Not Dead Enough

‘Thailand,’ Potting answered. He smiled at the ladies, as if imagining they would be impressed by such an exotic traveller.

‘Brought yourself back a nice suntan, didn’t yer?’

‘Brought myself back more than that,’ Potting said, beaming now. He held up his hand, then raised his third finger, which sported a plain gold wedding band.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zafferone said. ‘A wife?’

Bella popped a half-melted Malteser into her mouth. She spoke with a voice that Grace liked a lot. It was soft but always very direct. Despite looking, beneath her tangle of hair, like she was sometimes in another world, Bella was very sharp indeed. She never missed anything. ‘So that’s your fourth wife now, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, still beaming, as if it were an achievement to be proud of.

‘Thought you weren’t going to get married again, Norman,’ Grace said.

‘Well, you know what they say, Roy. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change a man’s mind.’

Bella smiled at him with more compassion than humour, as if he were some curious but slightly grotesque exhibit in a zoo.

‘So where did you meet her?’ Zafferone asked. ‘In a bar? A club? A massage parlour?’

Looking coy suddenly, Potting replied, ‘Actually, through an agency.’

And for a moment, Grace saw a rare flash of humility in the man’s face. A shadow of sadness. Of loneliness.

‘OK,’ Nick Nicholl said, sitting back down at the workstation and putting his phone back in his pocket. ‘We have something of interest.’ He put his notepad on the surface in front of him.

Everyone looked at him with intensity.

‘Gatwick airport’s on security alert. ANPR cameras have been installed on the approach bridges either side of the M23. A Bentley Continental car, registered to Brian Bishop, was picked up by one at eleven forty-seven last night. He was on the south-bound carriageway, heading towards Brighton. There was a technical problem with the north-bound camera, so there is no record of him returning to London – if he did.’

ANPR was the automatic number plate recognition system increasingly used by the police and security services to scan vehicles entering a particular area.

Glenn Branson looked at Grace. ‘Seems like he failed your blink test, Roy. He told us a porky. He said he was tucked up in bed in London at that time.’

But Grace wasn’t upset about this. Suddenly his spirits lifted. If they could force a confession out of Brian Bishop, tonight perhaps, then with luck the investigation would be over almost before it had begun. And he could go straight to Munich – perhaps as early as tomorrow. Another option would be to leave Kim Murphy running the inquiry, but that wasn’t the way he operated. He liked to be fully hands on, in charge of everything, overseeing every detail. It was when you had someone working with you, at almost your level, that mistakes happened. Important things could easily fall between the cracks.

‘Let’s go and have a word with the FLOs,’ he said. ‘See if we can find out more about his car. See if we can jog Bishop’s memory for him.’

30

At a quarter past seven, the sun was finally starting to quit the Sussex coast. The Time Billionaire sat at a table at a crowded outdoor cafe, sipping his third Coke Zero and occasionally scraping out more remains of pecan ice cream from the glass in front of him, to help pass the time. Spending some of his time dollars, his time pounds, his time euros. Might as well spend it, you couldn’t take it with you.

He brought his right hand up to his mouth and sucked for some moments. That stinging pain was still there and, he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, the row of tiny red marks, surrounded by faint bruising the colour of a nicotine stain, seemed to be looking steadily more livid.

A steel band was playing a short distance away. ‘Island in the Sun’.

He’d been going to go to an island in the sun once. Everything had been all set and then the thing had happened. Life had pissed on him from a great height. Well, not life exactly, no, no, no.

Just one of its inhabitants.

The air tasted salty. It smelled of rope, rust, boat varnish and, every few minutes, a sudden faint but distinct reek of urine. Some time after the sun had gone, the moon would rise tonight. Men had pissed on that too.

The receipt for his bill, already paid, lay pinned under the ashtray, flapping like a dying butterfly in the light sea breeze. He was always prepared, always ready for his next move. Could never predict what that would be. Unlike the sun.