by Peter James
‘What is this about?’ Bishop asked.
‘We need to speak to you about your wife, sir. I’m afraid we have some rather bad news for you. I’d appreciate it if you could step into the clubhouse with us for a few minutes.’
‘My wife?’
The DS pointed towards the clubhouse. ‘We really need to speak in private, sir.’
�
8
Sophie Harrington did a quick mental count of the dead bodies. There were seven on this page. She flipped back. Eleven, four pages ago. Add those to four in a car bomb on page one, three blown away by a burst of Uzi fire on page nine, six on a private jet on page nineteen, fifty-two in a fire-bombed crack den in Willesden on page twenty-eight. And now these seven, drug runners on a hijacked yacht in the Caribbean. Eighty-three so far, and she was only on page forty-one of a 136-page screenplay.
Talk about a pile of poo!
Yet, according to the producer who had emailed it two days ago, Anthony Hopkins, Matt Damon and Laura Linney were attached, Keira Knightley was reading it, and the director Simon West, who had made Lara Croft, which she had thought was OK, and Con Air, which she had really liked, was, apparently, gagging to make it.
Yeah, sure.
The tube train was pulling into a station. The spaced Rastafarian opposite her, earphones plugged in, continued to knock his raggedly clad knees together in tune with his jigging head. Beside him sat an elderly, wispy-haired man, asleep, his mouth gaping open. And beside him a young, pretty Asian girl reading a magazine with intense concentration.
At the far end of the carriage, sitting beneath a swinging grab-handle and an advertisement for an employment agency, was a creepy-looking shell-suited jerk in a hoodie and dark glasses, long-haired with a beard, face buried in one of those free newspapers they give out in the rush hour at tube station entrances, occasionally sucking the back of his right hand.
It had been Sophie’s habit, for some time now, to check out all the passengers for what she imagined the profile of a suicide bomber to be. It had become one more of her survival checks and balances, like looking both ways before crossing a road, that were part of the automatic routine of her life. And at this moment her routine was in slight disarray.
She was late, because she’d had to run an errand before coming into town. It was ten thirty and ordinarily she would have been in the office an hour ago. She saw the words Green Park sliding past; the advertisements on the wall turn from a blur into images and clear print. The doors hissed open. She turned back to the script, the second of two which she had intended to finish reading last night before she had been interrupted – but wow, what an interruption! God – even just thinking about it was making her dangerously horny!
She flipped the page, trying to concentrate, in the hot, stuffy carriage, in the few minutes she had left before the next stop, Piccadilly, her destination. When she got to the office she would have to type a script report.
The story so far . . . Squillionaire daddy, distraught after beautiful twenty-year-old daughter – and only child – dies from a heroin overdose, hires former mercenary turned hit man. Hit man is given unlimited budget to track down and kill every person in the chain, from the man who planted the poppy seed to the dealer who sold the fatal fix to his daughter.
The logline: Death Wish meets Traffic.
And now they were pulling into Piccadilly. Sophie crammed the script, with its classy bright red cover, into her rucksack, between her laptop, a copy of the chick-lit book, Alphabet Weekends, which she was halfway through, and a copy of the August edition of Harpers & Queen. It wasn’t her kind of magazine, but her beloved – her fella, as she discreetly referred to him to everyone but her two closest friends – was some years older than her, and a lot more sophisticated, so she tried to keep up to speed with the latest in fashion, in food, in pretty well everything, so that she could be the smart, hip girl-about-town that suited his planet-sized ego.
A few minutes later she was striding in the clammy heat down the shady side of Wardour Street. Someone had once told her Wardour Street was the only street in the world that was shady on both sides – a reference to its being the home of both the music and the film industries. Not entirely untrue, she always felt.
Twenty-seven years old, long brown hair swinging around her neck and an attractive face with a pert snub nose, she wasn’t beautiful in any classic adman’s sense, but there was something very sexy about her. She was dressed in a lightweight khaki jacket over a cream T-shirt, baggy grungy jeans and trainers, and was looking forward, as always, to her day in the office. Although today she felt a pang of longing for her fella, not sure quite when she would see him next, and an even deeper pang of jealousy that tonight he would be at his home, sleeping in a bed with his wife.
She knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere, just could not see him giving up all that he had for her – even though he had ended a previous marriage, one from which he had two children. But that did not stop her adoring him. She just couldn’t bloody help that.
She totally adored him. Every inch of him. Everything about him. Even the clandestine nature of their relationship. She loved the way he looked furtively around when they entered a restaurant, months before they had actually started sleeping together, in case he spotted someone who knew him. The texts. The emails. The way he smelled. His humour. The way he had started, recently, to arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Like last night. Always coming to her little flat in Brighton, which she thought was strange as he had a flat in London, where he lived alone during the week.
Oh shit, she thought, reaching the door to the office. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
She stopped and tapped out a text:
Missing you! Totally adore you! Feeling dangerously horny! XXXX
She unlocked the door and was halfway up the narrow staircase when there were two sharp beeps on her phone. She stopped and looked at the incoming text.
To her disappointment it was from her best friend, Holly:
RU free 4 party 2morrow nite?
No, she thought. I don’t want to go to a party tomorrow night. Nor any night. I just want—
What the hell do I want?
On the door in front of her was a logo: a symbol of lightning made in the image of celluloid. Beneath it the words, in shadowed letters, Blinding Light Productions.
Then she entered the small, hip office suite. It was all Perspex furniture – Ghost chairs and tables, aquamarine carpets, and posters on the walls of movies the partners in the company had at some time been involved with. The Merchant of Venice, with the faces of Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons. An early Charlize Theron movie that had gone straight to video. A vampire movie with Dougray Scott and Saffron Burrows.
There was a small reception area with her desk and an orange sofa, leading through to an open-plan office where sat Adam, Head of Business and Legal Affairs, shaven-headed, freckled, hunched in front of his computer, dressed in one of the most horrible shirts she had ever seen – at least since the one he wore yesterday – and Cristian, the Finance Director, staring at a coloured graph on his screen in deep concentration. He was dressed in one of his seemingly bottomless collection of fabulously expensive-looking silk shirts, this one in cream, and rather snazzy suede loafers. The black frame of his collapsed fold-up bike sat next to him.
‘Morning, guys!’ she said.
For a response, she received a brief wave of the hand from each.
Sophie was the company’s Head of Development. She was also the secretary, the tea-maker and, because the Polish cleaning lady was away having a baby, the office cleaner. And receptionist. And everything else.
‘I’ve just read a really crap script,’ she said. ‘Hand of Death. It’s dross.’
Neither of them took any notice.
‘Coffee, anyone? Tea?’
Now that did elicit an instant response. The usual for both of them. She went into the kitchenette, filled the kettle and plugged it in, checked the biscuit tin �
�� which contained just a few crumbs, as usual. No matter how many times a day she filled it, the gannets emptied it. Tearing open a packet of chocolate digestives, she looked at her phone. No response.
She dialled his mobile.
Moments later he answered and her heart did a back-flip. It was so great just to hear his voice!
‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said.
‘Can’t talk. Call you back.’ Colder than stone.
The phone went dead.
It was as if she had just spoken to a total stranger. Not the man she had shared a bed with, and a whole lot more, just a few hours ago. She stared at her phone in shock, feeling a deep, undefined sense of dread.
Across the street from Sophie’s office was a Starbucks. The shell-suited jerk in the hoodie and dark glasses who had been sitting at the far end of the tube train carriage was standing at the counter, the freebie newspaper rolled up under his arm, ordering a skinny latte. A large one. He was in no hurry. He put his right hand to his mouth and sucked on it to try to relieve the mild, tingling pain like a nettle sting.
As if on cue, a Louis Armstrong song began to play. Maybe it was playing inside his head, maybe inside this caf�He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter, he heard it, Louis was playing it just for him. His own private, favourite tune. His mantra. ‘We Have All the Time in the World’.
He hummed it as he collected his latte, picked up two biscotti, paid for them in cash and carried them over to a window seat. We have all the time in the world, he hummed again, to himself. And he did. Hell, the man who was near on a time billionaire had the whole damn day to kill, praise the Lord!
And he had a perfect view of the entrance to her office from here.
A black Ferrari drove along the road. A recent model, an F430 Spider. He stared at it unexcitedly as it halted in front of him, its path blocked by a taxi disgorging a passenger. Modern cars had never done it for him. Not in that way they did for so many people. Not in that must-have way. But he knew his way around them, all right. He knew all the models of just about every make of car on the planet, and carried most of their specifications and prices in his head. Another advantage of having plenty of time. Staring through the wheel spokes, he noticed this car had the Brembo brake upgrade, with 380mm ceramic discs with eight-pot callipers in front and four-pots at the rear. The weight saving was 20.5kg over steel.
The Ferrari passed from his line of vision. Sophie was up on the second floor, but he wasn’t sure which window. Didn’t matter; she was only ever going to go in and come out of this one door here, which he could see.
The song was still playing.
He hummed to himself happily.
�
9
The club secretary’s office at the North Brighton Golf Club had a military feel which reflected the secretary’s own background, as a retired army major who had managed to survive active service in the Falklands and Bosnia with his important bits – and most important of all, his golf handicap – intact.
There was a polished mahogany desk, piled with several orderly stacks of papers, as well as two small flags, one a Union Jack, the other sporting the green, blue and white logo of the club. On the walls were a number of framed photographs, some in sepia, of golfers and golf holes, and a collection of antique putters, crossed like duelling swords.
Bishop sat alone on a large leather sofa, staring up at Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson and Detective Constable Nick Nicholl in chairs facing him. Bishop, still wearing his golfing clothes and studded shoes, was sweating profusely, from the heat and from what he was hearing.
‘Mr Bishop,’ the tall, black Detective Sergeant said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your cleaning lady –’ he flipped back a couple of pages in his notepad – ‘Mrs Ayala, arrived at your house in Dyke Road Avenue, Hove, at eight thirty this morning to discover that your wife, Mrs Katherine Bishop –’ He paused expectantly, as if for confirmation that this was indeed her name.
Bishop stared blankly.
‘Um – Mrs Bishop did not appear to be breathing. An ambulance attended at eight fifty-two and the paramedics reported there were no responses to any of their checks for signs of life. A police surgeon attended at nine thirty and certified your wife dead, I’m afraid to say, sir.’
Bishop opened his mouth, his face quivering; his eyes seemed momentarily to have become disconnected and rolled around, as if not seeing anything, not locking on anything. A faint croak escaped from his throat: ‘No. Please tell me this isn’t true. Please.’ Then he slumped forward, cradling his face in his hands. ‘No. No. I don’t believe this! Please tell me it’s not true!’
There was a long silence, punctuated only by his sobs.
‘Please!’ he said. ‘It’s not true, is it? Not Katie? Not my darling – my darling Katie . . .’
The two police officers sat, motionless, in deep discomfort. Glenn Branson, his head pounding from his mighty hangover, was privately cursing for allowing himself to be bullied back to work early by Roy Grace, and being dumped into this situation. It had become normal for family liaison officers, trained in bereavement counselling, to break this kind of news, but it wasn’t the way his senior officer always operated. In a suspicious death, like this, Grace wanted either to do it himself or to have one of his close team members break the news and immediately observe the reactions. There would be time enough for the FLOs to do their job later.
Since waking up this morning at Roy’s house, Glenn’s day had been a nightmare. First he’d had to attend the scene of death. An attractive red-headed woman, in her thirties, naked in a bed, manacled with two neckties, a Second World War gas mask beside her, and a thin bruise line around her neck that could have been caused by a ligature. Probable cause of death was strangulation, but it was too early to tell. A sex game gone wrong, or murder? Only the Home Office pathologist, who would be arriving at the scene about now, would be able to establish the cause of death for certain.
The sodding bastard Grace, whom he totally idolized – but sometimes was not sure why – had ordered him to go home and change, and then break the news to the husband. He could have refused, he was still off sick; and he probably would have refused if it had been any other police officer. But not Grace. And in some ways, at the time, he had been quite grateful for the distraction from his woes.
So he had gone home, accompanied by DC Nick Nicholl, who kept blathering on about his newborn baby and the joys of fatherhood, and found to his relief that Ari was out. So now, shaved, suited and booted, he found himself in this establishment golf clubhouse, breaking the news and watching Bishop’s reactions like a hawk, trying to divorce emotion from the job he was here to do. Which was to assess the man.
It was a fact that around 70 percent of all murder victims in the UK were killed by someone they knew. And in this case, the husband was the first port of call.
‘Can I go to the house and see her? My darling. My—’
‘I’m afraid not to the house, sir, that’s not possible until forensics have finished. Your wife will be taken to the mortuary – probably later this morning. You will be able to see her there. And we will need you to identify her body, I’m afraid, sir.’
Branson and Nicholl watched in silence as Bishop sat, cradling his face in his hands, rocking backward and forward on the sofa.
‘Why can’t I go to the house? To my home? Our home!’ he suddenly blurted.
Branson looked at Nicholl, who was conveniently staring out of the wide window at four golfers putting out the ninth. What the hell was the tactful way of saying this? Staring back hard at Bishop, watching his face, in particular his eyes, he said, ‘We can’t go into detail, but we are treating your house as a crime scene.’
‘Crime scene?’ Bishop looked bewildered.
‘I’m afraid so, sir,’ Branson said.
‘What – what kind of a crime scene do you mean?’
Branson thought for some moments, really focusing his mind. There just wasn’t any easy way to say thi
s. ‘There are some suspicious circumstances about your wife’s death, sir.’
‘Suspicious? What do you mean? What? In what way?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say. We will have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’
‘Pathologist?’ Bishop shook his head slowly. ‘She’s my wife. Katie. My wife. You can’t tell me how she died? I’m – I’m her husband.’ His face dropped back into his hands. ‘She’s been murdered? Is that what you are saying?’
‘We can’t go into detail, sir, not at this moment.’
‘Yes, you can. You can go into detail. I’m her husband. I have a right to know.’
Branson stared back at him levelly. ‘You will know, sir, as soon as we do. What we would appreciate is for you to come to our headquarters in order that we can talk to you about what has happened.’
Bishop raised his hands. ‘I – I’m in the middle of a golf tournament. I . . .’
This time Branson made eye contact with his colleague and each clocked the other’s raised eyebrows. It was an odd priority. But in fairness, when in shock people often said strange things. It wasn’t necessarily worth reading anything into it. Besides, Branson was partially preoccupied with trying to remember how long it was since he had last swallowed any paracetamols. Whether it was safe to take a couple more now. Deciding it was OK, he surreptitiously dug his hand into his pocket, popped a couple of capsules from their foil wrapper and slung them into his mouth. Attempting to swallow them with just saliva, it felt as if they had lodged halfway down his throat.
‘I’ve explained the situation to your friends, sir. They are carrying on.’ He tried swallowing again.
Bishop shook his head. ‘I’ve screwed up their chances. They’ll be disqualified.’
