Not Dead Enough

a royalty on his revenues.
    Mr Abramson is threatening to obtain an injunction against me if I ever approach his client again.
    I’m really very angry.

87
    Leighton Lloyd looked as if he’d had a hard day. Exuding a faint smell of tobacco smoke, he was sitting in this windowless, airless, enclosed interview room, dressed in an expensive-looking but crumpled grey suit, cream shirt and a sharp silk tie. A well-travelled leather attaché case was on the floor beside him, from which he extracted a black, lined A4 notebook.
    Lloyd was a lean, wiry man, with close-cropped hair and an alert, predatory face that reminded Branson a little of the actor Robert Carlyle when he was playing a Bond villain in The World Is not Enough . Branson got a kick out of matching a movie villain’s face to all lawyers – and he found it helped him to avoid feeling intimidated by them, particularly when being cross-examined by defence barristers in court.
    Plenty of officers got on fine with solicitors. They took it in their stride, saying that it was all a game that sometimes they won, sometimes they lost. But for Branson it was more personal than that. He knew that criminal solicitors and barristers were only doing their job, and formed an important part of the freedoms of the British nation. But for nearly a decade before joining the police, he’d worked several nights a week as a nightclub bouncer in this city. He’d seen and tangled with just about every bit of scum imaginable, from drunk braggarts, to ugly gangsters, to some very smart criminals. He felt an intense obligation to try to make this city a better place for his own children to grow up in than it had been for him as a kid. That was his beef with the man sitting opposite him right now, in his hand-made suit and his black, tasselled loafers, with his big swinging dick of a BMW parked out front, and no doubt a flash, secluded house somewhere in one of Hove’s swankier streets, all paid for out of the rich pickings from keeping scumbags out of jail – and on the streets.
    Branson’s mood had not been improved by a blazing row with his wife, Ari, on his mobile phone as he had walked over to the custody block. He’d called to say goodnight to the children and she had pointed out acidly that they had been asleep in bed for some time. To which his response, that it was not much fun still being at work at nine o’clock, received a torrent of sarcasm. It had then degenerated into a shouting match, ending with Ari hanging up on him.
    Nick Nicholl closed the door, pulled up a chair opposite Branson and sat down. Lloyd had positioned himself at the head of the table, as if arranging the stage to assert himself from the getgo.
    The solicitor made a note in his black book with a roller-ball pen. ‘So, gentlemen, what information do you have for me?’ He spoke in a brisk, clipped voice, his tone polite but firm. Above them, an air-conditioning unit was starting, noisily, to pump out cool air.
    Lloyd made Branson nervous. The detective could deal with brute force, no problem, but cunning intellects always unnerved him. And Lloyd was observing them both with an inscrutable, unreadable expression. He spoke slowly, articulating each word as if he were addressing a child, thinking very carefully about what he was going to say next.
    ‘We have spoken to Mr Bishop over the last four days, as you will appreciate is normal in these circumstances, in order to get background information regarding himself and his wife. There is some information that we have been given which we will be covering during the interview, concerning his movements and location around the time of the murder.’
    ‘OK,’ Leighton Lloyd said, a tad impatiently, as if flagging that he wasn’t here to listen to waffle. ‘Can you bring me up to speed on why my client has been arrested?’
    Branson then handed him the Pre-Interview Disclosure document that had been prepared. ‘If you would like to read this, we can go through any questions you may have.’
    Lloyd reached across the desk and took the short document, a single A4 sheet, and read it in silence. Then he read parts of it out aloud. ‘Possible strangulation by ligature, subject to further pathology tests…We have certain DNA evidence which will form part of the interview.’
    He looked up at the two officers for a moment, then continued reading out aloud, his voice now sounding quizzical: ‘We have reason to believe that Mr Bishop has not been telling