Peter James - Dead at First Sight

The spurting blood dwindled to a trickle, then almost stopped altogether. The siren was getting louder.

Two Response officers came running into the room.

‘Oh my God,’ one of them said quietly. He was looking at the severed hand, his face going green.

‘Have you called an ambulance?’ his colleague asked.

‘The ambulance could take an hour. Take us to the hospital. NOW!’

One man disappeared up an alley. The other, holding the glinting machete, dodged onto the pavement as Holly Little, frantically radioing for back-up, drew level with him. She was debating whether to keep pursuing in the vehicle or jump out and run after him on foot.

Pepper spray and a baton against a machete. Swing onto the pavement and run him over? What if he was innocent?

An innocent man doesn’t run through a city centre holding a machete. With blood on it.

But the IOPC might take a different view.

All these thoughts running through her head. A black man with a bloody machete versus, potentially, her career.

Screw you.

They reached the main road, just below the old Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital building. He turned left, down the hill, going like the wind.

She overtook him. Swung the car onto the pavement. Screeched to a halt, blocking his path, and jumped out.

He dodged past her.

‘Stop, police!’ she shouted. Then she sprinted after him. He stopped. Turned towards her.

Holding his blood-stained machete high.

‘One step towards me, lady, and you are dead.’

She took ten steps, pulling out her pepper spray, aware the wind was behind her, and fired off its contents.

In his face.

The machete hit the pavement. His hands hit his eyes.

He was screaming in agony.

Two seconds later she had him face-down on the pavement. Using her fast-cuffs she snapped one wrist, then the next.

Two guys walked past, up the hill. One said, in passing comment, ‘Racist pigs.’

Another time she might have rounded on them and startled them, but not now.

‘What’s your name?’ she said to her prisoner, pressing her emergency location button.

‘Mickey Mouse.’

‘So what’s your alias?’

‘Donald Duck.’

She slipped her hand inside his jacket, found a wallet and phone and pulled them out. Holding him down with her knee, she flipped the wallet open and saw a couple of credit cards.

Both said D. Duck.

‘Work in Disneyland, do you? Or Disneyworld?’ she asked. He said nothing but continued to struggle.

She dug her kneecap into his left kidney to restrain him. He screamed in pain.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear your answer. What’s your name?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Duck,’ he gasped, thinking about the false Ghanaian driving licence in his wallet.

‘Duck? As in Donald Duck.’

‘That’s my name. Donald.’

‘Nice to meet you, Donald. My name’s PC Little.’

He grunted.

She told him he was under arrest and cautioned him. Although she knew that, whatever crime this piece of scum had committed with his lethal knife, he would never get an appropriate sentence.

‘Come on, sista, we’re both black, lemme go!’

‘It’s not going to happen.’

He suddenly struggled violently, trying to pull free. She kneed him in the kidney again.

He yelped in pain.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Not nice, is it? I’ll keep doing it until you stop.’

Something Cleo had insisted on from the earliest days of their marriage was that, no matter how busy either of them might be, they would make time to sit down at the table, with no television on, and have their evening meal together. She had also been steadily trying to wean Roy onto a healthier diet than he’d traditionally eaten as a police officer. A lot more fish than meat, vegetarian and sometimes even vegan meals.

He’d once had a pathological aversion to the very notion of vegan, but after she’d created some seriously tasty recipes he had now started to enjoy it. Tonight they’d had nut burgers, with baked beans and sliced avocado. Afterwards they both returned to the living area, Cleo to continue with her studies and Roy to start work on his best-man’s speech for Glenn Branson’s wedding to Argus reporter Siobhan Sheldrake.

He googled the subject on his laptop and found a number of websites. He needed a good joke to start with, something perhaps a little risqué but inoffensive. He found a whole stack of them, most of them terrible. Then he came across one he quite liked. ‘Darling, sorry to interrupt you, what do you think of this?’ he asked.

She looked up.

‘ I would strongly advise the newlyweds to be cautious about buying their marital bed from Harrods. Apparently, they always stand by their products! ’

She rocked her head from side to side as if weighing the balance. ‘Yuk, that is so cheesy. No, no, no!’

‘I quite like it,’ he said defensively. ‘I mean, hey, Glenn is cheesy, right?’

‘You can do a lot better.’ She peered at him. ‘Roy, you look exhausted. I’m knackered, too, and I’ve a full-on day tomorrow, nine postmortems.’

‘Be nice if people stopped dying for a couple of days to give you a break!’

‘Maybe you should ask the Argus to put out a request.’

His job phone rang.

Cleo raised her eyebrows.

‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.

It was Arnie — Notmuch — Crown. ‘Sir,’ the American said, ‘thought you’d appreciate an update. We’ve arrested one of the suspects, but Red Shoes got away and has disappeared.’

Instantly, Roy sat upright. ‘Tell me?’ Crown filled him in on events. ‘Jesus, his right hand? How is he?’

‘Lost a lot of blood. He’s in ITU at the Sussex County, but they think he’ll pull through. The Response Team had the presence of mind to get instructions from the hospital on how to pack the hand and keep it cold. Surgeons are going to attempt to reattach it.’

‘What do we know about the suspect?’

‘Very little, sir. Apparently he’s keeping resolutely schtum . All they have at present is a burner phone and two credit cards and a driving licence in his wallet, both cards in the name D. Duck — from two different private banks in Lithuania. No address in the UK that he’s giving out. He wouldn’t say a word to the custody sergeant.’

‘So we need to make him quack.’

Notmuch gave a nervous, ‘Ha ha.’

‘Anything on the phone?’

‘It’s been biked over to Digital Forensics as an urgent priority.’

‘Good. What about the missing one — any progress on finding him?’

‘We’ve alerted Oscar-1 and CCTV are reviewing all footage of the area where he was last seen.’

‘Did we get anything from that boutique they went into? OnTrend? How did they pay?’

‘Cash, I’m afraid. There’s some CCTV from inside the shop but it doesn’t give us much more. The officers attending seized the banknotes Red Shoes paid with for fingerprint and DNA analysis. There’s no print match. We’ll have DNA sometime tomorrow.’

‘Nothing back from Europe or Interpol?’ Grace asked him.

‘No, sir.’

‘Was the victim able to speak? Did he say anything?’

‘Only one thing, sir. In the car on the way to the hospital he told the officers that the guys who did this said they were upset by his radio appearance this morning.’

‘Radio appearance?’

‘He was on the Danny Pike show, talking about Suzy Driver.’

‘Shit,’ Grace said. His brain spun, rapidly connecting the dots. At least this latest development, horrific though it was, gave him whatever further ammunition he might need — if indeed he did still need it — to convince Cassian Pewe of just what they were dealing with. The woman dead in Munich after threatening to expose her online ‘lover’. Suzy Driver dead after threatening to do the same. Now Toby Seward, the man Suzy Driver had gone to, whose identity had been taken, viciously attacked in his home hours after talking on the radio.