Peter James - Dead at First Sight

‘Richie Griffiths?’

‘Yes. I discovered that what she’d done was put up a photo of me, because the earlier ones of her looked out of date — we looked very similar when she was my age. I told her that the moment they met, he was going to realize she had lied.’

‘How did she respond?’

‘She got angry with me and told me I was being ageist. That what did an age gap matter? She said she’d read about a sixty-nine-year-old man in Holland who’d gone to court saying his doctor had told him he had the body of a forty-nine-year-old, so that’s what he wanted to change his age to. He argued that if you could change your name or your sex, then you could change your age — he wanted to be twenty years younger to help his chances of getting a job. Mum said that when they met she knew Richie would forgive her little white lie. She said they were madly in love and that she slept with his photo under her pillow.’

‘OK, so then what happened?’ Jack prompted.

‘Well, I help out with her paperwork — I go over there every week. A couple of months or so ago I opened a bank statement and saw a whole bunch of payments to an account in Munich. Small at first — £250. Then £500. Then £800. Then £2,000. I asked her about them. My mother told me that Richie Griffiths was a film-maker, originally from England, and married to a German actress in Munich. They’d recently split up and were going through an acrimonious divorce, and he’d had his bank account frozen by a German lawyer. He was strapped for cash and if she could help him out he would pay her back when he got his life sorted out. I wasn’t happy about this, obviously.’

‘It’s a familiar kind of pattern.’

‘Next time I visited her, I was alarmed to see a much bigger payment, £15,000. This man had told her his sister had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and needed immediate treatment. He was in despair and could she lend him the money to pay for her treatment until he got his affairs sorted out? Then yesterday morning I went over to her and she told me he’d offered her a great investment. His marital home, in the best area of Munich, was worth a lot more than his ex-wife was claiming from him. If my mother loaned him the money to buy out his wife’s share of their home, they would both make a killing when he sold it.’

‘How much is the loan he’s asking for?’

‘In the region of £450,000.’

Roberts whistled. ‘Does she have that amount in cash available?’

‘She has, invested. Luckily it’s going to take a while for her to get all the money because much of it is in bonds. I’ve told her she needs to get her solicitor to make sure it’s all done correctly with this fellow — hoping any lawyer would realize pretty quickly it’s a con. I’ve spoken to her bank manager. She was sympathetic but said she was powerless to stop her. But she said she would speak to her to try to dissuade her. What is even more alarming is that the manager told me, in confidence, that my mother had enquired about remortgaging her house. When she told Mother that she was unlikely to get a mortgage due to her lack of income, my mother said she had been looking into equity-release plans. So this Richie — whoever he might be — is clearly not going to stop at £450,000. That’s when I decided I needed urgent help and found you, on the internet. You seem to be specializing in this kind of fraud — if that’s what this is.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Jack Roberts reassured her. ‘When I got your message, via my secretary, I did some background checks on this “Richie Griffiths” and found out he’s a pretty busy guy out on the internet. At least half-a-dozen different ladies are all in love with him — and several of them in the process of helping him buy his ex-wife out of their property.’ He grimaced. ‘Not bad for someone who doesn’t actually exist.’

Matt Sorokin sat on a huge sofa in his hotel suite, feeling small and lost. He stared, blankly, at the ghost of himself in the window that stared back at him, and at the darkness of the night and ocean beyond. Darkness that felt like it was leaking in through the glass and seeping deep into every vein and pore of his body.

His brain was wired. His stomach felt hollowed out. Four a.m.

He was a long way from sleep. A long way from anything, oh God, from what this night should have been.

He reached over and grabbed his wallet. Flipped it open and stared at the photograph. Evelyne’s beautiful face, with her big, trusting eyes, the laughter creases around her mouth, her long, silky dark hair. Half his age. Punching above his weight , a couple of buddies back at the Sheriff’s office had ribbed him. But they were just jealous — any guy would be when they saw that picture. And there were plenty, way more sexy photographs that she’d sent him on their private Facebook link. Some wickedly so indeed, driving him wild with anticipation!

This was to have been the night of his dreams. Sweeping into his arms the woman of his dreams.

Instead he sat alone in the wreckage of a train crash. Surrounded by vases of flowers. Big, vibrantly coloured and insanely expensive flowers. Thinking what a close call he’d had to giving her more money. She’d tried to get him to lend her over half a million bucks, ostensibly to buy out her husband’s share of their house in São Paulo. But it still hurt to lose ninety thousand bucks. What his NYPD pal Pat Lanigan called his fun money .

Money he’d put aside to help his brother, who was unable to walk because of a muscle-wasting disease, to make his home more wheelchair friendly. Money he was going to use to help his granddaughter rent premises for her new fashion business. And the rest he’d been going to spend enjoying life with Evelyne.

Gone.

Evelyne and the money? Not possible.

He looked at his phone, as he did every few minutes. In the forlorn, fading hope that... That...?

He was too gutted to open the champagne in the fridge — and toast what? Instead he was drinking his way steadily through the contents of the minibar. The bourbons. Then the Scotch. The gin. And now he was on the vodka.

On the screen of his laptop beside him was the real estate agent’s brochure of the white, colonial-looking house. Evelyne Desota’s home. He had nearly taken out a mortgage to help her buy out her husband’s share.

Except, from an exhaustive trawl of the internet an hour or so back, it had become evident the real estate agency did not exist.

It was all an elaborate scam and he had been suckered in.

How?

How had he been such a fool?

At least he’d not been a complete idiot and given her all the money. But even so, he felt a raw, ulcerous pain in his stomach. He was sixty-three. He’d had it all figured out. Maybe twenty years of active life left if he was lucky and, boy, had he been planning to make each one of those years count — even more so in the five months since beautiful Evelyne Desota had responded to his advert on findMefindYou.net.

He’d learned very early on in his career as a cop never to trust anyone and to check every story. How had he allowed himself to blindly believe Evelyne? To send her money without even a signed piece of paper between them?

Because he had trusted her — or maybe it was his dick that had trusted her. All those Facebook messages. Texts all day long and late into the night, telling him how much she loved him. The long and often very intense phone conversations. Ever since she had come into his life he’d been fired with a zest he never knew was in him.

The woman he was certain he would cherish to the ends of the earth. In his dreams.

Where was she now? Who was she?

He’d done a reverse Google search on her. The one he should have done the moment he’d first seen her, when he’d have found out right away she wasn’t a restaurant manager at all. Her image was on the website of a Brazilian escort agency, under a different name. He recognized her from the erotic pose; the exact same photograph she had sent him a while back.