?’ Kim Murphy asked. ‘Any gas masks hanging on the wall? Or in any of his paintings?’

‘He had a few raunchy nudes on the walls, I’m telling you! Not the kind of paintings you’d want your elderly mum to see. And there’s something very interesting I got out of him: he was with Mrs Bishop on Thursday night. Until nearly midnight.’

‘We need to bring him in for questioning, ASAP,’ Grace said.

‘He’s coming in at ten.’

‘Good. Who will be with you?’

‘DC Nicholl.’

Grace looked at Nick Nicholl. The young, fledgling father was stifling a yawn, barely keeping his eyes open. Clearly he’d had another bad night with his baby. He didn’t want a sleep-deprived zombie interviewing such an important witness. He looked at Zafferone. Much though he disliked the cocky youngster, Zafferone would be perfect, he thought. His arrogance would rub anyone up the wrong way, and particularly a sensitive artist. And often the best way to get something out of a witness was to wind them up, so they lost their rag.

‘No,’ Grace said. ‘DC Zafferone will interview him with you.’ He looked down at his typed agenda, then up at shaven-headed thirty-seven-year-old Joe Tindall, with his narrow strip of beard and blue-tinted glasses. ‘OK,’ he said formally. ‘We will now have a report from the Crime Scene Manager.’

‘First off,’ Joe Tindall informed them, ‘I’m expecting DNA results back this afternoon from Huntington from semen found in the vagina of Mrs Bishop.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘We are sending several exhibits from Ms Harrington’s flat off to the lab this morning. These include a small piece of flesh removed from her right big toenail, and a gas mask found on the victim’s face, which appears similar in type and manufacture to the one present at Mrs Bishop’s house.’

He took a swig of bottled water. ‘We are also sending clothing fibres recovered from Ms Harrington’s flat and blood samples. We believe the blood samples may be significant. We found blood smeared on the wall just above the bed where the victim was found, which is not consistent with the injuries found on the victim. So it may be the perp’s blood.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘All fingerprints found at both scenes to date have been eliminated from our inquiries, which would indicate that the killer of both women was either wearing gloves – the most likely scenario – or wiped them. However, using chemical enhancement we have found footprints on the tiled bathroom floor that are clearly not the victim’s. We will be analysing these for shoe type.’

Next, tough, sharp-eyed DC Pamela Buckley reported on a check she had run on all accident and emergency departments in hospitals in the area – the Sussex County, Eastbourne, Worthing and Haywards Heath – for people coming in with hand injuries.

‘We’re up against patient confidentiality,’ she said with more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Then she read out the list of hand-injury types that had been seen at each hospital – with no names attached – and treated. None were consistent with those Grace had seen on Brian Bishop’s hand, and none of the staff she had interviewed identified Bishop from his photograph.