Love You Dead Page 29

  Shit!

  Grace climbed out, removed his warrant card and walked up to the cab, raising an apologetic hand to the woman and the driver, who wound down his window, peering out nervously.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Grace said. ‘You can continue.’

  He returned to his car, wondering. Had it actually been Tooth he had seen? Or just wishful thinking?

  Twenty minutes later, as he arrived back at Sussex House, the Ops-1 Inspector called him back to report no success. Grace thanked him and went in through the front door of the building. Climbing the stairs to the Major Crime suite, he reflected on just what he had seen in the back of that taxi. Had he imagined it? He didn’t think so. Offenders had a way of looking at coppers that was different from all other people. But maybe he was just a regular Brighton villain who had picked up on him. Maybe it was just his imagination working overtime.

  Back in his office, he phoned Pewe to update him on his meeting with West at the mortuary, and the expert’s opinion. When he had finished, he said, ‘Do you need anything else, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Pewe said, grudgingly. ‘I don’t.’

  As he ended the call, Grace’s phone instantly rang. It was Guy Batchelor and he sounded excited.

  85

  Wednesday 11 March

  ‘Boss, something of significance to report!’ Batchelor said. ‘I think we may have found Tooth.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Last Friday, there was a report of a man in collision with two cyclists close to Brighton Pier. He was taken unconscious to the Royal Sussex County Hospital. His US driving licence identified him as John Daniels, with an address in New York City. And there was a bar receipt from the Waterfront Hotel in his wallet.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘I sent two officers to the hospital but he’s gone – seems to have discharged himself, sometime during this morning. But the hospital says he has severe bruising to both his legs and would be limping significantly. Someone’s going to have noticed him.’

  ‘Is this a genuine injury or a phoney one like Crisp’s, Guy?’

  ‘I haven’t checked that, boss, but I assume that the hospital wouldn’t have said so if it wasn’t the case.’

  ‘Yep, well you know my views on assumptions,’ Grace retorted.

  ‘I’ll get someone to double-check.’

  ‘Good. Have you contacted the hotel?’

  ‘Yes, they don’t have any guest by the name of Daniels registered. Nor Hinton.’

  ‘Bizarrely, I think I may have seen Tooth heading up New England Road in a Streamline taxi, twenty minutes ago,’ Grace said.

  ‘Seems an odd route from the Sussex County Hospital, wherever he was going,’ Batchelor said.

  ‘I could have been mistaken. Can you get on to Streamline and ask them for details of all pick-ups from the hospital this morning? All of them have CCTV in their cars now. Also can you see if there’s a n update on possible sightings from our message to Streamline earlier?’

  ‘Right away, sir.’

  ‘OK, good work, Guy. And can you arrange an accommodation check in the city for Daniels, Hinton, or any single American males

  – but keep it low-key for now.’

  As soon as he ended the call, Grace phoned Lanigan. He got his voicemail and left a message. ‘Pat, it’s Roy in Brighton. You said John Daniels was one of the aliases of our pal, Mr Tooth, and there’s Mike Hinton also. Can you let me have any others? I need to know very urgently.’

  He hung up and then sat and thought. Had it been Tooth in hospital? Had it been him in the back of the taxi? If he had just left the Royal Sussex County Hospital, what was he doing at the north end of the city? New England Road was a route many people who came south into the city on London Road took to get to the beaches, or the western side of the city. Why would Tooth have gone north only to head south again? That route didn’t make any sense. Unless he was trying to shake someone off his tail.

  Or be deliberately confusing.

  86

  Wednesday 11 March

  Jodie Carmichael, returning home in light drizzle from a trip to the Asda superstore at Brighton Marina, turned into her driveway and clicked the remote button to open her double-garage door. She reversed her blue convertible Mercedes in, clicked the remote to close the door behind her, then climbed out of the car. She removed her bags from the boot and let herself into the house through the internal door.

  As she laid out the bags on the kitchen table, her mobile phone rang. She saw the name of the funeral directors, P & S Gallagher, appear.

  She hesitated for a moment, then putting on her grief-stricken voice, she answered. ‘Hello?’

  It was the very charming boss of the firm. ‘Mrs Carmichael, it’s Mr Gallagher, how are you?’

  ‘Oh, you know, bearing up, I guess.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. I’m afraid I’ve got some rather frustrating news – the Coroner still hasn’t released the body. And I’ve also had a call from Mr Carmichael’s son who wants to engage the services of another pathologist to conduct a second post-mortem.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ she said, furious. ‘My darling husband died at the start of our honeymoon. Doesn’t he think I’ve suffered enough? And he’s been embalmed – what the hell does he think another post-mortem’s going to achieve? I’m his wife! Don’t my wishes count?’

  ‘Well, there is another complication,’ he continued. ‘The police have also informed us that further enquiries are taking place, so I’m afraid our hands are tied.’

  ‘My poor Rollo has to suffer the indignity of a mortuary fridge while everyone squabbles over his body, is that what you’re saying, Mr Gallagher?’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Carmichael. They just need to establish beyond any doubt the cause of your husband’s tragic death.’

  ‘He was killed by a fucking snake bite, right? By a saw-scaled viper. The Coroner in Goa certified that. What else do they bloody need?’

  ‘I’m sure it will all be sorted very quickly,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘I’ll do my best to get all of this resolved, and your husband’s body released to us, just as soon as possible.’

  When she hung up, Jodie sat, wondering what Gallagher had meant by ‘enquiries’. What were the police sniffing around for? She made herself a coffee and switched on her computer. One thing was becoming certain, she would have a fight with Rowley’s family on her hands. At the end of the day she would get some of the inheritance. But from the way Rowley’s family already seemed to be heading for a legal battle, it could be a long way down the line. It certainly wasn’t likely to be the jackpot that she’d hoped for, which still seemed to be eluding her.

  That was out there somewhere.

  She needed to be more selective, she decided, as she started to trawl through the various replies to the advertisements she had placed on dating sites for the rich.

  www.sugardaddies.com

  www.seekingmillionaire.com

  www.millionairematch.com

  www.daterichmen.com

  And a whole ton more. But she dismissed all the replies she saw waiting for her. She’d learned, through experience of dating dozens of them, how to spot the ones that were only out for affairs. And she didn’t just want someone wealthy. She wanted someone who was super-rich. Would she find him on a website, or in one of the playgrounds of the rich?

  She remembered something her beautiful childhood friend, Emira, had once said to her, that had been at the same time disparaging and consoling. ‘Don’t worry, one day you’ll find Mr Right. There’s someone out there for everyone.’

  Maybe she’d been too hasty recently. She just needed to bide her time.

  She went upstairs, pressed the remote to open the sliding wall then peered through the glass door, into her reptile room, checking as she always did that nothing had escaped. She went in and over to the vivarium containing the nine-foot boa constrictor she called Silas.

  A smile broke out on her face as she saw what lay on the floor of t
he toughened glass container.

  87

  Wednesday 11 March

  Tooth hobbled on the walking stick he’d stolen from the hospital corridor, clutching his huge package of shopping and a smaller carrier bag as he crossed the foyer of the hotel to the bank of lifts. It took him a good minute – a journey he could normally have made in seconds – to get from the elevator to his room on the fourth floor. Every step was uncomfortable, but for anyone else would have been agony. Tooth had been born with an abnormality – his tolerance levels to pain were far higher than those of most human beings.

  Finally, in the sanctuary of his room, after looking around carefully, he sat at his desk and flipped open the lid of his laptop. Nothing seemed to have been touched here. But he couldn’t rely on that for much longer.

  He’d always had a rule. He never stayed in one place for too long. Staying in one place was how people could catch up with you, whether it was picking up your scent or picking up your financial trail. He’d had to leave the hospital this morning, because the hotel was only paid up to today; but more than that, ten days was already too long in one place, and he couldn’t risk any longer. Earlier today he’d taken advantage of the shortage of hospital staff to slip away.

  But had that cop recognized him in the taxi?

  He wasn’t certain, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to take the risk that he had. And that cop sure as hell would not recognize him the next time he saw him.

  He began to scan the videos from the sixteen cameras he had concealed in Jodie’s house and the four he had put in her flat in Alexandra Villas. He started with the two he had placed in her reptile room, and it didn’t take him long before his hunch paid off.

  He watched her pull on rubber gloves – the time recording gave it as just two hours ago. She removed the lid of a vivarium containing a huge boa constrictor, then took out what looked like a white clay sausage. She placed it on the table, then pulled it open with her hands and removed a memory stick from inside it.

  ‘Clever girl!’ he said aloud. ‘Oh yes, you are one very clever girl!’

  He watched her place the memory stick back in the vivarium, dropping it out of sight into the foliage, then deposit the sausage – t he boa’s excrement – into a bin.

  ‘So clever!’ he thought. ‘You really are very clever.’ And very sexy too, he thought. I’m sure it would be nice to fuck you. Too bad I’ll never find out.

  He opened his packages.

  88

  Wednesday 11 March

  ‘Mice, lizards, frogs, scorpions and insects,’ Tanja Cale said, as she joined Roy Grace heading along the Major Crime suite corridor towards the conference room for the 2 p.m. briefing.

  ‘That what you had for breakfast, Tanja?’ he said. ‘No wonder you look so healthy!’

  ‘No,’ she grinned. ‘It’s what Jason cooks me for dinner every evening!’

  He raised a finger to his lips. ‘Sssh, don’t share your secret, everyone will be wanting some!’

  ‘Guess it depends on the recipe.’

  ‘And yours is?’

  ‘Raw and preferably alive,’ she said. ‘You asked me to find out what a saw-scaled viper likes to snack on.’

  ‘And that’s its diet?’

  ‘Yep!’

  ‘In which case, on the whole, I’m glad I’m not a saw-scaled viper.’

  ‘And Jason’s glad I’m not a black widow spider. They eat their husbands after they’ve made love.’

  ‘I think if I was a male black widow, I’d be pretty happy if my wife told me she had a headache!’ Grace retorted, as they entered the packed conference room.

  ‘Well, in case you fancy a change of diet, sir, I’ve found several companies who tie in with the credit card statements who can supply all these creatures, and more.’

  ‘And get me points on my Tesco clubcard?’

  ‘Well, unfortunately not that many, sir. I spoke to a gentleman called Danny Yeoman from a large Sussex store, Pets Corner. One of the saw-scaled viper’s favourite foods is cockroaches. But if you buy a box of them, that’s all you need. From then on you can culture them yourself. So long as you have the right bedding and substrate and you give the creature access to water and a warm environment, you really don’t need anything else.’

  ‘I’ll remember that next time I’m thinking of buying Cleo a saw-scaled viper for Christmas,’ Grace said.

  Taking their seats, he brought his team up to speed on the overnight developments regarding Edward Crisp, informing them that Branson and Potting were flying back, and then went on to describe his conversation with Kelly Nicholls last night, his meeting with Pewe earlier this morning and his subsequent meeting with Dr West at the mortuary.

  ‘I updated the ACC on the latest developments with Operation Spider and our belief that we may well have a black widow operating in this city, who is targeting, marrying then killing elderly rich men. And with West’s opinion that Rowley Carmichael’s death from the venom of a saw-scaled viper might well be suspicious, in that he was apparently bitten in an area of the crocodile farm that is not this creature’s natural habitat, and that there was none of the ecchymosis – skin discolouration – around the bite mark that he would have expected to see.’

  ‘When you say suspicious, boss,’ Jon Exton asked, ‘what do you – or Dr West – actually mean?’

  ‘In Dr West’s view,’ Grace replied, ‘the venom might have been delivered to Rowley Carmichael by some other means than a bite.’

  ‘What kind of other means?’

  ‘Well, according to West there is only one other way to deliver it in a lethal form and that’s by injection. Carmichael was an insulin-dependent diabetic, who injected himself four times daily. Could his darling new bride have accidentally substituted his insulin with snake venom? It’s a possibility we can’t rule out, given her past form, which is pretty interesting. There are all the identities of Jodie Bentley, who would have become Jodie Klein by marriage, but whose prospective husband fell over a cliff in Courchevel, France. She then married Rowley Carmichael, who died a few days after their marriage. Interestingly, Jodie Bentley’s first husband, Christopher, also died from a saw-scale viper bite some years ago.’ He paused to sip his coffee.

  ‘She seems very adept at creating false identities. I informed ACC Pewe that at the present time, whilst we are putting a lot of resources into finding her, we do not know the whereabouts of this extremely clever and dangerous lady. We are aware of one poste-restante address she is known to use, and we have asked them to notify us when she next turns up, but not surprisingly they are reluctant to cooperate. And we don’t have the resources to place surveillance on her known addresses to see if she appears. What we are doing is keeping an eye on the CCTV camera footage in the streets outside them, but it’s a huge task. We’ve had nothing back on her phone, and therefore Michelle Websdale has not been able to set up a meeting with her.

  ‘We have two problems right now. The first is locking this woman up before she finds her next husband – and possible victim. The second is that so far all evidence against her is largely circumstantial and we need something more solid to arrest her.’

  He brought the briefing to an end, and asked Tanja Cale and Glenn Branson, who was just back from Lyon, to come to his office.

  A few minutes later, sat around the table, Roy began the meeting by saying, ‘If we are correct in our assumption that Jodie Carmichael is targeting wealthy older men, I suggest we put someone in place, with a carefully created background, who fits this mould. A retired, secretive multimillionaire, whose wife died some time ago, who is perhaps terminally ill and has returned to Brighton to spend his last days here. We use social media to seed his fake background as a rich philanthropist. I’m thinking we work with some of the local papers, the Argus in particular, but also the Brighton and Hove Independent, the Mid Sussex Times and the Sussex Express, to run features on him, and consider the local media, too – such as Radio Sussex, Latest TV, perhaps get an interview with hi
m on the Albion Roar – about how much he’s missed attending his home football team’s games; and how honoured the city is that he’s chosen Brighton to spend his last days, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Isn’t there a problem, sir?’ Tanja said. ‘That anyone checking would see there is no historic social media trail?’

  Grace nodded. ‘You are quite right, Tanja. I discussed this with the Chief Superintendent of the Financial Crimes Unit at the City of London Police and with the Commander of the Scotland Yard Fraud Squad.’ He smiled. ‘They’re well ahead of the curve and they anticipated these kinds of problems very early on. Almost from the get-go of so-called “social media”, they’ve been on it. Seeding and creating false identities first on MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, and more recently on Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and all the others. Name an identity and they have it. In our case, a reclusive multimillionaire, who’s a widower and has made the decision to leave the bulk of his estate to charity.

  ‘Bloody hell, that’s smart!’ Glenn said.

  ‘I thought so, too!’ Roy Grace replied. ‘Mostly in the police we’re constantly playing a game of catch-up with villains. Nice to think we have some visionaries who occasionally put us ahead of the game. The Financial Crimes Unit of the City of London Police are sending one of their detectives down to advise us today.’

  ‘Do you have someone in mind for this undercover officer, sir?’ Tanja asked.

  ‘I don’t yet,’ he replied. ‘The Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team can approach the Covert Policing Unit to identify a suitable officer who has been trained in this field. It’s actually been so well managed, historically, that no one knows who any of these people are. The normal procedure would be to use a detective from out of area, but that’s not always possible.’