Bishop stared down at his coffee, looking like a small, lost boy suddenly, as if talk of undertakers made it all too real for him to bear.
‘I just want to go back over a time sequence with you,’ Grace said, ‘to make sure I’ve got it right.’
‘Yes?’ Bishop gave him an almost pleading look.
Grace leaned towards the table and flicked back a few pages in his notebook. ‘You spent Thursday night in London, then you drove down to Brighton to play golf early on Friday morning.’ Grace turned back another page and read carefully for a moment. ‘At half past six yesterday morning, your concierge, Oliver Dowler, helped you load your golf clubs and your luggage into your car, you told us. That’s correct, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’d spent the night in London, after having dinner with your financial adviser, Mr Phil Taylor?’
‘Yes. He could vouch for that.’
‘He already has, Mr Bishop.’
‘Good.’
‘And your concierge has vouched that he helped you load your car at about six thirty in the morning.’
‘So he should.’
‘Indeed,’ Grace said. He studied his note pages again. ‘You are certain you didn’t go out anywhere in between having dinner with Mr Taylor and leaving in the morning?’
Brian Bishop hesitated, thinking about the bizarre phone conversation yesterday with Sophie, when she had been insisting that he slept with her after his dinner with Phil Taylor. That made no sense. There was no way on earth he could have driven an hour and a half down to her flat in Brighton, then back up to London again and not remembered.
Was there?
Looking at each police officer in turn, he said, ‘I didn’t. No. Absolutely not.’
Grace observed the man’s hesitation. Now wasn’t the moment to reveal the piece of information he had, that Bishop’s Bentley had been clocked by a camera heading towards Brighton at eleven forty-seven on Thursday night.
Grace had a number of detectives available to him in Sussex Police who were specifically trained in interviewing techniques and would put Bishop under pressure. He decided to hold back this nugget of information, so they could spring it on the man at the appropriate moment.
That interview process would begin when Grace decided to treat Bishop formally as a suspect. And he was fast approaching that decision.
47
On the two o’clock news on Southern Counties Radio, the murder of Katie Bishop remained the top story, as it had been on all of the bulletins he had caught throughout the past twenty-four hours. Each time he heard it, the story seemed a little more pepped up with carefully chosen words to make it increasingly glamorous. It was starting to sound like something from a soap opera, he thought.
Brighton
The news presenter, whose name was Dick Dixon, sounded young, although he looked older in his photograph on the BBC website, craggier and very different from his voice. His picture was up on the screen now, quite mean-looking, like the actor Steve Buscemi in
With the help of the editorial team behind him, Dick Dixon was trying his best to turn this bulletin, in which there were no fresh developments to report on the murder investigation, into one which gave the impression that a breakthrough was imminent. A sense of urgency was created by cutting to the taped voice of Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, from a press conference earlier today.
‘This is a particularly nasty crime,’ the Detective Superintendent said. ‘One in which the sanctity of a private home, protected by an elaborate alarm, was breached and a human life tragically and brutally destroyed. Mrs Bishop was a tireless worker for local charities and one of this city’s most popular citizens. We offer our deepest sympathy to her husband and all her family, and we will work around the clock to bring the evil creature who did this to justice.’
As he listened to the officer, he sucked his hand. The pain was getting worse.
