‘Roy? It’s Norman – sorry – Paul.’
Potting sounded pissed, his voice alternating between his Devon burr and his assumed Transatlantic accent.
‘You shouldn’t be calling me direct. It’s all meant to go through your Cover Officer.’
‘I know that, Roy, but I just wanted to let you know as well – cut the bureaucracy out.’
‘It’s not so much red tape as protocol, Norman. OK. I appreciate you calling, but it’s dangerous, OK? This is a breach of procedure.’
‘OK, chief, if you say so.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve made contact.’
‘I’ve been informed from Surveillance.’
‘Had a pretty interesting evening.’
‘So it sounds.’
‘Huh?’
‘Boozy time?’
‘Well, I had to keep up with her. I think she likes me. She’s a fast mover. Our plan worked, I think she mus – must – have read the Argus piece and figured out who I was. You know?’
‘Cornel.’
‘Thash– that’s– me!’
Alarm bells were ringing at the sound of his voice. ‘Nice work, Norman – sorry – Paul. So?’
‘I’m seeing her again tomorrow. She’s suggested going to hers – she’s cooking me dinner at home tomorrow evening, and you’ll be able to pick the address up from my tracker when I get there.’
‘Good, well done, but don’t call me again.’
Grace ended the call feeling worried. Many officers in Sussex Police felt that Potting, with his non-pc attitudes – albeit less extreme these days – was well past his sell-by date. With the historic thirty-year service to retirement, few officers in Sussex Police were older than fifty-five. But with recent unpopular revisions to the pension scheme, working past the age of fifty-five was going to become the norm. And the DS, a late entrant to the police, would not be completing his thirty years until he was almost sixty. Another few years to go. As one of the officers to have worked closely with him over a number of years, Roy Grace saw qualities in the strange but kind character that eluded those who knew – or saw – only the old-school cop in him, and the values that came with that. Grace knew better and had fought Potting’s corner several times in recent years, saving him from disciplinary action – and potential dismissal on more than one occasion – because he believed in him.
He hoped to hell that Potting wasn’t going to let him down now. But even more importantly for the DS’s personal security, he hoped he wasn’t going to let his guard down. If Grace was right – and he was pretty sure that he was – Jodie Carmichael wasn’t someone it was safe to get drunk with.
105
Friday 13 March
Tooth rose at 5.30 a.m., adrenalin pumping, not wanting to miss what should be the big event of the day. He went over to his desk, opened his laptop and checked the cameras in Jodie Carmichael’s house. She was still asleep in bed, just like most of her fellow reptiles. The only activity in that room was in two of the glass vivariums – the one containing the cockroaches and the other the mice. All of those crawling, wriggling, twitching, darting creatures, unaware that the sole reason for their existence was to be fed to their neighbours in the other vivariums all around them.
Just as Jodie Carmichael was at this moment unaware of what lay ahead for her in her garage.
Enjoy your last few hours on earth, sweetheart, he thought, squatting down on the floor to begin his regime of recuperation exercises.
When he’d finished, he showered and shaved, then began applying his Thelma Darby make-up. Shortly after 6.30 a.m., the breakfast he’d ordered on the card he’d hung on the door last night arrived. ‘Thank you, madam,’ the young room-service boy said gratefully, palming his tip.
He ate whilst continuing to watch the sleeping woman, then packed his bag, slipped out of the hotel and headed over to his car. He didn’t plan to return, but he didn’t want the hotel to know that. Let them think he was still here for the three more days he had booked and paid in advance for. It all helped to cover his tracks from smartass Detective Grace. But, with luck, by the time the police came to the hotel looking for him, he’d long be back home with Yossarian.
Fifteen minutes later he drove along Roedean Crescent, checking out the stationary cars he remembered from last night. All of them had misted windows, including the Range Rover he had parked behind.
He continued past No. 191 to the end of the street, made a U-turn and parked up on the opposite side to her house, a couple of hundred yards away, with a clear view of the entrance to her driveway. He switched the engine off, moved his seat back, put his computer on his lap and logged on via his 4G phone connection, once more checking the cameras.
She was awake.
Good.
Jodie sat up in bed, sipping water, trying to resist taking some paracetamol for the hangover that seemed to be worsening by the minute, intending instead to go to the gym and do an hour’s hard workout. She had drunk too much last night, far more than had been wise, and she was thinking hard for anything she might have let slip about her past to Paul Cornel. J. Paul Cornel. Julius Paul Cornel. But she reckoned she had it covered, and he’d had a skinful too.
And she couldn’t believe her luck. Inside she was smiling. She had found him in the first bar she’d entered and they had got on so well. What a brilliant night, it had gone better than she could have possibly imagined! And the bonus was she actually did like him, a lot. He really could be the cash jackpot she had been hunting for for so long. All that money and no children alive! Her immediate task would be to prevent him from doing the stupid thing he had talked to the newspaper about, giving all his money away to charities. She needed to get that ring on her finger fast. Sometime during their evening yesterday he’d said he was intending to return to California next Tuesday. Which gave her just the weekend. Between now and Monday she had to have him invite her to go to California with him – and make him think it was all his idea. She did not want to risk any time apart. Not even a day.
He wasn’t the greatest looker in the flesh – he’d seemed more attractive in his newspaper photograph – but he had a sense of fun that she liked. And hell, she had slept with a lot worse. She was going to give him the best night of his life. And the best morning in bed, too. By the end of the weekend he was going to be sated, and he was not going to want to be without her. No man she’d slept with since she had matured ever had.
Rays of sun were streaking through the window and, despite her headache, the day felt full of promise. She glanced at her clock. 7.05 a.m. She needed to get up and on it.
She was meeting Paul at the Grand at 12.30 p.m. He was going to take her for a bite of lunch, then on a tour of his Brighton, the Brighton he remembered from his youth. Then she planned to cook him a meal here this evening. He’d already told her his favourite foods last night. If she got up now she’d have time to go to the gym, get her hair and nails done, do the food shopping and be back in good time.
She pulled on her tracksuit and trainers, and went down to the kitchen, trying to remember the disturbing dream she’d had during the night, which she had woken from crying out for help, but it eluded her. She put it out of her mind, focusing on what lay ahead. She took a strawberry yoghurt drink from the fridge, shook it and swallowed it, then went upstairs and opened the entrance to the reptile room.
Everything looked fine. Pulling on her heavy-duty protective gloves, she removed a cockroach and dropped it into one of the vivariums containing a saw-scaled viper; moments later, she watched the snake pounce on it. She fed the other three vipers similarly. Next she took a live white mouse by the tail and dropped it into the emperor scorpion vivarium. Then she took out another mouse and carried it over to Silas the boa constrictor’s vivarium, unclipped and lifted the lid, and dropped the wriggling, terrified creature in.
She knew the snake must be hungry as it had excreted the last food she had given it. But instead of instantly coiling itself around the terrified-lo
oking creature, as it normally would have done, it did not move. Then she noticed the small bulge about a foot down its body, and frowned.
The bulge could only be caused by something it had eaten.
She felt a stab of panic. What was going on? She peered down into the foliage and saw, to her relief, the USB memory stick lying there. Then she stared back at the bulge. ‘What have you eaten, Silas?’ she asked, out loud.
Tooth, watching her on the screen in his car, smiled. Nice to see you worried. Don’t want you dying happy.
Jodie left the reptile room, closing the secure door behind her, mystified. That looked like a food bulge – the kind made by the snake swallowing a rodent. But she had not fed it. Was Silas sick? Was it a tumour? How the hell could a rodent have got into the vivarium? She tried to think back to the rush she was in before leaving for the cruise. Was it a mouse she had left him in his tank that she’d not noticed, and which he had only just now eaten?
Fretting, she went back downstairs, took her Mercedes key fob out of the hall table drawer, then went into the kitchen. She opened the door to the integral garage, switched the light on and stared for a moment at the beautiful dark blue car. Although, if all went well in the coming days, she decided, maybe in time she would buy the car she had always really dreamed of, an Aston Martin.
She pressed a button on the fob and the doors opened with a clunk, the indicators all winking together. She climbed in, picked up the garage door clicker and pressed it. The door began to rise. She fired up the engine and watched the dials come to life, put on her seat belt, then let off the handbrake. She was about to move the gear shift to D when she suddenly noticed a distinct whiff of alcohol. She frowned, placed her hand in front of her mouth and exhaled. The smell of booze was on her breath.
Just how much had she drunk last night?
She tried to calculate. How many units? A lot, for sure. And she actually wasn’t feeling that great, as if she still had plenty of the stuff in her system. She would feel a lot better after a good workout in the gym, she knew. She pulled an open pack of chewing gum from the door pocket, popped a piece in her mouth and chewed, enjoying the instant minty taste explosion. But as she put her hand on the gear shift her head swam.
Am I fit to drive? she wondered, thinking about the piece in the Argus yesterday, about the new police blitz in the city on morning-after drinkers.
That would not be clever, to be caught in one of those spot checks. Quite apart from the risk of blowing her date with Paul Cornel, the consequences of being arrested could be catastrophic if any of her alternative identities were uncovered. She switched the engine off, walked round to the rear of the car, opened the boot and took out a breathalyser kit she had bought a long time back. She read the instructions, clipped a mouthpiece into place, switched it on and blew into it as hard as she could.
The dial glowed red. It showed a reading of 51.
She cursed. The legal limit for a breath alcohol reading in England and Wales was 35 microgrammes per hundred millilitres of breath.
For the cost of a taxi, it wasn’t worth the risk, she decided. She went back into the house and called Streamline.
Tooth watched her in impotent fury. Testing her breath? Over the goddam alcohol limit? Ordering a taxi? You bitch! Think you are being clever? I’ll show you what clever is. Get back in that goddam car!
106
Friday 13 March
Tooth had to wait nearly four hours for Jodie Carmichael to return. The neighbourhood was quiet. A few cars pulled out from driveways and returned a while later. He saw a man emerge in Lycra, on a racing bike, and pedal off. A red post van stopped at each of the houses in turn, the driver keying in gate codes and then running in with the day’s mail. Around 11 a.m. he saw a vehicle that didn’t fit, an old, beat-up-looking Volkswagen Golf driving slowly, the driver wearing a baseball cap low over his face.
With a stab of anxiety he wondered, for a moment, if it was an undercover police surveillance officer. But from the slow speed the car was travelling at, and the way he drove past his car without paying him any attention, he ruled that out. A burglar casing the area? he wondered.
Finally, shortly before 11.30 a.m., a taxi pulled up at the top of Jodie’s drive. When she emerged, holding several grocery store bags, he noticed she’d had her hair done. Tooth followed her on the cameras as she entered the house. She emptied the bags, putting most of the stuff, including a bottle of champagne and a bottle of wine, into the fridge, then went up to the bedroom, dialled and ordered another taxi for 12.15 p.m. Then she began to take off her clothes.
Another taxi?
Drive your car, lady, drive your goddam car!
How long was he going to have to wait here before she drove anywhere?
Seething with anger and frustration, he watched her slip off her underwear. At least she was giving him a show. She had a good body. He’d had no sex for weeks and he was starting to feel aroused. Long, slender legs, a flat stomach, large but firm breasts.
She sat down naked, provocatively, theatrically, in front of her white dressing table. She was behaving almost as if aware she had an audience, and was deliberately flaunting herself.
His arousal was deepening. Rays of sunshine lay across her white flesh. He looked at his watch. 11.40 a.m. The last flight today out of this freezing shithole country and back to the US was in just under five hours. If he left soon he could make that flight. He could slip in through the front door now, up the stairs, fuck her, break her neck and be gone in ten minutes. In plenty of time to make the flight.
The bang on his window sounded like a gunshot.
He turned his head, startled, his body instantly coiled for action, his laptop sliding on his dress and wedging against the steering wheel.
Peering in through the window he saw a severe-looking elderly lady in a tweed coat and a Tyrolean hat. He snapped shut the computer lid and hit the button to lower the window. She leaned in and said in a booming voice, ‘I’ve seen you’ve been here for a while. You haven’t noticed a small black and white dog – with pointy ears – have you?’
Tooth, gathering his composure, gave a sweet, Thelma Darby old-lady smile and shook her head.
‘His name’s Bonzo and he’s a rascal. Just a puppy, you see. Must have got out of the hole in our fence – I’ve been on at my husband to fix it for ages.’ The woman was looking at him oddly. Had he missed something with his make-up,? he wondered.
He gave her another sweet Thelma Darby smile.
‘No, well, thanks anyway!’ she said.
As he raised the window, there was another sudden sharp rap on it. He lowered it once more and she peered in again. ‘By the way, I’m the local Neighbourhood Watch coordinator. I’ve had a few calls from people who have noticed you. It’s a free world, of course, but we like to keep an eye on strangers. Just so you know.’
She walked on. As he raised the window once more he heard her call out, loudly, ‘Bonzo! Bonzo! Come along! Bonzo!’
Angry at himself for being so careless, for not noticing her approaching and allowing himself to be startled like that, Tooth started the car and drove for several minutes before stopping again, this time in a lay-by on the main seafront road. He was angry that he’d fucked up.
He didn’t do fuck-ups.
107
Friday 13 March
A few minutes after the time they had agreed, 12.30 p.m., Jodie Carmichael stepped out of her taxi in front of the Grand Hotel into the bright sunshine and strong breeze.
She had been back home for less than an hour. It had given her time to shower and dress appropriately for a tour of Brighton with, potentially, her next victim, and she was in a good mood. Her hang-over was gone after the workout in the gym, shopping for dinner tonight was complete and her worries about Silas were temporarily parked. Her hair had been done exactly as she liked it, her fingernails and toenails were manicured and varnished, and she was dressed elegantly in a leopard-skin coat over a grey sweater, leggings and high-heeled
ankle boots. She looked great, she knew. She’d decided not to drive as she had a feeling that lunch and the afternoon with J. Paul Cornel might well involve more alcohol.
‘Wow!’ he said, striding along the lobby towards her. ‘Wow!’
She smiled and stared into his eyes. ‘And right back at you!’
He was dressed in a mandarin-collared black shirt, buttoned up to the neck, a beautifully tailored charcoal suit and expensive-looking black loafers.
‘I think I just won the lottery!’ he said.
She grinned. ‘Me too.’
‘I thought we’d have a light lunch here – I’ve a bottle of Moët on ice and two lobster salads up in my suite. How does that sound?’
‘That sounds rather lovely,’ she replied with a warm smile. ‘You wouldn’t be planning to seduce me by any chance, would you?’
‘If my old wedding tackle was up to it, absolutely I would be doing just that, my dear. But I’m afraid my days of seduction are long behind me. So you are in safe hands!’
‘Isn’t that just too bad?’ She grinned. ‘But I’m sure there are other ways.’
An hour and a half later the silver Bentley threaded its way through the network of hilly, narrow residential streets. Brighton’s Whitehawk Estate, on the north-east of the city, lined with post-war semis and bungalows, had some fine views to the south and east.
Jodie and Paul lounged back in the rear seats, her right arm linked inside his.
‘So this is where you grew up?’ she asked.
‘Yep, it was pretty rough back then,’ he drawled. ‘There were plenty of good, decent folk living here, like my mother. But it was a haven for villains in those days, too, in the fifties. Cops wouldn’t leave a car unattended here, because if they did, they’d find it jacked up on blocks with its wheels stolen!’
‘But it looks nice now,’ she said.
‘Uh-huh.’ He was peering intently through the window. ‘Make a right here, please, driver,’ he said. Then a few moments later he said, ‘If I’m right – and it was a long time back – make a second left.’