Not Dead Enough

Incident Suite for the team of detectives, typists and indexers he was putting together, as well as arranging a meeting with an intelligence officer to plan the intelligence strategy for his policy book for this investigation. Every minute was precious at the moment, in the golden hour . What you did in that first hour of arriving at the scene of a suspicious death could greatly affect your likelihood of a successful arrest.
    And in this chilly room, pungent with the smell of classy perfume, the thought presenting itself to him between each of his calls was, Is this death an accident? A night of kinky sex gone wrong?
    Or murder?
    In almost every murder, the chances were that the perpetrator was in a much more ragged frame of mind than yourself. Roy Grace had met his share of killers over the years and not many were able to keep cool, calm and collected, not at any rate in the immediate aftermath. Most would be in what was termed a red mist . Their adrenaline out of control, their thinking confused, their actions – and whatever plan they might have had – all muzzed up by the fact that they simply had not reckoned on the chain reaction of chemicals inside their brains.
    He had seen a television documentary recently about human evolution failing to keep pace with the way humans had evolved socially. When confronted by the income tax inspector, people needed to stay cool and calm. Instead, instinctive primitive fight-or-flight reactions kicked in – those same reactions as if you had been confronted out on the savannah by a sabre-toothed tiger. You would be hit by a massive adrenaline surge that made you all shaky and clammy.
    Given time, that surge would eventually calm down. So your best chance of a result was to grab your villains while they were still in that heightened phase.
    The bedroom ran the entire width of the house – a house he knew, without any envy, that he could never afford. And even if he could, which would only happen if he won the Lottery – unlikely, since most weeks he forgot to buy a ticket – he would not have bought this particular house. Maybe one of those mellow Georgian manors, with a lake and a few hundred rolling acres. Something with a bit of style, a bit of class. Yep. Squire Grace . He could see that. Somewhere in the wildest recesses of his mind.
    But not this vulgar, faux-Tudor pile behind a forbidding whitewashed wall and electric wrought-iron gates, in Brighton and Hove’s most ostentatious residential street, Dyke Road Avenue. No way. The only good thing about it, so far as he could see at this moment, was a rather beautifully restored white 3.8 Jaguar Mk II under a dustsheet in the garage, which showed that the Bishops had at least some taste, in his view.
    The other two of the Bishops’ cars in the driveway didn’t impress him so much. One was a dark blue cabriolet BMW 3-series and the other a black Smart. Behind them, crammed into the circular, gravelled area in front of the house, was the square hulk of the mobile Major Incident Room vehicle, a marked police car and several other cars of members of the SOCO team. And shortly they would be joined by the yellow Saab convertible belonging to one of the Home Office pathologists, Nadiuska De Sancha, who was on her way.
    On the far side of the room, to the left – and right – of the bed, the view from the windows was out over rooftops towards the sea, a mile or so away, and down on to a garden of terraced lawns, in the centre of which, and more prominent than the swimming pool beyond, was an ornamental fountain topped with a replica of the Mannequin Pis, the small, cherubic stone boy urinating away, and no doubt floodlit in some garish colours at night, Grace thought, as he made yet another call.
    This one was to an old sweat of a detective, Norman Potting – not a popular man among the team, but one Grace had learned, from a previous successful investigation, was a workhorse he could trust. Seconding Potting to the case, he instructed him to coordinate the task of obtaining all CCTV footage from surveillance cameras within a two-mile radius of the murder scene, and on all routes in and out of Brighton. Next, he organized a uniformed house-to-house inquiry team for the immediate neighbourhood.
    Then he turned his attention, once more, to the grim sight on the canopied, king-sized, two-poster bed. The motionless woman, arms splayed out, each strapped by a man’s necktie to one of the two posts, revealing freshly shaven