Peter James - Dead at First Sight

Next to the wall-mounted monitor behind the conference table were three whiteboards on easels. On one were crime scene photographs of Suzy Driver’s hanging body in her bedroom, as well as a couple of her taken when she was alive. On another was a family tree of both her and her sister, Lena Welch. On the third was an association chart. One section of that contained the names, along with photographs, of six different men Suzy Driver had had contact with on the internet dating site. These had been recovered from her phone and iPad by the Digital Forensics Team. Five of the photographs were small, the sixth, of a man with silver hair, much larger. There was a second photograph of the same man, but with a different hairstyle, next to it.

Grace stifled a yawn and swallowed a guarana pill from the bottle Cleo had got him, to try to help him cut down on his coffee intake. ‘OK, everyone, this is the seventh briefing of Operation Lisbon, the enquiry into the suspicious death of Suzy Adele Driver, so we will be running through all the information to date. With new members of the team, we need to bring everyone up to speed. What we know at this juncture is that Suzy had joined PerfectPartners.net in the hope of finding a soulmate to share the latter years of her life with. She engaged in online dialogues with six different men, five of whom have now been contacted and eliminated from our enquiries, but we’ve drawn a blank on the sixth.’ He pointed at the large photograph. ‘This person gave his name to Suzy Driver as Dr Norbert Petersen. He told her he was a Norwegian geologist from Oslo, working in the petrochemical industry in Bahrain. But so far he hasn’t been traced. A double-check at the Norwegian Embassy confirms Petersen is not a real person. They have no one of that name working either in the petrochemical industry or in Bahrain — or anywhere. This might chime with recent information that’s just come in from our media appeal, right, Simon?’ He looked over at DS Snape.

‘Very much so, sir. This afternoon I took a call from a Brighton resident, Toby Seward, a professional motivational speaker. He said Mrs Driver had contacted him out of the blue on September 26th, telling him his photograph was being used for what she believed to be an internet scam. He said she’d told him that eleven different women, including herself, thought they were in love with him.’

‘Lucky him!’ Norman Potting said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Snape, who was not a Potting fan, retorted. ‘Toby Seward is gay.’

‘He could pass these ladies on to me, then!’

‘Thank you, Norman,’ Grace said, sharply.

Snape went over to the whiteboard and pointed at the larger photographs. ‘These two are of Toby Seward. On the left is one he emailed me this afternoon. The one on the right is the online profile photograph with the name Dr Norbert Petersen.’ He paused to let this sink in.

‘Do all the other women Suzy traced have this same name and identity of Petersen, Simon?’ Kevin Hall asked.

‘All different,’ said the newly promoted Detective Sergeant Jack Alexander, who was running the Outside Enquiry Team. ‘According to Mr Seward, who I went over to see with Arnie. He’d subsequently spoken to Suzy Driver on several occasions and she’d given him pretty much chapter and verse.’

Arnie Crown was a diminutive, wiry American of thirty-six. Due to his height he had been nicknamed Notmuch, as in ‘Not Much Cop’. It was a soubriquet he appeared to revel in. His wife, Vivienne, now a member of the enquiry team, was proving extremely effective as the analyst.

‘Mr Seward is a smart guy,’ Crown said. ‘No question he had absolutely no idea his identity had been taken. He was devastated that Suzy was dead. He certainly didn’t think she was remotely suicidal — he said she was a feisty lady who was rather enjoying her sleuthing, and she was hatching a plan to turn the tables on the scammers.’

‘That’s helpful, thanks, Arnie,’ Grace said. ‘Now, we have another significant development regarding her sister, Lena Welch. We have established from talking to relatives and friends of Suzy that they were close. Suzy was widowed, Lena Welch was a divorcee. The two ladies both joined online dating agencies — Digital Forensics have looked at email exchanges between them in which they compared notes on the replies from men they received. Where this gets particularly interesting is that in the weeks prior to their deaths, each woman had become suspicious about a man they were communicating with.’

‘The same man?’ Simon Snape queried. The Detective Sergeant, an intense and very keen officer in his early thirties, was a new addition to Roy’s team. With his elongated neck that left his shirt collar snagged on his Adam’s apple, and small head with eyes close together, he had the look of a reptile constantly poised to strike. An effect further enhanced by his sometimes hissy voice from the way he pronounced his ‘S’s.

‘No.’ Grace hesitated. ‘Actually, Simon, that’s a very good question. Certainly neither women thought or suspected that. But from what Digital Forensics have learned, and from what we’ve been told by Munich, each of them was in communication with someone who had gone a very long way to hide his — or even her — identity.’

He paused to turn the page, momentarily distracted by Norman Potting who was tapping his vaping device on his worktop. Then he continued.

‘On Monday, September 24th, Lena Welch plunged to her death from her sixth-floor apartment in Munich, landing on railings which impaled her. Moments after her fall, according to witnesses, a man ran up to her wielding a machete and hacked at her face with it, which accords with the subsequent forensic report in which the front part of her tongue was severed. A week later, Suzy Driver was found hanged in the bedroom of her home here in Hove. Although it was meant to look like suicide, in my opinion and supported by forensic evidence, she was murdered. Kevin has some details on this.’

Despite his confident figure, DC Hall looked a tad nervous addressing the team. ‘Thank you, guv. Well, two primary reasons for believing Suzy was murdered. The first as the boss says is the forensic evidence. She had a blow to the rear of her head — sufficient in the pathologist’s view to have rendered her unconscious prior to her being hanged. This was backed up by further forensic evidence — traces of her hair and blood found on the carpet of her bedroom. Secondly, we have new information from the Landeskriminalamt in Munich. A neighbour of Lena Welch reported seeing a man acting suspiciously outside her flat in Munich, sometime before she fell to her death. Her description of this man matches closely a report from one of Mrs Driver’s neighbours who saw a person of his description in a car near her house several times over the weekend she died. This is possibly the same man who stars in very blurry CCTV footage the LKA have obtained from a convenience store opposite Lena Welch’s apartment building.’

‘How blurry, Kevin?’ Grace asked.

‘The quality’s rubbish, I’m afraid.’

The team watched on the monitor, in poor, hazy colour, with constant flare-out from the street lighting, a man of African origin pacing up and down the street, past Lena Welch’s front door. He appeared to press the door panel and disappear inside. The image was too blurred to make out his face, but he was wearing bright-red shoes of some kind. After a gap of several minutes, he reappeared and walked out of frame.

Suddenly, a second African appeared, holding something, possibly a blade, that glinted in the light. After a brief gap, a dark-coloured car raced past at speed.

‘It gets better, guv. Here’s footage from a concealed camera in Lena’s flat.’

He hit a couple of buttons on his laptop and on the screen appeared an African man, blurry at first, and there was the sound of a scuffle, followed by a woman’s voice crying out, then stifled. Something, possibly two figures, moved past the camera. There was a loud thud. The woman was silent. They saw the African again, in better focus now, walking hurriedly around as if looking for something. Then he ran out of the room.