Peter James - Dead at First Sight

Matt Sorokin downed two whiskies, followed by two miniature bottles of shit wine, closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The movie he had been watching on the transatlantic flight from JFK to London was shit. The seat he was in, sandwiched between a fat guy with bad BO, who was snoring loudly, and a woman on his left who smelled like she’d tried every perfume in the duty-free shop, was shit, too.

He’d pulled off the headphones and stuck them in the pocket in front of him, reclined his seat, ignoring the protest of someone behind him, and closed his eyes.

The Neanderthal behind him was now kicking the back of his seat. Kick. Kick. Kick .

Matt unbuckled his belt, turned round and leaned over his headrest, staring at the man, an angry-looking guy with bulging, thyroid eyes. ‘You got a problem, buddy?’

‘You put your seat back,’ he said.

‘Yeah. I put my seat back. I paid for my seat and I paid for the button that puts it back. You gotta problem with that?’

‘I do.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It doesn’t give me any room.’

‘That’s the airline’s problem, not mine,’ Sorokin said. He turned away and let his seat back even further, as far as it would go.

The man behind him remained silent.

He closed his eyes again. Thought about his plans. His connecting flight to the island of Jersey. His lunch date at a fancy restaurant with Steve Barrey, whose name and contact details had been given to him by Jersey States Police Financial Crimes Unit. He’d approached Barrey in the guise of a bent cop, working in the NYPD Money Laundering Team, in the pay of a major New York crime family, and Barrey, who had fingers in the financial services world, had swallowed the bait. Sorokin was really looking forward to meeting the bastard.

And hey, the menu looked good, too. Shame, if his plan worked out, that he’d never get as far as ordering.

He drifted back into sleep, waking an hour later with a raging thirst and a blinding headache.

Roy Grace woke with a raging thirst and a blinding headache and glanced at the clock radio. It said 4.11 a.m. He gulped down the entire glass of water he kept at his bedside every night.

Cleo was sound asleep beside him. He hadn’t heard her come back, although at some point in the night Humphrey had woken him, barking. His mind was whirring. Tooth. Jules de Copeland. Cassian Pewe. Alison Vosper. No one had called, so presumably there’d been no developments, so far.

Was he missing something? Something vital? What?

Slipping as quietly as he could out of bed, using the light of his phone and trying not to disturb Cleo, he went through into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He ran the tap, waiting for the water to get cold, opened the cabinet and took out a couple of paracetamols. He swallowed them with another glass of water. He should try and grab a few hours more sleep, he knew.

Returning to bed, he lay there with his eyes closed. But he was too wired to go back to sleep. After fifteen minutes of raking over everything in his mind, he gave up, went back into the bathroom, showered and shaved. Using the minimum light possible, he got dressed in a fresh shirt and suit and tie. He kissed Cleo goodbye, but she didn’t stir. Fortunately Humphrey, downstairs, didn’t stir either. He was snoring in his basket.

Grace made himself a double espresso, gobbled down a bowl of cereal and went out in the darkness to his car.

Two armed CROPS officers travelled in the small grey van, in the darkness, heading north towards the country town of East Grinstead along a winding rural road. The driver, borrowed at the last moment to replace a sick member of the team, was a pot-bellied old sweat of a uniform constable, seventeen shifts from retirement, he told them with pride and no hint of regret. He smelled of curry. For the past forty minutes since leaving Brighton he’d bored his passengers rigid, swinging the lantern as well as telling them how policing had changed since he’d first joined. Wasn’t the same any more, no sir. You could call a spade a spade back then. Now you’d be up in front of Professional Standards for making a racist statement.

His passengers, CROPS officers PC Doug Riley and PC Lewis Hastings, politely humoured him, the CROPS knowing they would need him for transport later. Riley and Hastings were kitted out in their camouflage fatigues, with thermal underwear, black balaclavas and helmets with netting. They carried in their rucksacks water bottles, food rations, bottles to urinate in, bags to poo in, food rations, night-vision goggles, binoculars, cameras with long lenses and encrypted radios with earpieces. Each was armed with a Glock 17 handgun, in a holster.

Hastings, in the front seat, was watching the satnav on the dashboard, as well as the Google Maps app on his phone into which he had programmed Primrose Farm Cottage, Forest Row. The wipers, on the intermittent setting, swept away the light, misty drizzle from the screen. He was pleased at the mist, it gave them even more cover.

‘Coming up, quarter of a mile, sharp left,’ he instructed their driver.

The voice of the Silver Commander, Superintendent Julian Blazeby, came through the radio. ‘Charlie Romeo Three Seven?’

Hastings reached forward and picked up the mike.

‘Charlie Romeo Three Seven.’

‘I have you on my screen close to the drop point. How is it looking?’

‘Brilliant conditions, sir. Mist as well as darkness. Our ETA is five minutes.’

‘Good. Let me know when you are both in position.’

‘Yes yes, sir.’

The van turned into a wooded single-track lane, with overhanging trees forming a tunnel, and continued for a short while. They passed a sign for Primrose Farm on an open five-barred gate marking a potholed, metalled driveway. The driver slowed.

‘The cottage is showing as further on,’ Hastings said. An animal shot across in front of them.

‘Deer,’ the driver said. ‘Lucky it wasn’t a sabre-tooth tiger, eh?’

‘Ha ha!’ Riley, in the back seat, said.

‘Did I tell you the time when I had to go looking for a reported tiger spotted in the woods at Stanmer Park?’

‘No, but I expect you’re about to,’ Hastings said in a resigned voice.

‘Turned out it had escaped from a circus! Do many of you CROPS guys get eaten by wild animals?’ he asked.

‘More likely to get eaten by boredom,’ Hastings said.

‘So what happens if you need to take a dump?’

‘I don’t,’ Hastings said. ‘I take Imodium before a job, bungs me up good and proper.’

‘I once spent three days inside a fridge in the back of a van, parked up outside a crack den in Whitehawk, in Brighton,’ Riley said. ‘Had to piss into a bottle. Worth it, though, we got the scumbags.’

The headlights picked up the opening to another entrance, to the left. It was marked by rotting wooden gates, wide open and overgrown with brambles, which didn’t look like they’d been closed in years, and a newer-looking oval wooden sign above a mailbox.

The driver slowed.

The letters read PRIMROSE FARM COTTAGE. He halted the car. ‘Want me to drive down?’

‘No,’ Hastings said. ‘Here’s good.’

They rehearsed the code word they had agreed between them. Rattlesnake. If Hastings or Riley or the support team that would be stationed nearby said this word over the radio, it meant their cover was blown and the operation would switch instantly from covert to overt. The support team call sign was Romeo One.

As the two CROPS officers climbed out with their heavy rucksacks, the driver said, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter...’