Dead at First Sight, page 20
He’d once had a pathological aversion to the very notion of vegan, but after she’d created some seriously tasty recipes he had now started to enjoy it. Tonight they’d had nut burgers, with baked beans and sliced avocado. Afterwards they both returned to the living area, Cleo to continue with her studies and Roy to start work on his best-man’s speech for Glenn Branson’s wedding to Argus reporter Siobhan Sheldrake.
He googled the subject on his laptop and found a number of websites. He needed a good joke to start with, something perhaps a little risqué but inoffensive. He found a whole stack of them, most of them terrible. Then he came across one he quite liked. ‘Darling, sorry to interrupt you, what do you think of this?’ he asked.
She looked up.
‘I would strongly advise the newlyweds to be cautious about buying their marital bed from Harrods. Apparently, they always stand by their products!’
She rocked her head from side to side as if weighing the balance. ‘Yuk, that is so cheesy. No, no, no!’
‘I quite like it,’ he said defensively. ‘I mean, hey, Glenn is cheesy, right?’
‘You can do a lot better.’ She peered at him. ‘Roy, you look exhausted. I’m knackered, too, and I’ve a full-on day tomorrow, nine postmortems.’
‘Be nice if people stopped dying for a couple of days to give you a break!’
‘Maybe you should ask the Argus to put out a request.’
His job phone rang.
Cleo raised her eyebrows.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
It was Arnie – Notmuch – Crown. ‘Sir,’ the American said, ‘thought you’d appreciate an update. We’ve arrested one of the suspects, but Red Shoes got away and has disappeared.’
Instantly, Roy sat upright. ‘Tell me?’ Crown filled him in on events. ‘Jesus, his right hand? How is he?’
‘Lost a lot of blood. He’s in ITU at the Sussex County, but they think he’ll pull through. The Response Team had the presence of mind to get instructions from the hospital on how to pack the hand and keep it cold. Surgeons are going to attempt to reattach it.’
‘What do we know about the suspect?’
‘Very little, sir. Apparently he’s keeping resolutely schtum. All they have at present is a burner phone and two credit cards and a driving licence in his wallet, both cards in the name D. Duck – from two different private banks in Lithuania. No address in the UK that he’s giving out. He wouldn’t say a word to the custody sergeant.’
‘So we need to make him quack.’
Notmuch gave a nervous, ‘Ha ha.’
‘Anything on the phone?’
‘It’s been biked over to Digital Forensics as an urgent priority.’
‘Good. What about the missing one – any progress on finding him?’
‘We’ve alerted Oscar-1 and CCTV are reviewing all footage of the area where he was last seen.’
‘Did we get anything from that boutique they went into? OnTrend? How did they pay?’
‘Cash, I’m afraid. There’s some CCTV from inside the shop but it doesn’t give us much more. The officers attending seized the banknotes Red Shoes paid with for fingerprint and DNA analysis. There’s no print match. We’ll have DNA sometime tomorrow.’
‘Nothing back from Europe or Interpol?’ Grace asked him.
‘No, sir.’
‘Was the victim able to speak? Did he say anything?’
‘Only one thing, sir. In the car on the way to the hospital he told the officers that the guys who did this said they were upset by his radio appearance this morning.’
‘Radio appearance?’
‘He was on the Danny Pike show, talking about Suzy Driver.’
‘Shit,’ Grace said. His brain spun, rapidly connecting the dots. At least this latest development, horrific though it was, gave him whatever further ammunition he might need – if indeed he did still need it – to convince Cassian Pewe of just what they were dealing with. The woman dead in Munich after threatening to expose her online ‘lover’. Suzy Driver dead after threatening to do the same. Now Toby Seward, the man Suzy Driver had gone to, whose identity had been taken, viciously attacked in his home hours after talking on the radio.
One of the assailants still at large.
Who was the next victim going to be?
Where did they start looking?
‘Arnie, who’s with you in the Incident Room tonight?’
‘DS Snape, Norman, EJ, Alec and Velvet.’
Grace debated whether to go in, but decided there was little he could accomplish that he couldn’t do over the phone. And, as Cleo rightly observed, he was knackered, and would be a lot more use to the investigation after a night’s sleep. They had thirty-six hours to keep the man in custody before they needed to formally charge him. He didn’t know how secretive Lithuanian banks might be, but they had enough time, hopefully, to establish his real identity. What he now needed was two trained advanced suspect interviewers. ‘Nice work, Arnie. I want you to make sure that the suspect has a lawyer – if he doesn’t have one of his own, arrange a legal aid solicitor. We’re going to interview him at 9 a.m.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Put Norman on, will you?’
Grace briefed Potting, then called Glenn Branson. ‘Sorry to disturb your love nest.’
‘Very funny.’
In the background he could hear the television. ‘What are you watching? A replay of Love Island?’
‘The news, actually.’
‘Getting your rocks off to the latest on Brexit?’
‘Sometimes, Roy, you are really sad.’
Grace told him the recent development. ‘I want you and Norman to interview the suspect at 9 a.m. I’ll watch from the observation room.’
‘I always perform better in front of a voyeur.’
60
Tuesday 9 October
As he walked away from the pub, the heavy package still tucked in his belt, safely concealed by his jacket and parka, Tooth checked his phone.
The blue dot was heading north on the A23, the main road out of Brighton towards London, passing Gatwick Airport.
He hurried back to the Polo, which he’d parked down a side street a short distance away, and jumped in. Under the glow of a street lamp, he peered cautiously inside his coat at the contents of the brown carrier. Inside was an unbranded handgun that looked like a backstreet copy of a Beretta, a silencer and a plastic bag containing some bullets – around twenty he guessed, he didn’t have time to count them. More than enough for his purposes.
He balanced the phone on the seat beside him, stuck the bag with its contents in the glovebox, looked at the moving blue dot again and calculated that the Hyundai was around fifteen minutes in front of him.
He drove carefully through the city, then once he was out of the 30-mph zone and on the A27 dual carriageway he accelerated hard up the hill and down the far side, before peeling off left, onto the A23 north.
Taking a risk on the quiet road, he increased his speed until the needle was nudging the 90-mph mark. Steadily, over the next fifteen minutes, he narrowed the gap with the blue dot. He maintained his speed. It was reckless, he knew, but he watched out for police cars like a hawk. The gap continued to close.
A few miles on, the A23 became the M23 motorway. He continued maintaining his speed. Less than ten minutes between them now. The blue dot was turning left, off the M23. Onto the Gatwick Airport slip road, the map showed him.
Shortly after, the blue dot stopped moving. Why?
Tooth almost shot past the Hyundai. He spotted it pulled over in a lay-by a few hundred yards ahead.
He slowed right down and switched off his headlights. A couple of taxis overtook him as he was wondering where to pull in. But he didn’t need to as the Hyundai suddenly began moving again, crawling round the perimeter road. Tooth followed behind it at a safe distance, wondering what they were doing. Were they returning the car? Flying out?
The Hyundai drove all the way round, through the Departure drop-off zone and back round the perimeter road. Then it entered the short-term car park.
Tooth felt a beat of excitement. The car park would be pretty quiet at this time of the night. Perhaps, if they parked in a dark area, he could get them both as they climbed out of the car. A double-tap to each of their heads.
An untraceable gun and bullets.
He could be on a plane out first thing in the morning. Job done. Then on to South America. To the house he’d recently acquired in Cuenca, in Ecuador.
But instead of heading up the ramp to the parking levels, the Hyundai made a right, into the Sixt car rental area, and pulled up in a bay.
What were they doing?
Then he saw, under the weak overhead lighting, there was only one person in the car. Which puzzled him.
Red Shoes got out and headed towards the office.
Tooth reversed into an empty bay that gave him a view of the office through his mirrors. He watched Red Shoes approach the reception counter, with a bored-looking woman behind it.
And now he had a pretty good idea what was happening.
Leaving his Polo and keeping stealthily out of sight of the office, he hurried behind several rows of parked cars and over to the Hyundai. He crouched down behind it, felt underneath until he found the magnetic tracker, pulled it free and pocketed it.
61
Tuesday 9 October
Jules de Copeland drove away from Gatwick Airport in a new car, a small Kia, hired under a different name and card, from a different rental firm, Avis.
He was thinking about his vanished colleague. What a complete fool.
Jeopardizing their entire lucrative operation. Jesus.
His anger preoccupied him. Distracted him. Made him totally forget, as it had this past hour and a half, to properly check his mirrors.
Even if he had, he would have been unlikely to spot the headlights of the little VW Polo that followed him some distance back, staying several cars behind.
The Seekers were playing on the radio, ‘I’ll Never Find Another You’.
Oh yes I will. You, man, are history.
But all the same, he fretted. Kofi could give the whole game away if he was caught, and talked.
Hopefully, like himself, he’d been smart enough to get away.
Thirty minutes later, back in Brighton, he turned off the busy Dyke Road Avenue thoroughfare and down a short distance to leafy, secluded Withdean Road. He drove past the entrances to several houses, then halted at wrought-iron gates set between brick pillars and lowered the window to let the duty security guard in the control room see his face.
A twelve-foot-high, fortress-like brick wall protected the grounds and mansion beyond from prying eyes. The place served both as his residence and the headquarters of the JDC dating agency.
As the gates opened, he assured himself that Kofi would be there, in the private cinema, watching one of the crappy Netflix true-crime dramas he was addicted to.
He wasn’t.
He wasn’t in any of the toilets either.
Nor was he in his bedroom. The only occupant was the soul of the human skull sitting on a bookshelf. Kofi told him he’d stolen it from a grave, for his Sakawa fetish rituals. He could believe what he wanted, Copeland was fine with that, but he didn’t go for all that stuff himself.
He didn’t even like standing here alone in the room with the skull. It gave him the heebie-jeebies. Brought back too many memories, too many bad memories of too many skulls. Too many dead people. He had been a proud teenage warrior back then but he wasn’t proud of his past any more. When you were a kid you believed what older people told you. It was easy to be brainwashed. He’d moved on from all that killing and mutilating, all that bullshit ideology fighting for a cause. All the futility. Kofi hadn’t. Yeah, at times you had to be violent because that was the only thing some people understood. Kofi still got his rocks off being violent, but not himself, not any more. Now he got his bangs from seeing money in his bank accounts. Kerrrrrchinggg! The cash register ringing it all up in his head.
The day he reinvented himself several years ago as businessman Mr Jules de Copeland, open to do business between Ghana and the gullible Western world, with all its rich pickings to be had, was the day his life had changed. From his humble beginnings he was now a rich man, and getting richer all the time. Or at least he had been until tonight. Kofi had been a good and loyal lieutenant, but now, if he had been arrested – God forbid – he had to find a way to cut loose, fast.
He was a family man now, with his sweet wife, Ama, and a six-month-old son, Bobo, living in their farmhouse a short distance from Munich. He missed them and wanted to be back with them, soon. Please God Kofi wasn’t going to mess all his plans up.
Down the end of a long corridor, in the large phone room, were six of his operatives whom he had brought over from Ghana, via Munich, for cultural training in UK ways. All were busily engaged emailing, FaceTiming or phoning ‘loved ones’. Three males, three females, earning more each month here than they could have done in a lifetime back home.
But no Kofi.
Why had that stupid idiot gone back into the house? They’d already frightened the crap out of Seward – he would have been putty in their hands.
He sat down at his private workstation at the back of the room, elevated on a dais so it gave him a commanding view of his team. A bank of monitors in front of him enabled him to watch or listen in to any conversation any of his employees was having with a ‘loved one’ they’d met online.
He selected No. 5. Sisi Tawney. She was twenty-three, pretty.
He’d invested in a course of online elocution lessons for her, as he had with all his team.
Sisi’s identity was Monique Dupres. Resident of Esher, Surrey. Widowed, tragically, at fifty-four when her late husband, a born-again middle-aged biker, was killed in a motorcycle accident, leaving huge debts. Looking to start her life over. And she had now found Mr Right.
Sisi was doing nicely. She had her hooks into a man called Guy Relph, a sixty-nine-year-old widower, eager to help his beloved in any way he could. He’d already transferred over £50,000 to help her clear her debts and keep her home. She was now playing him for a further £50,000 and it was going well.
The money was piling up!
Jules next hooked into his total star player, Esi Jabbar.
Esi had sucked in a seventy-nine-year-old widow who was besotted with him, or rather, the image she believed was him. A thirty-year-old black hunk he’d lifted from a past World’s Strongest Man competitors’ list.
She’d loaned him £28,000, and was now engaged with her bank, seeing if she could find a way to get an equity release on the last £100,000 of value in her house.
She was totally smitten with him, she told him. He was totally smitten with her, he’d replied.
As Jules logged on to his own workstation, a new email came in, which stood out amongst the dross and made him immediately focus. It was from his best prospect, a woman called Lynda Merrill. She was fifty-nine and attractive, with a sparkle in her eyes. He liked her. They’d been communicating for four months now, under the identity he was using of Richie Griffiths, a handsome silver-haired man, the film producer.
Hello, sexy beast, I’ve not heard from you all day. Have you gone off me? XXX
She’d already paid over several small amounts, and now she was in the process of liquidating £450,000 to send him, to buy out his ex-wife’s share of their home.
Or so she thought.
Go off you, my gorgeous? How could I ever, you’re in my mind every second, driving me crazy for you. I’ve had one hell of a day. Laters, babe, yeah? I’m bursting for you. So can’t wait to meet. XXXXXX
He sent the email then put her momentarily out of his mind. He needed to find Kofi. Pulling an unused burner phone from a carefully labelled selection in his desk drawer, he set it on ‘number withheld’ and dialled his lieutenant’s current phone. It rang. Once, twice, three times. Four times. Just as he thought it was going to voicemail, it picked up.
‘Hello?’ A male voice he did not recognize.
He hesitated in panic, wondering whether to hang up. Instead he asked, ‘Who is this speaking?’
‘Sussex Police. Who are you?’
He terminated the call instantly. His hand was shaking. He switched the phone off, and in his panic, stamped on it several times, crushing it, trying to destroy it.
His brain was racing. Could they trace the call? It was one of a bunch of burners he had bought in different stores around the Brighton area in the past months. And he’d withheld the number.
The bigger worry was why the police were answering Kofi’s phone. Had the idiot dropped it, or – more likely – had he been arrested – and if so, what would he tell them? They’d long rehearsed the scenario of either of them being arrested. They both carried false identification with nothing to link them together. They had their cover story: they were travelling independently, tourists, come to visit England, the same as thousands of other visitors to Brighton.
But the British police were smart. Even if the jackass didn’t squeal, how long would it take the police to make the connections?
One statement from Toby Seward?
He thought about the £450,000. A big prize.
If he could get that quickly, then he could bail out, back to Germany or – even better – take Ama and Bobo home to the safety of Ghana, and screw Kofi. He could stew in his own mess.
Feeling a bit better, he went up to his room and began packing. Fortunately he had an emergency Plan B. A safe house he’d never told Kofi about. For just such a situation as this.
It was going to be fine.
Jules de Copeland was unaware of the car that had followed him back here from Gatwick Airport. The Polo was now parked a short distance along from the gates of this house, on the other side of the street, with an unobstructed view of the entrance.
He was unaware, too, of its occupant. A man trained by the US military in patience. A man who could go without food or water or sleep for days and still function sharply. A man who had learned to sit as motionless as a twig on a tree, for as many days as it took to do the job.
