Peter James - Dead Man's Grip

Omotoso’s radio crackled. He turned the volume right down. There was another long silence before eventually he said, ‘We’re going to need to make sure it is Tony Revere. Would you be willing to identify the body later today? Just in case there’s been a mistake?’

‘His mother’s a control freak,’ she blurted. ‘She’s the one you’re going to have to speak to.’

‘I’ll speak to anyone you’d like me to, Susan. Do you have her number?’

‘She’s in New York – in the Hamptons. She hates my guts.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She’ll be on the first plane over, I can tell you that.’

‘Would you prefer her to identify Tony?’

She fell silent again, sobbing. Then she said, ‘You’d better get her to do that. She’d never believe me anyway.’

Tooth was small. It was an issue he’d had to deal with since childhood. He used to be picked on by other kids because of his size. But not many of them had ever picked on him twice.

He was one of the tiniest babies Brooklyn obstetrician Harvey Shannon had ever delivered, although he wasn’t premature. His mother, who was so off her face with junk she hadn’t figured out she was pregnant for six months, had gone to full term. Dr Shannon wasn’t even sure that she realized she had actually given birth, and staff at the hospital told him she kept looking at the infant in bewilderment, as if trying to figure out where it had come from.

But the obstetrician was worried about a bigger problem. The boy had a central nervous system that seemed to be wired all wrong. He appeared to have no pain receptors. You could stick a needle in the tiny mite’s arm and get no reaction, while all normal babies would bawl their lungs out. There were any number of possible causes, but the most likely, he figured, was the mother’s substance abuse.

Tooth’s mother died from a rogue batch of heroin when he was three, and he spent most of his childhood being shunted around America from one foster home to the next. He never stayed long because no one liked him. He scared people.

At the age of eleven, when other kids began taunting him about his size, he learned to defend himself by studying martial arts and soon responded by hurting anyone who angered him, badly. So badly he never stayed in any school for more than a few months, because other kids were too frightened of him and the teachers requested he be moved.

At his final school he learned how to make a buck out of his abnormality. Using his martial arts skills of self-control, he could hold his breath for up to five minutes, beating anyone who tried to challenge him. His other trick was to let kids punch him in the stomach as hard as they liked, for a dollar a go. For five bucks they could stick a ballpoint pen into his arm or leg. Letting them do this was the closest he ever came to any of his fellow pupils. He’d never had an actual friend in his life. At the age of forty-one he still didn’t. Just his dog, Yossarian.

But Tooth and his dog weren’t so much friends as associates . Same as the people he worked for. The dog was an ugly thing. It had different-colour eyes, one bright red, the other grey, and looked like the progeny of a Dalmatian that had been screwed by a pug. He’d named it after a character in one of the few books he’d read all the way through, Catch-22 . The book started with a character called Yossarian irrationally falling in love, at first sight, with his chaplain. This dog had fallen irrationally in love with him at first sight, too. It had just started following him, in a street in Beverly Hills four years ago, when he was casing a house for a hit.

It was one of those wide, quiet, swanky streets with bleached-looking elm trunks, big detached houses and gleaming metal in the driveway. All the houses had lawns that looked like they’d been trimmed with nail scissors, the sprinklers thwack-thwacking away, looked after by armies of Hispanic gardeners.

The dog was wrong for the street. It was mangy and one eye was infected. Tooth didn’t know a thing about dogs, but this one didn’t look much like any recognizable breed and it didn’t look designer enough to have come from this area. Maybe it had jumped out of a Hispanic’s truck. Maybe someone had thrown it out of a car here in the hope of some rich person taking pity on it.

Instead it had found him.

Tooth gave it food, but no sympathy.

He didn’t do sympathy.

‘What – what happens now?’ Carly asked the police officer.

‘I’d like you to sign your name here,’ Dan Pattenden said, handing her a long thin strip of white paper, which was headed SUBJECT TEST. Halfway down it had her name, date of birth and the words SUBJECT SIGNATURE. Below was a box containing the words Specimen 1: – 10.42 a.m. – 55 and Specimen 2: 10.45 a.m. – 55 .

With her hand shaking so much she could barely hold the pen he gave her, she signed her name.

‘I’m going to take you to a cell where you’ll wait for your solicitor to arrive,’ he said, signing the same form along the bottom. ‘You will be interviewed with your solicitor.’

‘I have a really important meeting with a client,’ she said. ‘I have to get to the office.’

He gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m afraid that everyone involved in the incident has something important to do today, but it’s not up to me.’ He pointed to the door and gently, holding her right arm, escorted her towards it. Then he stopped and answered his radio phone as it crackled into life.

‘Dan Pattenden,’ he said. There was a brief silence. ‘I see. Thank you, guv. I’m up at Custody now with my prisoner.’

Prisoner. The word made her shudder.

‘Yes, sir, thank you.’ He clipped the phone back in its holder on his chest and turned to her. His expression was blank, unreadable. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m now going to repeat the caution I gave you earlier at the collision scene. Mrs Chase, I’m rearresting you now on suspicion of causing death by driving while under the influence of alcohol. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you may later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.’

She felt her throat constricting, as if a ligature was being tightened. Her mouth was suddenly parched.

‘The cyclist has died?’ Her words came out almost as a whisper.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hit him. I crashed because I was – because I avoided him. I swerved to avoid him because he was on the wrong side of the road. I would have hit him if I hadn’t.’

‘You’d best save all that for your interview.’

As he propelled her across the custody reception floor, past the large, round central station, she turned to him in sudden panic and said, ‘My car – I need to get the RAC to collect it – I need to get it repaired – I-’

‘We’ll take care of it. I’m afraid it’s going to have to be impounded.’

They began walking down a narrow corridor. They stopped at a green door with a small glass panel. He opened it and, to her horror, ushered her into a cell.

‘You’re not putting me in here?’

His phone crackled into life again and he answered it. As he did so, she stared at the cell in bewilderment. A small, narrow room with an open toilet and a hand basin set into the wall. At the far end was a hard bench, with a blue cushion behind it propped up against the wall. There was a sanitized reek of disinfectant.

PC Pattenden ended the call and turned back to her. ‘This is where you will have to wait until your solicitor gets here.’

‘But – but what about my car? When will it go to be repaired?’