Not Dead Enough

Tonight they had covered this distance in thirty-six minutes. At legal speeds, the journey would have taken closer to an hour. Branson really had been driving like the wind, and it was a miracle they hadn’t been stopped anywhere. With lighter traffic, or taking a different route, he reckoned it might be possible to knock five to ten minutes off this time. Which meant Bishop could have driven it in twenty-six minutes.

There were a number of factors to be considered. Phil Taylor’s restaurant receipt showed the bill had been paid at ten fifty-four on Thursday night. The clock on the credit card machine wouldn’t necessarily be 100 percent accurate – it could easily be a few minutes fast or slow. He made an assumption for the moment, erring on the side of caution to give Bishop the benefit of the doubt, that it was five minutes slow. So, he assumed Bishop had left the restaurant more or less exactly at eleven on Thursday night. The cab journey, assuming no traffic hold-ups, could have been done in fifteen minutes. Add on a couple of minutes for Bishop to get his car out of the underground parking area beneath his flat.

Bishop could have been in his car, on Westbourne Grove, by eleven twenty. The ANPR camera on the bridge of Junction 9 at Gatwick had clocked him at eleven forty-seven.

Twenty-seven minutes to do a journey that had just taken them thirty-six. And Bishop had a much more powerful car. The fastest saloon car in the world.

The ANPR camera clock wouldn’t necessarily be dead accurate either. There was a whole bunch of moving parts to this time-line. But what he was now certain of was that it was possible.

He turned the radio off.

‘Hey!’ Branson protested.

‘And don’t start playing that stuff in my house, or you’ll be out in the chicken shed.’

‘You don’t have a chicken shed.’

‘I’ll buy one in the morning.’

‘You’re crap at DIY. You’d never put it together.’

‘So you’ll have to hope it’s not raining.’ Then, serious, he asked, ‘Give me your assessment of Phil Taylor as a witness?’

‘He’s straight. Well flash, with that car and all. Cocksure.’

‘Covering for his client? In league with Bishop for the insurance money?’

Branson shook his head. ‘Didn’t strike me as the type. Ex-Inland Revenue special investigator? Nothing to say anyone isn’t a villain, but he just seemed straight to me. Regular guy, he was all right. But that car, though, bastard! I hate him for that!’

‘I think he’s straight too. And he’d come over as a credible witness in court.’

‘So?’

‘You did the journey in thirty-six minutes. On my calculations, Bishop would have needed to have done it in twenty-seven, but there’s give or take on either side.’

‘I could have gone faster.’

Grace winced at the thought. ‘You did it exactly right.’

‘So?’

‘We’re going to charge him.’

Grace pulled out his mobile phone and dialled the home number of the Crown Prosecution Service solicitor, Chris Binns, with whom he had already been liaising over the past couple of days, whose sanction he would require in order to formally charge Bishop. He informed the lawyer of his latest findings tonight, and the time constraints they were under with Bishop’s detention.

They arranged to meet at six thirty a.m. at Sussex House.

101

Cleo lay on a sofa in the downstairs living area, with an almost empty bottle of rose wine on the floor and a completely empty glass lying next to it. A DVD of Memoirs of a Geisha was playing on the large television screen, but she was struggling to keep her eyes open.

She shouldn’t really have drunk anything, she knew, being on call tonight – and she had an essay to write for her philosophy course – but finding Fish on the floor had really upset her. It was strange, she was thinking, that she saw dead human beings all day long and, with the exception of children, remained emotionally detached from them. But seeing little Fish lying sideways across the join between two oak planks, much of her vivid gold colour faded to a dull bronze, her opaque eye staring up at her, accusatory, as if saying, Why didn’t you come home and rescue me?

And how the hell had the little creature got there? If it had been yesterday, she could have blamed her cleaning lady, Marija, because the clumsy woman was always breaking things. But she didn’t come on Tuesdays. Could a cat have got in here?