requisitioned all Bishop’s bank records to see if any premium was in fact ever paid. I suspect we may find he did genuinely have no knowledge of this.’ He sipped some coffee.
‘Pamela and Alfonso have been checking further into the criminal record of Bishop. They have been unable to find any mention of either crimes in the local or national press around the times they allegedly occurred, or around the dates of the convictions.’
He turned another page. ‘Yesterday evening in a raid on garage premises rented by Jecks, we discovered a duplicate set of licence plates identical to those on Brian Bishop’s Bentley. In a raid on his flat in Sackville Road, Hove, at the same time, we discovered evidence of an unhealthy obsession Jecks had – or rather, would appear to
Grace continued, listing what had been found at Jecks’s flat, although he held back the information about the three dialled numbers that he and Branson had found on the man’s pay-as-you-go phone, as they were not really supposed to have examined it, and it had now been passed to the Telecoms Unit.
When he had finished going through his notes, Norman Potting raised a hand. ‘Roy,’ he said, ‘I know it’s not strictly our case, but I did a ring around the Brighton and Hove travel agents this afternoon, asking if they had any record of a Janet McWhirter asking about flights to Australia back in April of this year. There’s a company called Aossa Travel. A lady there by the name of Lena found an inquiry form with the name of Janet McWhirter on it. She had put down her travelling companion as Norman Jecks.’
When the briefing meeting was complete, Grace went to his office. First he called the SIO on the Janet McWhirter inquiry and told him about Potting’s findings. Then he dialled Chris Binns, the Crown Prosecution Service solicitor for the Katie Bishop case, and brought him up to date on their findings.
Although the evidence seemed to be pointing increasingly away from Brian Bishop and towards his brother, it was still early days, and it would be reckless to move too quickly in freeing a suspect. Bishop was due to appear in court on Monday for his next remand hearing. The two men agreed on a strategy. Chris Binns would speak to Bishop’s solicitor and inform him that the Crown might be experiencing some difficulties with the prosecution as a result of new evidence coming to light. Provided Bishop would agree to keeping the police informed of his whereabouts, and to surrendering his passport, the bail application on Monday would not be contested by the CPS.
When Roy Grace finished the call, he sat in silence for a long time. There was one part of the puzzle still missing. One very big part. From one of the files on the pile on his desk, he removed Brian Bishop’s birth and adoption certificates, and those of his brother.
His door opened and Glenn Branson’s head appeared round. ‘I’m just off, old-timer,’ he said.
‘What you looking so happy about?’ Grace asked.
‘She’s letting me put the kids to bed tonight!’
‘Wow. Progress! Does that mean I get my house back soon?’
‘I dunno. One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’
Grace looked back down at the adoption certificates. Branson was right. One swallow did not indeed make a summer. Nor, it seemed, did two men under arrest make a solution to a puzzle.
Norman Jecks just said this morning that he spent the first months of his life in an incubator. And that his parents were dead. And according to his parents, he was dead.
Why were they lying about each other?
121
For the first time in what seemed a long, long week Grace was in bed before midnight. But he slept only fitfully, trying to move as little as possible as he lay awake in order not to disturb Cleo, who was naked and warm and sleeping like a baby in his arms.
Maybe when Norman Jecks was behind bars, he would start to relax. All the time he was at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, it was too easy for a man of his cunning to escape, despite the police guard. And every unfamiliar noise in the night was potentially a Norman Jecks footfall.
It was the Black & Decker power drill that Cleo had found in her broom cupboard that upset him – and her – the most. She had never owned an electric drill in her life and had had no workmen in the house recently. It was as if Jecks had left behind a souvenir of his visit, a little token, a reminder.
Because You Love Her.
The drill was now in an evidence bag, safely locked up in the crime scene evidence store at the Major Incident Suite. But the image of what it represented, and those words breathed at him earlier today by Jecks, from his hospital bed, would shadow him for a long time to come.
His mind returned to Sandy. To Dick Pope’s utter conviction that he and Lesley had seen her in Munich.
