Dead at First Sight Read online

  DEAD AT FIRST SIGHT

  PETER JAMES

  Contents

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  130

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  TO ROB KEMPSON

  My ski buddy and very dear friend

  1

  Monday 24 September

  Life may not be the party we’d hoped for, but while we’re here we should dance, Gerald Ronson used to say. It was Gerry who had put him up to this, the reason he was standing in the arrivals hall of London’s Gatwick Airport. A bit difficult to dance at this particular moment, but inside him, boy, was his heart pounding away!

  She would appear at any moment.

  His upright military bearing, conservative tweed suit, suede brogues and neat grey hair barbered earlier today were at odds with the sheer, utter childlike joy on his face. His whole body was jigging with excitement. With anticipation. His stomach was all twisted up. He felt like a teenager on a first date, except he was approaching sixty, and he knew it was ridiculous to be like this, but he couldn’t help it. And, hey, this day had been such a long time coming – almost a year – he could scarcely believe it was finally here – that she was finally here!

  Most of the people massed alongside him were chauffeurs, holding up placards bearing the names of their pick-ups, peering hopefully at the throng emerging through the sliding doors. But Johnny Fordwater, instead, clutched a massive bouquet of pink roses, so big he needed both arms to hold it. Normally the former soldier might have been embarrassed about carrying a bunch of flowers, he wasn’t really a flowers kind of guy, but today was different. Today he didn’t give a monkey’s what anyone thought. He was walking on air. And he only had one thought.

  Ingrid. She would be coming into the arrivals hall any second. The love of his life. Who had told him she loved pink roses. And rosé champagne. A fine bottle of that was on ice, awaiting her, back in his flat in Hove. Laurent Perrier, vintage. Classy.

  For a very classy lady.

  The wait was tantalizing. The butterflies were going berserk inside him. Butterflies he’d not felt since that first date with Elaine, over forty years ago, when as a teenage student he’d nervously climbed out of his rust-bucket of an old Mini and walked up the garden path of her parents’ house close to Brighton seafront.

  A cluster of people emerged through the doors. An elderly couple being driven on a buggy, their luggage stacked behind them. A large Middle Eastern family, accompanied by a porter with a loaded flatbed trolley. A mother wheeling a suitcase with a small boy trailing behind her, pulling a little suitcase striped like a tiger. A group of serious-looking suits. Two nuns. A man in shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops with a woman wearing a sombrero the size of a tepee, each pushing along gaudy wheeled cases.

  Come on, Ingrid! My darling, my love! Mein Liebling, mein Schatz!

  He glanced at his watch: 7.08 p.m. Fifty minutes had elapsed since the Munich flight had landed. He looked at the arrivals board, then pulled out his phone and double-checked on the flight tracker app for the fifth or maybe sixth time to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. Definitely. Fifty-two minutes ago, now. Probably a delay with the baggage coming through, which often happened here. He looked at the luggage tags of passengers who had just emerged and were walking past him along the cordon. Looking for the tell-tale easyJet tags, which would show him they were probably on the flight from Munich, along with his beloved.

  Ingrid Ostermann.

  He loved everything about her, including her name. There was something mysterious about it, something exotic. A woman of the world!

  A blonde in her late thirties, with cool dark glasses, a short leather jacket and ankle boots appeared, striding confidently, pulling an expensive-looking suitcase.

  Ingrid!

  His heart did a double flip. Then another!

  Then sank as she came nearer and he realized it wasn’t her. Was it?

  She walked straight past him. He was about to check her photograph on his phone when she waved at someone ahead. He watched her step up her pace and fall into the arms of a tall guy with a ponytail.

  At least the Munich flight was coming through now, he thought. Hoped. He waited. Another fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Plenty more easyJet tags. But no Ingrid. He checked his phone. She had promised she would text the moment she landed, but maybe she had a problem getting her German phone to connect here. He sent a text.

  I’m here waiting, mein Liebling! XXXXXXXXXX

  He watched the display, waiting for a text back. Had she forgotten to switch her phone back on?

  Then he heard a male voice right behind him say his name. ‘Mr Fordwater?’

  He turned to see a shaven-headed, stocky man in his fifties, wearing a suit and tie, accompanied by a woman in her late twenties, with sharply styled fair hair, in a dark trouser suit.

  ‘Yes?’ Johnny said, alarmed by their sudden presence. Had something happened?

  ‘John Charles Fordwater?’

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  The man held out a warrant card. ‘Detective Sergeant Potting and Detective Constable Wilde from Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, sir. We’ve had a phone call from your sister, Angela, who’s been concerned about you since one
of my colleagues spoke to you a couple of months ago. Your sister told us you would be here and who you are meeting. Could we have a word with you, sir?’

  Johnny felt a moment of utter bewilderment. Then his insides were like a lift plunging down, as the terrible thought struck him. ‘Oh God, please no, please don’t tell me Ingrid’s had an accident. Please don’t.’

  ‘Would you mind accompanying us to the airport police station, Mr Fordwater?’ DS Potting said. ‘It’s only a five-minute drive.’

  ‘Please – please say she’s all right. She hasn’t had an accident, has she?’

  ‘There hasn’t been an accident, sir, no,’ DC Wilde said as they went outside and reached the parked police car.

  ‘Thank God, thank God for that,’ Johnny said, relief surging through his confusion. ‘You see I’m worried – I’ve been waiting for – waiting to meet her off the flight.’ He looked down a little sheepishly at the bouquet he was carrying.

  ‘I’m afraid Ingrid Ostermann wasn’t on the flight, sir,’ she said.

  Johnny turned to her, feeling that plunging sensation again. ‘Why – what happened?’

  There was a brief moment in which both police officers glanced uncomfortably at each other before DC Wilde spoke again, deeply sympathetic.

  ‘I don’t know quite how to put this to you, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry to have to tell you, as I think it’s going to come as a shock. From our intelligence, the lady you are waiting for, Frau Ingrid Ostermann, does not exist.’

  2

  Monday 24 September

  A text pinged in.

  Take your clothes off, meine liebe Lena, I want to see your beautiful body!

  In her sixth-floor apartment in Munich’s Müllerstrasse, Lena Welch was feeling an erotic tingle and desire she had not experienced in a very long while. Fortified by three glasses of prosecco, her normal inhibitions were all but gone. The forty-seven-year-old divorcee was flattered by the attentions of the handsome man who had responded to her ad on an online dating agency, who had been engaging with her for the past three months, but whom she had not yet met.

  She liked to think she was still attractive, and through keeping rigorously fit in the gym and by running three times a week, she knew her body was still in great shape, particularly for someone who had given birth to three children, now all at university. But five years on, she was still wounded by the break-up of her twenty-year marriage to her Peter Pan of a husband, who preferred the company of younger women to herself and to the responsibility of his growing children.

  Some of her old confidence was beginning to return and she had finally taken the advice of her sister, who had joined an online dating agency after being widowed, and pressed her to do the same. And her sister had been right, these past months of flirting online with a number of men had done wonders for her self-esteem. But after enduring years of Jorg’s behaviour, it was still taking the former PR executive time to trust any man. And she had good reason, just recently, to be suspicious about this one. Although Dieter Haas was the only one of her current suitors that she actually really fancied.

  Until she’d discovered that he wasn’t real.

  Propped up on her desk in front of her was a row of photographs of a fair-haired hunk. In one he was modelling a Prada suit on a catwalk. In another, all rippling muscles, he was wearing the briefest of swimming trunks on the quay of a Mediterranean harbour, against a background of yachts. In a third, he was in a cool black jacket and Ray-Bans, leaning on a bar, being admired by a very beautiful girl.

  And in a fourth, he was posed in a pornographic shot, stark naked.

  None of these images quite gelled with the advert he had placed on the German dating agency site, ZweitesMal.de.

  Thirty-five-year-old divorcee, Air Traffic Controller, seeks friendship with a feisty fair-haired lady for fun, frolics, and who knows what beyond?

  She took another sip of prosecco for Dutch courage and texted back:

  You’ll have to wait to get here to see what I’m wearing ;-)

  Moments later he replied:

  Meine liebe Lena, I cannot wait!

  She looked again at the photographs of Mr Too-Good-To-Be-True. Thinking how much she had been enjoying their email correspondence, but at the same time getting increasingly concerned that some of the things he had said to her and his excuses for not meeting just did not correlate. And then came the bombshell of asking her for a loan of 25,000 euros for his sick mother’s hospital bills.

  That had made her suspicious enough to begin extensive research on the internet. With her background in IT and with the help of a former work colleague who was a borderline hacker, she now believed she’d uncovered his true identity.

  She hadn’t yet updated her sister about what she had found out earlier today, and before she went to the police she needed to have some evidence. Which was why she’d invited him here tonight, under the pretext of handing over the money he’d asked for. She’d set up a hidden camera and recording device.

  But would he take the bait?

  3

  Monday 24 September

  So far, a no-show.

  His intelligence was wrong. Crap. And he was feeling crap, again. His head was swimming from the symptoms that kept recurring, randomly, and mostly when they were least welcome. Behind the tinted glass of his grey Passat parked on Munich’s residential Müllerstrasse, Andreas Vogel continued his vigil, drinking a tepid can of Coke and frequently lighting another cigarette, which, each time, made him feel even worse. A steady drizzle was falling, coating his windows, helping make him even more invisible, but not helping his view of the entrance to the small apartment building a short distance ahead, on the other side of the street. A typically Bavarian building, painted yellow with red roof tiles and dinky balconies.

  Lena Welch, the woman he had been sent here to watch, had arrived home over four hours ago. Definitely her. In her forties, with blonde hair, a smart raincoat and high boots; from the photograph on his phone there was no mistaking her. She’d opened the gate in the spiked railings, let herself in the front door of the building and had not come out again, that he was certain of. The rear entrance was only a fire escape that would trigger an alarm. He might not be feeling up to the job at this moment, but he was professional enough not to have let her slip out unnoticed. Vogel could see lights on in the sixth-floor apartment that, from the plan he had been given, he was pretty certain was hers.

  Suddenly, he stiffened. Headlights in his rear-view mirror. A car was crawling along the street as if looking for an address. A dark-coloured sedan. An Audi. It passed by and in the glow of a street light he saw the silhouettes of two men inside. African-looking.

  Them?

  An instant later his view was blocked by a large motorhome that pulled up alongside him.

  ‘Get out of my way!’

  The passenger door of the camper opened and a dumpy woman climbed down, then stood in the road talking loudly to the driver. Another car pulled up behind and, after some moments, gave a blast of its horn.

  The woman carried on talking, in German, to the driver. ‘Get out of my way!’ Vogel repeated, frustrated.

  The horn from the car behind blasted again.

  4

  Monday 24 September

  Johnny Fordwater sat in silence in the back of the car during the short drive from Gatwick’s North Terminal to the airport police station, anger rising inside him. He stared at his phone, willing a text to appear from Ingrid. The police had no idea. Of course she existed! He and Ingrid were crazily in love with each other. About to start a new life together. She had been selling up everything in Germany, preparing for her move to be with him in England. He’d had his flat redecorated, with new carpets in some rooms, and he’d worked hard making it feel homely.

  The male officer in front of him put his window down as they reached a barrier and held a card against the reader. The barrier rose and they entered a wire-mesh compound containing several police vehicles. They
pulled into a bay and the female officer opened the door to let him out.

  They walked through the September warmth, the male officer having a quick vape on the way, and entered a nondescript two-storey building that smelled of old linoleum. They went up a flight of stairs, along a drab corridor past several notices stuck to the wall and into a small, functional, windowless room with two chairs on either side of a metal table. A CCTV camera, mounted high on one wall, was aimed down at them.

  ‘Would you like something to drink, Mr Fordwater?’ Velvet Wilde asked. ‘Tea or coffee?’

  He felt sick with worry. Numb. He didn’t know what he wanted. ‘Just some water, please.’

  As the two police officers left the room, he checked his phone again. Then again. There was clearly a terrible mistake here. Had Ingrid missed the flight? There could have been any number of reasons. Most likely the road to the airport closed because of an accident, or something of that nature. He texted her again. Perhaps the police were mistaken and she was still in the baggage area, waiting for her luggage? Or filling in a lost-baggage claim?

  No reply.

  He dialled her number.

  All he got was a message in German which he did not understand. But it sounded like there was some kind of a problem with the number.

  Was the network down? Had she lost her phone? Had the battery died?

  The woman officer, DC Wilde – he remembered her name – came back in, followed by her colleague. She placed a plastic beaker of water on the table in front of him. He thanked her. ‘Mr Fordwater, would you be comfortable if my colleague, DS Potting, and I recorded this conversation?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure, why not,’ he said, bleakly.

  ‘We met you at the airport as a result of a phone call from your sister, Angela, and we believe you have been targeted in a fraud case that we are investigating. You may remember my colleague DC Helen Searle coming to see you a couple of months ago. She was concerned that you were a possible victim of an internet scam, but you disagreed,’ she said. ‘We believe the situation now has changed and want to ask you a number of questions. It will be easier to have those on record, so thank you for agreeing to us recording it.’

  The two officers sat down opposite him. She pressed a button on a control panel and tilted her head up towards the camera. ‘The time is 8.10 p.m., Monday, September 24th. DC Wilde and DS Potting interviewing Mr John Charles Fordwater.’