Dead at First Sight, page 14
‘Ah, right, hello. My name is John Fordwater. I was given your number by our mutual friend, Gerald – Gerry – Ronson.’
‘That son of a bitch?’
It wasn’t the response Johnny had been expecting. He wasn’t sure if it was humour or anger in Sorokin’s voice.
‘You know what I would do to Gerry if I had him in range?’ Sorokin said, ending Johnny’s uncertainty. ‘I’d squeeze his scrotum so tight his testicles flew out hard and fast enough to win me a coconut. OK?’
‘OK,’ Johnny echoed, uncertainly. ‘Should we talk?’
‘We sure should. How much you been suckered for?’
‘Close to 500,000 dollars, in your currency. You, er – Matt?’
‘A lot less, but all my savings.’ He hesitated then he said, ‘Ninety thousand give or take. I’ve been a goddam fool.’
‘I think you and I are members of a very big club.’
‘Tell me about it. So what’s your story? Apart from having the same misfortune as me to know Gerry.’
Johnny told him. Sorokin listened in silence until he had finished. Then he said, ‘You and I – we’re in the same deep brown stuff. I’m down a little less than you but that don’t make the pain any easier. Thing is, John, I don’t take crap lying down. You don’t strike me, from your background, as a guy who does either. Are you in my boat?’
Johnny Fordwater didn’t know the expression. But he had a good idea what it meant.
‘I’m in your boat,’ he replied.
‘An old colleague, Pat Lanigan, is still working in law enforcement in New York. He has connections, know what I’m saying?’
‘What kind of connections?’
‘You got enough dough left to buy yourself an air ticket to New York?’
‘Just about.’
‘Good. We have a plan. I’ll meet you there. Next Monday too soon?’
‘Not soon enough.’
39
Thursday 4 October
Roy Grace stood in front of Assistant Chief Constable Cassian Pewe’s absurdly large desk – which he was about to lose, Grace thought with some satisfaction, due to austerity forcing more and more senior officers to have to share office space. The ACC, still seated, was daintily sipping from a china cup of coffee. He offered Grace neither a seat nor a drink, pretty much par for the course. The time to be worried, Grace knew, was when he did.
Pewe, perfectly groomed as always, was, in Roy Grace’s opinion, sailing close to a nervous breakdown. The sooner the better, he thought. The man had been on a management training course earlier in the year, and ever since, at their twice-weekly morning meetings, had been spouting unintelligible gobbledygook.
Pewe gave him an unnaturally warm – near-dementedly warm – smile, staring at him intently. The look reminded Grace of an expression he had always liked: The eagle eye of the inefficient. Then, the ACC’s voice, half snide, half patronizing, asked, ‘So, Roy, are all your spreadsheets green?’
‘I actually wouldn’t know, sir.’ The sir came out with the reluctance of a dental extraction.
‘You are aware, are you not, Roy, that I’m an advocate of the multi-systems approach?’
‘Completely.’
‘Good. So may I enquire why, in midst of preparing for three important murder trials, you’ve decided to take time out to waste your valuable energies – doing nothing to move the needle on our homicide statistics and stretching police financial resources on what is clearly no more than an unfortunate suicide?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘You know exactly what I’m referring to, Roy. You are allowing yourself to be distracted from your important trial work out of sheer hubris.’
‘Hubris?’
‘Yes, hubris. You always need to be at the forefront of any major investigation, don’t you, in order to see your name in the papers?’
‘In my role as Head of Major Crime for the county I’d be derelict in my duties if I wasn’t involved in an overseeing capacity in our major investigations, sir.’
‘Perhaps it would help you focus if I removed you from that role?’
Struggling to contain his anger, and thinking to himself, I once saved your life, more fool me, Grace replied, tersely, ‘That would be your prerogative. But I cannot agree with you that Suzy Driver’s death is suicide. You’ve seen the pathologist’s initial report, that she had suffered a blow to the back of her head from a blunt instrument prior to hanging – or rather, being hung.’
‘A blow to the back of her head that matched marks and hair found on her carpet by the CSIs which indicated she might have fallen over backwards sometime before her death. Old people do fall over sometimes.’
‘She was not an old lady, sir, she was only in her mid-fifties.’
‘I don’t care, Roy, I don’t see enough evidence here to launch a murder enquiry. You are aware of our tight budgets these days, aren’t you? The average cost of a murder enquiry currently stands at £3.2 million.’
‘What about the emotional cost to a victim’s loved ones? Have the bean-counters calculated that, too?’
‘Everything has a cost, Roy, unlike the dreamland where your head seems to spend most of its time.’
‘Fine, sir. So from now on you want me to tell the families of murder victims that we’re not going to be investigating them because we can’t afford to?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. We just have to be absolutely certain before we launch any investigation and start incurring costs.’
Grace was struggling to keep his temper. ‘Is it really that you don’t want to spend the money on an investigation, or is the truth that you are mindful of massaging your crime statistics and we are already over our murder rate for the year?’
Pewe wagged a warning finger.
Ignoring it, Grace said, ‘Christ, you were once a detective yourself. Would you have looked at a body hanging from a cord around the neck with her feet six inches above anything she could have stood on and not wondered how she could possibly have done that by herself?’
‘No,’ Pewe replied, flatly.
‘Do you want to tell me she stood on a block of ice, like that old locked-room puzzle?’
‘I’m not playing puzzle games with you, Roy, I’m looking at the evidence, the facts. We have a bereaved and lonely woman. She’s looking for love online and all she finds is conmen. Then her sister dies, the final straw. Did she know? Maybe she got drunk, fell over, bashed her head. Had enough, ended it all. End of.’
‘Very few women hang themselves, sir, that’s a known fact. It’s extremely rare.’
‘Good, so you have an extremely rare situation. As you are into known facts and presumably statistics, too, let me throw a few at you. Last year in the UK we had a total of 585 homicides. We had 1,730 road traffic deaths. Those figures pale into insignificance when you look at the number of suicides: 6,188. How does that weight the odds, Roy?’
The Detective Superintendent shook his head in disbelief at his boss’s attitude.
‘Anything else I can help you with today?’ asked Pewe.
‘You’re really happy to leave it there?’ Grace stared at him with a mixture of frustration and anger.
‘Until I see better evidence to convince me she might have been murdered, I am, Roy. Perhaps you should be wondering to yourself, Roy, how come – when we were both the same rank less than two years ago – you are exactly where you were and I’m now an ACC? Maybe there’s a reason for it which is now becoming self-evident.’
It was all Grace could do not to punch his boss’s supercilious face. He stood, simmering. ‘And what about her dead sister in Germany?’
Pewe replied, ‘Is that information confirmed yet? It’s for them to investigate, not us.’
‘It’s not confirmed one hundred per cent, but it’s looking like the two sisters were killed and their deaths are linked.’
‘Not in my mind, they’re not. And while you’ve been out there garnering more newspaper column inches, you’ve been totally ignoring another directive I gave you, Roy.’
‘I have?’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Which directive are you referring to, sir?’ Pewe threw so many at him, he had lost track.
‘I’m referring to one from the latest Home Office report, Roy. Can you tell me exactly how you have delivered, supported and inspired your team in a way that’s led to an increase in diversity?’
Grace stared back at him, almost incredulous. ‘Sir, at this moment we are facing a crime epidemic. Sussex citizens on dating agencies were scammed out of £30 million last year. Our murder rate in the last twelve months is at a fifty-year record high, as are burglaries and street crime. And you are worrying about diversity? I’m extremely proud of the diversity in my team, sir. I’m afraid I don’t have any field officer in a wheelchair because unfortunately, in my wide but admittedly limited experience, not many victims are considerate enough to always be murdered in access-friendly locations.’
‘You’re sailing very close to the wind, Roy,’ Pewe said.
All of it coming from your backside, with a very nasty smell, Grace would dearly love to have said.
As he left the ACC’s office a few minutes later, closing the grand door behind him, he was thinking about the words an embittered colleague had said to him recently, over a pint: ‘It’s not the down-and-outs and the criminals on the outside that you have to worry about, Roy, it’s the ones on the inside who’ll cut your throat and hang you out to bleed dry.’
His phone rang.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered, standing in the corridor; Pewe’s assistant sat typing in her booth, opposite him.
It was DC Kevin Hall, a member of the small Major Enquiry Team he had assembled to investigate Susan Driver’s death.
‘Boss, we’ve just heard back from the Landeskriminalamt in Munich. Could be quite significant.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Lena Welch, the woman who went over her balcony in Munich, and Suzy Driver, are definitely confirmed as sisters. It took them a while to make the connection because both of them have married names. And there’s more, boss. Velvet’s just spoken to a close friend of Mrs Driver. She’d been telling her, very excitedly, about the dating agency she’d joined about a year ago. The friend told Velvet that recently the sisters had been concerned that a man Suzy had been talking with, who she found very attractive, had asked her for money and she was becoming suspicious about him.
‘And now both sisters are dead,’ Grace said.
‘It gets better. Munich police recovered from Lena’s flat a digital recording device, which shows images of her killer. There might be more to this than meets the eye, boss – in my humble opinion.’
Roy Grace was feeling a sudden burst of elation. ‘Humble is good, Kevin!’ Ending the call, he spun round and knocked on ACC Pewe’s door, a rat-a-tat-tat riff on the classic policeman’s knock, and loud enough to annoy him. He was more than a little pleased that he was about to ruin his boss’s morning – and, with a bit of luck, his entire day.
40
Monday 8 October
Johnny Fordwater, nursing a stinger of a hangover, was feeling tired and fractious. It was 9 a.m. in New York but his metabolism was elsewhere, in another time zone. It was 2 p.m. UK time, he calculated, which would be fine if he’d managed to sleep last night, which he hadn’t. He’d dozed for a while on the flight over from London, but it had been hard in the cramped economy seat. Then he and Sorokin met and hit it off like old mates. They’d sat drinking far too much whisky in his hotel bar late into the evening.
Now, in the open-plan offices of the Conviction Review Team, on the second floor of the handsome building of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, Johnny sat perched alongside his new comrade-in-arms on a wobbly swivel chair. Facing them, arms outstretched on top of his cluttered desk, was the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan. In his mid-fifties, the Irish-American had begun his working life in the US Navy, before becoming a stevedore in the docks and then joining the NYPD. He had a pockmarked face with greying brush-cut hair and a light beard. He exuded charm and seemed genuinely concerned for their predicament.
The Conviction Review Team shared the floor with the Mafia-busting Team. A short distance behind Fordwater and Sorokin was a large whiteboard on which was charted the family tree of one of the most notorious New York crime families.
‘So, Johnny,’ Pat Lanigan said in a strong Brooklyn accent, ‘I wanna tell you something about how I feel about all vets, OK? The American flag that you see on our roof and every other place does not fly because the wind moves past it. Our beautiful flag flies from the last breath of each military member who has died serving it. And that goes for the flag you served under, too, Johnny. I don’t like to see anyone screwed over, but most of all someone who’s put their life on the line serving all that we believe in and stand for.’
‘Thank you,’ Johnny said. He had liked Lanigan instantly, the moment he met him, just fifteen minutes or so ago. Matt Sorokin, dressed in jeans, a leather jacket over a turquoise polo shirt and cowboy boots, looked like a guy who had been born angry and had just got even angrier with each passing year.
‘Good old Lanigan horseshit!’ Sorokin retorted.
‘You’ll have to excuse my pal,’ Lanigan said. ‘He never took too kindly to life creeping up and biting him on the ass.’
‘I only protected your ass for thirty-two years in this city, buddy! But I appreciate your sentiments.’
Looking serious now, Lanigan said, ‘So, I wanna do everything I can to help you guys. Where do we begin, how do you wanna play this?’
‘Pat,’ Sorokin said, ‘Johnny Fordwater here is a decorated war hero. He served his country, rank of major in the military, and put his life on the line, then lost his beloved wife. He deserves happiness in his twilight years. Having dedicated forty years of my life to serving my country, mostly through the NYPD, I kind of feel the same. Instead, both of us have been hit pretty hard. How do we wanna play it? Hardball, is what I say.’ He looked at the Englishman for confirmation.
‘Detective Investigator Lanigan,’ Johnny Fordwater said, ‘the thing is—’
‘Pat, please,’ Lanigan interjected.
‘OK, Pat. Thank you. Matt and I know there is little – if any – hope of ever recovering what we’ve lost. We’ve both been damned fools, in our own ways. But if there’s to be any good out of all this mess it will be to – somehow – use our experience to help prevent others from becoming victims. And just maybe, in the process, find a way to recover some of our losses.’
Sorokin was looking studiously at his phone. ‘What we’d like, Pat, is for you to use whatever contacts you have in the NYPD, currently, to track down the shitbags behind this. I’ll do whatever it takes.’
Johnny stared at the family tree behind him. ‘Are the New York Mafia involved in this area, Pat?’
‘I’m sure it’s a business they’d love to be in,’ Lanigan said. ‘These guys hate to miss out on any opportunity. But mostly they carry on their business the way they always have done – with one foot in the past, and they’re being overtaken. They’ve not moved into technology. They’re still doing mostly their same protection racketeering shit but with smaller traders now, because none of the big ones have cash these days, it’s all credit cards and online. So now it’s the corner stores, the little guys who are struggling who are their prey, as well as the same old smuggling cigarettes and alcohol, fake designer goods and prostitution. The Mob are behind the eight-ball when it comes to internet crime – for now, anyhows.’
‘Probably not for long,’ Sorokin commented.
Lanigan nodded. ‘So, I talked to a couple of Secret Service guys who are housed right here in this building, just one floor up, and they say internet financial fraud comes mostly under Homeland Security or the FBI depending on jurisdiction.’ He looked at them. ‘So, here’s the thing. I’ve spoken to internet fraud guys in both these outfits here in New York and they tell me the ringleaders are almost all based either out of Africa or Eastern Europe. The major player in tackling internet fraud is the City of London Police Economic Crimes Unit, but they’re creaking under the strain. We’re talking about an epidemic here. Over one billion dollars in this country in the last year alone.’
‘One billion?’ Johnny said.
‘One billion that they know about. The true figure could be way above that. A lot of people are too embarrassed to admit to anyone they’ve been scammed. And large corporations, too. It’s party time for the con artists. Banking, credit card fraud, romance fraud, mortgage fraud, and still, after thirty years, every day of every week someone falls for an email telling them their uncle in Nigeria has died leaving a fortune of a hundred million bucks they can’t get out of the country, and all they have to do is send four blank sheets of signed letterhead notepaper to get a share of it. Every damn day of the week some poor damned sucker is standing in a hotel lobby, somewhere in the world, waiting for a guy to turn up with ten million bucks in a suitcase who is never going to appear. And they’re gonna find out they’ve just been cleaned out of every cent they have in the world. I hate to have to tell you, but you guys are small beer in this shitstorm.’
‘Well, that’s just great to hear, Pat,’ Sorokin said, bitterly.
Lanigan raised his arms placatingly. ‘I have someone who may be of help to you guys.’
‘You do?’ Johnny’s hopes rose.
‘Uh-huh. Someone the FBI Cybercrime Unit has worked with in the past. This is one smart guy – he’s been an advisor to both Apple and Microsoft on cybersecurity.’ Lanigan looked directly at the Englishman. ‘And he must be near where you live, Johnny. Ray Packham. Recently retired from the Sussex Police Digital Forensics Team due to a health issue. Set himself up as an independent consultant investigating internet fraud. The guys here say he’s the top banana, knows how to drill down through pretty much any internet exchange. My advice to you guys is to go talk to him.’
