Not Dead Enough

There was no response.

He rapped again, even more loudly. ‘Police! Open up!’ Then he turned to Nicholl and told him to get the LST team to bring the battering ram.

Moments later two burly LST officers appeared, one of them holding the long, yellow, cylindrical door-busting ram.

‘OK, Chief ?’ he said to Grace.

Grace nodded.

He swung the ram at one of the glass panes. To everyone’s amazement, it bounced off. He swung it again, harder, and again it bounced off.

Both Branson and Nicholl frowned at him. ‘Didn’t eat enough spinach when you were a kid?’ the LST officer’s colleague joked.

‘Fuck this!’

His colleague, who was even more heavily built, took the implement and swung it. Moments later he was looking sheepish too, as it bounced back from the glass again.

‘Shit!’ the constable said. ‘He’s got armour-plated glass!’ He swung it at the door lock. The door barely moved. He swung it again, then again, breaking out into a sweat. Then he looked at Grace. ‘I don’t think he likes burglars.’

‘Obviously been taking advice from his local crime prevention officer,’ Nick Nicholl quipped, in a rare display of humour.

The constable signalled them to move out of the way, then took an almighty swing at the centre of the door, low down. It buckled, with wood splinters flying off.

‘Reinforced,’ he said grimly. He swung again, then again, until the wood was sheared away and he could see the steel plate behind it. It took another four swings of the ram before the plate had been bent back enough for someone to crawl through.

Six LST officers went in first, to establish if anyone was in the flat. After a couple of minutes one of them unlocked the damaged door from the inside and came back out. ‘The flat’s empty, sir.’

Grace thanked the LST team, then asked them to leave, explaining that he wanted to limit the number of officers on the premises in order to conduct a forensic search.

As Grace went in, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he found himself in a small, gloomy basement room, almost every inch of the shabbily carpeted floor covered in partially dismembered computer equipment, piles of motoring magazines and car manuals. It smelled damp.

At the far end of the room was a workstation, with a computer and keyboard. The entire wall in front of it was covered in newspaper cuttings and what looked like flow charts of family trees. To the right was an open door, with a dark passageway beyond.

He crossed the room, threading a careful path through the stuff on the floor, until he reached the ancient swivel chair at the workstation. Then he saw what was pinned up on the wall.

And he froze in his tracks.

‘Shit!’ Glenn Branson, now standing right beside him, said.

It was a gallery of news cuttings. Most of the pages, cut or torn from the Argus and from national newspapers, appeared to track Brian Bishop’s career. There were several photographs of him, including a wedding photograph of his marriage to Katie. Alongside was an article, on a pink page from the Financial Times, on the meteoric rise of his company, International Rostering Solutions PLC, talking about its entry, last year, into the Sunday Times list of the UK’s hundred fastest-growing companies.

Grace was vaguely aware of Branson, and other people, moving past him, pulling on rubber gloves, doors and drawers opening and closing, but his attention was riveted by another article sellotaped to the wall. It was the front page of a late edition of Monday’s Argus newspaper, carrying a large photograph of Brian Bishop and his wife, and a smaller, inset photograph of himself. In one of the columns beneath was a red ink ring around his words: Evil creature.

He read the whole passage:

‘This is a particularly nasty crime,’ Detective Superintendent Grace, the SIO, said. ‘. . . we will work around the clock to bring the evil creature who did this to justice.’

Nick Nicholl suddenly waved a flimsy, legal-looking document in front of him. ‘Just found this lease. He’s got a lock-up! Two in fact – in Westbourne Villas.’

‘Phone the incident room,’ Grace said. ‘Get someone to type up a new warrant and get it down to the same magistrate, then