Not Dead Enough

police-women who said they were acting as his family liaison officers. Nice ladies, they’d been very supportive, but he was worn out with their questions and needed this break.
    And then sweet Sophie – what was all that about? What the hell did she mean that they’d spent the night together? They hadn’t. No way. Absolutely no which way.
    Sure, he fancied her. But an affair? No way. His ex-wife, Zoë, had had an affair. He’d discovered that she had been cheating on him for three years, and the pain when he’d found out had been almost unbearable. He could never do that to anyone. And recently he’d felt things were not right between himself and Katie, and he’d been making a big effort with their relationship, or so he felt.
    He enjoyed flirting with Sophie. He enjoyed her company. Hell, it was flattering to have a girl in her mid-twenties crazy about you. But that was as far as it went. Although, he realized, maybe he’d encouraged her too far. Quite why he’d ever invited her to lunch, after sitting next to her at the conference on tax relief on film investments he had been invited to, he didn’t know. All the danger flags had been up, but he’d gone right ahead. They’d seen each other again, several times. Exchanged emails sometimes two or three times a day – and hers, recently, had been getting more suggestive. And in truth he had thought about her a couple of times, during the – increasingly rare, these days – act of making love to Katie.
    But he’d never slept with her. Damn it, he’d never even kissed her on the lips.
    Had he?
    Was he doing things and not remembering them? There were people who did things without realizing it. Stress could cause people mental problems, make the brain function in weird ways, and he’d been under plenty of stress lately, worrying about both his business and Katie.
    His company, International Rostering Solutions, which he had founded nine years ago, was doing well – but almost too well. He needed to be in his office earlier every morning, just to clear all his emails from the previous day – as many as two hundred – but then the new lot would deluge in. And now that they had more offices opening up around the world – most recently in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur – communications were twenty-four/seven. He had taken on a lot more staff, of course, but he had never been good at delegating. So increasingly he found himself working in the office until well into the evening, and then going home and continuing to work after supper – and, to Katie’s displeasure, over the weekends as well.
    In addition, he sensed that all was not right in their marriage. Despite her charity and Rotary interests, Katie was resenting the increasing amount of time she was left alone. He had tried to tell her that he would not be working at this pace forever – within a couple of years they might float the business or sell out, with enough money never to have to work again. Then she reminded him he had said that two years ago. And a further two years before then.
    She had told him very recently, and quite angrily, that he would always be a workaholic, because he didn’t really have any interests outside his business. Lamely, he had argued back that his baby , the 1962 Jaguar he had lovingly restored, was an interest. Until she had responded, scathingly, that she couldn’t recall the last time he had taken it out of the garage. And, he was forced to admit to himself, nor could he.
    He remembered, during the break-up of his marriage to Zoë, when he had found himself barely able to cope, his doctor had suggested he check into a psychiatric clinic for a couple of weeks. He’d rejected that, and somehow got through everything. But he had that same low and sometimes muddled feeling now that he’d had then. And he was picking up from Katie some of those same kinds of vibes he’d experienced with Zoë, before he’d discovered she was having an affair. Maybe it was just in his mind.
    Maybe his mind just wasn’t working that well right now.

29
    The camera panned slowly, and a little jerkily, around the Bishops’ bedroom at 97 Dyke Road Avenue. It stopped for some moments on the naked body of Katie Bishop, lying spread-eagled, her wrists tied to the rather fancy wooden bedposts, ligature mark on her neck, gas mask lying beside her.
    ‘The gas mask was on her face when she was found,’ Roy Grace said to his team, which had now increased