At least the hysterical cleaning lady had been removed from the house. God alone knew how much she had already contaminated the crime scene, by ripping off the gas mask and running around like a headless chicken.
After he’d managed to calm her down, she’d provided him with some information. She knew that the dead woman’s husband, Brian Bishop, spent most of the week in London. And that this morning he was playing in a golf tournament at his club, the North Brighton – a club far too expensive for most police officers to afford, not that Grace was a golfer anyway.
The SOCO team had arrived a while ago and were hard at work. One officer was on his hands and knees on the carpet, searching for fibres; one was dusting the walls and every surface for fingerprints; and their forensic scene manager, Joe Tindall, was carrying out a room-to-room survey.
Tindall, who had recently been promoted from Scene of Crime Officer to Scientific Support Officer, which gave him responsibility for the management of several different crime scenes simultaneously if the need arose, appeared now out of the en-suite bathroom. He had recently left his wife for a much younger girl and had had a complete makeover. Grace never ceased to be amazed at the man’s transformation.
Only a few months ago, Tindall had resembled a mad scientist, with a paunch, wiry hair and bottle-lensed glasses. He now sported a completely shaven head, a six-pack, a quarter-inch-wide vertical strip of beard running from the centre of his lower lip down to the centre of his chin, and hip rectangular glasses with blue-tinted lenses. Grace, who was going out with a woman again for the first time in many years, had recently tried to sharpen up his own image. But, a tad enviously, he realized he was nowhere close to the hip, cooler-than-thou Tindall.
Every few moments the dead woman was suddenly, vividly, illuminated for a millisecond by the flash of a camera. The photographer, an irrepressibly cheerful silver-haired man in his late forties called Derek Gavin, used to have a portrait studio in Hove, before the world of home digital photography had dented his profits enough to make him pack it in. He joked, darkly, that he preferred crime-scene work, because he never had to worry about making corpses sit still or smile.
The best news of the morning, so far, was that his favourite Home Office pathologist had been assigned to this case. Spanish-born, of Russian aristocratic descent, Nadiuska De Sancha was fun, irreverent at times, but brilliant at her work.
He stepped carefully around the body of the woman, and there were moments when he felt the marks of the ligature around his own neck, then inside his gut. Everything inside him tightened. What goddamn sadist had done this? His eyes dropped to the tiny stain on the white sheet just below her vagina. Where semen had leaked out?
It was always a problem for him, whenever a young woman died. He wished desperately that someone else had been on duty today.
There was a phone on one of the gilded, reproduction Louis XIV bedside tables. Grace nearly picked it up, old habits dying hard. Under new
Then he did what he always liked to do at a potential crime scene, which was to wander around the area, immersed in his thoughts. His eye was caught, momentarily, by a striking modern painting on the wall. He peered at the artist’s name, Helen Steele, wondering if she was famous, and realizing again how little he knew about the art world. Then he went into the vast, en-suite bathroom and opened the glass door of a shower big enough to live in. He clocked the soap, the gels hanging on hooks, the shampoos. The mirrored cabinet door was open and he checked out the pills. Thinking all the time about the cleaning lady’s words.
So if Brian Bishop wasn’t here last night, having kinky sex with his wife, who was?
And if he killed her – why?
An accident?
The ligature mark shouted a very distinctive ‘No.’
As did his instinct.
12
Like many of the products of the early post-war building boom, Sussex House, a sleek, rectangular, two-storey building, was not ageing particularly well. The original architect had clearly been influenced by the Art Deco period and the place looked from some angles like the superstructure of a small, tired cruise liner.
Originally constructed in the early 1950s as a hospital for contagious diseases, at that time it had occupied a commanding, isolated position on a hill on the outskirts of Brighton, just beyond the suburb of Hollingbury, and the architect could no doubt have seen his vision in its full, stand-alone glory. But the ensuing years had not been kind. As the urban sprawl
