It was a bright, sunny but chilly London morning, the kind when the city looked at its most beautiful. Forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly had only recently arrived back from a long stint in humid Asia, and it looked even more beautiful than ever to him. He had always enjoyed the long walk along Harley Street with its sternly handsome red-brick Georgian properties, something he had done for many years before he went international; he was pleased to see Old Blighty again.
A sturdily built man in his forties, he had brown hair cropped short, and a tanned, amiable face. Conservatively but elegantly dressed in a fine black suit, light blue shirt and brushed silk black tie, he sat at his desk in his spacious consulting room with two floor-to-ceiling windows at one end, staring at the fifteen video files that had just arrived in his Dropbox folder from Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.
He had a clear diary for the morning. He had recently been elected as Dean of Podiatric Surgery – his ‘charity work’ as he referred to it, as it was not a paid position but still took up a big chunk of his time and the committee’s, too, in helping Podiatry advance. With over two decades in the profession which had been so good to him, he was pleased to give something back. He had kept the morning open in order to deal with the stack of emails that he knew would be waiting. He buzzed through to reception, asking them to hold his calls for the next couple of hours, then opened the first video, which was titled ‘Park Royale West, NY, Lobby, 22.12 p.m., February 18th’.
He saw the woman that the detective superintendent had described after some moments. She was in her mid-thirties, dressed in a smart black coat and knee-high tan suede boots. She exited from a lift and strode over to the front desk, where she appeared to be checking out. After that she went out through the revolving door.
He ran the video through his Forensic Gait Analysis software, and opened the next video file. It showed an arrivals area at Washington Dulles Airport. He picked up within a few minutes the same woman he had seen in the Park Royale West, pushing a luggage trolley, and began to work his way through the rest of the files. Each covered the domestic departure gates.
After over an hour of working his software, the image froze on the gate for a 13.05 Delta flight to Atlanta. A woman walking towards the gate, wearing a grey felt trilby, dark glasses and a cream-coloured trouser suit.
Kelly perked up and took a big gulp of his black, piping-hot Colombian-blend coffee, put the footage into slow motion mode and clicked to enlarge her. Then clicked again. And again. Her image became fuzzy, and it was impossible to tell if it was the same face as the woman at the Park Royale West, and in the other photographs he’d been sent. There was very little hair visible below the hat – either she had crammed it up inside or had cropped it short.
He ran his eye down the various stats his software had thrown up. The different points of a gait match. Since he had first created Forensic Gait Analysis – the identification of a person by their gait or by features of their gait, involving assessment of whole body movements from head to toe – he had provided many expert opinions and forensic reports and had helped others do so, too. In the five years since he had developed his most recent advance of the technology, the reliability had been established beyond any possible doubt. His textbook, the first ever on the subject, had recently been published.
Every human being walked in a different way and some people were more distinctive than others. Everyone’s gait was as unique as their DNA, but the quality of the footage was a factor in reducing the accuracy; or as Kelly described it when presented with very poor quality footage, quoting the old computer maxim, ‘garbage in, garbage out’.
It was only a matter of time before he and his team successfully built more technology into the system to take account of the cheap-skate companies that deployed low-grade CCTV, and never bothered updating it, and then expected law-enforcement agencies to work miracles with footage of such a lousy quality on occasion that it was impossible to decipher a tree from a lamp post, let alone one person from another. He sometimes wondered if they had ever even heard of digital. The added time and expense of companies not having up-to-date technology was costly in more ways than one.
Even from analysis of a single foot position, the software had the capacity to pick someone out in a crowd with reasonable accuracy. When good quality footage was provided of a person actually walking, certainty of identification could be very high. The technology could help determine whether a person was or was not present at a crime scene. It not only looked for similarity, it assessed for dissimilarity, too. It could be used to seek particular aspects of a person’s gait, and the process of exclusion was a vital one.
Fortunately the quality of these images was good. The woman he was looking at was, without doubt, the same woman who had checked out of the Park Royale West.
With a very satisfied smile on his face, he picked up his phone, sat back in his leather swivel chair and called Roy Grace’s mobile number.
27
Thursday 26 February
Tooth didn’t much like reading. He’d named Yossarian after a character in one of the few books he’d ever read all the way through. Catch-22. It held him because it captured pretty much what life in a war zone in the military had been like, in his personal experience. A lot of assholes, fighting an unwinnable war. Mostly he watched television.
Recently, back home, he had been curiously fascinated by an English TV series, Downton Abbey, and the place he entered now was pretty much what he imagined a stately home in England would be like. Except, as he stepped out of the elevator, walking between two suits of armour into an oak-panelled hall, the walls hung with stern, gloomy old masters, he was on the ninth floor of a New York Park Avenue East apartment block.
As the short, creepy-looking uniformed butler bowed unctuously, he could smell cigar smoke and fresh coffee.
Two large goons materialized, all in black, with earpieces on coiled cables, and frisked him, removing the hunting knife strapped to his left ankle and the Heckler & Koch from his shoulder holster. Tooth stood, silent and sullen, until they had finished. He kept the weapons in a locker he rented in a storage depot in Brooklyn. He had weapons in storage lockers in several cities around the world.
‘This way, please,’ the butler said.
Tooth did not move. ‘I want a receipt,’ he said.
‘You get them back when you leave,’ one goon said.
‘I’m leaving now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the other goon said, producing a large Sig Sauer with a silencer attached.
Tooth brought his left leg up hard between the goon’s legs. As the man doubled up in pain, he grabbed the Sig, headbutted the second guard, then with his right foot delivered a roundhouse kick, swinging the instep through the man’s knee, sending him crashing to the ground. As both guards lay on the floor in pain, Tooth covered them with the gun and said, ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me right. I said I’m leaving.’
He recovered his own gun and the knife, reholstering them.
‘Please, Mr Tooth,’ the butler said. ‘Mr Egorov would really like to talk to you.’
‘Yeah? Well I’m here.’
The two men stared at each other for some moments. Then the butler said, ‘Mr Egorov is unable to walk.’
Tooth remembered. His client had been shot by someone he’d upset, paralysing him from the waist down. He tossed the Sig on the floor contemptuously, towards the two goons, then followed the butler.
Tooth didn’t do art. But the long corridor he walked down was hung with oil paintings of landscapes, piles of dead game and portraits of stiff-looking men and women, all in ornate gold frames, that he figured hadn’t come from a garage sale.
He was ushered through double doors into a grand room with curtains held back with tasselled ties, antique furniture and more paintings adorning the walls.
Four men sat at a long dining table which was laden with silver baskets full of croissants, decanters of orange juice, silver coffee pots, plates and tiny pots of jam.
Three of them, who all looked faintly Neanderthal, though dressed in business suits, stared at him warily. The fourth, Sergey Egorov, was in a wheelchair. He had cropped fair hair, a massive gold medallion visible inside his white shirt which was unbuttoned to his navel, and a large cigar, with a white band, in his hand.
‘Ah, Mr Tooth. Good to see you,’ he said.
Unsmiling, and without acknowledging the greeting, Tooth strode across the floor towards him.
He sat down at one of the empty spaces at the table, looked at each of the three Neanderthals in turn, as if they were small piles of dog shit that he needed to step over, then turned to the man who had hired him, Sergey Egorov, staring him in the eyes as he reached for a coffee pot.
Instantly the butler was at his side, pouring it.
‘What would you like to report to us?’ Egorov said.
‘It’s fucking cold here.’
Egorov laughed loudly. He waved his arms expansively and each of his goons laughed, too. Then all around the table fell silent.
‘Anything else?’
‘Walt Klein’s funeral is tomorrow. A service at Riverside Memorial Chapel, on 76th and Amsterdam, followed by a committal at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.’
‘And you will be there? You haven’t found this woman yet?’ Egorov asked. ‘Why not?’
‘I’ve been to every hotel in this city where she might be staying,’ Tooth replied. ‘So far no.’
‘Why not?’
‘Like I told you before, she’s not here any more.’
‘It’s her fiancé’s funeral. You don’t think she’ll be there for appearances?’
‘That’s what I thought at first. But now I don’t think so. Why would she be?’ Tooth replied. ‘Klein’s family despise her. She’s not going to inherit a cent. I think she’s back in England, as I’ve already told you.’ Tooth pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and tapped one out. He put it in his mouth and lit it.
‘It’s a week now,’ Egorov said. ‘Are you trying hard enough?’
Tooth sipped the coffee the butler had poured. Then he looked back at his paymaster. ‘Give me your bank account details.’
‘My bank account details? Why?’
‘I don’t like you.’ Tooth looked at the other three. ‘You can always judge a man by the friends he keeps. You keep shit company.’
All three bodyguards stirred and it took a sharp hand in the air by Egorov to calm them.
‘I’ll repay you the million, no charge for expenses. You don’t want to listen to me? Fine, I’m gone.’
‘OK, OK,’ Egorov said. ‘I’m listening to you.’
Tooth eyed him for some moments. He was also weighing up just what this job meant to him. He needed the money, so he held his temper, as much as he could. ‘What part of she’s not here any more don’t you understand?’
‘Mr Tooth, we need back what this woman has. We need that memory stick. Don’t bother about the cash, it’s counterfeit. And we’d like you to teach that woman a lesson. You understand? One of your lessons. We’d like to see it, too.’ He raised one hand in front of his eyes and with the other made a cranking motion, miming filming.
‘If it’s so important to you, who the hell entrusted that Romanian moron with it?’
‘It is really important,’ Egorov said, ignoring the question and puffing on his cigar. ‘I want you to go to the funeral. If she’s not there, fine, that’s my bad call. Then you go to England. Get the memory stick. And kill the bitch. I’m told you are good at filming the death of your targets. We’d really enjoy seeing that film. Understand what I’m saying?’
Tooth hesitated. He didn’t like dealing with assholes who didn’t listen to him. They were the people who got you caught.
But.
He needed the money. These assholes were good paymasters. If he upset them maybe they’d badmouth him. Maybe business would dry up totally.
He stared back at Egorov as if watching a poker opponent, then said, ‘Your dollar, your call.’
28
Thursday 26 February
It was 5.30 p.m., and pelting with rain outside his window. Roy Grace shuffled together a bunch of papers on the prosecution he was preparing for Dr Edward Crisp’s eventual return to the UK, which he was going to take home and read later this evening. Then he stared at the screensaver on his phone, a picture of Noah and Cleo outside the front of their new home. He was looking forward to getting back in good time to play with Noah before bed, and then enjoy a drink and a meal with Cleo.
There was a knock on his office door.
‘Come in!’
Following Haydn Kelly’s report, he had, the day before, asked Jack Alexander to find out urgently from the US authorities what he could about Jodie Bentley’s movements at Atlanta Airport. Had she or Judith Forshaw travelled anywhere else within the USA, or did their systems show Jodie Bentley leaving the country?
The DC came in, beaming, clutching a wodge of papers on which were rows of names, as well as the blurry, blown-up image of the suspect woman’s face from CCTV footage at Atlanta Airport, and a memory stick, which he put down on the Detective Superintendent’s desk.
Grace indicated a chair in front of him.
‘Sir,’ Jack said, sitting down, ‘I’ve found out that Jodie Bentley appears to have travelled from Washington Dulles to Hartsfield–Jackson Airport at Atlanta using the name Jemma Smith. She then flew out of Atlanta as Jodie Bentley, on a Virgin Airlines flight to Heathrow last Thursday, at 17.35, scheduled to arrive in London at 6.30 a.m. on Friday the 20th. I’ve obtained her address from her credit card details.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Now we get to the interesting bit, sir,’ Alexander said. ‘I’ve checked it out. It’s a rental mailbox address – the same as she used when she booked in to the Park Royale West in New York.’
‘What did you find out about it?’
‘I’ve been to see them and spoke to the manager, who wasn’t too helpful, until I threatened her with a search warrant.’
Grace smiled; he liked this detective’s attitude. He reminded him of himself at that age.
Alexander continued. ‘She said they’ve never met the woman. It was all set up via email about a year ago. A Hotmail account, naturally. I’ve given it to the High Tech Crime Unit to see if they can find out any information – but they’re dubious. Donald Duck could set up an untraceable Hotmail account in a couple of minutes.’
‘How did she pay for this mailing address?’ Grace quizzed him.
‘In cash, apparently. Delivered by a cab.’
‘So she was planning in advance,’ Grace commented, thinking hard. Who the hell is this woman? ‘Who picks up her mail?’
‘The manager says that the staff change all the time, and none of the current employees have any recollection of dealing with her.’
Jodie Bentley, Grace thought. ‘Have you checked the electoral register?’
‘Yes, I have. There’s no one of that name.’
‘Nice work, Jack.’
‘Thank you, sir. Sounds to me like she doesn’t want to be found.’
Grace smiled. ‘You don’t say!’
‘I checked with the Border Control Agency at Heathrow. Her passport was scanned at 7.35 a.m. It would have been flagged if it had been recorded as lost or stolen, or if it had been a poor forgery – apparently forged passports often won’t scan as forgers don’t always get it absolutely right!’
‘Do they retain information from these scans?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Great – why the hell not?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
They both looked at the blurry photograph again for some moments. Then the DC continued, picking up the memory stick. ‘I went up to the CCTV Control Room at Heathrow to see if I could track Jodie Bentley’s movements after passing through Passport Control. I’ve got her heading to the escalator down to Baggage Reclaim, but then she vanishes.’
‘Vanishes?’
‘P
ossibly she went into a toilet and changed her hair and put on a different hat. On this stick I’ve got the footage from the arrivals hall, but I couldn’t see her on it. There’s a dozen or so women of similar build emerging into it, but none of them that look like her, or are dressed like her. She had three large suitcases on a trolley at Atlanta Airport. She must either have got a porter or another trolley at the carousel.’
‘What about the taxi companies and limousine services at the airport?’ Grace asked. ‘Any of those take a single woman to Brighton? Also, what CCTV footage is there of people outside the building?’
‘I’ve put in a request for that footage and I’m working through the taxis and limousines, sir.’
Grace looked at the detective’s eager face. ‘Well done!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Next he called the Financial Investigations Unit at John Street police station. He spoke to Kelly Nicholls, and asked her to see if she could find anything on a woman, aged in her thirties, from the Brighton area who had recently been in the United States, going under the name of Jodie Bentley, Judith Forshaw or Jemma Smith.
Then he went home.
29
Thursday 26 February
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes! OH, YESSSSSS, YESSSSSS! Oh my God you are incredible! Yes, YES, YESSSSSSSSS! OHHHH, OHHHHHHH, OHHHHHHHHHH!’ Jodie screamed in ecstasy – or rather what she hoped sounded like ecstasy. She clawed her nails down Rollo Carmichael’s naked back as, crushing her with his weight, he kept on thrusting as deep inside her as his not-very-well-endowed and slightly flaccid penis would go. She shot a discreet glance at her wristwatch. Only three minutes had elapsed. Too soon.
She’d been right in her original assessment of Carmichael. While he wasn’t a lawyer or a banker, he had been a Mayfair art dealer in a very serious way. The Impressionists he’d dealt in ranged in value up to figures with ridiculous rows of noughts at the end. He had a house in Knightsbridge which he used just as an occasional pied-à-terre and which, from the address she had managed to get out of him, she had discovered on the internet to be worth a good ten million, and his main home was now here in the city, this beachfront house, valued at more than three million pounds. If she played her cards right, this could truly be the catch that set her up for life. And he had excitedly invited her to join him on an exotic cruise he’d booked – he was flying out on Saturday afternoon. He had no one to go with, could she possibly drop everything and join him – please?