Peter James - Dead at First Sight

Ogwang shrugged, then brightened a little — football was his big interest. ‘Actually, Manchester United, they’s my team.’

‘Cunt,’ his cellmate said.

Half an hour or so ago a doddery old man with a hearing aid the size of a golf ball, dressed in an overcoat and a tweed hat, emerged from the front door of the apartment building with two equally doddery-looking King Charles spaniels on leashes, and headed off through the falling drizzle in the direction of the seafront.

Still parked in the visitor’s bay, where no one had bothered him, Tooth waited patiently, munching on a dried-up sandwich he’d bought at the filling station last night. He had no appetite and it tasted horrible, but he needed to eat something. The sickness he was feeling was sapping his strength, and his concentration. He forced himself to swallow. Then another bite. He chewed for some while before he felt he wouldn’t throw up if he swallowed it. The other half of the sandwich he dropped back in the bag.

Sure enough, the old guy was now returning at an interminably slow, plodding walk, the dogs looking knackered.

As he reached the front door, Tooth slipped quietly out of the darkness and stood right behind him. Close enough to read the entry code he punched in. Neither dog reacted.

Tooth stood as the man and his dogs went in, allowing the door to click shut behind him, and watched through the glass as he waited at the lift, then dragged the dogs in. When the doors had shut on them, Tooth punched in the code and walked back into the building, feeling the reassuring weight of his gun in his inside jacket pocket.

First he went down to the car park, to check on the Kia and make sure he had not somehow been outsmarted. The engine compartment was stone cold. Good. He summoned the lift, entered the tired-feeling car and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

The doors opened onto a dimly lit corridor with a worn, patterned carpet. There was the faint sound of an opera aria, and a smell of cooking that reminded him of hospitals, which did not help his queasiness. Of course, Copeland could have taken the lift to the fifth floor as a blind, and then walked up or down to another one, but Tooth didn’t think he had given the African any reason to believe he had been followed here last night.

He went to the end of the corridor, his story prepared, and rang the doorbell of flat 501, standing well clear of the spyhole.

After a brief wait, the door suddenly opened and he saw a middle-aged woman with long, fair hair in ringlets, in a revealing silk dressing gown, her breasts almost falling out of it, peering at him through glazed eyes.

‘Oh,’ she slurred. ‘I thought it was—’ She frowned. ‘Who are you?’

‘Sorry,’ he said, slipping hastily away. ‘Wrong flat.’

He tried the next one, directly across the corridor. It was where the opera was playing. There was no response. He tried again, then knocked. A dog yapped, a high-pitched yip-yip-yip .

The door opened with a ferocity that startled him. As did the face of the young man with the bleached hair and make-up who was looking at him. The one he had seen some hours earlier picking up the rat-like dog’s poop. The creature came running out, yip-yip-yipping, towards him, and the man knelt to grab its collar. ‘Goliath!’ he said, sternly. ‘Goliath, sit!’

‘Sorry,’ Tooth said. ‘Wrong address.’

‘Why don’t you get the right one next time?’ the young man said, standing up and slamming the door. It was followed by the rattle of a security chain.

Tooth was struggling, feeling dreadful and unsteady on his legs. Too many doors, too many flats.

Steve Barrey’s stinging words rang in his ears.

Are you going to screw up again?

He knew he was letting too many people see his face but he had no choice but to persevere. He moved along to 503 and rang the bell. A male voice called out, in a very posh English accent, ‘Hello, who is this?’

‘It’s Ricky!’

‘Ricky who?’

‘Ricky Sharp.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I may have the wrong flat. Are you James Pusey?’

‘Sorry, you must have. Don’t know anyone of that name.’

He next tried 504. There was no response to his repeated rings on the bell, followed by raps on the door. He clocked the number as a possibility and moved to 505. There was a faint smell of cigarette smoke coming from it. The door opened and the smell instantly became much stronger. He was greeted by a friendly woman in her mid-sixties wearing a grey onesie. The sound of a television was on, loudly, behind her.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said, feigning a frown. ‘I think I wrote the wrong apartment number down.’

‘Who are you looking for, love?’ she said in a kindly voice.

‘James Pusey,’ he replied. It was from a list of names he had memorized for moments like this.

She turned and called, ‘Mick, do you know a James Pusey?’

A gruff voice called back, ‘No!’

‘A tall black guy — wears red shoes, usually?’ Tooth prompted.

‘Ah.’ She looked pensive. ‘Now I come to think of it, yes. We pretty much keep ourselves to ourselves here. But I’ve seen the chap you’re describing, I think. Yes.’ She pointed. ‘Number 507, over there. I think, but I can’t be sure.’

Tooth thanked her, waited for her to close the door then moved, stealthily, diagonally across the corridor. He stood outside the door, checking around for signs of anyone and listening hard.

He slipped his right hand under his jacket and gripped the heavy gun. Glancing around again in both directions, he switched off the safety catch; it was something he had practised endlessly in the long hours he’d had to kill waiting outside in his car.

He hadn’t had a chance to properly test the gun which the rude moron had given him in the toilet of the Stag pub. Not a big problem if it failed to discharge. He had been studying the martial arts since his early teens. He rarely read books or watched movies or television. Mostly he’d filled the endless hours of the void since leaving the US military, in between fishing for food, hiking with his associate and occasionally visiting his hooker, by teaching himself every martial arts discipline there was.

If the gun which he was now holding in his hand, finger on the trigger, failed him, it wasn’t a problem. Before Jules de Copeland even realized he hadn’t been shot, his neck would have been severed and the top half of his spine would have been powered up through the base of his neck, through his brain and into the roof of his skull.

With his free left hand, Tooth pressed the doorbell.

‘Healthy tonight, OK? Cod, quinoa, beetroot and goat’s cheese salad.’

‘Sure,’ Roy Grace said. ‘Sounds yum! Glenn told me I’m getting fat, so that would be good!’

‘He said what?’ Cleo peered at her husband. He was perched on the sofa, reading a paper, catching up on the news to switch off for a short while. ‘Well, OK, maybe there’s the tiniest bit of a tum visible.’

‘Thanks a lot! Is that the reason for the salad?’

‘No. We had the victims of a house fire in the PM room today,’ Cleo said. ‘You know how it always gets me.’

‘From that one yesterday?’

‘A chip pan on the gas hob. Two kids, the mother couldn’t get them out of the house. Poor woman.’

‘How do you ever recover from that?’

‘You don’t,’ she said, simply.

He stood up and put a comforting arm around her. ‘Poor love, you really are shaken, aren’t you?’

There were tears in her eyes and she was fighting back a sob. ‘It doesn’t get to me, not normally. I always think nothing can shock me any more, that I’ve seen it all. Then something like this comes along.’