Dead at First Sight, page 11
‘Right,’ Grace said, his patience running on empty. ‘This is what you are going to do. You’re going to put the front door in and show Liam Morrisey the back of a cell door within the next thirty minutes, do you understand?’
‘What do you mean, Roy? How, why?’
‘Why?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly why, Andy, OK? You’re going to do it because I’m telling you to do it. This is our town, we’re the cops and tonight I’m the fucking sheriff.’
An hour later Grace was out in the garden, in the darkness, waiting for Humphrey to finish doing his business, when his job phone pinged with a text. He looked down at the screen. It was from Andy Anakin. The message was short and meek.
One in custody.
29
Tuesday 2 October
PC Holly Little, nicknamed the Pocket Rocket because of her small stature and cluttered kit of gadgets and protection that made her look like a walking machine, was partnered on B-Section with John Alldridge, a six-foot-four, eighteen-stone rugby forward, fondly known as the Gentle Giant. They were two hours into their shift, cruising around the city of Brighton and Hove, hunting as they called it. Windswept rain lashed down, which meant most of the city’s scrotes would be tucked away inside their lairs, staying dry. Good old PC Rain doing its stuff. Although it made for a boring morning for the two Response officers itching for some action.
All they’d had was a call to a domestic at the eastern end of the city in Kemp Town, which they had just left. Two gay women were slugging it out, but by the time they’d arrived at the scene there were already three other cars – with crews as bored as they were – in attendance.
‘Bloody Q,’ Alldridge said to his colleague, who was driving.
No police officer ever said the word ‘quiet’ intentionally. It was a jinx. They were heading along the seafront, passing Brighton Palace Pier to their left and the angry grey sea around it.
‘Back to base and grab a coffee?’ Holly suggested.
Just as Alldridge said, ‘Good plan,’ the driver of a beaten-up Astra heading past in the opposite direction suddenly drew Holly’s attention. ‘That looked like Leetham Greene!’ she said. ‘Little shitbag’s got a ban. I nicked him for driving while disqualified just a couple of months ago!’
Looking swiftly over his shoulder, John Alldridge clocked the registration and tapped it into the computer. Moments later it came up as registered to Leetham Greene, flagged as untaxed and uninsured. ‘Spin her round,’ he said, leaning forward and switching on the blues and twos.
A taxi coming in the opposite direction obligingly slowed and flashed its headlights. As Holly made a sharp U-turn and accelerated, the voice of a female controller came through the radio. ‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five?’
‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five,’ Alldridge answered.
Holly rapidly caught up a two-lane bottleneck of traffic at the roundabout in front of the pier. The rogue Astra was some cars in front. No one could move out of the way so she switched off the siren, leaving the blue lights flashing.
‘Charlie Romeo Zero Five, we’ve had a couple of calls about the same address, in Somerhill Avenue. A concerned daughter called us from Australia about her widowed mother. She’s not been able to contact her since the weekend, says she’s not responding to calls, texts, emails or Facebook. We’ve also had a report of a yapping dog at the same address, from a neighbour. Are you free to attend? Grade Two.’
John answered. ‘Yes, yes.’
He turned to his colleague. ‘See which way Greene, went?’ She shook her head.
‘Let him go, we’d better attend at Somerhill.’
Grade Two was not an emergency, which meant, to Holly’s disappointment, it wouldn’t be a blue-light run.
‘What do we know about the occupant?’ John asked the call handler.
‘Owner is a Mrs Driver, first name Susan. She lives alone with a Yorkshire terrier called Buster. Her neighbour says she’s concerned because she’s been round a few times, knocking on the door and getting no reply, other than the dog going nuts. The dog has barked off and on for three days, which is very unusual. She’s phoned Mrs Driver, also, and she’s not picking up.’
‘We’re on our way.’ John leaned forward to punch the address into the satnav.
‘It’s OK,’ his partner said. ‘I know the area.’ She made a left into Old Steine and another left into North Street up towards the Clock Tower, and then on, uphill, to the Seven Dials. She shot John a glance. ‘G5?’
‘Sounds likely.’
Holly wrinkled her nose. ‘Not my favourite.’
‘At least it’s not summer. Went to one a couple of years ago, a seafront flat where an old lady had put a Sainsbury’s bag over her head – and been there three months before anyone noticed she was missing. Called in by a neighbour who said there was a funny smell. I thought she was still alive when I went in the door – that she was moving – then I realized it was her body covered in maggots.’
‘Yech! I attended one, an old man, dead for a month, locked in a room with his cat. The cat had eaten half his face.’
‘Says it all about cats, doesn’t it?’
‘I’d like to think my cheeky cat, Madam Woo, wouldn’t eat me,’ she replied. ‘Probably best not to give them the chance.’
In front of them, a tiny Honda with what looked like two old ducks in it halted at the roundabout. And stayed halted. A taxi came round; a van; a car; a lorry; then a long, long gap before another car and then another interminable gap. The Honda did not move.
‘What are you waiting for? Go!’ Holly yelled through the screen. ‘For God’s sake!’
John chuckled at her impatience. Another car came round.
Holly hammered on the steering wheel in frustration. ‘GO!’
Finally the little car pulled forward, straight into the path of a BMW which blasted its horn, narrowly missing the back end of the Honda.
A couple of minutes later they drove slowly along Somerhill Avenue, looking at the house numbers.
‘Nice street,’ Holly Little said. ‘Lovely park opposite. I think I could live here.’
‘All you need is a rich old uncle to die and leave you a couple of million quid and you’d be sorted.’
‘Or win the Lottery,’ she replied.
‘I wouldn’t bank on that buying you anything much. I almost won it once.’
‘You did?’
‘Well, sort of – five matches. Same day that half of England had the same numbers. I ended up with a few hundred quid. Seven hundred and eighty-five, to be precise.’
‘Bummer.’
‘That wasn’t actually the word I used, but you’re on the right track.’ Then he pointed through the windscreen. ‘There!’
They pulled up outside a handsome, red-brick Victorian house in good condition. There was a short, neat front garden with a tarmac drive up to what was previously an integral garage that had, at some time, been converted to a room. As they got out they could hear yapping.
They hurried through the rain up to the shelter of the entrance porch. John rang the smart, in-period, bell push. They could both hear, clearly, the loud ring from the interior of the house. The yapping became frenzied.
He knelt down, opened the letter box and peered in. The floor was littered with newspapers and mail. He pressed his nose in and sniffed, instantly recoiling.
The one smell all police officers could instantly recognize. And loathed.
The two officers looked at each other. They’d been partnered up for long enough to know each other’s body language. And Holly Little was reading his loud and clear.
They walked down the side of the house, past the bins, and into a very well-kept urban garden that could do with the grass cutting. There were patio doors leading out from a conservatory at the rear. John rapped on the window. The dog came racing through, putting its paws up against the glass, near demented.
‘Think we should call for a dog unit?’ he asked.
‘You wuss!’
They went back round to the front. John hurried over to the car, removed the heavy battering ram and lugged it up to the imposing front door. ‘You happy about this?’ he asked her. ‘We’re not contravening any of the new bloody privacy laws? We don’t need to get a warrant?’
‘Would it make you feel better?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Let’s go round the back and do the patio doors – less expensive to repair.’
They hurried round. He swung the ram at the door, shattering it, then again, punching a big enough hole for them to crawl through. The dog snarled at them and then ran out into the garden. Laying the ram down, John called out, futilely, he reckoned, ‘Mrs Driver? Hello! This is the police! Hello!’
The dog came running back in. Holly Little tried to stroke it, but it shot past and ran up the stairs.
The smell was even stronger now they were inside the house. The distinctive, putrid, cloying smell of decaying human flesh and blood. There was no smell on earth more horrible to either officer.
‘Mrs Driver!’ Holly called out, with little expectation of a response. ‘Hello, this is the police!’
They split and dutifully checked out the ground-floor rooms. There were stains of dog wee on the white carpet, and several dried dog messes. Then they looked in the separate garage. It contained a modern Mini and a silver classic Mercedes 500SL, from the 1980s. No sign of anyone.
Then they ventured upstairs. The dog was frantically yapping and pawing at a closed door. John turned the handle and tried to open it, but it would barely budge. He pushed hard against it, opening it just a few inches, the stench even stronger now. Then he threw all of his considerable weight against it and it opened wide. He burst through, stumbling across the room, closely followed by Holly.
An instant later a pair of stockinged legs, high in the air, one foot wearing a velvet slipper, the other bare, struck him in the face.
30
Tuesday 2 October
Matthew Sorokin sat in his uniform in the tiny office he had been allocated in the single-storey building occupied by the Sheriff’s Department of the Hernando County Police. He sneezed, feeling another cold coming on. The air con was freezing his nuts off, the one thing he did not like about Florida. Outside it was often hot and humid as hell while inside it was an icebox. He seemed to be permanently either sweating or shivering, and sometimes, like now, both.
He was leafing through the album of crime scene photographs of another cold case he had been allocated. Back in 1998, Dara Lamont, a beautiful socialite, lay in the hallway of a mansion on a gated estate in nearby Naples, most of her head blasted away by a shotgun. It had initially looked to the cops like a burglary gone wrong, but that had soon changed.
Her husband, Arron, then thirty-four, had been in the process of filing for divorce, and having uncovered a string of his infidelities, his wife was after him for every penny she could get. His real estate company had taken a nosedive after a large, unwise investment, and from being worth millions, was struggling to survive. On the night Dara had died, Arron had a cast-iron alibi. He was 1,283 miles away in New York, having dinner with his then mistress, now his wife, who had stood by her story, and he had the restaurant receipt as further evidence.
But Sorokin had discovered something significant. AT&T never destroyed their phone records. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1879, established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. It had a monopoly on the US telephone service until 1982. As a matter of policy, they kept all phone records for twenty years and then archived them. But when Homeland Security was established in the aftermath of 9/11, a request was made to all US phone providers to retain call records indefinitely.
Sorokin had managed to obtain the complete call log from Arron Lamont’s mobile phone from 1998. The calls put him in Florida, at the family home, at the exact time of his wife’s murder. The Sheriff’s task now, in order not to be shot down by a defence brief, was to try to establish that the husband had the phone in his possession at that exact time. That was a tough one. A real challenge.
Sorokin was grateful for it. For taking his mind off the nightmare of the past week.
The waking nightmare that had become his new normality. His life.
His phone rang.
‘Deputy Sheriff Sorokin,’ he answered.
‘Very grand. Does Deputy Sheriff Sorokin have time to talk to an old buddy?’
‘Gerry!’ he said.
‘How you doing?’
‘I’d like to say great, Gerry! I’d like to say it’s good to hear from you, but right now, if I saw you, I’d happily plug you.’
‘Hey, whoahhh! Wind back, pal!’
‘Gerry, there isn’t any winding back.’
‘Buddy, what’s the problem?’
‘That dating agency you put me on to?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘It just cost me a packet, OK? Ninety thousand bucks.’
‘Holy shit. That’s why I was calling you, to see how it was going. Say you’re joking?’
‘I’m not joking.’
‘I was calling to warn you. I’ve got another pal I put on to online dating – a guy in England, he got stiffed for an insane amount of money. I met Karen, my wife, online. Thought I’d do you guys a favour. But it seems it’s been hijacked by total shitbags since. Ninety thousand bucks? What do you mean, ninety thousand bucks?’
‘I mean, Gerry, ninety thousand bucks.’
‘How in God’s name did you part with that kind of dough?’
‘Probably the same way your pal in England got suckered. I thought she was for real – her name was Evelyne Desota. A babe. We got on so well, and I felt – you know – I really cared for her and trusted her. She had a whole load of issues, with a nightmare of a husband and family – so I thought. I don’t know what to believe any more – I don’t think I believe any of it. I was just spun a load of total baloney.’
‘Pretty convincing baloney,’ Gerry said.
‘I’ve lost all my fun money. Every extra dime I worked for is gone.’
‘Any chance you can recover any of it?’
‘You sitting near a window, Gerry?’
‘Near a window? Sure, right by a window.’
‘Can you see the sky?’
‘Uh-huh. Got a clear view.’
‘See any pigs flying past?’
31
Tuesday 2 October
‘Follow the money,’ Financial Investigator Emily Denyer said. ‘That’s what we need to do.’
The phrase, Roy Grace well knew, had become a mantra for the police in every case where money was involved. Following the money would, hopefully, lead you to the villain or villains.
Glenn Branson, seated alongside Emily in Grace’s office, stared gloomily at the paperwork stacked in front of him. Two mountains in fact, one getting smaller as the other grew taller. Evidence. All in sixteen-point type on the advice of the lawyers, because they might be unlucky enough to come in front of an elderly judge with deteriorating eyesight and failing patience.
A bronze statue of Lady Justice stood outside the Old Bailey, the building housing the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales. She carried a sword in her right hand and scales in her left. In Roy Grace’s view, for accuracy the scales should be replaced with a pair of dice or a roulette wheel. Every prosecution, even the most watertight one, was a gamble, a game of chance in which the prosecution might be up against a smart defence brief, a perverse jury or a blinkered judge. You did all you could to arrest the right suspect and once that was done the even bigger battle of the paperwork started – with the chain of evidence being one of the most important elements.
The paperwork in front of the three of them related to the impending trial of Jodie Bentley, a woman who had sent at least two husbands as well as a prospective one to premature graves, and pertained in part to proving the money – and potential money – she had to gain from her machinations.
With all three unfortunate victims, the physical proof that she had murdered them was entirely circumstantial, even after laying a honeytrap for her with an undercover operator. As Emily Denyer said, following the money was their best hope. But Jodie Bentley was a clever woman and operated under a string of aliases, with bank accounts in different names spread around the globe.
‘What a bitch,’ Glenn Branson said, studying one document, evidence from a Home Office pathologist, Dr Colin Duncton. ‘Even if her last victim had survived the snake venom she used – from a saw-scale viper – his willy would have shrunk! I’m sure there was some movie about that.’
‘The Shrinking Man or something?’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Branson, a movie buff. ‘1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Grant Williams and Randy Stuart. But it wasn’t just his manhood that shrunk.’
‘Grant Williams and Randy Stuart?’ Grace looked perplexed.
‘A man of your vintage? Surely you remember them?’
‘Respect your elders, Detective Inspector Branson!’
‘That was a TV movie in 2012.’
‘Is there anything you don’t know about films?’ Grace shook his head with a smile and returned to the stack he was working through, covered in annotations from a Crown Prosecution solicitor. He read through them, trying to answer each of the queries about Jodie Bentley’s then fiancé, an American called Walt Klein. The solicitor was asking for corroboration on the following points.
Why were they in Courchevel?
What time did they leave the hotel?
Exactly what time did she lose sight of him?
How long after his disappearance before she notified the police?
There weren’t just hours of questions, there were days. He had been working on the queries since 7 a.m. this morning and was starting to lose the will to live. Then his phone rang.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
It was an old colleague he hadn’t spoken to in a while, Inspector Bill Warner from Brighton CID. ‘Roy, how are you doing?’
