Not Dead Enough

Nations, had, despite all that baggage, produced impressive results before. ‘Keep on it,’ he said, and turned to DC Zafferone.
    Alfonso Zafferone had been assigned to the important but tedious job of working out the time-lines. Insolently chewing gum, he reported on his work with the HOLMES team, plotting the sequence of events surrounding the discovery of Katie Bishop’s body.
    The young DC reported that Katie Bishop had started the day of the night she died with a one-hour session at home with her personal trainer. Grace made a note that he was to be interviewed.
    Next she had attended a beauty parlour in Brighton, where she had had her nails done. Grace jotted down that the staff there needed to be interviewed. That had been followed by lunch at Havana Restaurant in Brighton with a lady called Caroline Ash, the appeals organizer of a local charity for children, the Rocking Horse Appeal, to discuss plans for a fund-raising event that she and her husband were scheduled to host at their Dyke Road Avenue home in September. Grace wrote down that Mrs Ash was to be interviewed.
    Mrs Bishop’s gruelling day, Zafferone said, with considerable sarcasm, continued with a visit to her hairdresser at three o’clock. After that the trail on her went cold. The information that Norman Potting had provided clearly filled in the gap.
    The next report was from the latest recruit to Grace’s team, a tough, sharp-eyed female detective constable in her late thirties called Pamela Buckley – constantly confused by many with the family liaison officer Linda Buckley and so similar-looking, they could have been sisters. Both had blonde hair, Linda Buckley’s cropped boyishly short, Pamela’s longer, clipped up rather severely.
    ‘I found the taxi driver who drove Brian Bishop from the Hotel du Vin to the Lansdowne Place Hotel,’ Pamela Buckley said, and looked down at her notepad. ‘His name’s Mark Tuckwell and he drives for Hove Streamline. He has no recollection of Bishop hurting his hand.’
    ‘Could Bishop have injured himself without this driver knowing?’
    ‘It’s possible, sir, but unlikely. I asked him that. He said Bishop was completely silent throughout the journey. He felt that if he had injured himself, he’d have said something.’
    Grace nodded, making notes, not convinced this got them anywhere.
    Bella Moy then gave a detailed character report on Katie and Brian Bishop. Katie Bishop did not come out of it particularly well. She had been married twice before, the first time to a failed rock singer, when she was eighteen. She had divorced him when she was twenty-two and then married a wealthy Brighton property developer, whom she had divorced six years later, when she was twenty-eight. Bella had been in touch with both men, who had described her, unflatteringly, as being obsessed with money. Two years later she had married Brian Bishop.
    ‘Why didn’t she have any children?’ Grace asked.
    ‘She had two abortions with her rock singer. Her property developer already had four children and didn’t want any more.’
    ‘Was that the reason for her divorcing him?’
    ‘That’s what he told me,’ she said.
    ‘Did she get a big settlement?’
    ‘About two million, he said,’ she replied.
    Grace made another note. Then he said, ‘She and Brian Bishop were married for five years. And we don’t know the reason why they didn’t have children. We need to ask him. Could have been an issue between them.’
    Next on Grace’s list was DS Guy Batchelor. One of the actions he had delegated to the detective sergeant was to conduct a thorough search of the Bishops’ Brighton home, once the forensic work had been finished, and to act as a coordinator in the meantime.
    ‘I have something which may be significant,’ Batchelor said. He held up a red file folder, with an index tab clipped to the top. He opened it and removed a bunch of A4-sized papers, clipped together, bearing the logo of the HSBC bank. ‘A SOCO found it in a filing cabinet in Bishop’s study,’ he said. ‘It’s a life insurance policy taken out six months ago in the name of Mrs Bishop. For three million pounds.’

50
    Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance or serendipity. Alexander Fleming had it when he left some bacteria out overnight in his lab and discovered penicillin as a result. Steve Jobs had it when he looked at a Swatch watch one day and