We took the lift to the third floor, down another grey corridor, and then DC Wade showed me into a room.
‘Take a seat, Mr Craine,’ he said. ‘The DCI will be with you in a minute.’
He went out and shut the door behind him, leaving me alone in the room. I’d never been in a police station interview room before, but I’d seen enough cop shows on TV to recognise one when I saw one: off-white walls, plain table, two hard chairs, a double-decked tape-machine on a shelf. I draped my coat over the back of one of the chairs and sat down.
It was 11.29.
Twenty minutes later, the door swung open and DCI Bishop breezed in, talking the busy-man’s talk as he came. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, John, but something important came up. You don’t mind if I call you John, do you?’ His hurried words stopped when he saw my battered face, and for a moment he just stood there looking at me. Then, after blowing out his cheeks, he gave me what can only be described as a shit-eating grin. ‘Christ,’ he said, sitting down opposite me. ‘I hope we’ve got it on record that you looked like that before you came in.’
I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him. He hadn’t changed all that much since the last time I’d seen him. Same wiry black hair, same hard-set mouth, same cold dark eyes. He had a quarter-inch scar on his clean-shaven jaw, and in the dull light of the room his skin looked hard and white. He was dressed in a dark-blue blazer with silver buttons, a pale-blue shirt, and a burgundy tie pinned with a thin gold chain.
‘Can I get you a coffee or anything?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
He grinned again. ‘Ice pack? Painkillers?’
‘No, thanks.’
He nodded. ‘OK, well … I think I already mentioned that I don’t have all that much time to spare, so if it’s all right with you …’
He paused for a moment as I glanced at my watch, and the corners of his mouth tightened slightly. I looked at him, waiting for him to go on. He said nothing for a moment, just carried on staring at me, and then, after a time, he eased his chair back from the desk, crossed his legs, and casually cocked his head to one side.
‘You used to work for Leon Mercer, didn’t you?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
He nodded. ‘I know Leon, he was a good officer. We worked some big cases together over the years … how’s he doing now? I heard his health’s not so good.’
‘He’s doing OK.’
‘Semi-retired, I hear.’
I nodded.
Bishop nodded back. ‘So when did you start working for Mercer Associates?’
‘Sixteen years ago.’
‘Right … so that would have been …?’
‘About a year after my wife was killed.’
He nodded again, trying his best to look sympathetic, but he had neither the face nor the heart for it. Which was fine with me. I just wanted this charade to be over — him asking me questions that he already knew the answers to, me having to answer them because I wanted something from him …
It was all just a nasty little game.
‘It must have been a really hard time for you,’ Bishop said. ‘First your father, then your wife …’
‘Yeah,’ I said, staring into his eyes. ‘It totally fucked me up.’
‘Well, of course … it would.’ He sniffed and cleared his throat. ‘So … you left Mercer in ’97 and set up your own business — is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘No particular reason. My mother died, I came into some money … I could afford to set up on my own.’ I shrugged. ‘It was something to do …’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
I looked at him. ‘What?’
‘Owning your own company … being a private investigator — do you enjoy it?’
‘Does it matter?’
He looked at me for a while, his head cocked slightly to one side, as if he was thinking about something … then he took a breath, leaned back in his chair, and sighed. ‘I checked the case file this morning to see if there’s been any progress on the investigation into your wife’s murder,’ he said. ‘We are still looking for him, you know. We haven’t given up.’
I looked back at him, holding his gaze … saying nothing, showing nothing.
‘We’ll find him eventually,’ he said, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘It’s just a matter of time.’
‘Right…’ I said vaguely, ‘well, that’s good to know. But it’s not what I’m here about.’
Bishop didn’t say anything for a few moments, he just carried on staring at me, his dark eyes unreadable … and then, with an unnecessary sniff and a curt nod of his head, he pulled his chair back to the table, glanced at his watch, and got down to business. ‘Right,’ he said briskly, ‘Anna Gerrish. I take it you’ve been talking to her mother?’
‘I can’t — ’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said impatiently. ‘There’s no need to give me all that client confidentiality shit again. Let’s just assume, hypo-fucking-thetically, that you’re working for Helen Gerrish, all right? You haven’t told me anything, you haven’t breached her trust. OK?’
I nodded.
‘Good. So what do you want from me?’
‘Well, I know you can’t give me any details about the case — ’
‘What details do you want?’
I looked at him, slightly taken aback.
He shook his head. ‘There is no fucking case, John. That’s all the detail you need to know. All that’s happened to Anna Gerrish is she’s met some bloke who’s promised her the world and they’ve fucked off together somewhere in his customised Golf GTI. Give it a couple of months and she’ll probably come crawling back home.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, I’m sure. It happens all the time.’ He shrugged one shoulder. ‘All right, so I might be wrong about the specifics — maybe she just fucked off on her own, or with a girlfriend, or maybe she met an older man with a nice sensible Volvo or something — but it’s all the same thing. We get at least two or three of these so-called missing persons every week — my daughter’s gone missing, my son’s disappeared, my husband, my wife … none of them ever come to anything. The trouble is, people simply can’t accept that someone they’ve known for years, perhaps even loved for years, can suddenly just decide that they’ve had enough.’ Bishop looked at me. ‘That’s all there is to it, John. Believe me. Anna Gerrish is safe and well somewhere. And there’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest otherwise.’
‘What about the report in the Hey Gazette?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, if you’re saying that this kind of thing happens all the time, how come the paper picked up on Anna’s disappearance?’
‘Because her mother kept nagging them, that’s why. And because Anna was reasonably attractive.’ Bishop shrugged. ‘The press don’t give a shit if there’s anything in a story or not … as long as it sells, that’s all they care about. And pretty girls sell.’
‘But if Anna’s safe and well somewhere, why hasn’t she contacted her mother?’
‘Who knows? Maybe she hates her, maybe she wants her to suffer …’ Bishop shrugged again. ‘Whatever the reason, it’s not our concern. Anna’s a grown woman. She can do what she wants. If she doesn’t want anyone to know where she is, that’s entirely up to her.’
‘You searched her flat?’
Bishop sighed. ‘Yes, we searched her flat.’ He was beginning to talk to me as if I was an annoying child.
I said, ‘There didn’t seem to be anything missing. I mean, I got the impression that she hadn’t packed any clothes or toiletries or anything.’
‘How can you tell if there’s anything missing without knowing what was there in the first place? And, besides … well, you were in her flat, you must have seen the kind of stuff she had in there. She’s not going to bother coming back for any of that shit if she’s been whisked off her feet by some knight in shining armour, is she?’ Bishop looked at me, a hint of smugness showing in his face, then he glanced at his watch. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘well, if that’s all — ’