Peter James - Not Dead Enough

Then DS Guy Batchelor gave his report. The tall, burly officer spoke in his usual businesslike way. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think I have something rather interesting.’ He gave Norman Potting an appreciative nod. ‘Norman did a good job getting his mate John Smith in the Telecoms Unit to give up his Sunday. John stayed on to look at the mobile phone taken from Sophie Harrington’s flat.’

He paused to take a sip of coffee from a large Starbucks Styrofoam cup, then looked up with a smile. ‘The last number that Ms Harrington dialled, according to information retrieved from her phone, was –’ he paused to read from his notes – ‘07985 541298. So I checked that number out.’ He looked Roy Grace squarely and triumphantly in the eye. ‘It’s Brian Bishop’s mobile phone.’

70

They say the recipe for success in life is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The bit they don’t tell you when you start a new business is the cash you need to find. You need the lawyer and the accountants to set up the company, the Patent Agent to file for your copyright on your software, the design company to create your logo and your corporate image, and the packaging for your product, which you need to have if you intend to be a global player, and of course your website. You need an office, furniture, phones, fax and a secretary. None of this stuff comes cheap. Twelve months on from my Big Idea, I was over one hundred thousand pounds out of pocket and not yet ready to rock and roll. But close.

I had taken out a second mortgage on my flat, sold everything I could sell, and, on top of that, a bank manager who believed in me had given me a bigger loan than he really should have. I had, as the Americans say, bet the ranch.

I was reading all the financial pages of the newspapers and subscribed to the trade magazines of every business I intended to target. So imagine my dismay one day when I opened a supplement of the Financial Times to see an article written by a journalist called Gautam Malkani on my business.

It was a complete carbon copy of everything I had thought of doing. And it was already up and running.

And my photograph was staring out at me from the pink page.

Except the name of the company was different from the name I had chosen.

And the name beneath my photograph was the name of someone else, a man I had never heard of.

71

Marija Djapic pressed the entry code and let herself in through the wrought-iron gates. It was just gone nine a.m. and she was a little later than usual, thanks to her daughter. She noticed the man immediately, standing outside the front door of number 5, looking as if he had been waiting for a while.

She strode across the cobbled courtyard, puffing from the exertion of her long walk here, made harder by the weight of the bag which she lugged everywhere, containing her work clothes, shoes, lunch and a drink. And she was perspiring heavily from the heat. She was also in a foul mood after yet another row with Danica. Who was this man? What did he want from her? Was he from another of the collection agencies she owed money to on a credit card?

The thirty-five-year-old Serbian woman walked everywhere, to save money on bus fares. She could reach all of her employers on foot in less than an hour from the council flat in Whitehawk she shared with her bolshy, fourteen-year-old prima donna. Almost every hard, sweated penny that she earned went on buying Danica the best she could afford in their new life here in England. She tried to buy decent food, made sure Danica had the clothes she wanted – well, some of them, at any rate. As well as all the stuff she needed to keep up with her friends: a computer, a mobile phone and, for her birthday two weeks ago, an iPod.

And her reward was for the girl to arrive home at ten past four this morning! Make-up all smeared, pupils dilated.

And now this smarmy-looking man was standing by the doorstep, doubtless waiting to snatch the cash that would have been left for her on the kitchen table out of her hand. She looked at him warily as she rummaged in her bag for the keys to Cleo Morey’s house. He was tall, with slicked-back brown hair, handsome in a way that reminded her of a movie actor whose name she couldn’t place and dressed respectably enough in a white shirt and plain tie, blue trousers, black shoes and a dark blue cotton jacket that looked as if it was a uniform of some sort, with a badge sewn on the breast pocket.

Marija glanced warily around for signs of life elsewhere in the courtyard and, to her relief, saw a young woman in Lycra shorts and top pulling a mountain bike out of a front door a couple of houses down. Emboldened, she put the key in the lock and turned it.

The man stepped forward, holding out an identity card bearing his photograph. It was laminated and hung from his neck on two thin white cords. ‘Excuse me,’ he said very politely. ‘Gas Board – would it be convenient to read the meter?’ Then she noticed the small metal machine with a keypad on it which he was holding.

‘You made appointment with Miss Morey?’ she said sharply and a tad aggressively.

‘No. I’m doing this area today. It won’t take me more than a couple of minutes, if you could show me where the meters are.’

She hesitated. He looked normal enough to her and he had the identification. Several times in her work in different houses people had turned up to read meters. It was normal. So long as they had the identification. But she was on strict instructions to let no one into the house. Maybe she should phone Miss Morey and ask. But to bother her at her important work because a man had come to read the meter? ‘I see identification again, please.’

He showed her the card again. Her English wasn’t that good, but she could see his face and the word Seeboard. It looked important. Official. ‘OK,’ she said.

Even so, she was wary of him, stepping in ahead of him, leaving the front door open. Then she marched straight through the open downstairs living area, up a couple of steps into the kitchen, not letting him out of her sight for a moment.

Her money was sitting on the square pine table, weighted down by a ceramic bowl of fruit. Next to it was a handwritten note from Cleo, with her instructions on what housework to do this morning. Marija beadily picked up the two twenty-pound notes and pushed them into her purse. Then she pointed up at a wall panel to the left of the huge silver fridge. ‘I think meter’s there,’ she said, noticing for the first time the bandage on his hand.

‘Sharp edges!’ the man said, seeing her eyes widen a fraction. ‘You wouldn’t believe the places some people have their meters! Makes my life quite hazardous.’ He smiled. ‘Do you have something I can stand on, to reach?’

She pulled a wooden kitchen chair over for him and he thanked her, kneeling down to remove his shoes, his eyes not on the meter at all, but on the cleaning lady’s set of keys lying on the table. He was thinking hard about how to distract her and get her out of the room, when her mobile phone suddenly rang.

He watched as the woman pulled a little green Nokia out of her handbag, glanced at the display, then, visibly shaking, said, ‘Yes, Danica?’ followed by furious gabbling in a language he did not recognize. After some moments the row this woman was having with this person, Danica, seemed to intensify. She paced up and down the kitchen, talking increasingly loudly, then stomped out and stood at the top of the stairs to the living area, where the conversation turned into what sounded like a full-scale yelling match.

She had her eyes off him for less than sixty seconds, but that was more than enough for his hand to shoot out, grab the key, press it into the soft wax in the tin concealed in the palm of his hand and return it to the table.