Not Dead Enough

Munich.

Jesus. The thought struck him now for the first time.

Could Sandy have gone back to her roots?

She had often talked about going to visit. She had even tried to persuade her grandmother to go with her, and show her where they had lived, but for the elderly lady the memories were too painful. One day, Grace had promised Sandy, they would go there together.

A sharp crunch, followed by a snap, brought him back to the present moment.

Katie Bishop’s breasts were inverted, beneath peeled-back flaps of skin, the ribs, muscles and organs of her midriff now exposed. The heart, lungs, kidneys and liver were all glistening. With her heart no longer pumping, only a trickle of blood slid, sluggishly, into the concave metal table on which she lay.

Nadiuska, holding what looked like a pair of gardening shears, began cutting through the dead woman’s ribs. Each grisly, bone-crunching snap brought Grace, and all the other observers in this room, to a strange kind of focused silence. It didn’t matter how many post-mortems you had attended, nothing prepared you for this sound, this awful reality. This was someone who had once been a living, breathing, loving human being reduced to the status of meat on a butcher’s hook.

And for the very first time in his career, it was more than Grace could take. With all kinds of confusion about Sandy swirling in his mind, he stepped back, as far away from the table as he could get without actually leaving the room.

He tried to focus his thoughts. This woman had been killed by someone, almost certainly murdered. She deserved more than a distracted cop, fixated on a possible sighting of his long-gone wife. For the moment he had to try and push the phone call from Dick Pope to the back of his mind and concentrate on the business here.

He thought about her husband, Brian. The way he had behaved in the witness interview room. Something had not felt right. And then he realized what, in his tired, addled state, he had totally forgotten to do.

Something that he had recently learned that would tell him, very convincingly, whether Brian Bishop had been telling the truth or not.

22

Sophie stepped off the train at Brighton station and walked along the platform. Using her season ticket at the barrier, she came out on to the polished concourse floor. High above her a lone pigeon flew beneath the vast glass roof. A tannoy announcement echoed around the building, a tired male voice reeling off a list of places some train was going to be stopping at.

Perspiring heavily in the clammy, airless heat, she was parched. She stopped at the news kiosk to buy a can of Coke, which she snapped open and drained in two draughts. She desperately, just desperately, wanted to see Brian.

Then, right in front of her nose, she saw the black scrawled letters on the white Argus news billboard: WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN MILLIONAIRE’S HOME.

She dropped the empty can in a bin and snatched up a copy of the newspaper from a pile on the stand.

Beneath the headline, with the same words, was a colour photograph of an imposing, mock-Tudor house, the driveway and street outside sealed with crime scene tape and cluttered with vehicles, including two marked police cars, several vans and the large square slab of a Major Incident vehicle. Much smaller, offset, was a black and white photograph showing Brian Bishop in a bow tie and an attractive woman with an elegant tangle of hair.

The copy beneath read:

The body of a woman was found at the Dyke Road Avenue mansion of wealthy businessman Brian Bishop, 41, and his wife, Katie, 35, early this morning. A Home Office pathologist was called to the house and a body was subsequently removed from the premises.

Sussex Police have launched an inquiry, headed by Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of Sussex CID.

Brighton-born Bishop, the Managing Director of International Rostering Solutions PLC, one of this year’s Sunday Times 100 fastest-growing UK companies, was unavailable for comment. His wife is on the committee of Brighton-based children’s charity the Rocking Horse Appeal and has raised money for many local causes.

A post-mortem was due to be carried out this afternoon.

Feeling sick in the pit of her stomach, Sophie stared at the page. She had never seen Katie Bishop’s picture before, had no idea what she looked like. God, the woman was beautiful. Way more attractive than she was – and could ever be. She looked so classy, so happy, so –

She dropped the newspaper back on the pile, in even more turmoil now. It had always been hard to get Brian to talk about his wife. And at the same time, although one part of her had had a burning curiosity to know everything about the woman, another part had tried to deny she existed. She had never had an affair with a married man before, never wanted to have one – she had always tried to live her life by a simple moral code. Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to you.

All that had fallen over when she’d met Brian. He had, quite simply, blown her off her feet. Mesmerized her.