‘Bella!’ Grace said firmly. ‘Thank you, that’s enough!’
She glared at Potting, her face flushed. Grace wondered for a moment whether her hostility towards the Detective Sergeant had something deep-rooted behind it. Had they ever been an item? He doubted it, looking at them now, contrasting the plug-ugly old warhorse with the fresh-faced, attractive thirty-five-year-old brunette divorcee. No way.
‘So did you discover anything in his premises to indicate he might be kinky?’ Kim Murphy asked. ‘Any gas masks hanging on the wall? Or in any of his paintings?’
‘He had a few raunchy nudes on the walls, I’m telling you! Not the kind of paintings you’d want your elderly mum to see. And there’s something very interesting I got out of him: he was with Mrs Bishop on Thursday night. Until nearly midnight.’
‘We need to bring him in for questioning, ASAP,’ Grace said.
‘He’s coming in at ten.’
‘Good. Who will be with you?’
‘DC Nicholl.’
Grace looked at Nick Nicholl. The young, fledgling father was stifling a yawn, barely keeping his eyes open. Clearly he’d had another bad night with his baby. He didn’t want a sleep-deprived zombie interviewing such an important witness. He looked at Zafferone. Much though he disliked the cocky youngster, Zafferone would be perfect, he thought. His arrogance would rub anyone up the wrong way, and particularly a sensitive artist. And often the best way to get something out of a witness was to wind them up, so they lost their rag.
‘No,’ Grace said. ‘DC Zafferone will interview him with you.’ He looked down at his typed agenda, then up at shaven-headed thirty-seven-year-old Joe Tindall, with his narrow strip of beard and blue-tinted glasses. ‘OK,’ he said formally. ‘We will now have a report from the Crime Scene Manager.’
‘First off,’ Joe Tindall informed them, ‘I’m expecting DNA results back this afternoon from Huntington from semen found in the vagina of Mrs Bishop.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘We are sending several exhibits from Ms Harrington’s flat off to the lab this morning. These include a small piece of flesh removed from her right big toenail, and a gas mask found on the victim’s face, which appears similar in type and manufacture to the one present at Mrs Bishop’s house.’
He took a swig of bottled water. ‘We are also sending clothing fibres recovered from Ms Harrington’s flat and blood samples. We believe the blood samples may be significant. We found blood smeared on the wall just above the bed where the victim was found, which is not consistent with the injuries found on the victim. So it may be the perp’s blood.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘All fingerprints found at both scenes to date have been eliminated from our inquiries, which would indicate that the killer of both women was either wearing gloves – the most likely scenario – or wiped them. However, using chemical enhancement we have found footprints on the tiled bathroom floor that are clearly not the victim’s. We will be analysing these for shoe type.’
Next, tough, sharp-eyed DC Pamela Buckley reported on a check she had run on all accident and emergency departments in hospitals in the area – the Sussex County, Eastbourne, Worthing and Haywards Heath – for people coming in with hand injuries.
‘We’re up against patient confidentiality,’ she said with more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Then she read out the list of hand-injury types that had been seen at each hospital – with no names attached – and treated. None were consistent with those Grace had seen on Brian Bishop’s hand, and none of the staff she had interviewed identified Bishop from his photograph.
Then DS Guy Batchelor gave his report. The tall, burly officer spoke in his usual businesslike way. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I have something rather interesting.’ He gave Norman Potting an appreciative nod. ‘Norman did a good job getting his mate John Smith in the Telecoms Unit to give up his Sunday. John stayed on to look at the mobile phone taken from Sophie Harrington’s flat.’
He paused to take a sip of coffee from a large Starbucks Styrofoam cup, then looked up with a smile. ‘The last number that Ms Harrington dialled, according to information retrieved from her phone, was –’ he paused to read from his notes – ‘07985 541298. So I checked that number out.’ He looked Roy Grace squarely and triumphantly in the eye. ‘It’s Brian Bishop’s mobile phone.’
70
They say the recipe for success in life is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The bit they don’t tell you when you start a new business is the cash you need to find. You need the lawyer and the accountants to set up the company, the Patent Agent to file for your copyright on your software, the design company to create your logo and your corporate image, and the packaging for your product, which you need to have if you intend to be a global player, and of course your website. You need an office, furniture, phones, fax and a secretary. None of this stuff comes cheap. Twelve months on from my Big Idea, I was over one hundred thousand pounds out of pocket and not yet ready to rock and roll. But close.
I had taken out a second mortgage on my flat, sold everything I could sell, and, on top of that, a bank manager who believed in me had given me a bigger loan than he really should have. I had, as the Americans say, bet the ranch.
I was reading all the financial pages of the newspapers and subscribed to the trade magazines of every business I intended to target. So imagine my dismay one day when I opened a supplement of the Financial Times to see an article written by a journalist called Gautam Malkani on my business.
It was a complete carbon copy of everything I had thought of doing. And it was already up and running.
And my photograph was staring out at me from the pink page.
Except the name of the company was different from the name I had chosen.
And the name beneath my photograph was the name of someone else, a man I had never heard of.
71
Marija Djapic pressed the entry code and let herself in through the wrought-iron gates. It was just gone nine a.m. and she was a little later than usual, thanks to her daughter. She noticed the man immediately, standing outside the front door of number 5, looking as if he had been waiting for a while.
She strode across the cobbled courtyard, puffing from the exertion of her long walk here, made harder by the weight of the bag which she lugged everywhere, containing her work clothes, shoes, lunch and a drink. And she was perspiring heavily from the heat. She was also in a foul mood after yet another row with Danica. Who was this man? What did he want from her? Was he from another of the collection agencies she owed money to on a credit card?
The thirty-five-year-old Serbian woman walked everywhere, to save money on bus fares. She could reach all of her employers on foot in less than an hour from the council flat in Whitehawk she shared with her bolshy, fourteen-year-old prima donna. Almost every hard, sweated penny that she earned went on buying Danica the best she could afford in their new life here in England. She tried to buy decent food, made sure Danica had the clothes she wanted – well, some of them, at any rate. As well as all the stuff she needed to keep up with her friends: a computer, a mobile phone and, for her birthday two weeks ago, an iPod.