Dead at First Sight, page 28
Balanced against getting away from the clutches of Pewe. And being on his level. Or above him!
‘I really want you to think about it, Roy. This could be a stepping stone for you to one day getting a top job in the Met. I know you are ambitious – and I know you have massive ability. Would you consider it?’
He looked at her, unsure for one of the few times in his life how to reply.
‘It would be a big upheaval for you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to paint a rosy picture. It would be 24/7, full on, and if you got the job you would be in the national spotlight. Go home, talk it over with your wife, think about it. Personally, I can’t think of anyone better for the job.’
‘I’m very flattered,’ he said.
The waiter reappeared. ‘On the bone or off?’ he asked in an Italian accent.
‘Off for me, please,’ she said.
‘On the bone for me,’ Grace said.
Alison Vosper said, without a hint of acidity, ‘That’s the Roy Grace I remember. Always up for a challenge!’
86
Thursday 11 October
Kofi Okonjo liked to work out. He let his lunch digest, then took his turn in the exercise yard, with its tall fence topped with two rolls of razor wire, and began running circuits in the pelting rain. No one else was out here and that was good.
As he ran he thought of his life back in Reutlingen. His cars. Julia. They’d had a similar background. She’d told him all about her father, an angry farmer, angry all the time at the EU subsidies, angry when she tried to read books to educate herself, angry at her mother. And who’d abused her throughout her childhood.
Kofi told her about his background, about stuff he’d done as a boy soldier, and it shocked and excited her. She understood. They were two of a kind. He dreamed of her now, her pale white skin. Her sexy mouth. Her bright-red nipples and her small but firm round breasts. The ring in her navel. The other ring, down below, that drove her crazy when he flipped it around with his tongue.
He felt himself growing stiff inside his loose grey tracksuit as he ran. When he finished his circuits he’d whack off in the shower, perhaps, thinking of her. Imagining her voice. Talking him through it. Imagining her hand on him. Slow, slow, gently, then firmer. Harder. Faster.
An hour later, sodden with rain, he re-entered the First Night Centre, and the sour reek of disinfectant. He walked past the cells and went into his. His mean-looking cellmate wasn’t there. No big loss. He stripped off his clothes, picked up his meagre towel, wrapped it round his midriff and headed off to the showers.
Entering, he slung his towel on one of a row of hooks and turned the tap, standing well back to check the temperature. Then stepped forward, immersing himself, feeling the jet of hot water, gratefully, on his face, body and hair. He washed his body and his hair thoroughly, rinsed off and stepped back, his eyes stinging from soap residue.
As he did so, a voice behind him startled him. ‘Nice fresh towel, Dunstan?’
Who knew him by that name in here?
He spun round. To see a man with a towel over his head and face. Holding what looked like a home-made knife.
‘Mr Barrey told me to take care of you.’
Before he could move, the man rammed the blade into his stomach. Okonjo felt for a second he had been punched by a fist. An instant later his stomach erupted with burning, searing pain. The towel fell away from his assailant’s face. It was the silent Eastern European man who had been in the prison van with him from the magistrates’ court.
‘I’m told you like blades, don’t you, Dunstan? Or should I call you Kofi?’
He moaned in agony.
The man held him against the wall with the hilt pressed against his stomach.
He was dimly aware that his bowels were evacuating. The man was eyeballing him.
‘I’ve a message from Mr Barrey. He told me to take care of you in prison. Do you know anything of history? Those old medieval knights, in wars, had a code of honour. They would ask the knight who’d pierced them with a sword not to twist – it gave them a better chance of survival, because if they twisted the blade, it would tear their guts, ripping open their bowels, all that muck getting into the bloodstream. Sepsis would follow. Too far gone for doctors. A slow, agonizing death. Eh?’
Okonjo stared at him, shaking in agony and terror. ‘No, please,’ he mouthed, but the sound came out strange, distorted, lost inside another moan of agony.
‘Plenty of time to think about your life, yes? All your loved ones. Got a girl you’re sweet on waiting for you back home, have you? Julia, that her name?’
His assailant shot a quick, wary glance behind him. ‘I could just twist the blade and then you’ll have a few hours before you die. A few hours to think about Julia, yes? Or you would if I left you like this, but I can’t take that chance. Sorry.’ He withdrew the shank, Okonjo gasping as he did, blood and something darker and vile-smelling running from the wound. Okonjo jammed his hands over it, panting in pain. An instant later the man plunged the blade through Okonjo’s chest. Pushing it in hard, right up to the makeshift hilt again. Then gave it a sharp twist.
The African jerked, once. A gurgling sound came from his throat, then he collapsed into the shower tray.
His assailant removed the shank. He rinsed it under the running water for some while, wiped it carefully with a towel and slipped away, taking the towel with him.
87
Thursday 11 October
Roy Grace had once been backstage at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, some years ago when he was a young DS, and had never forgotten the experience. A stressed stage-door manager named Setch had called the police after the mysterious disappearance of an actress in a touring play who had failed to turn up for a performance and had subsequently been reported missing from her lodgings.
There had been reports of a creepily obsessive fan repeatedly hanging around outside the stage door – ‘Stage Door Johnny’, the staff had called him. Fortunately there had been a good outcome: it turned out she’d had a breakdown unrelated to this stalker, and had gone home to the north of England without bothering to inform any of the play’s company.
What struck Roy, interviewing the stagehands, was the contrast between the opulence of the front-of-house, with its chandeliers, ornate decor and plush red velour seats, as well as the stage set of a Victorian drawing room, and the whole different world of darkness, shabbiness and seeming chaos of the cavernous dark spaces behind, with tangles of cables, ropes and pulleys, and props all over the place.
It was the same with barristers’ chambers, he thought, as he left the tube station following his meeting with Alison Vosper and walked along busy Fleet Street, past the imposing Gothic facade of the Royal Courts of Justice, then turned right, away from the hubbub, down through an archway into the sanctuary of Inner Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court, which housed barristers and their clerks. He was in a vast courtyard surrounded by tall, handsome red-brick terraced buildings, in front of which were gardens and a pond, as well as a car park containing a fair amount of expensive metal. Successful barristers, who acted as both prosecutors and defending counsel in the nation’s antiquated legal system, were among the highest paid professionals in their field. Their clerks did pretty well, too. And yet he knew, as he stood on the doorstep of No. 82 and rang the bell marked G. Carrington QC, that just like front-of-house at the Theatre Royal, compared to the grandeur of the courts in which they performed, barristers’ chambers tended to be in the main unimpressive and often quite cramped.
As the clerk on the third floor led him through into the small, legal-tome-lined office, it was little different from many he had been in before. George Carrington sat behind a desk, in front of which, in studded leather chairs, sat Financial Investigator Emily Denyer and Crown Prosecution solicitor Rodney Higgs.
Carrington, a Queen’s Counsel who had a formidable reputation on both sides of the Bar, was in his early sixties, with a rubicund, well-lunched face. Dressed in a three-piece chalk-striped suit and looking out imperiously through half-frame glasses, he instantly reminded Grace of a television character, many years back, called Rumpole of the Bailey, played by the late Leo McKern.
As the barrister rose to greet him, Grace clocked the uncomfortable expressions on both Emily Denyer’s and Rodney Higgs’s faces, and apologized for being late.
‘Detective Superintendent Grace,’ Carrington greeted him in a deep, bass voice. ‘Very good to meet you. Please take a seat.’
He pointed Grace to the third chair in front of him.
As he sat down, Roy Grace had the gut feeling this was not going to go well. He was right.
Carrington looked down for some moments at one of a pile of documents on his desk that were bound in coloured ribbon. ‘So, Detective Superintendent, this very charming young lady, Miss Jodie Bentley – at least that’s the name we are currently calling her, among many of her aliases – I believe you have given her the moniker of “Black Widow”?’ He gave Grace a long, hard look. ‘She’s a tricky character, I think you might agree?’
‘I’d say more than tricky, Mr Carrington,’ Grace replied. ‘Extremely well informed and cunning. She’s been operating under a string of aliases, with bank accounts set up in different names around the world. I believe she was responsible for the deaths of at least three previous lovers, as well as, very nearly, the murder of one of my finest detectives, DS Norman Potting. She’s a menace, a danger to society, and if there is any justice in the world, you’ll see to it that she’s locked behind bars for the rest of her life.’
Grace noted, uncomfortably, that both Denyer and Higgs were avoiding meeting his eye.
The QC steepled his hands. ‘I can well understand your sentiments, and there is no doubt in my mind, from your extremely well-prepared trial documents, that she is very probably guilty of all you say. The problem we are faced with is the gap between what you are certain to be the case and what we would be able to get a jury to believe. I’ve been looking at the evidence you and your team have put together and playing devil’s advocate with it.’
He tapped a pile of documents. ‘There is no certainty that we would be able to use similar facts in the evidence to connect the deaths of her first husband and of Walt Klein. She has only been charged with the murder of her second husband, Rowley Carmichael. The defence had indicated this was to be a not-guilty plea, but in the last couple of days new evidence has been submitted which puts a different complexion on matters. The psychiatric reports obtained by the experts working for both the defence and the prosecution agree that at the time of killing him, her mind was adversely affected to the extent of amounting to diminished responsibility.’
‘What?’ Roy Grace had to restrain himself from shouting at the pompous man. He looked at his two colleagues and again they avoided meeting his eye.
The barrister continued. ‘I’ve reviewed every salient detail of the evidence with the contents of the psychiatric reports and I have a number of concerns. But I also have a solution.’
‘Good to hear,’ Roy Grace said, barely masking his growing misgivings.
‘As you know, Detective Superintendent,’ Carrington continued, ‘Jodie Bentley is due to appear at Lewes Crown Court tomorrow morning for a plea and direction hearing. My proposal is that she will plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and be sectioned under Section 37 of the Mental Health Act. That means she can only ever be released under the orders of the Minister of Justice.’
Roy stared back at him in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious?’
‘I am very serious. I appreciate this may not be the day-in-court result you would like to see, but trust me, this is the best outcome. With the findings from the psychiatric reports and the experts’ agreements on her mental state, there is no way the trial judge would proceed in any other way.’
‘She’s had everybody over, she’s a serial killer, for God’s sake!’ Grace was almost shouting with frustration.
Carrington gave him a patronizing look that merely served to make Roy Grace even more angry. ‘I appreciate all the work you and your team put into this case, and I’ve studied it long and hard. But I’ve been in front of juries for the best part of forty years and I know only too well just how unpredictable they can be. Too often it’s not about right and wrong, justice and injustice.’ He looked hard at the Detective Superintendent. ‘This really is the right course of action, in the circumstances.’
Grace looked hard back at him. The QC carried on.
‘To sum up, having reviewed all the evidence, Detective Superintendent, both from a prosecuting counsel point of view and from a defence counsel’s, manslaughter is appropriate in this case.’
‘And released in a few months by a well-meaning health worker?’ Grace retorted.
Carrington shook his head. ‘No, that’s not going to happen.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can assure you,’ the barrister said. ‘This is a good result. Trust me.’
Roy Grace stared back at him, thinking, but not saying, Really? Trust you? Get real. Since when did letting a serial killer go free become a good result?
88
Thursday 11 October
Roy stormed out of the meeting, fuming. He felt let down by his legal team. In all his career, so far, he had encountered only a handful of people who could come close to Jodie Bentley for sheer evil. Why the hell didn’t they get it?
Glancing up at the statue of Lady Justice, as he always did, he recalled that some other cultures depicted her holding a snake rather than a sword. Maybe along with her holding some dice, they were more appropriate, he thought. Justice so often seemed to be a slippery serpent. And that was never more apposite than with Jodie Bentley, who had used snake venom to kill at least one husband and possibly more.
As he headed back towards the tube station, his phone rang. It was Glenn Branson.
‘How’re you doing, boss?’
‘Not great, actually. Got anything to cheer me up?’
‘I’ve just heard back from your pal, Marcel Kullen. He organized a team to go to the house linked to one of the phone numbers in Germany. There is a young lady living there.’
‘What do we know about her?’
‘Not much – I’ll – hang on a sec, can you? Kevin Hall’s trying to get my attention, looks like something’s up. Call you back in two?’
‘Fine.’
It was nearly ten minutes later when Glenn called him back. ‘Boss, we have a development this end.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Donald Duck’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘He’s dead. Donald Duck.’
‘Awwwww, think about all the kids around the world.’
‘This is serious, Roy. Kevin had a call from a deputy governor at Lewes Prison. Okonjo’s been murdered.’
‘What details do you have?’
‘It sounds like he’s been stabbed – shanked. Good and proper – in the stomach and the chest.’
When murders happened in prisons – relatively rare occurrences – they were mostly as a result of disputes. But just occasionally, in Grace’s experience, there were contract killings to silence a potential witness. Okonjo hadn’t been there long enough to have got into a murderous dispute, he was still in the First Night Centre. Had he been targeted by someone anxious to stop him talking – perhaps to stop him squealing on his accomplice who was still at large? But how did they access the First Night Centre?
Had his murder been masterminded by someone outside who knew how the remand-in-custody system worked?
At the magistrates’ court hearing, such as the one Okonjo had attended yesterday, there would usually be more than one prisoner remanded in custody. Could someone, paid to kill Okonjo, have had themselves arrested deliberately for an offence serious enough to be remanded, so they would be in the same wing as Okonjo in the first few days?
His thoughts went to Tooth. The man had been positively identified outside the house in Withdean Road, where Okonjo had been based, and now Okonjo was dead. Tooth was a contract killer. And Okonjo’s death had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
‘OK, two things, Glenn,’ Grace said. ‘First, check out the duty SIO roster and get one assigned to the killing. Then check out if there were any other prisoners remanded alongside him and get their profiles. In particular, make sure Tooth wasn’t one of them, under a bogus identity, although with what he knows that we have on him, he’d have to be nuts to allow himself to get processed through the prison system. But he’s surprised us all more than once before.’
‘On it, boss.’
89
Thursday 11 October
Jules de Copeland sat, dwarfing the small desk in the flat, his two large forefingers typing clumsily on the small keypad.
How’s it going my gorgeous one? I’m getting all tingly with desire for you, thinking about tomorrow. Thinking about that first thing I’m going to do to you when I have you in my arms. I’m going to drive you more crazy than anyone ever drove you in all your life. I just want to hold you and take your clothes off and then I’m going to give you something so special. Tomorrow. It’s too long. How can I wait? XXXXXXX
As he finished the email, checked it through and sent it, the 6 p.m. news came on Radio Sussex. He always listened, as often as he could throughout the day. The first item was another scandal the US President was glossing over, and the second was the recent royal visit to Brighton of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The third jolted him.
‘A spokesman for Lewes Prison has just confirmed that a prisoner was found dead from apparent stab wounds earlier today. His identity has been withheld but we understand the dead man was in the First Night Centre, where recently admitted prisoners spend their first few days. We will bring you more news on this story as it comes in.’
