Not Dead Enough

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