Peter James - Dead at First Sight

He’d found her five more times, under five more different names, on other dating websites.

His eyes were watering with tiredness, with sadness, with anger. Anger at himself.

You dumb asshole.

‘That’s him,’ Elizabeth Foster said, peering over Jack Roberts’s shoulder at the screen on his desk. At the face of a handsome, amiable-looking man with short silver hair. He was smartly dressed in a suit jacket, shirt and tie.

His profile gave him as a Munich-based film producer, formerly from England.

‘You’re sure, Liz?’

‘Positive.’

‘I looked him up on the IMDb — the internet movie database which lists everyone in the world in the movie business,’ Roberts said. ‘The only Richard Griffiths listed is the chubby actor best known for his role in the Harry Potter films — who died in 2013.

‘Take a look at this,’ he continued. He tapped his keyboard and another image of Toby Seward appeared, this time in military uniform. His profile gave him as Colonel Rob Cohen, aged forty-seven.

Elizabeth Foster narrowed her eyes.

‘Same fellow?’ Jack Roberts asked.

‘I think so. Yes.’

He tapped the keys again and another image of the same man appeared, this time in a British Airways pilot’s uniform, complete with cap. This profile was of a Peter Olins, fifty-one, airline captain.

Roberts looked over his shoulder. ‘Want to see any more of this busy chap? He has plenty of other different personas.’

‘How?’

‘Photoshop?’ He shrugged.

‘Can you give me the links — maybe that will help convince Mother.’

‘Of course.’

‘So, who is the real identity? Which one of these?’

‘I’m guessing it’s Colonel Rob Cohen. But that’s just a hunch.’

‘And presumably he has no knowledge of this?’

‘I doubt it. When they target ladies, these scammers tend to pick military types because they look trustworthy. Look at him, he seems a regular guy, decent and upright.’

They went back over to the sofa and sat down again.

‘I want to get that money back for her, Mr Roberts. My mother’s not a wealthy woman — by today’s standards. When my father died he left her the house mortgage free and just under half a million pounds in cash and stocks and shares. It’s a nice house, a semi, close to Hove seafront, but it’s not a mansion. That money, combined with her state pension, would have enabled her to live comfortably — she’s never been an extravagant woman.’ She hesitated and smiled, nervously. ‘She’s pretty thrifty by nature. She’s always looked for a deal when she’s been food shopping, buying stuff at the end of its sell-by date and hunting down the cheapest supermarket offers. In the past few years she’s done most of her grocery shopping at Lidl, and she’s always proud of her bargains. Only a couple of months ago she phoned me, excitedly, to tell me about an amazing offer Lidl had on prawns. What she’s doing now is so out of character. I need to somehow convince her of what is really happening here. Can you help me do that?’

‘Liz, I’d love to tell you I could, but I don’t want you throwing good money after bad.’

‘I don’t care what it costs, Mr Roberts. My husband’s a very successful businessman, with deep pockets. He’s as angry as I am. I’ve come to you because I’ve been told you are the best in this field. Don and I don’t care what it costs or what it takes, I want to find the bastard — or bastards — behind this and teach them a lesson they will never forget.’

He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I like your spirit, Liz. And I never like to turn down business or a challenge. But before my charge clock starts ticking you need to be aware just how slim the chances of success are. Most of the masterminds behind these scams operate from jurisdictions that aren’t easy for our police forces to get any help from. Ghana, Nigeria and Eastern Europe are the three most common ones. They hide behind firewalls in the dark web. Any money that’s sent to them is either spent almost right away or placed in accounts in countries — admittedly getting fewer these days — that aren’t willing to hand over information to police authorities.’

‘So a shitty little conman in one of these countries can screw my mother — and anyone else in the Western world — out of every penny, and none of our law-enforcement agencies can do a damned thing about it? Is that what you are saying?’

‘Not for want of trying, but in a nutshell, yes.’

‘Well, I’m going to do something about it. Are you in or out?’

Roberts looked back at her confidently. ‘I’m in.’

DS Sally Medlock looked around the room at the members of the recently formed Financial Crimes Safeguarding Team. It had been her initiative to set it up, with the enthusiastic support of the Chief Constable and Police and Crime Commissioner, to take new approaches in guarding the vulnerable — and sometimes just plain gullible — against the myriad predators lurking out there in the digital sewers.

In 2005 romance fraud accounted for just seven per cent of all financial scams perpetrated in the UK. Today it was close to eighty per cent. Sums varied from a few thousand pounds up to a staggering four and a half million. And romance fraud was just one area of the growing menace of financial crime.

The situation had become so serious they now had a daily management meeting, Monday to Friday. Seven officers, a mixture of detectives and uniform, sat around the table in the first-floor conference room at Police Headquarters in Lewes. They were housed, along with Major Crime, in one of the former dormitory buildings at the rear of the HQ campus, directly above Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s office.

‘Safeguarding’ was a vital but largely unseen duty carried out by British police forces. Monitoring and protecting people who were suffering domestic abuse. Children who were victims of sexual abuse. Young people from overseas, mostly Nigeria, Romania and Albania, who were brought over as slaves and forced into being sex workers or working in other jobs for a pittance. And more recently people who were under observation as victims of internet fraud — many of whom were elderly.

A wide number of both men and women of all ages, but mostly over forty, were currently being targeted by perpetrators of romance fraud. This new, specialist unit, expensive to run, was performing a crucial service, carrying out safeguarding assessments, along with social workers, and working with financial institutions to identify victims — and potential victims — and work with them and their families to try to prevent them parting with their cash.

Many of the victims were elderly and vulnerable with mental health issues, such as dementia and other age-related illnesses. Among the questions facing the team was whether targeted victims had the capacity to make informed decisions or were they just making unwise choices. Increasingly the police were being helped by the staff of money services bureaux, post offices and supermarket banks. There were protocols in place involving all high-street banks and post offices on reporting suspicious transactions. There were likely to be few good reasons, in this team’s view, for any elderly Sussex resident to be sending large sums of cash to Ghana or Nigeria.

The exponential growth of telephone and online fraud had resulted in a step change for the police. In the past, policing policy had been ‘let’s go after the offender’. But with romance fraud, in particular, mostly originating overseas, there were simply not the resources to send officers out to those countries. Too often police forces would have to close their files, marked ‘Undetected’. It was Sussex Police’s Operation Signature that had led the way forward.