Not Dead Enough

Next on Grace’s list was DS Guy Batchelor. One of the actions he had delegated to the detective sergeant was to conduct a thorough search of the Bishops’ Brighton home, once the forensic work had been finished, and to act as a coordinator in the meantime.

‘I have something which may be significant,’ Batchelor said. He held up a red file folder, with an index tab clipped to the top. He opened it and removed a bunch of A4-sized papers, clipped together, bearing the logo of the HSBC bank. ‘A SOCO found it in a filing cabinet in Bishop’s study,’ he said. ‘It’s a life insurance policy taken out six months ago in the name of Mrs Bishop. For three million pounds.’

50

Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance or serendipity. Alexander Fleming had it when he left some bacteria out overnight in his lab and discovered penicillin as a result. Steve Jobs had it when he looked at a Swatch watch one day and realized that offering computers in a range of colours was the way forward for Apple. Bill Gates must have had one of those moments too, at some point.

These ideas sometimes come to us when we least expect it: when we are lying in the bathtub fretting about this or that, or wide awake in bed in the middle of the night, or perhaps just sitting at our desk at work. The idea that no one has ever had before us. The idea that will make us rich, get us away from all the drudgery and daily crap we have to put up with. The idea that will change our lives and set us free!

I had mine on Saturday 25 May 1996, at eleven twenty-five p.m. I was hating my job as a software engineer at a company located in Coventry that developed gearboxes for racing cars.

I was trying to figure how to get my life together – and realizing, now I was soon turning thirty-two, that it was as together as it was ever going to get. I was on a charter plane coming back from a lousy week’s holiday in Spain, and there was a sudden walk-out of staff at Malaga airport and all the planes got grounded.

The ground staff tried to put us into hotels for the night, but it was hopeless. There was one girl on the charter company desk, trying to find rooms for 280 people. And there were employees at all the other airline desks trying to do the same for their stranded passengers. There were probably three to four thousand people stranded and there was no way they were able to cope and book everyone in.

I lay down on a bench in the departure lounge. And then I had my moment! One computer software program installed in all the local hotels and in all the airlines could have solved their problems. Instant boost of profit for the hotels; instant solution to their nightmare for the airlines. Then I began to think of other applications beyond cancelled flights. Any organization that had to fit large numbers of people into places and any organization that had rooms to sell. Tour operators, prisons, hospitals, disaster relief agencies, the armed forces, were just some of the potential customers.

I had found my gold mine.

51

The tide was coming in on the Brighton and Hove waterfront, but there was still a wide expanse of exposed mudflats between the pebble beach and the frothing surf from the breakers. Although it was almost half past eight in the evening and the sun was fast closing on the horizon, there were still plenty of people on the beach.

Sweet barbecue smoke mingled with the smells of salt, weed and tar. Strains of steel-band music from a stoned group playing on the promenade drifted through the warm, still air. Two small naked children dug plastic spades into the mud, helped by a plump, badly sunburnt man in loud shorts and a baseball cap who was adding a further layer to an already fine- looking sandcastle.

Two young lovers, in shorts and T-shirts, walked barefoot across cool, wet mud. They stepped on whorls of lugworm casts, upturned shells, strands of weed, carefully avoiding the occasional rusted can, discarded bottle or empty plastic carton. Their hands were tightly linked and they stopped every few steps to kiss, dangling their flip-flops with their free hands.

Carefree, smiling, they passed a solemn, elderly man in a crumpled white hat pulled tight down over his ears, swinging a metal detector in an arc in front of him, inches above the surface of the mud. Then they passed a youth, in gumboots and khaki trousers, with an open shirt spilled over them, a fishing bag on the ground beside him, digging out worms for bait with a garden spade and shaking them off the blade into a rubber bucket.

A short distance ahead were the blackened girders of the ruin of the West Pier, rising out of the shallows, in the fading light, like an eerie sculpture. The water seemed to be travelling faster, more urgently, every minute, the breakers getting larger, louder.

The girl squealed and tried to pull her boyfriend away, towards the shore, as water suddenly ran in further than before, covering her bare feet. ‘I’m getting wet, Ben!’

‘Tamara, you’re such a wuss!’ he replied, standing firm as another breaker, even closer, sent water shooting over their ankles, and then a third, almost up to their knees. He pointed out towards the horizon, at the crimson orb of the sun. ‘Watch the sunset. You get a green flash of light when it hits the horizon. You ever seen it?’