Dead Man's Footsteps

*

  In his office, Roy Grace was reading through a wodge of faxed reports that had been sent from Australia during the past twenty-four hours by Norman Potting and Nick Nicholl. He felt a little guilty about keeping Nicholl out there so long, but the list of contacts that Lorraine Wilson’s friend had given them had been too good to be ignored.

  However, despite everything, they still had no positive lead on where Ronnie Wilson was.

  He looked at his watch: 1.20. His lunch, which Eleanor had picked up for him from ASDA, lay on his desk in its carrier bag. A Healthy Option crayfish and rocket sandwich and an apple. He was gradually yielding, day by day, to the pressure Cleo was putting on him to improve his diet. Not that it made him feel any different. Just as he reached into the bag, his phone rang.

  It was Bill Warner, who was now in charge of Gatwick Airport CID.

  They were old enough friends to be able to dispense with pleasantries and the Gatwick DI cut straight to the chase.

  ‘Roy, there’s a woman you have an alert out on, Abby Dawson, also known as Katherine Jennings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re pretty sure she’s just checked in on an easyJet flight to Nice which leaves at 3.45. We’ve checked her image on our CCTV and it matches the photographs you’ve circulated.’

  They were photographs that had been pulled off the Interview Suite CCTV cameras. Strictly speaking, under the terms of the Data Protection Act, Grace should not have used them without her consent. But he didn’t care.

  ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘Absolutely bloody brilliant!’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘Just have her tracked, Bill. It’s vital she doesn’t know she’s being followed. I want her to get on the flight, but I’m going to need some officers there with her – and some support in Nice. Can you find out if the flight’s full – and if we could get two officers on? If they’re full, maybe you could persuade them to bump a couple of passengers?’

  ‘Leave it with me. I already know that the plane is only half full. I’ll get on to the French police. I take it we are interested in who she might meet?’

  ‘Spot on. Thanks, Bill. Keep me informed.’

  Grace clenched his fist for joy, then he called Glenn Branson.

  123

  NOVEMBER 2007

  ‘So when do I see you again? Tell me. When?’

  ‘Soon!’

  ‘How soon is soon?’

  She lay on top of him, their naked skin running with perspiration from their exertions in the morning heat. His spent penis nestled in her hairs. Her small round breasts pressed into his chest and her eyes gazed into his, nut-brown eyes, filled with laughter and mischief. And hardness. For sure.

  She was savyy, streetwise. She was a piece of work.

  A very rich piece of work.

  And she liked this goddamned humidity. This cloying heat which made him perspire constantly. She insisted on making love with the terrace doors of her house wide open and it was about a hundred fucking degrees in the room. And now she was pummelling his chest with her tiny fists.

  ‘How soon? How soon?’

  He brushed her jet-black hair away from his face and kissed her rosebud lips. She was so pretty and she had a great body. He’d come to appreciate slender Thai girls during his month holed up in Pattaya Beach, waiting for Abby to give him the signal that she was on her way.

  And oh wow! He had lucked out big time with this one. Totally unexpected! Because she was everything he had fantasized about, but with a whole lot more. About twenty-five million US dollars more! Give or take a few percentage points on the Thai Baht conversion rate.

  He’d met her in a stamp dealer’s shop in Bangkok and just got chatting. Turned out her husband had a chain of nightclubs, which she’d inherited when he died in a scuba-diving accident – a tourist on a jet-ski had chopped his head off at the neck. She had been trying to flog his very serious stamp collection and Ronnie had given her guidance, stopped her being ripped off, got her treble what she’d originally been told they were worth.

  And had been banging her once and sometimes twice a day ever since.

  Which left him with a problem. Although it wasn’t too big a problem. He’d already started tiring of Abby. He couldn’t say exactly when that had begun to happen. Perhaps it was the way she had behaved – or looked – after her assignments with Ricky. Like, certainly after the first two occasions, she had really enjoyed them.

  Which had made him realize what she was capable of.

  A woman who had no limits. She would do anything to get rich and was, for sure, just using him as a stepping stone.

  Luckily, he was one step ahead. He’d screwed up twice before. Water had not served him well. Something had gone wrong with the damned storm drain in Brighton. And who the hell could have predicted the drought continuing in Melbourne?

  Fortunately there were plenty of boats for hire in Koh Samui. And they were cheap. And the South China Sea was deep.

  Ten miles out and there was no chance a body was going to fetch up back on the shore. He already had the boat moored and waiting. Abby would love it. It was fuck-off stunning. And cost peanuts. Relatively. And, hey, you had to speculate to accumulate.

  He kissed Phara.

  ‘Not long at all,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  124

  NOVEMBER 2007

  Instead of following the signs for Departures when she stepped away from the easyJet check-in desk, Abby headed back into the main concourse and made her way to the toilets.

  Having locked herself in a cubicle, she removed the Jiffy bag from her carrier bag, ripped it open and shook out the contents – a cellophane bag containing an assortment of stamps, some loose, some in sheets.

  Most of the sheets were just replicas of the ones Ricky had wanted so badly, but several of the other sheets and individual stamps were genuine, and looked old enough to excite someone who knew nothing about philately.

  She also took out the receipt from the stamp dealer South-East Philatelic, which she had visited two weeks ago. It was for one hundred and forty-two pounds. Probably more than she had needed to spend, strictly speaking, but the assortment did look impressive to the layman, and she had rightly placed Detective Sergeant Branson in that category.

  She tore the stamps and the receipt into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Then she removed her jeans, boots and fleece jacket. She wouldn’t need those where she was going. She pulled out of the carrier bag a long, blonde wig, cut and styled much how her hair used to look, and pulled it on, adjusting it a little clumsily with the help of her make-up mirror. Then she put on the sundress she had bought a couple of days ago and the cream linen jacket that went so well with it, together with a rather nice pair of white, open-toed shoes. She completed her new look with a pair of lightly tinted Marc Jacobs sunglasses.

  She crammed the clothes she had discarded into the plastic bag, then went out of the cubicle, adjusted her hair in the mirror, put the Jiffy bag into a bin and checked her watch. It was 1.35. She was making good time.

  Suddenly, her phone beeped with a text.

  Can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Just a few

  hours now. XX

  She smiled. Just a few hours. Yes, yes, yes!

  She walked, with a spring in her step, back to the left-luggage area and checked out the suitcase she had deposited just over two weeks ago. She wheeled it over to a corner, unlocked and opened it, then removed a bubble-wrapped Jiffy bag. Then she shoved the carrier bag with her old clothes inside, closed it and locked it.

  She returned to the check-in area, found the British Airways section and walked up to a business-class desk. An extravagance, but she had decided she would celebrate the start of her new life today in the style in which she planned to continue it.

  Handing her passport and ticket to the woman behind the desk, she said, ‘Sarah Smith. I’m on Flight 309, connecting through to Rio de Janeiro.’

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ the woman said,
and checked the details on her terminal.

  She asked Abby the usual security questions and tagged her suitcase. Then the bag jerked forward, fell over on the conveyor and disappeared from view.

  ‘Is the flight on time?’ Abby asked.

  The woman looked at her screen. ‘At the moment, yes, it looks fine. Leaves at 3.15. The boarding gate opens at 2.40. It will be Gate 54. You’ll find the signs to the lounge after you’ve gone through security into the duty-free area.’

  Abby thanked her, then checked her watch again. Butterflies were going bonkers in her stomach. There were still two more things she had to do, but she wanted to wait until closer to the time for both of them.

  She went through into the BA lounge, helped herself to a glass of white wine to steady her nerves, craving a cigarette. But that would have to wait. She ate a couple of finger-sized sandwiches, then sat down in front of a television screen, with the news on, and went carefully through her mental checklist. She was satisfied she had not forgotten anything. But to be doubly sure she checked that her phone was set to withhold her number from anyone she rang.

  Shortly after 2.40 she saw on the screen that boarding had commenced, but the flight had not yet been called in here. She walked over to a quiet section, by the entrance to the toilets, where there was no one nearby to overhear her, then dialled the number of the Incident Room that DS Branson had told her to use if she couldn’t reach him on his mobile.

  As the phone rang, she kept her ears pricked for the ding-dong warning that preceded any tannoy announcement, not wanting to reveal her whereabouts.

  ‘Incident room, DC Boutwood,’ a young female voice answered.

  Abby disguised her voice as best she could, putting on her best shot at an Australian accent. ‘I have information for you on Ronnie Wilson,’ she said. ‘He will be at Koh Samui Airport, waiting to meet someone off Bangkok Airways Flight 271, which is due in at 11 a.m. local time tomorrow. Have you got that?’

  ‘Bangkok Airways, Flight 271, Koh Samui at 11 a.m. local time tomorrow. Who is that calling, please?’

  Abby hung up. She was clammy with perspiration and shaking. Shaking so much she found it hard to tap out the reply to the text she had received earlier, and had to backspace several times to correct errors before she finished. Then she read it through one more time before she sent it.

  True love doesn’t have a happy ending,

  because true love never ends. Letting go is one

  way of saying I love you. xx

  And she did love him. She loved him loads. But just not four million quid loads.

  And not with this bad habit he had of killing the women who delivered money to him.

  Sometime after take-off, she sat well back in her seat, having drunk a Bloody Mary and an extra miniature of vodka, and opened the bubble-wrapped Jiffy bag. The seat beside her was empty, so she didn’t have to worry about prying eyes. She checked over her shoulder to make sure none of the cabin crew were around either, then very gently eased one of the cellophane envelopes out.

  It contained a block of Penny Black stamps. She stared at Queen Victoria’s stern profile. At the word POSTAGE printed in not terribly even letters. At the faded colour. They were exquisite, but they weren’t really perfect at all. As Dave had once explained, sometimes it was their imperfections that made them all the more special.

  That applied to a lot of other things in life too, she thought, through her pleasant haze of booze. And besides, who wanted to be perfect?

  She gazed at them again, realizing it was the first time she had ever truly looked at them properly. They really were special. Magical. She smiled at them, whispering, ‘Goodbye, my little beauties. See you later.’

  Then she put them carefully away.

  125

  NOVEMBER 2007

  ‘Nice holiday?’ Roy Grace asked.

  ‘Very funny. I only saw the beach from the plane window,’ Glenn Branson replied.

  ‘Meant to be beautiful, Koh Samui, so I’ve heard.’

  ‘It was humid as hell and pissing with rain the whole time I was there. And I got bitten on my leg by something, either a mutant mosquito or a spider. It’s swollen right up – do you want to see it?’

  ‘No, thanks all the same.’

  The Detective Sergeant, sitting on a chair in front of Grace’s desk, his suit and shirt looking and smelling as if he’d slept in them, shook his head, grinning. ‘You’re a bastard, Grace, aren’t you?’

  ‘And I can’t believe you trashed my fucking record collection again. I allowed you to stay there one night. I didn’t ask you to take every CD I own out of its sleeve and leave it lying on the floor.’

  Branson had the decency to look embarrassed. ‘I was trying to sort it out for you. I got – shit – I’m sorry.’ He swigged some coffee and stifled a yawn.

  ‘So how’s the prisoner? What time did you get in?’

  Branson glanced at his watch. ‘About 6.45.’ He yawned. ‘I reckon we’ve blown Sussex CID’s overseas travel budget for the year in the past two weeks.’

  Grace smiled. ‘Did Wilson say anything?’

  Branson swigged some more coffee. ‘You know, inasmuch as you can say such a thing, he actually seems a nice guy.’

  ‘Oh, sure. He’s the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet, right? He just has this slight problem that he prefers killing his wives to doing an honest day’s work.’ Grace gave his friend a look of feigned shock.

  ‘Glenn, you are a nice guy. If it wasn’t for all the crap in my life, maybe I’d be a nice guy too. But Ronnie Wilson, no, he’s not a nice guy. He’s just good at making people think he is.’

  Branson nodded. ‘Yeah. I didn’t quite mean it the way I said it.’

  ‘You need to go home, have a sleep, then shower and come back later.’

  ‘I will. But actually he did talk a lot. He was in a philosophical mood and wanted to talk. I get the feeling he’s had enough of running. He’s been in hiding for six years. That’s why he agreed to come back with us. Although he kept going on about some Thai bird. Wanted us to let him text her.’

  ‘Did you caution him before he started talking?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good man.’

  It meant that anything Ronnie Wilson said on the plane could be used in evidence in court.

  ‘Tell you something, he’s well furious with Skeggs. He wanted to be sure that if he was going down, he took Skeggs with him.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘As much as I can figure it from what he said, it seems like Skeggs helped him when he first arrived in Australia.’

  ‘As we thought,’ Grace said.

  ‘Yeah. At some point down the line, Ronnie Wilson acquired this parcel of stamps.’

  ‘From his wife?’

  ‘He went evasive on me over that.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Anyhow, he gave them to Skeggs to sell them and Skeggs tried to screw him. He wanted ninety per cent of their value, otherwise he was threatening to shop Ronnie. But Skeggs had one weakness. He had the hots for Ronnie’s bird – the one he shacked up with, he said, after his wife had, in his words, buggered off.’

  ‘In the boot of a car.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And the bird was one Abby Dawson?’

  ‘You’re sharp this morning, Detective Superintendent.’

  ‘I’ve had the benefit of a night’s sleep. So Ronnie Wilson uses her as a kind of honeypot? Gets her to shag Skeggs and nick the stamps back. Am I on the right track?’

  ‘You’re on the monorail.’

  ‘Do you think he would have killed Abby once he’d got them back?’ Grace asked.

  ‘On previous form? Undoubtedly. He’s a vulture.’

  ‘I thought you said a few moments ago that he was a nice guy.’

  Branson smiled in defeat. Then suddenly he changed the subject. ‘Bought a new car yet?’

  ‘No. Fucking insurance companies. They want to invalidate my policy because I was driv
ing in a chase. Bastards. I’m trying to sort it. Headquarters are helping me as it was on police business.’ Then, changing the subject back, he said, ‘So do you think Abby still has the stamps?’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘Hegarty is one hundred per cent certain the stuff you photocopied is rubbish.’

  ‘Not a scintilla of doubt.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot,’ Grace said. ‘That’s why she kicked Skeggs in the bollocks.’

  Branson frowned. ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘The reason she kicked Skeggs when she was handing the stamps over was because she needed time. She knew she was giving him rubbish and that it would only take him a few seconds to realize that. She went for him in order to bring us into the frame. She set him up all along.’

  Branson stared back at him, nodding as it slowly dawned on him. ‘She’s a clever bitch.’

  ‘She is. And no one has actually reported the stamps stolen, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Branson said pensively. ‘But what about the insurance companies? The ones who paid out on the compensation and the life insurance? Couldn’t they have a claim on the stamps, as they were bought with their money?’

  ‘Same problem – chain of title. Without Hegarty testifying, how are they going to prove it?’

  The two detectives sat in silence for some moments. Glenn drank some more coffee, then he said, ‘I heard a rumour from Steve Mackie that Pewe’s applying for a transfer.’

  Grace smiled. ‘He is. Back to the Met. Good luck to them!’

  After another pause, Glenn said, ‘So, this woman, where do you think she is now?’

  ‘You know what I think? I think she’s probably lying on a tropical beach somewhere, downing a margarita and grinning her head off.’

  She was.

  126

  NOVEMBER 2007

  The margarita was one of the best she had ever drunk. It tasted sharp and strong, the barman had added just the right amount of Cointreau and had salted the rim to perfection. After a week in this hotel, he had got the hang of the way she liked it.