‘Already done that.’
‘Good man.’ He looked at his watch. Just over twenty minutes to the six-thirty pre-briefing he had called. There should be enough time. He led Glenn Branson along, past the SOCO evidence rooms and the Outside Inquiry Team rooms, then doglegged right towards the Witness Interview Suite, where they had been earlier this afternoon.
They went into the small, narrow viewing room, adjoining the main interview room. Two mismatched chairs were pulled up against a work surface, running the width of the room, on which sat the squat metal housing of the video recording machinery, and a colour monitor giving a permanent, dreary colour picture of the coffee table and three red chairs in the empty Witness Interview Room on the other side of the wall.
Grace wrinkled his nose. It smelled as if someone had been eating a curry in here, probably from the deli counter of the ASDA supermarket across the road. He peered in the wastepaper bin and saw the evidence, a pile of cartons. It always took him a while after leaving a post-mortem before he was comfortable at the thought of food, and at this moment, having just seen the remnants of what appeared to be a shrimp rogan josh among the contents of Katie Bishop’s stomach, the sickly reek of the curry in here was definitely not doing it for him.
Grace ducked down, picked up the bin and plonked it outside the door. The smell didn’t clear, but at least it made him feel a little better. Then he sat in front of the monitor, refamiliarized himself with the controls of the video machine and hit the play button.
Thinking. Thinking all the time. Sandy loved curries. Chicken korma. That was her favourite.
Brian Bishop’s interview from earlier began to play on the screen. Grace fast-forwarded, watching the dark-haired man in his tan designer jacket with its flashy silver buttons and his two-tone brown and white golfing shoes.
‘Look like spats, those shoes,’ Branson said, sitting down next to him. ‘You know, like those 1930s gangsters films. Ever see Some Like It Hot?’ His voice was flat, lacking its usual energy, but he seemed to be making a superhuman effort to be cheerful.
Grace realized this must be a difficult time of day for him. Early evening. Normally, if he were home, he’d be helping get his two children ready for bed. ‘That the one with Marilyn Monroe?’
‘Yeah, and Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft. Well brilliant. That scene, right, when they wheel the cake in and the man steps out from inside it with a machine gun and blows everyone away, and George Raft says, “There was summin’ in that cake that didn’t agree wid him!”’
‘A modern spin on the Trojan Horse,’ Grace said.
‘You mean it was a remake?’ Branson said, puzzled. ‘The Trojan Horse? Don’t remember it.’
Grace shook his head. ‘Not a movie, Glenn. What the Greeks did, in Troy!’
‘What did they do?’
Grace stared hard at his friend. ‘Did you get all your bloody education from watching movies? Didn’t you ever learn any history?’
Branson shrugged defensively. ‘Enough.’
Grace slowed the tape. On the screen Glenn Branson said, ‘May I ask when you last saw your wife, Mr Bishop?’
Grace paused the tape. ‘Now, I want you to concentrate on Bishop’s eyes. I want you to count his blinks. I want the number of blinks per minute. You got a second hand on that NASA control tower on your wrist?’
Branson peered down at his watch as if thrown by the question. It was a fashionably large Casio chronometer, one of the kind that had so many dials and buttons Grace wondered if his friend had any idea what half of them did. ‘Somewhere,’ he said.
‘OK, start timing now.’
Glenn messed it up a couple of times. Then, on the screen, Roy Grace entered the room and began questioning Bishop.
‘Where did you sleep last night, Mr Bishop?’
‘In my flat in London.’
‘Could anyone vouch for that?’
‘Twenty-four!’ Glenn Branson announced, his eyes switching from his watch, to the screen, then back again.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Do it again.’
On the screen Grace asked Bishop, ‘What time were you on the tee at the golf club this morning?’
‘Just after nine.’
‘And you drove down from London?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘About half-six.’
‘Twenty-four again!’
Grace froze the tape. ‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘What exactly?’ Branson asked.
‘It’s an experiment. I’m trying out something I read the other day in a psychology newsletter I subscribe to. The writer said they’d established in a lab at a university – I think it was Edinburgh – that people blink more times a minute when they are telling the truth than when they are lying.’
‘For real?’
‘They blink 23.6 times a minute when they are telling the truth and 18.5 times a minute when they are lying. It’s a fact that liars sit very still – they have to think harder than people telling the truth – and when we think harder we are stiller.’ He ran the tape on.
Brian Bishop seemed to be getting increasingly agitated, finally standing up and gesticulating.
‘A constant twenty-four,’ Branson said.
‘And his body language tallies,’ Grace said. ‘He looks like a man who is telling the truth.’
But, he knew only too well, it was only an indicator. He had misread someone’s body language before and been badly caught out.
26
The press called August the silly season. With Parliament in its summer recess and half the world on holiday, it tended to be a quiet news month. Papers often made major items out of minor stories which, at other times, might never have even reached their pages at all; and they liked nothing better than a serious crime, the grimmer and more horrific the better. The only people who didn’t seem to go on holiday, in the same way that they didn’t stick to conventional office hours, were criminals.
And himself, Roy Grace contemplated.
His last proper holiday had been over nine years ago, when he and Sandy had flown to Spain and stayed in a rented flat near Malaga. The flat had been cramped and, instead of the advertised sea view, it overlooked a multi-storey car park. And it rained for most of the week.
Unlike this current August heatwave here in Brighton, which brought even more holidaymakers and trippers flooding into the city than usual. The beaches were packed, as were all the bars and cafés. Brighton and Hove had a hundred thousand vertical drinking spaces, and Grace reckoned every single one of them was probably taken at this moment. It was a paradise for the street criminals. More like open season than silly season for them.
And he was well aware that, with the lack of news to go around, a murder inquiry such as the one he now had on his hands was going to be subject to even closer press scrutiny than normal. A rich woman found dead, a swanky house, possibly some kinky sex involved, a flash, good-looking husband. A slam-dunk for every editor looking to fill column inches.
From the getgo, he needed to plan the handling of the press and media with extra caution, and to try, as he always did, to make the coverage work for, rather than against, his investigation. Tomorrow morning he would be holding the first of what would become a regular series of press conferences. Before then, he had two briefing meetings with the team he was assembling, to get prepared.