Peter James - Not Dead Enough

One of the officers sprinted up the road. Cleo stared down at the writhing, blackened figure. He was shaking, vibrating, as if he was plugged into an electrical socket. She was scared that he was dying. She knelt beside him. She wanted to hold his hand, to comfort him, but it looked so painfully blackened. ‘You’ll be OK,’ she said gently. ‘You’ll be OK. Help’s coming. There’s an ambulance coming! You’re going to be fine.’

He was rolling his head from side to side, his mouth open, the lips blistered, making pitiful croaking sounds.

He was just a kid. Maybe not even twenty. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him gently.

He was barely able to focus on her.

‘You’ll be OK. You will!’

The officer came running back, holding two coats. ‘Help me wrap these around him.’

‘He’s covered in molten fabric – do you think we should try and get it off?’ she asked.

‘No, just get these around him, tight as we can.’

She heard a siren in the distance, faint at first, but rapidly getting louder. Then another. Followed by a third.

From the darkness of the interior of his Prius, the Time Billionaire watched Cleo Morey and the two police officers kneeling on the ground. He heard the sirens. A splinter of blue light skittered past his eyes. He watched the first police car arrive. Two fire engines, then a third. An ambulance.

He watched everything. He didn’t have anything else to spend his time on tonight. He was still there, watching, as dawn was breaking, and the low-loader arrived and craned the MG, its interior all blackened but the exterior looking fine, considering, out of its space and carted it away.

Suddenly the street seemed quiet. But inside his car the Time Billionaire was raging.

103

The alarm was due to go off in a few minutes, at five thirty, but Roy Grace was already wide awake, listening to the dawn chorus, thinking. Cleo was awake too. He could hear the scratching of her eyelashes on the pillow each time she blinked.

They lay on their sides, two spoons. He held her naked body tightly in his arms. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

‘I love you so much,’ she whispered back. Her voice was full of fear.

He had still been in the office at one a.m., preparing for his meeting with the CPS solicitor, when she’d rung him, sounding truly terrible. He’d gone straight over to her house and then, in between comforting her, had spent much of the next hour on the phone, tracking down the two officers who had first arrived on the scene. Eventually he had got through to an undercover PC on the Car Crime Unit called Trevor Sallis, who explained what they had been doing. It had been a sting to catch the ringleader of a gang.

According to Sallis, a local lowlife villain had been cooperating with the police and, in one of life’s coincidences, it had been Cleo’s car that was targeted. Something had gone badly wrong, it appeared, in the thief’s attempt to hot-wire it. MG TF cars were, it appeared, notoriously hard to steal.

The explanation had calmed Cleo down. But something that he couldn’t quite put a finger on bothered Grace deeply about the incident. The would-be thief was now in the intensive care unit at the Royal Sussex County Hospital – God help him in that place, he thought privately – and was due to be transferred, if he survived the next few hours, to the burns unit at East Grinstead. The other officer, Paul Packer, was also in the same hospital, with severe, but not life-threatening, burns.

What could make a car catch fire? A lowlife jerk, fiddling with wires he did not understand, rupturing a fuel pipe?

The thoughts were still churning through his tired brain when the alarm started beeping. He had exactly one hour to get home, shower, put on a fresh shirt – there was another press conference scheduled for later this morning – and get to the office.

‘Take the day off,’ he said.

‘I wish.’

He kissed her goodbye.

Chris Binns, the CPS solicitor who had been allocated to the Katie Bishop case, was in Grace’s opinion – which was one shared by a good many other officers – several miles up his own backside. The two of them had had plenty of encounters in the past, and there wasn’t a huge amount of love lost.

Grace viewed his own job as, principally, to serve decent society by catching criminals and bringing them to justice. Binns viewed his priority as saving the Crown Prosecution Service unwarranted expense in pursuing cases where they might not secure a conviction.

Despite the early hour, Binns entered Grace’s office looking – and smelling – as fresh as a rose. A tall, trim man in his mid-thirties, sporting a bouffant hairstyle, he had a large, aquiline nose, giving his face the hawkish look of a bird of prey. He was dressed in a well-cut dark grey suit that was too heavy for this weather, Grace thought, a white shirt, sharp tie and black Oxfords that he must have spent the whole night buffing.

‘So nice to see you, Roy,’ he said in his supercilious voice, giving Grace’s hand a limp, moist shake. He sat down at the small, round conference table and placed his upright black calfskin attaché case down on the floor beside him, giving it a stern look for a moment, as if it was a pet dog he had commanded to sit. Then he opened the case and produced a large, hard-bound notebook from it, and a Montblanc fountain pen from his breast pocket.

‘I appreciate your coming in so early,’ Grace said, stifling a yawn, his eyes heavy from tiredness. ‘Can I get you any tea, coffee, water?’

‘Some tea. Milk, no sugar, thanks.’

Grace picked up the phone and asked Eleanor, who had also come in early, at his request, to get them one tea, and a coffee that was as strong as she could possibly make it.

Binns read through the notes in his book for a moment, then looked up. ‘So you arrested Brian Desmond Bishop at eight p.m. on Monday?’

‘Yes, correct.’

‘Can you recap on your grounds for charging him? Any issues we should be concerned about?’

Grace summarized the key evidence as being the presence of Bishop’s DNA in the semen found in Katie Bishop’s vagina, the insurance policy taken out on her life just six months previously, and her infidelity. He also pointed out Bishop’s two previous convictions for violent acts against women. He raised the issue of Bishop’s alibi, but then showed the solicitor the time-line sheet he had typed up last night, after getting back from London, demonstrating that Bishop would have had enough leeway to get to Brighton and murder his wife – and then return to London.

‘I imagine he would have been a bit tired on the golf course on Friday morning,’ Chris Binns said drily.

‘Apparently he was playing a blinder,’ Grace said.

Binns raised an eyebrow and for a moment Grace’s spirits sank, wondering if Binns was now going to nitpick and request witness statements from Bishop’s golfing partners. But to his relief, all he added was, ‘Could have been on an adrenaline rush. From the excitement of the kill.’

Grace smiled. For a welcome change, the man was on his side.

The CPS solicitor shot his cuff, revealing elegant gold links, and frowned at his watch. ‘So, how are we doing now?’

Grace had been keeping a tight eye on the time. It was five to seven. ‘Following our conversation last night, Bishop’s solicitor was contacted. He’s meeting with his client at seven. DS Branson, accompanied by DC Nicholl, will charge him.’

At seven thirty Glenn Branson and Nicholl, accompanied by a custody sergeant, entered the interview room, where Brian Bishop was already seated with his solicitor.

Bishop, in his paper suit, had dark rings under his eyes and his skin had already taken on a prison pallor. He had shaved, but clearly in a poor light or in a hurry, and had missed a couple of spots, and his hair was not looking as neat as before. After just thirty-six hours he was already looking like an old lag. That’s what prison did to people, Glenn knew. It institutionalized them more quickly than they realized.