Peter James - Dead at First Sight

Potting never saw the money or his bride again.

‘Like I said, chief,’ Potting added, ‘a complete idiot! Unbelievably gullible.’

‘We’re talking about an amount of 200,000 euros, right?’

‘I don’t think he told us the whole story, sir,’ Velvet Wilde cut in. ‘I suspect it’s even more than that. We’re going to talk to him again, in an hour’s time.’

‘Let me ask you a question. Do either of you think he’s capable of murdering someone — or ordering them to be killed?’ Grace asked, looking at each of them in turn.

‘Murdering someone — seriously, chief?’ Potting quizzed.

‘Very seriously, Norman.’

‘You want my humble opinion?’ Potting looked at his colleague for reassurance. ‘I don’t think he’s capable of making toast.’

‘But he was a soldier, right? SAS regiment. Decorated for bravery,’ Grace said. ‘We’re talking about pretty capable people, Norman.’

Potting looked at Wilde again and shook his head. ‘Maybe once he was a tough soldier, but not now. The only soldier in him these days is the kind you dunk in an egg.’

‘I agree with Norman,’ she said.

‘This is the lady Major Fordwater has been in a romantic flirtation with... or so he thought,’ Grace said. He leaned over and pushed three photographs across the desk. ‘I just received these from the Munich Landeskriminalamt. I’ll be getting a full set shortly.’

Potting and Wilde looked at them, in shock.

‘If you’re wondering about all the blood running down from her mouth,’ Grace said, ‘it’s because half her tongue was sliced off when she was lying impaled.’

Toby Seward, a motivational speaker — and recent early loser on the television programme MasterChef — was happily occupied with one of his two passions, preparing meals for his husband, Paul. His other was tending the tiny garden at the front of their home. Playing on the television in the kitchen of their house in the North Laine district of Brighton was a recording of the programme, with contestants on the show who had got further than he had managed.

Few things in life gave the distinguished-looking, silver-haired, soon-to-be forty-eight-year-old more pleasure than to cook a fine dinner for the man he loved. And he was at a critical stage in the early preparations for tonight. Lobster ravioli with avocado and garlic, broccoli, almond and quinoa salad. Paul’s favourite. The almonds, frying in coconut oil in the pan, were on the verge of burning. He drained them, all the time watching the television programme, as he was copying a recipe from it. He was also in a hurry. In less than two hours he was due on stage at the Brighton Centre to talk to five hundred delegates from a pharmaceutical company.

His mobile phone rang, and he very nearly did not answer. Usually, when he saw the message ID Withheld , he ignored the call, because almost certainly it was spam, someone trying to sell insurance, a fake car-crash claim or some other bit of flotsam from the digital sewer. Then he remembered that Paul was having problems with his new iPhone and was taking it to the shop to exchange it. Perhaps it was him?

Hitting the remote to freeze the television, he answered perkily, ‘Toby here!’ And heard a cultured, middle-aged female voice. ‘Is that Toby Seward ?’

‘It is indeed!’

‘I’m very sorry if this sounds strange, Mr Seward,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Suzy Driver. You see, you don’t know me, but the thing is, I thought I knew you.’

Twenty-five minutes after he’d left the airport, the receptionist at the Radisson Blu hotel on St Helier harbour front photocopied his passport, took an impression of his Amex card, told him how to connect to the Wi-Fi and handed him his key card. ‘Enjoy your stay with us, Mr Vogel.’

Tooth scooped up his passport, Amex and the key card in its little envelope and headed to the lifts, he walked down the fourth-floor corridor and entered the suite his paymaster had booked for him. Hotels like this suited him. Big, modern, anonymous. The windows looked down onto a commercial port. A tall incinerator chimney, fishing boats, a ferry marked CONDOR and a harbour basin of small private motorboats and yachts. The tide was a very long way out. Over to the right was a causeway to a rocky island on which was some kind of an old fortress.

He removed his laptop from his bag, set it on the desk and connected to the Wi-Fi, then removed his washbag and the small amount of spare clothing he travelled with, along with the encrypted, ex-military phone he’d bought for $10,000 on the dark web, as well as his pre-paid ‘burner’ phones and the one he’d been given earlier, and placed the items in drawers. Next, he removed a roll of gaffer tape, stood on the desk and masked the smoke detector. He made himself a treble espresso coffee from the capsules and, using the spare mug as an ashtray, lit a cigarette.

An email pinged in on the phone he’d been given:

I will see you at midday tomorrow. You screwed up. This will not happen again. This is where he and his accomplice are living, and I believe this is his next target. You will stop them. Frighten them.

Beneath was an address in the city of Brighton and Hove, in England, as well as a JPEG attachment.

He didn’t like the tone of the email, the thinly veiled threat. Nobody threatened him, ever. Tooth had fed the testicles of the last person who’d threatened him to his dog. Yossarian had licked his lips and looked up at him for more. Maybe soon, if he had any further emails like this, the dog would finally be getting a second helping.

He looked again at the address. It didn’t make him happy.

If there was one place in England he did not want to return to it was there. The lair of that smartass detective, Roy Grace, who had been such a big pain in his life in recent years. Although, he considered, it would give him a kind of perverse pleasure to outsmart him yet again. And an even bigger pleasure to kill him.

Just the thought of Roy Grace’s name made him angry. He’d like to get even with him. And take his dog a little Detective Grace goody bag. But that was not for now. He had a job to do and needed the money, paltry though it was compared to the fee he normally commanded, to fund the new life in Ecuador he was planning. Somewhere he could have his ‘associate’, Yossarian, flown out to join him. The only friend he’d ever had in this shitty world.

He removed the SIM card from the phone, went into the bathroom, shut the door and switched the shower on hot. Then with his lighter he burned the card. Steam from showers, he had learned, dissipated smoke and prevented the alarm from going off.

Tooth flushed the charred card down the toilet. He was feeling hot, he realized. Clammy. He walked over to the air-con control on the wall to turn it down. Saw it was already down low, 16 degrees. And it wasn’t even a warm day outside.

He needed another cigarette. He sat down heavily at his desk, perspiring. Again.

He drank some coffee, lit a Lucky Strike and instantly felt worse. Jesus.

He wobbled his way across to the minibar, peered at the rack of miniatures inside and pulled out a Jim Beam. Not his favourite bourbon, but better than nothing. He twisted off the cap, necked half the contents and sat back down.

For a few seconds he felt better, then his head was swimming again. The same flu-like symptoms he’d had repeatedly over the past six months. Back in March, due to his own stupidity and Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s actions, he’d been trapped in a room full of venomous creatures. He’d been bitten by spiders, snakes and suffered a sting from a deathstalker scorpion, one of the world’s most venomous critters. He’d been close to death for some while, so he’d been told by medical staff at the Royal Sussex County Hospital when he’d eventually come round.