Peter James - Dead at First Sight

‘My pleasure, thanks for having me on, Danny.’

‘Just to set the scene, Toby is a handsome fellow, forty-eight years old with nice hair and great teeth. He is so handsome in fact that his image has been used, without his knowledge or consent, to chat up no less than eleven different ladies who’ve signed up to internet dating agencies in search of a soulmate. He is in the studio with me to talk about the dangers of online dating. Sussex Police today released figures on internet crime, showing it to have reached epidemic status, and online dating is the biggest of all in this current crime wave. In Sussex alone, during the past twelve months, over forty residents have been scammed out of £30 million by people they had met online and fallen in love with. The smallest loss was £40,000 and the largest scam relieved one person of an incredible four million quid. Toby, you’ve recently had a pretty shocking experience. Would you like to tell our listeners about it? I should repeat, this comes with a health warning. So, Toby, you must have had lots of success internet dating?’

‘Thank you, Danny,’ Toby Seward said with a grin. ‘I’ve got no need at all to go internet dating now. My husband, Paul, and I are very happy — we did actually meet on a dating site some years ago. But since then I’ve had an experience I felt I needed to publicize because, as you rightly say, online romance does indeed come with a very serious warning.’

‘Tell us what happened to you, Toby.’

‘Sure. Well, it was about a fortnight ago I got a phone call out of the blue from a well-spoken lady called Suzy. It’s a call I will never ever forget. She asked if I was Toby Seward. When I said yes, she said, “I’m very sorry if this sounds strange, Mr Seward. My name is Suzy. You see, you don’t know me, but the thing is, I thought I knew you.”’

‘Wow!’ Pike interjected. ‘And you didn’t, right?’

‘I’d never heard of her, no. She went on to tell me that we’d been in love with each other for the past eight months, having met on a dating website.’

‘In love — but you hadn’t actually met, right?’

‘Right. She’d signed up to this agency, putting up a photograph of herself and her profile. She was the fifty-five-year-old widow of an antiques dealer, looking for a new life-partner. One of the replies she’d received was from a gentleman giving his name as Dr Norbert Petersen, a geologist from Norway working in Bahrain in petrochemicals. And he used my photograph!’

‘Your photograph? Where did he get it from?’

‘He must have pulled it off the internet. He also said he was fifty-eight, which is a bit insulting as I’m only forty-eight!’

‘I’d be a bit annoyed by that, too, I think! So how did she rumble this person?’

‘Well, it seems he strung her along for several months, all the time professing to be falling more and more in love with her.’

‘Although they hadn’t actually met?’

‘Not physically, no. I think there is something very powerful about internet flirtations. I remember the excitement when I first met Paul over the internet. There’s something both mystical and compelling about it.’

‘And dangerous?’

‘Exactly. Very. If you meet someone through friends, you have a frame of reference, you’ll know something about that person’s background by the fact that they’re a friend of a friend — that’s a kind of automatic vouching for them. When you meet a complete stranger online, it’s a very different situation.’

‘Don’t online dating agencies check out their clients carefully?’

‘I’m sure that some do, Danny, but there’s a limit to how far they can, and all the more so with the current data protection legislation in place.’

‘OK, so go on.’

‘Well, a few weeks ago, Norbert Petersen told Suzy that his grandmother was desperately ill and needed expensive hospital treatment. He explained that his wife, whom he was divorcing, had had their bank account frozen. Could she lend him £20,000 to help with the medical bills, which he promised to pay back as soon as the divorce was sorted and he could sell their home. Fortunately, Suzy is... was... a smart lady. She became suspicious at this point and did a reverse Google search.’

‘A what?’

‘She popped Norbert Petersen’s photograph into Google and basically did a search on it... it’s very simple. Through this she discovered that “Norbert Petersen” was one of a number of different names under which this same photograph of myself appeared across different dating sites.’

‘Blimey, so what happened?’

‘She confronted him, saying she believed she was being scammed and she was going to report it to the police. He came back at her with a story about his identity being taken by an internet scammer, which again she was smart enough not to believe. Then yesterday I heard the shocking news that she is dead and Sussex Police have begun an investigation. It begs the question of whether there is a connection.’

‘What do you know? What do you believe, Toby?’

‘I don’t know anything more than I read in the Argus . Two officers came to interview me, but they wouldn’t give me any details. All I can say is that from my conversation with her she was a very nice lady. I can’t think of any reason why someone would kill her other than to silence her.’

‘She was the widow of a very successful antiques dealer,’ Pike said. ‘Might it not be simply and tragically a burglary gone badly wrong?’

‘It might indeed be, but I don’t think it’s that.’

‘So what’s your theory, Toby?’

‘I’m speculating wildly here, Danny, but knowing how much money is at stake with internet fraud, I think it’s possible Suzy was killed to stop her investigating any further. She had also hinted to me the last time we spoke that she had found out something really damning about the person who’d been trying to scam her.’

‘What do you think that might have been, Toby?’

‘I don’t know. I suspect it was something to do with his past — about who he really is.’

‘And do you think that could have got her killed?’ Pike pressed.

‘It could have, yes.’

‘So the dark side of internet dating,’ Pike said. ‘Do you have any message for our listeners, Toby?’

‘I do, yes. I want people who go online looking for love to understand the potential dangers they’re exposing themselves to.’

‘So should people should stop online dating? Is that what you’d like to see, Toby?’

‘Not at all. But for anyone out there listening, who is either internet dating or contemplating it, please just be aware.’

They were aware. Very aware.

Only too aware.

‘Like, you should be aware, too, Toby Seward -sounds-like- Sewage ,’ Jules de Copeland muttered back at the radio. ‘You know, going live on air and saying this shit.’ Tossing his cigarette butt out of his window, he glanced at his colleague in the passenger seat. Ogwang was playing a game on his phone, concentrating intently. ‘Right?’

‘Yeah.’

Ogwang glanced at his watch. His large, shiny, £15,000 Breitling Navitimer that was his pride and joy. And more swanky than Copeland’s smaller Vacheron Constantin.

The wipers squeak-clonked in front of them, shovelling away the pelting rain. ‘You’re not even listening to me, man. Local radio, that’s where you find what’s going on. That and the local paper, right? They’re your eyes and ears, yeah?’ Copeland pointed to his own eyes, then ears.

A gusting sou’westerly straight off the English Channel rocked the car. Copeland had rented the little black Hyundai deliberately, figuring they would look less conspicuous than in something bigger and flashier. But with his hulking frame making him look like he had been shoehorned into the small vehicle, his penchant for shiny clothes and his sidekick an angry bonsai version of himself, they were about as inconspicuous as two sharks in a toddler’s paddling pool.