Dead at First Sight, page 31
He made a list of what he needed to take with him, set his alarm and lay down on his bed, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
95
Friday 12 October
Matt Sorokin downed two whiskies, followed by two miniature bottles of shit wine, closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The movie he had been watching on the transatlantic flight from JFK to London was shit. The seat he was in, sandwiched between a fat guy with bad BO, who was snoring loudly, and a woman on his left who smelled like she’d tried every perfume in the duty-free shop, was shit, too.
He’d pulled off the headphones and stuck them in the pocket in front of him, reclined his seat, ignoring the protest of someone behind him, and closed his eyes.
The Neanderthal behind him was now kicking the back of his seat. Kick. Kick. Kick.
Matt unbuckled his belt, turned round and leaned over his headrest, staring at the man, an angry-looking guy with bulging, thyroid eyes. ‘You got a problem, buddy?’
‘You put your seat back,’ he said.
‘Yeah. I put my seat back. I paid for my seat and I paid for the button that puts it back. You gotta problem with that?’
‘I do.’
‘Yeah?’
‘It doesn’t give me any room.’
‘That’s the airline’s problem, not mine,’ Sorokin said. He turned away and let his seat back even further, as far as it would go.
The man behind him remained silent.
He closed his eyes again. Thought about his plans. His connecting flight to the island of Jersey. His lunch date at a fancy restaurant with Steve Barrey, whose name and contact details had been given to him by Jersey States Police Financial Crimes Unit. He’d approached Barrey in the guise of a bent cop, working in the NYPD Money Laundering Team, in the pay of a major New York crime family, and Barrey, who had fingers in the financial services world, had swallowed the bait. Sorokin was really looking forward to meeting the bastard.
And hey, the menu looked good, too. Shame, if his plan worked out, that he’d never get as far as ordering.
He drifted back into sleep, waking an hour later with a raging thirst and a blinding headache.
96
Friday 12 October
Roy Grace woke with a raging thirst and a blinding headache and glanced at the clock radio. It said 4.11 a.m. He gulped down the entire glass of water he kept at his bedside every night.
Cleo was sound asleep beside him. He hadn’t heard her come back, although at some point in the night Humphrey had woken him, barking. His mind was whirring. Tooth. Jules de Copeland. Cassian Pewe. Alison Vosper. No one had called, so presumably there’d been no developments, so far.
Was he missing something? Something vital? What?
Slipping as quietly as he could out of bed, using the light of his phone and trying not to disturb Cleo, he went through into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He ran the tap, waiting for the water to get cold, opened the cabinet and took out a couple of paracetamols. He swallowed them with another glass of water. He should try and grab a few hours more sleep, he knew.
Returning to bed, he lay there with his eyes closed. But he was too wired to go back to sleep. After fifteen minutes of raking over everything in his mind, he gave up, went back into the bathroom, showered and shaved. Using the minimum light possible, he got dressed in a fresh shirt and suit and tie. He kissed Cleo goodbye, but she didn’t stir. Fortunately Humphrey, downstairs, didn’t stir either. He was snoring in his basket.
Grace made himself a double espresso, gobbled down a bowl of cereal and went out in the darkness to his car.
97
Friday 12 October
Two armed CROPS officers travelled in the small grey van, in the darkness, heading north towards the country town of East Grinstead along a winding rural road. The driver, borrowed at the last moment to replace a sick member of the team, was a pot-bellied old sweat of a uniform constable, seventeen shifts from retirement, he told them with pride and no hint of regret. He smelled of curry. For the past forty minutes since leaving Brighton he’d bored his passengers rigid, swinging the lantern as well as telling them how policing had changed since he’d first joined. Wasn’t the same any more, no sir. You could call a spade a spade back then. Now you’d be up in front of Professional Standards for making a racist statement.
His passengers, CROPS officers PC Doug Riley and PC Lewis Hastings, politely humoured him, the CROPS knowing they would need him for transport later. Riley and Hastings were kitted out in their camouflage fatigues, with thermal underwear, black balaclavas and helmets with netting. They carried in their rucksacks water bottles, food rations, bottles to urinate in, bags to poo in, food rations, night-vision goggles, binoculars, cameras with long lenses and encrypted radios with earpieces. Each was armed with a Glock 17 handgun, in a holster.
Hastings, in the front seat, was watching the satnav on the dashboard, as well as the Google Maps app on his phone into which he had programmed Primrose Farm Cottage, Forest Row. The wipers, on the intermittent setting, swept away the light, misty drizzle from the screen. He was pleased at the mist, it gave them even more cover.
‘Coming up, quarter of a mile, sharp left,’ he instructed their driver.
The voice of the Silver Commander, Superintendent Julian Blazeby, came through the radio. ‘Charlie Romeo Three Seven?’
Hastings reached forward and picked up the mike.
‘Charlie Romeo Three Seven.’
‘I have you on my screen close to the drop point. How is it looking?’
‘Brilliant conditions, sir. Mist as well as darkness. Our ETA is five minutes.’
‘Good. Let me know when you are both in position.’
‘Yes yes, sir.’
The van turned into a wooded single-track lane, with overhanging trees forming a tunnel, and continued for a short while. They passed a sign for Primrose Farm on an open five-barred gate marking a potholed, metalled driveway. The driver slowed.
‘The cottage is showing as further on,’ Hastings said. An animal shot across in front of them.
‘Deer,’ the driver said. ‘Lucky it wasn’t a sabre-tooth tiger, eh?’
‘Ha ha!’ Riley, in the back seat, said.
‘Did I tell you the time when I had to go looking for a reported tiger spotted in the woods at Stanmer Park?’
‘No, but I expect you’re about to,’ Hastings said in a resigned voice.
‘Turned out it had escaped from a circus! Do many of you CROPS guys get eaten by wild animals?’ he asked.
‘More likely to get eaten by boredom,’ Hastings said.
‘So what happens if you need to take a dump?’
‘I don’t,’ Hastings said. ‘I take Imodium before a job, bungs me up good and proper.’
‘I once spent three days inside a fridge in the back of a van, parked up outside a crack den in Whitehawk, in Brighton,’ Riley said. ‘Had to piss into a bottle. Worth it, though, we got the scumbags.’
The headlights picked up the opening to another entrance, to the left. It was marked by rotting wooden gates, wide open and overgrown with brambles, which didn’t look like they’d been closed in years, and a newer-looking oval wooden sign above a mailbox.
The driver slowed.
The letters read PRIMROSE FARM COTTAGE. He halted the car. ‘Want me to drive down?’
‘No,’ Hastings said. ‘Here’s good.’
They rehearsed the code word they had agreed between them. Rattlesnake. If Hastings or Riley or the support team that would be stationed nearby said this word over the radio, it meant their cover was blown and the operation would switch instantly from covert to overt. The support team call sign was Romeo One.
As the two CROPS officers climbed out with their heavy rucksacks, the driver said, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter . . .’
‘You’re a regular cheerful Charlie, aren’t you?’ PC Riley said.
‘Nah, I just like horror flicks. Have fun, lads!’
As the van drove off, the two officers pulled on their night-vision goggles and set off along the track, which dipped steeply at first down to the left, then levelled out. It was a long walk, three-quarters of a mile, lined on both sides with ferns and scrubby bushes, with the occasional mature rhododendron, and with dense forest beyond. Finally a house came into view. It was in pitch darkness and showed up a ghostly green through their goggles.
It was a substantial brick building with three gables, a thatched roof and the front door off-set slightly. Attached to the right-hand side of the house, as if added on many years ago as an afterthought, was an ugly double garage that looked in a bad state of neglect. To Hastings, who’d worked in the building trade before joining the police, it looked like two – or possibly three – cottages had at some point in the past been knocked together and converted into a single dwelling. Ivy had grown up a large part of the facade, with almost bare branches of wisteria covering the rest.
A small off-roader was parked outside the front of the house, beyond an overgrown lawn with a brick wishing well bounded by an unpaved circular driveway. They slowed their pace. ‘Proper Hansel and Gretel,’ Hastings said, quietly.
‘Mmmm. I’m kind of thinking Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ Riley retorted, also quietly.
‘I’ll make sure Leatherface gets you first!’
‘And I always had you down as a gentleman!’ Riley retorted. ‘So what intel do we have?’
‘Not much.’
‘Dogs?’
‘Just a cat.’
‘If I lived here I’d have Rottweilers.’
‘Me too, so I could keep out old plods with boring sodding stories!’
They began to move forward more slowly now, one step at a time, in case there were motion-sensor lights.
‘Probably don’t get too many Jehovah’s Witnesses out here!’ Riley whispered. Hastings sniggered.
The house was now fifty feet in front of them. A light came on in an upstairs window. The two officers melted into the trees.
The shadow of a woman crossed the window. Another light came on. Then another. An owl hooted somewhere nearby.
Twenty minutes later the upstairs lights went off and several came on downstairs.
At a few minutes before 4.15 a.m., all the lights went off. A woman emerged from the front door with a handbag and a large suitcase. She popped the tailgate of the off-roader, pulled out a squeegee and wiped the vehicle’s windows clear of moisture. Then she hefted her suitcase into the rear and closed the tailgate. Firing up the rattling engine, she sat for some moments, then drove off past them, leaving behind a haze of diesel fumes.
Ten minutes later, Doug Riley had carved out a hide inside a dense rhododendron bush. He made sure both the front and rear were covered, then radioed the support team in the van. ‘Romeo One, Mike Whisky One in situ.’
His colleague, Lewis Hastings, buried deep inside a hedge behind the house, radioed in a few seconds later. ‘Romeo One, Mike Whisky Two in situ.’
Riley radioed again. ‘Romeo One. A woman, looks like the householder, has just departed with luggage. What’s the ETA of our weekend guests?’
‘Early evening, Mike Whisky One,’ the old sweat in the van replied. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a long day, chaps. Silver has requested as soon as it’s light enough you take and email close-up shots of the front- and rear-door locks. He wants to get a listening device in the house ASAP.’
‘Yes yes,’ Riley said.
‘Yes yes,’ Hastings replied also.
98
Friday 12 October
At 4.30 a.m., dressed and heavily sprayed with cologne, Jules de Copeland peered down through the window at the parking area. The Polo was still there. The windscreen was wet and misted. Was that someone at the wheel?
Wait on, bro, Copeland thought.
He took the lift down to the underground car park, carrying two bags with him, one containing his passport and a few belongings, the other empty, big enough, he had calculated, for the cash Lynda Merrill was going to give him.
His plan was to leave here under the cover of darkness and head towards the rendezvous, then park up somewhere remote. En route he would buy a massive bunch of flowers, an impressive box of chocolates and a bottle of champagne.
He could imagine the look on her face. She would be expecting a handsome Richie Griffiths. Not him.
He had the spiel all prepared. ‘Hi, Mrs Merrill, Richie got delayed, he sent me ahead to present you with these little gifts!’
Then, depending how she reacted, he’d either knock her unconscious or more likely break the stupid bitch’s neck.
The doors opened. He stepped out and walked across the silent, dimly lit car park, looking around warily while he made his way towards the dark-blue Kia, checking every shadow the way he used to as a kid during jungle warfare. As he approached, he pulled the key out of his pocket and pressed the unlock button. The indicators flashed and he heard the clunk.
Then he saw the front right tyre. Completely flat.
Shit, shit, shit.
This was so not part of the plan.
Putting the bags down on the ground, he opened the boot and peered inside for a toolkit and spare wheel. There wasn’t one – instead he saw a bag labelled ‘Tyre Inflation Kit’. He opened it and studied the instructions. He removed the cylinder, knelt and removed the dust cap from the valve. Then he screwed in the nozzle and pressed the trigger.
There was a sharp hiss and to his relief the tyre began inflating. Then, as the gas in the cylinder ran out, he heard a further hiss. Coming from another part of the tyre.
In front of his eyes, it fully deflated again in seconds. He swore, feeling a flash of panic.
Opening the passenger door, he flipped down the lid of the glovebox, pulled out the rental document and scanned it, looking for an emergency contact number. He found it and dialled. It was answered after a few rings. He explained the problem to a polite, weary-sounding male. He would get a breakdown vehicle to him as soon as possible, he assured Copeland. But it might take a while because it was the middle of the night.
Copeland locked the bags in the boot of the car and went back up to his flat. Over two hours later, his phone rang. A chirpy-sounding man from the breakdown company told him he was five minutes away with a spare tyre for him in case the puncture could not be fixed; could he let him into the underground car park?
Copeland hurried back down.
99
Friday 12 October
Now parked just behind a bus stop lay-by on the far side of the clifftop road above Brighton Marina, two hundred yards to the east of the apartment block, where he had moved over two hours ago, Tooth maintained his vigil in the van. Oblivious to the cold, he sat pretty much motionless, just occasionally switching on the wipers. He was still nauseous.
The only thing that gave him any pleasure was the red NO SMOKING roundel fixed to the van’s dash. He shook out yet another Lucky Strike and lit it. After a few drags he flicked the ash into the footwell, where it fell on the pile of butts that had accumulated during the night.
A few hundred yards to the west, DC Hall and DC Wilde sat in their silver Ford Focus, in the parking bay of another, smaller block of flats, with a clear view but out of sight of the Polo parked at Marina Heights. They had relieved the Road Policing Officer, PC Trundle, almost eight hours earlier. In the breaking light they could see the skeletal structure of a gasometer a short distance to their left.
Kevin Hall, struggling to keep awake, periodically ran the engine to crank the heating up and drained the last of the coffee, that had long gone cold, from his thermos flask. Beside him, DC Wilde mostly occupied herself with her phone, exchanging texts with her partner who was a nurse on night shift in West Sussex, and occasionally showing him jokes and videos that a friend was sending her on WhatsApp. Several of them were of questionable political correctness, but they sure helped pass the time.
He winced at one she showed him, captioned, ‘If you ever moan about a splinter . . .’ It showed a young man, lying on what looked like a hospital trolley, with the sharp, thin shoot of a tree branch lancing his scrotum and emerging from his stomach just above his navel.
‘Yech! How did the poor sod end up like that, Velvet?’ Hall asked her.
She shrugged, then in her rich Belfast accent said, ‘Guess he branched out from whatever he was doing.’
He laughed. ‘You are one sick puppy!’
She replied, ‘I’m taking that as a compliment.’
A few minutes later they saw a flatbed truck, with a winch in the rear, pull up at the entrance to the underground car park of Marina Heights. On the side of the vehicle were emblazoned the words, SUSSEX TYRE & BREAKDOWN SERVICES.
Hall was hoping against hope that an arrest would be made today. Tomorrow his team, Reading, were playing a crucial game against Queens Park Rangers and he wanted to be there in the crowd to lend his voluble support.
The garage doors opened and the truck drove down the ramp.
He called Comms and asked for the duty Oscar-1. Inspector Mark Evans came on the line. ‘Charlie Romeo Six Four Zero?’
‘Sir, a truck has just entered Marina Heights underground car park, from a company called Sussex Tyre & Breakdown Services. Can you find out who has requested it?’
‘SUSSEX TYRE & BREAKDOWN SERVICES?’
‘Yes yes.’
‘I’ll get it checked and come back to you, Charlie Romeo Six Four Zero.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Tooth watched as the garage door lowered seconds after the breakdown truck had descended. Wondering. Had it been called to fix a flat tyre?
He put his hand into his inside pocket, pulled out his gun and deactivated the safety catch. If he was right in his assumption, Copeland would be emerging soon. And he would be ready. The fuel would carry Copeland no more than a few hundred yards from the entrance – if that far.
