Stop Them Dead, page 39
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Read the opening chapters of the new Peter James novel
THEY THOUGHT I WAS DEAD
Sandy’s Story
COMING SPRING 2024
For years Roy Grace searched for his missing wife.
Why did she disappear without a trace?
Who and what was she running from?
This is Sandy’s story . . .
PROLOGUE
A lot of us screw up in life, some more than others, and some of us screw up pretty much most of the time. I’m there, right up amongst the big screw-ups. My favourite comedian, the late Peter Cook, said, ‘I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m sure I can repeat them exactly.’
That’s pretty much how I feel.
I read a poem once, which I think was called ‘The Dash’. It talked about that mark, that hyphen you see on gravestones, linking the date of birth and date of death. It’s always struck me as curious that the important thing on those headstones is the two dates. The dash in between is inconsequential. Maybe that’s because human lives are generally inconsequential. Is all that matters that we were born and that we died?
But surely everyone has a story to tell. They may not have invented the wheel, or split the atom or solved the Riemann hypothesis. But surely a lot of people deserve more than that tiny dash, don’t they?
This is my story. I’m just fleshing out the dash of my odd little life.
1
Brighton, England
26 July 2007
My name is Sandy. I’m driving from Brighton towards Gatwick Airport and I’m nervous as all hell. You would be too if you were me right now, I promise you. I keep looking in my rear-view mirror for someone following me. Silly, because no one can possibly know – yet – what I’ve done.
I’ve just left my husband, Roy, but he certainly won’t have a clue at this moment – he’s immersed in his work as ever, on a murder case. It’s his thirtieth birthday today and we’re supposed to be going out to dinner tonight. We have a reservation at our favourite restaurant – us and two other couples, our closest friends. It’s a big deal, your thirtieth, a milestone. I’d even asked the restaurant to make him a cake with a marzipan goldfish just like his pet, Marlon, on top.
Bad timing, I know. If I’d had a choice, I’d have picked any day but this one. But I don’t have that luxury.
I’m not just running from my husband, although that’s part of this story. He’s a decent guy who doesn’t deserve what I’m going to be putting him through. A decent guy but not an ideal husband for me. No, I’m running from a mess I’ve got myself into – a real, proper mess. A death threat from someone the police have in their sights as a highly dangerous Person of Interest. My husband knows the man, he’s talked about him, believes he is behind several killings, but the fact is that the Major Crime Team don’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Yet.
Roy doesn’t know I have an involvement with this man. He has no idea that I’m the next person he is intending to kill. He doesn’t know how terrified I am.
He doesn’t know I am taking someone with me, either, but that’s another story, for later.
And I’ve no idea what Roy will do when he can’t find me, or call or text me. I’ve not left a note or anything corny like that. But I have left pretty much all my personal stuff, other than just a couple of small photographs he won’t miss. He’s a smart detective, so I guess he’ll start by using all those great skills he has at tracking down murder suspects, both current and long past.
But he is going to find it hard to track me down, for one very simple reason.
I no longer exist.
2
Roel Albazi was forty-seven years old, stocky and squat, and dressed in mismatched Versace. The Albanian, who had lived in England for most of his life, had a shaven head, a tattooed neck and a pencil-thin version of a Fu Manchu moustache that ran down either side of his mouth to his chin. Adorned with a gold necklace, big rocks on his fingers and a bling watch, he sat outside the pizza restaurant in Shoreham High Street, one of his legitimate business fronts, sipping a macchiato and smoking his short cigar which was nearly down to the stub.
He had the physique of the kind of non-negotiable muscle you’d find outside any nightclub door on the planet. From a distance he looked a thug and not a man with a degree in international law. A hard man, you’d think. Not someone who would be afraid of anyone.
Until you looked closer and saw his frightened eyes.
He was very afraid right now of one person. Her name was Song Wu. She was a lot richer than him, a lot more ruthless and a lot more powerful. And she owned him – pretty much – since making his company, Albazi Debt Recovery International, an offer he should have refused but could not three years ago. The offer had been a vastly lucrative contract to work for her company exclusively.
It had been an invitation to sup at the Devil’s table, he was well aware of that, but he thought he could handle it. The money on the table was just too good to turn down.
And the deal had been too good to last.
And at this moment he was in deep trouble with Song Wu.
There was a rumour that she liked to have people who crossed her or defaulted on her cut up alive, and then she watched the videos. But Roel Albazi knew it wasn’t just a rumour.
Before his rise from mere debt collector to Fu Shan Chu in the triad run by Song Wu – effectively, in Mafia terms, her underboss – she’d made him watch the video of his predecessor. It was an hour long and involved kitchen knives, a rotary bandsaw and a chainsaw. The man was still conscious fifty-five minutes into the procedure. His mistake had been trying to broker a deal with another employee to siphon off some money. He didn’t understand about loyalty. This employee was Chinese, and Albazi’s predecessor fatally did not get the way the triad connections worked, and how a Chinese person would always be loyal to another Chinese person over a westerner.
Song Wu was third-generation English, but she was still as pure Chinese as the day her family had left Hong Kong back in 1954. Her father had amassed an empire of thirty-five restaurants and takeaways across the south of England, twenty Chinese grocery stores, and a wholesale business supplying Chinese restaurants around the UK.
Privately educated at one of the nation’s poshest girls’ schools, she had reacted to racist bullying with a ferocity that soon made other pupils steer well clear of her, and she found she enjoyed both the power and inflicting pain. Within five years of her father’s death, she had added a dozen more restaurants, a string of launderettes, two fully legal casinos in England and another five around Europe, as well as seven stone of body-weight to her existing twelve. She liked an excess of food, but she liked an excess of money even more. She was a glutton for cash. Profits made her eyes light up; losses made her face flame out. Nothing melted the ice that was her heart.
She had two brothers who were directly beneath her in the family hierarchy. Silent figures in the shadows who executed their sister’s instructions with precision. Albazi did not know anyone who admitted to being acquainted with them, or even having seen them, but everyone in the Song Wu organization feared them.
It was from the Casino d’Azur group that she hauled in the biggest gains – but only in part from the actual gaming tables. The highest margins came from her business model of loaning cash to gamblers who had run out of luck. They were given big loans, always short-term, with interest rates of 50 per cent per month. Defaulters were sent a video of someone being tortured, which self-erased after one viewing. Most paid up pretty fast, finding the money somehow. And that was partly because Albazi vetted the people the Casino d’Azur lent to very carefully in advance. He made sure they had assets they could turn to in desperation. Assets such as the unmortgaged portion of their homes.
But at this moment, Albazi was a worried man. His role was not just to collect debts, but to sanction loans. Two people he’d approved big loans to in the past three months had separately done a runner in the past two weeks, and Mrs Wu was not happy. Albazi knew she suspected he was lying to her and had cut some kind of a deal with these people behind her back. Now this third person wasn’t showing up either, and he was feeling physically sick at the thought of having to tell Mrs Wu. She was going to be even more certain he was double-crossing her.
Every five minutes Albazi methodically checked his watch and each of the three phones lined up on the metal table. Traffic streamed past. Pedestrians streamed past. But there was no sign of her. And no message.
She had given him her word. Assured him. They had an appointment. An assignment. At 12 p.m. today she was going to turn up with the £150k she owed him.
It was now 12.20 p.m. Then it was 12.25 p.m. Then 12.30 p.m.
Yet again he checked the middle phone, the one she had the number for, the one they always spoke or texted on. No message.
Bitch.
He stubbed out the cigar in the ashtray. She might think she was clever, but it wasn’t clever not to pay him. Sure, the interest rates were high, but so they should be as he never took security for the loans. All of them were on trust, and he made sure he collected what he was owed. Always. His customers either paid with cash or with their homes or with their lives. He preferred the cash, but killing a debtor – and very publicly – served as a great warning to others. Call it a marketing cost.
He picked up the phone on the left and dialled. It was answered almost instantly.
‘Sandy Grace,’ Albazi said. ‘Find her. Now.’
3
How does a relationship get to the point of no return? I have often asked myself if there is a way back to our blissful marriage. But it is like a broken glass – however brilliantly it gets repaired, there will always be cracks. Roy might call them tiny fractures, but for me they are significant.
Of course, the heat of that first passion can’t last, however much we fantasize it will. We go through stages with any significant other. First we fall in lust, then we fall in love, then we hitch our waggons together and steadily rumble and bounce along Reality Road. Whether we have kids or not, some are destined to end up in some form of compromised state of contentment. Acceptance of our lot. And that is fine for those. But I want more. I need more. My compromises are too many. It may seem selfish given my husband is not a bad person, but it’s the only way out I see. I think it will damage him less for me to disappear than for me to tell him what I have become and what I have done. It would ruin his career having a wife who has got into this situation and I would be an embarrassment to him. Of course, this is not easy for me. I dislike myself entirely. I hate what I have become. I wish it hadn’t got to this.
I like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s description of love as not staring into each other’s eyes, but staring in the same direction together. I think he got that from Dickens, who was always mentioning people sitting in companionable silence. But wasn’t that because they had nothing else to do in his day? No internet, no computer games, no Amazon to browse, no Sky Sports.
So, when does that oh-so-subtle change in your relationship start? The first night that you share a bed and don’t make love? The first morning you leave home forgetting to say I love you? The first time you don’t notice your significant other’s new hairstyle? The day you forget the anniversary of when you met? The day you realize, for whatever reason, you no longer come first in your significant other’s life?
Tick that last box for me.
The reality of being married to an ambitious Major Crime detective is that you will often come second – sometimes to a corpse.
The more I go over and over this in my head the more I realize that whatever I do now, even if I somehow sort out this mess, too much has happened for our relationship to continue. I’d always carry the lies and live in fear of Roy finding out about my sordid other life. I have to leave. Selfishly, it is easier for me if I pass some blame onto him, so I consume myself with thoughts of what he could’ve done to prevent me getting into this mess – maybe he did prioritize his job over me, maybe he didn’t love me enough. That I’m just an appendage, the person who makes the bed, who does the shopping, who cooks, that he doesn’t care for my career or any of my ambitions to use my interior design skills, as long as I turn up to functions on his arm. But deep down, if I let myself go there, I’m just trying to ease off my guilt.
He’s actually a bloody good guy. I should find his dedication to his job a positive thing, but I use it against him. I’m a disgrace. He’s better off without me.
Just over a year ago. Our ninth wedding anniversary. He never forgets significant dates and he’d booked a restaurant as a surprise – our favourite seafood restaurant in the Brighton Lanes, where we’d gone on one of our very first dates. He’d sorted a taxi so we could both have a drink, and he’d given me a beautiful present, a white gold eternity ring. I felt bad because I hadn’t given him anything special.
That was the evening when I made a terrible decision and my life as it was went past the point of no return.
4
One Year Earlier
We are in the back of the taxi. Roy has his arm around me and we are all loved-up. Nine years of marriage and still in love. I feel hugely grateful, despite all the fertility treatment we’ve been through for years, which has been arduous and draining for us both.
We are heading east along Church Road, Hove, one road north of the seafront. A wide, buzzy street, lined with shops, cafes, bars and restaurants. The driver is a young, friendly guy. His plate says Mark Tuckwell. Roy and I are chatting to him, like we always do to taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants, pretty much anyone, really. We both share an insatiable curiosity about people. I’m sure Roy banks it all though, somewhere in that ten-gazillion gigaflop processor inside his skull, whereas I just remember faces. But I know my husband too well. I can see that all the time he’s chatting to this driver he’s looking through the windows, taking in both sides of the street, and suddenly he yells, ‘Stop! Stop! STOPPPP!’
And my heart stops.
I know what’s about to happen because it’s happened before. Roy, with his damned near-photographic memory, has spotted a villain he’s been after for a year, or maybe longer, walking along the street.
As the driver pulls hard over to the kerb, Roy already has his door open. ‘Darling, order a bottle of bubbly – I’ll see you at the restaurant as soon as I can.’
Then he’s gone.
The time is 7.30 p.m.
At 8 p.m. I’m sitting in the restaurant, English’s, with a bottle of champagne, reading the menu over and over. And over. Roy calls with an update. He has chased this suspect down Western Road for over half a mile, finally rugby tackling and pinning him to the floor at the Clock Tower.
He’s now on his way to the custody centre at Hollingbury. He can’t hand this charmer over to anyone else yet because of something to do with chain of evidence after finding Class-A drugs on him. But it shouldn’t be a problem, he assures me. It’s early evening, so he will be able to process him through custody quickly, and then join me.
It’s now 10 p.m. I’ve spent much of the past two hours reading the menu until I’ve learned it by heart, then texting my best friend about my progress on this increasingly boring and increasingly non-romantic date. A combination of the booze and the boredom and I’m really pissed off. It’s escalating in my head, and I can’t stop it even though the evening started so well.
On the plus side I’ve eaten an entire basket of delicious breads with a fish paste and a very yummy butter, and I’ve almost finished the bottle of Veuve Clicquot. And now Roy has just called with yet another update.
For some reason I don’t fully understand, he’s still stuck in the custody centre but will be with me, he promises, faithfully, in twenty minutes.
I read out the menu to him and he chooses scallops for his starter and monkfish for his main. I select a bottle of Chablis from the wine list, hang the cost. Although I’m feeling a bit smashed and know I shouldn’t drink much more.
It is now 10.15 p.m. and Roy has texted to say he is still delayed. I’m so ravenous I’ve had my starter and half the bottle of Chablis. Not sure if I’m feeling more pissed or just plain pissed off. Through my haze of alcohol the restaurant appears to be emptying. Actually, it is empty.
Am I really the only person still here? I look around and see tables all tidied and laid for lunch tomorrow. Around the corner a couple of waiters are chatting by the bar. One of them has just asked, with a slightly desperate look on his face, if I would like my main course or would I still prefer to wait. I can’t remember what I said to him, but I seem to recall ordering some chips. Or French fries as I’m in a posh place.
Then I hear footsteps clumping down the stairs, and I see a tall man I vaguely recognize, and he appears to vaguely recognize me, too. Everything is vague at this moment. I’m definitely drunk. Last time I went to the bathroom – some while ago – and peered into the mirror, even my hair looked drunk.
This guy is tall, good-looking in a kind of supercilious way, as if everything around him is beneath him, and sharply dressed in a dark jacket, crisp white shirt and tailored jeans. His loafers are so polished they are like black mirrors. I’ve seen him before somewhere, but I can’t think who the hell he is. But he’s walking over to me with a knowing look. When he speaks, his voice is posh and measured. ‘Sandy Grace, right?’
