Dead at First Sight Read online

  Although he was still dressing well, some of his spark seemed to have left him, his face was drawn and pale and he seemed downcast. Grace wondered if that had anything to do with the prostate cancer treatment Norman had begun back in May, after which he had lamented privately to him that his libido was on the floor.

  Unable to cope with the changed world he was in, the detective constantly upset people with his politically incorrect remarks and attitude, but Roy Grace resolutely kept him on his team, despite requests from ACC Pewe to the contrary. He fought Norman Potting’s corner for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, he was an immensely capable detective with years of invaluable experience – something, Grace rued, people seemed to value less and less. And secondly, he fought to keep him because he cared for the man. Compassion was another value that had gone missing during the country’s austerity measures.

  Grace no longer had space for a conference table in his office, so Potting and Wilde had to sit in the two swivel chairs at the empty desk facing his own.

  ‘Good to see you, Norman,’ he said. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Not enough blooming murders,’ Potting grumbled. DC Wilde smiled politely.

  ‘Good to see you, too, Velvet,’ Grace said. She was a feisty character, with short, spiky blonde hair, though conservatively dressed, like most detectives. ‘How’s everything?’ he asked.

  ‘Good, thank you, sir,’ she said in her Belfast accent.

  He turned to Potting. ‘Norman, what can you tell me about this man John – Johnny – Fordwater?’

  ‘If you want my opinion, chief, for a retired high-ranking soldier he’s pretty dim. Allowed himself to be defrauded by a woman he met on a German dating agency. I think he’s a sandwich short of a picnic.’

  Grace looked at DC Wilde. ‘Would you agree with that assessment, Velvet?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, guardedly. ‘He’s a nice fellow, but he seems to have been pretty naive, as Norman says, sir.’

  ‘In what way naive, Velvet?’

  ‘To hand over every penny he has in the world to a complete stranger he’s never actually met in person. I call that naive, sir.’

  Grace glanced quizzically at Norman Potting for being quick to criticize Fordwater. Potting’s own record wasn’t much better. His third marriage – or perhaps it was his fourth – had been to a Thai gold-digger. After just a few months, Potting had come to see him wanting advice. She’d returned to Thailand to be with her supposedly sick father. Within days, the first request for money had come through. The amounts had steadily risen. Grace had told him to stop, and Potting had, wisely, heeded his advice. But not before the DS had paid over many thousands into her bank account.

  Potting never saw the money or his bride again.

  ‘Like I said, chief,’ Potting added, ‘a complete idiot! Unbelievably gullible.’

  ‘We’re talking about an amount of 200,000 euros, right?’

  ‘I don’t think he told us the whole story, sir,’ Velvet Wilde cut in. ‘I suspect it’s even more than that. We’re going to talk to him again, in an hour’s time.’

  ‘Let me ask you a question. Do either of you think he’s capable of murdering someone – or ordering them to be killed?’ Grace asked, looking at each of them in turn.

  ‘Murdering someone – seriously, chief?’ Potting quizzed.

  ‘Very seriously, Norman.’

  ‘You want my humble opinion?’ Potting looked at his colleague for reassurance. ‘I don’t think he’s capable of making toast.’

  ‘But he was a soldier, right? SAS regiment. Decorated for bravery,’ Grace said. ‘We’re talking about pretty capable people, Norman.’

  Potting looked at Wilde again and shook his head. ‘Maybe once he was a tough soldier, but not now. The only soldier in him these days is the kind you dunk in an egg.’

  ‘I agree with Norman,’ she said.

  ‘This is the lady Major Fordwater has been in a romantic flirtation with – or so he thought,’ Grace said. He leaned over and pushed three photographs across the desk. ‘I just received these from the Munich Landeskriminalamt. I’ll be getting a full set shortly.’

  Potting and Wilde looked at them, in shock.

  ‘If you’re wondering about all the blood running down from her mouth,’ Grace said, ‘it’s because half her tongue was sliced off when she was lying impaled.’

  12

  Wednesday 26 September

  Toby Seward, a motivational speaker – and recent early loser on the television programme MasterChef – was happily occupied with one of his two passions, preparing meals for his husband, Paul. His other was tending the tiny garden at the front of their home. Playing on the television in the kitchen of their house in the North Laine district of Brighton was a recording of the programme, with contestants on the show who had got further than he had managed.

  Few things in life gave the distinguished-looking, silver-haired, soon-to-be forty-eight-year-old more pleasure than to cook a fine dinner for the man he loved. And he was at a critical stage in the early preparations for tonight. Lobster ravioli with avocado and garlic, broccoli, almond and quinoa salad. Paul’s favourite. The almonds, frying in coconut oil in the pan, were on the verge of burning. He drained them, all the time watching the television programme, as he was copying a recipe from it. He was also in a hurry. In less than two hours he was due on stage at the Brighton Centre to talk to five hundred delegates from a pharmaceutical company.

  His mobile phone rang, and he very nearly did not answer. Usually, when he saw the message ID Withheld, he ignored the call, because almost certainly it was spam, someone trying to sell insurance, a fake car-crash claim or some other bit of flotsam from the digital sewer. Then he remembered that Paul was having problems with his new iPhone and was taking it to the shop to exchange it. Perhaps it was him?

  Hitting the remote to freeze the television, he answered perkily, ‘Toby here!’ And heard a cultured, middle-aged female voice. ‘Is that Toby Seward?’

  ‘It is indeed!’

  ‘I’m very sorry if this sounds strange, Mr Seward,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Suzy Driver. You see, you don’t know me, but the thing is, I thought I knew you.’

  13

  Wednesday 26 September

  Twenty-five minutes after he’d left the airport, the receptionist at the Radisson Blu hotel on St Helier harbour front photocopied his passport, took an impression of his Amex card, told him how to connect to the Wi-Fi and handed him his key card. ‘Enjoy your stay with us, Mr Vogel.’

  Tooth scooped up his passport, Amex and the key card in its little envelope and headed to the lifts, he walked down the fourth-floor corridor and entered the suite his paymaster had booked for him. Hotels like this suited him. Big, modern, anonymous. The windows looked down onto a commercial port. A tall incinerator chimney, fishing boats, a ferry marked CONDOR and a harbour basin of small private motorboats and yachts. The tide was a very long way out. Over to the right was a causeway to a rocky island on which was some kind of an old fortress.

  He removed his laptop from his bag, set it on the desk and connected to the Wi-Fi, then removed his washbag and the small amount of spare clothing he travelled with, along with the encrypted, ex-military phone he’d bought for $10,000 on the dark web, as well as his pre-paid ‘burner’ phones and the one he’d been given earlier, and placed the items in drawers. Next, he removed a roll of gaffer tape, stood on the desk and masked the smoke detector. He made himself a treble espresso coffee from the capsules and, using the spare mug as an ashtray, lit a cigarette.

  An email pinged in on the phone he’d been given:

  I will see you at midday tomorrow. You screwed up. This will not happen again. This is where he and his accomplice are living, and I believe this is his next target. You will stop them. Frighten them.

  Beneath was an address in the city of Brighton and Hove, in England, as well as a JPEG attachment.

  He didn’t like the tone of the email, the thinly veiled threat. Nobody threatened him, ever. Tooth had fed the testicles of the last person who’d threatened him to his dog. Yossarian had licked his lips and looked up at him for more. Maybe soon, if he had any further emails like this, the dog would finally be getting a second helping.

  He looked again at the address. It didn’t make him happy.

  If there was one place in England he did not want to return to it was there. The lair of that smartass detective, Roy Grace, who had been such a big pain in his life in recent years. Although, he considered, it would give him a kind of perverse pleasure to outsmart him yet again. And an even bigger pleasure to kill him.

  Just the thought of Roy Grace’s name made him angry. He’d like to get even with him. And take his dog a little Detective Grace goody bag. But that was not for now. He had a job to do and needed the money, paltry though it was compared to the fee he normally commanded, to fund the new life in Ecuador he was planning. Somewhere he could have his ‘associate’, Yossarian, flown out to join him. The only friend he’d ever had in this shitty world.

  He removed the SIM card from the phone, went into the bathroom, shut the door and switched the shower on hot. Then with his lighter he burned the card. Steam from showers, he had learned, dissipated smoke and prevented the alarm from going off.

  Tooth flushed the charred card down the toilet. He was feeling hot, he realized. Clammy. He walked over to the air-con control on the wall to turn it down. Saw it was already down low, 16 degrees. And it wasn’t even a warm day outside.

  He needed another cigarette. He sat down heavily at his desk, perspiring. Again.

  He drank some coffee, lit a Lucky Strike and instantly felt worse. Jesus.

  He wobbled his way across to the minibar, peered at the rack of miniatures inside and pul
led out a Jim Beam. Not his favourite bourbon, but better than nothing. He twisted off the cap, necked half the contents and sat back down.

  For a few seconds he felt better, then his head was swimming again. The same flu-like symptoms he’d had repeatedly over the past six months. Back in March, due to his own stupidity and Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s actions, he’d been trapped in a room full of venomous creatures. He’d been bitten by spiders, snakes and suffered a sting from a deathstalker scorpion, one of the world’s most venomous critters. He’d been close to death for some while, so he’d been told by medical staff at the Royal Sussex County Hospital when he’d eventually come round.

  He managed to escape, evading the dumb police guard on his room, and make his way under one of his false identities to Germany, where he had work contacts. The specialist doctor he had consulted subsequently, in Munich, was a world authority on tropical diseases and reptile venom. He told him he’d been lucky to survive the scorpion sting, but as a result he was likely to suffer severe flu-like symptoms on a regular basis for the rest of his life. He was experiencing another of these episodes now, he realized.

  There was another side effect the doctor informed him of, the bastard barely masking a smirk. That he might find his manhood had shrunk.

  Which, to his embarrassment, it had.

  Thank you, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.

  One day, I’m just biding my time at present, but one day, I’ll get you – I promise you that.

  He badly needed to lie down, but he daren’t. Last time, a month back, when he had felt like this, he’d lain down on his bed and woken, soaking wet and shaking, three days later. Remembering his military training as a sniper, which had enabled him to stay concealed, motionless, behind enemy lines for days at a time, he allowed himself to catnap, seated. Five minutes’ shut-eye and he’d be good to go again. That had been part of his training. He used to be able to function for days like that. Weeks if he had to. But those catnaps were vital. Deprive a cat of sleep and it would die in two weeks. Deprive a human and he would become psychotic.

  He was remembering something else about that sniper course all those years back, too. Almost the first thing his instructor had said. ‘Most times you get just the one chance at your target, one shot. There’s no second chance. The target needs to be dead at first sight. And if he ain’t, you might be.’

  Five minutes later he opened his eyes and necked the rest of the tiny bottle, then, forcing himself to concentrate, opened the JPEG. A sequence of photographs. A blowsy-looking woman in her mid-fifties. Long dark hair. Still doing her best to look sexy. And no doubt did, to some. Might have been a beauty in her younger years, but probably spent too much time in the sun, judging from her tanned, wrinkled skin. Or a heavy smoker, perhaps. Or both.

  Whatever.

  Next was a photograph of his target – his employer’s former business partner who had gotten greedy and gone rogue. A tall, large-framed African, his hair cropped to a neat fuzz, wearing an Armani bomber jacket over jeans, a bling watch and loud red trainers. He was leaning, proprietorially, against the driver’s door of a red Ferrari, his expression confident and arrogant. A long way from his impoverished roots as a boy soldier in a war-torn nation. When he’d moved to the West he’d ditched his old name, Tunde Oganjimi, in favour of Jules de Copeland, a name he had seen on the credits of a television show, and which he wore with a swagger.

  This was the man Tooth had seen running from the front door of Lena Welch’s apartment building and jumping into the passenger seat of the Audi.

  There was another photograph, this one of Copeland’s colleague and distant cousin, Dunstan Ogwang, whose real name was Kofi Okonjo. Tooth instantly recognized the shorter man with the machete who had hacked out the tongue of the dying woman. According to the file, this man had formerly been a child soldier along with Copeland. He read on.

  Both men, at the age of fourteen, had been taught how to rape and then mutilate or cut the throats of their victims. What kind of moral compass did either have, he wondered? More fool his paymaster, Steve Barrey, for thinking he could be in business with them.

  Tooth liked always to know who he was actually dealing with, in a world where few people went under their real names. Barrey at some point in the past decade had relocated from his native city of Brighton and Hove to Germany, where he had made his base, and from there to Jersey. Barrey seemed to be his real name, but Tooth was never sure.

  After being transplanted from Ghana to Bavaria by Barrey, Copeland had then moved, with a forged passport, from Germany to Brighton, England, where he had an uncle and a cousin who ran an internet café and safety deposit box business. It was behind that front he had set up his own internet scamming business, and brought over his cousin as his lieutenant. He’d taken into his employment, back in Ghana, several of the notorious Sakawa Boys internet scammers, whom he’d been running for Barrey, and he was now both targeting his former employer’s chosen victims, as well as fishing for new ones. Tooth was well aware that, through Copeland’s clumsy approach, the dumb, greedy, arrogant idiot was risking blowing apart his employer’s entire carefully crafted and managed empire. Two of the targeted women had already rumbled the scam. Both had threatened to go to the police. One was now dead.

  If Copeland had anything between his eyes other than sawdust and pound signs, he’d have moved on and ended all contact. There were enough firewalls and digital trails for it to have taken any cop a year or more to drill down through them, and still ended up at a dead-end. And no cop had that time to spare. Copeland should have just moved on to the next targets – there were plenty of them out there online, thousands of men and women looking for love, all of them rich pickings. But Tooth knew Copeland’s type, blinded by greed and hubris.

  He was so dumb he hadn’t even realized that Barrey was monitoring his computer, phones and his every move. He’d never even thought to throw away the laptop Barrey had given him and get a new one.

  Tooth had been hired in Munich to follow the men and stop them. But, stupidly, he had failed, because of all that venom inside his body making him feel crap. Now the first woman was dead.

  You will stop them. Frighten them.

  His work was killing people. How was he supposed to frighten these guys? Run up behind them in a Halloween mask and shout boo?

  The way he was feeling right now, sick in the pit of his stomach, giddy, too hot, he wasn’t in the mood to frighten anyone. Everything had turned to rat shit. His health, his judgement, his future. He’d been reduced to taking a job paying way beneath his skill set. Way beneath his dignity. At this moment he envied scorpions. They had it sorted. Scorpions had a gap between the armoured scales that covered their backs. When a scorpion wasn’t happy it would commit suicide by stinging itself through that gap. Simple. End of. If he’d had his gun with him, he’d be gone, too.

  But he had no gun with him now. Just a view across St Helier harbour.

  He never saw the point in views – what did it matter if it was an ocean or a brick wall you were looking at? People travelled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to commit suicide some place with a beautiful view. They flew or drove across America, and sometimes even from further afield, to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge facing the bay of San Francisco. Or a place called Beachy Head in Sussex, facing the English Channel. Or the Aokigahara Forest in Japan.

  What was all that about?

  Did a view matter when oblivion beckoned? They could put him in a garbage bin after he was gone, for all he cared. That’s all the human race was anyway. Garbage with attitude.

  He stared at the photograph of Suzy Driver. Then at her address in the city of Brighton – a city which over the past few years he had come to know well. And which in turn knew him a little bit too well.

  This had to be a fast in-and-out mission. In and out before Detective Superintendent Roy Grace would have a chance to know he’d been there.

  He stared at the photograph of the African again. As he did so, an email came in. A phone number. The pilot he was to call. The one who would fly him to Shoreham Airport, just outside Brighton. There were few customs and immigration controls there. All being well he would slip back into England without anyone noticing. Especially not Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.