Bella glared childishly at Norman Potting, as if trying to stare him out. Grace made a mental note to speak to her about her attitude afterwards.
‘I went to the BP petrol station this morning and requested permission to view and interrogate the forecourt’s CCTV camera footage for the previous night. The staff were obliging, partly because they’d had two people drive off without paying them.’ Potting suddenly looked straight back at Bella smugly. ‘The camera takes one frame every thirty seconds. When I studied the images, they revealed a BMW convertible, which had pulled in just before midnight, which I later ascertained was the vehicle belonging to Mrs Bishop. I was also able to identify a woman walking to the petrol station’s shop as Mrs Bishop.’
‘This could be significant,’ Grace said.
‘It gets better.’ Now the veteran detective was looking even more pleased with himself. ‘I checked the interior of the car afterwards, at the Bishops’ residence in Dyke Road Avenue, and found a pay-and-display parking ticket, issued at five eleven p.m. on Thursday afternoon from a machine in Southover Road in Lewes. The stolen van was taken from a car park just behind Cliffe High Street – about five minutes’ walk away.’
Potting said nothing further. After some moments Grace prompted him, ‘And?’
‘I can’t add anything further at this stage, Roy. But I have a feeling that there’s a connection.’
Grace looked at him, hard. Potting, with a disastrous personal life, and enough political incorrectness to inflame half of the United Nations, had, despite all that baggage, produced impressive results before. ‘Keep on it,’ he said, and turned to DC Zafferone.
Alfonso Zafferone had been assigned to the important but tedious job of working out the time-lines. Insolently chewing gum, he reported on his work with the HOLMES team, plotting the sequence of events surrounding the discovery of Katie Bishop’s body.
The young DC reported that Katie Bishop had started the day of the night she died with a one-hour session at home with her personal trainer. Grace made a note that he was to be interviewed.
Next she had attended a beauty parlour in Brighton, where she had had her nails done. Grace jotted down that the staff there needed to be interviewed. That had been followed by lunch at Havana Restaurant in Brighton with a lady called Caroline Ash, the appeals organizer of a local charity for children, the Rocking Horse Appeal, to discuss plans for a fund-raising event that she and her husband were scheduled to host at their Dyke Road Avenue home in September. Grace wrote down that Mrs Ash was to be interviewed.
Mrs Bishop’s gruelling day, Zafferone said, with considerable sarcasm, continued with a visit to her hairdresser at three o’clock. After that the trail on her went cold. The information that Norman Potting had provided clearly filled in the gap.
The next report was from the latest recruit to Grace’s team, a tough, sharp-eyed female detective constable in her late thirties called Pamela Buckley – constantly confused by many with the family liaison officer Linda Buckley and so similar- looking, they could have been sisters. Both had blonde hair, Linda Buckley’s cropped boyishly short, Pamela’s longer, clipped up rather severely.
‘I found the taxi driver who drove Brian Bishop from the Hotel du Vin to the Lansdowne Place Hotel,’ Pamela Buckley said, and looked down at her notepad. ‘His name’s Mark Tuckwell and he drives for Hove Streamline. He has no recollection of Bishop hurting his hand.’
‘Could Bishop have injured himself without this driver knowing?’
‘It’s possible, sir, but unlikely. I asked him that. He said Bishop was completely silent throughout the journey. He felt that if he had injured himself, he’d have said something.’
Grace nodded, making notes, not convinced this got them anywhere.
Bella Moy then gave a detailed character report on Katie and Brian Bishop. Katie Bishop did not come out of it particularly well. She had been married twice before, the first time to a failed rock singer, when she was eighteen. She had divorced him when she was twenty-two and then married a wealthy Brighton property developer, whom she had divorced six years later, when she was twenty-eight. Bella had been in touch with both men, who had described her, unflatteringly, as being obsessed with money. Two years later she had married Brian Bishop.
‘Why didn’t she have any children?’ Grace asked.
‘She had two abortions with her rock singer. Her property developer already had four children and didn’t want any more.’
‘Was that the reason for her divorcing him?’
‘That’s what he told me,’ she said.
‘Did she get a big settlement?’
‘About two million, he said,’ she replied.
Grace made another note. Then he said, ‘She and Brian Bishop were married for five years. And we don’t know the reason why they didn’t have children. We need to ask him. Could have been an issue between them.’
