Stop them dead, p.40
Stop Them Dead, page 40
I give him a guarded, ‘Yes.’
I’m finding him a bit intimidating. And I’m still trying to think who the hell he is. He smells nice, a cologne I don’t recognize.
‘Charming little restaurant this, isn’t it? Are you and Roy having a pleasant evening?’ He looks down at the table, and I can see he’s clocking the untouched other side of the table, the glasses and plates and cutlery.
‘Well, I can’t speak for Roy, but mine’s been a bit rubbish, actually.’
He frowns. Or rather, looks pained. Or bewildered. ‘Right,’ he says awkwardly. ‘Yes, OK. Right – well—’
He looks around him, as if expecting Roy to materialize – perhaps from the loo – at any moment.
‘He’s not here,’ I say, to put him out of his misery.
‘Not here? You’ve been stood up?’
I shake my head. ‘Not stood up – not exactly.’ I explain the events. When I finish I pick up the bottle of Chablis from the ice bucket, show him there is still some left and offer him a glass. He hesitates, saying he’s driving, then he says, ‘Why not, I’ve not drunk anything all evening,’ and accepts, sitting down and clinking his glass against mine. ‘I’ve also been stood up,’ he says.
‘Seriously?’
‘My date never showed.’ He shrugs a What-the-hell. ‘You’re wondering who I am and where we’ve met before, aren’t you?’
It throws me, because he’s right. ‘I’m trying to place you,’ I reply diplomatically and take a stab. ‘Sussex Police, right?’
‘I’m a DI, we met at the Sussex Detectives’ Ball, at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, last October. I was on the next table to you and your husband – we chatted briefly about how terrible the comedian was. I’m down on secondment to Sussex Police from the Met, briefing the force on Counter-Terrorism.’ He holds out his hand and gives a very clammy, limp handshake for much longer than I’m comfortable with, all the time staring into my eyes. ‘My name is Cassian Pewe. Maybe I can give you a lift home?’
5
Have you ever come across someone who you found both attractive and repulsive at the same time? If not, you’ve never met Cassian Pewe. Snake charmers work by hypnotizing venomous reptiles. Cassian Pewe is the reverse. He’s the cocky reptile with the silver tongue and the golden looks. I knew he was dangerous, but as we talked, there was something about him – I can’t explain what exactly – I found mesmerizing. Hypnotic?
When it got to 11.15 p.m., and the remaining staff in the restaurant were clearly dying to go home but too polite to say so, Roy rang, his voice full of apology. He was still at work, he said, and he would make up for this evening but best I get a taxi home.
I hung up on him. Then I accepted Cassian’s gallant offer to give me a lift home in his white convertible Jaguar. He told me it was a classic, although I don’t know much about cars, but it was rather gorgeous, with its soft leather seats and mahogany dashboard, and he was clearly proud of it. It was snug and warm inside, with the roof down and the night air blowing in our hair and on our faces. In my woozy state I imagined for a moment we were in the South of France, Cannes maybe, instead of Brighton.
When we pulled up outside our house ten minutes later, I saw Roy’s car wasn’t on the driveway. He was still at work, still playing with his prisoner. Cassian Pewe suddenly switched off the engine, and before I knew it, had slipped one arm around my neck, pulled me towards him and kissed me passionately on the lips.
Shocked, I was again both attracted and repulsed. Then he stared into my eyes, in the faint glow of a streetlight above us, and said, ‘I really like Roy. I like him a lot.’
‘Well, I hope you don’t kiss him like that,’ I replied.
6
Brighton, England
26 July 2007
I’m faced with a choice as I approach Gatwick Airport. The North or South Terminal? If I had a coin I’d toss it. I decide South. So many decisions I’m completely free to make.
It’s 1.45 p.m. Horrible Roel Albazi can only just about now be figuring I’m a no-show. My mirrors are still clear. But just for belt and braces, to be certain no one is following, I do a full 360-degree loop around the South Terminal before driving up the ramp of the short-term car park. Roy is not going to be happy if he gets stuck with the bill, the size of which will depend on how long it takes them to find my car. But the car is in my name, so it really shouldn’t be a problem for him.
I take my ticket and the barrier rises in front of me. I drive through, into my new life, which begins with an empty space between a white Porsche Cayman and a purple Nissan Micra on the fourth floor of the short-term car park – symbolic in a way. I lock my little Golf – I’ve no idea why, habit I guess – toss the keys into a convenient bin, then walk across the bridge into the terminal building.
One bonus, in the situation I find myself in, of being married to a detective is the stuff I’ve learned from Roy that most people would never even think about. Like how to disappear in our online, digital world.
How to vanish without trace.
Like I’m about to. I am so nervous. Then I remind myself I have no choice.
It’s weird when I look at my left hand and don’t see my wedding ring or my engagement ring, which has been part of my fourth finger for ten years. There’s just a faint white band of skin that isn’t suntanned. I’m going to pawn them, but not too close to home, in case pawnbrokers become a line of enquiry. I dig my hand into the pocket of my lightweight denim jacket as I stroll around the Departures concourse because I’m oddly self-conscious about that white band, my naked finger.
After stopping at WHSmith to buy a newspaper, I head over to the British Airways check-in area, being careful to turn my head left then right repeatedly, so the CCTV cameras, wherever they are, have a good chance of clocking me. I join a short queue and then check in to flight BA 2771 to Malaga. No luggage, I tell the polite young man behind the desk, who is looking at my passport.
After a few moments of tapping on his computer, he hands my passport back to me. ‘Have a nice flight, Mrs Gordon.’
Instead of heading for security, I head for the loos. Once securely locked inside the ladies I open the small holdall slung over my shoulder, pull out a blonde wig and position it on my head along with a large pair of dark glasses. Then I reverse my denim jacket, so it is now white. Tug off my jeans and replace them with a sensible skirt. Next, I make my way across to the EasyJet check-in area.
Fifteen minutes later, thanks to my second false passport, Sandra Smith is allocated seat 14C on EZY 243 to Amsterdam. When she arrives, with just hand baggage, she will check in to a London City Airport flight under the name of Sandra Jones. On entering the arrivals lounge there, she will see a limousine driver holding up the name Alison Shipley, arranged by Nicos.
Alison Shipley will be whisked away from the airport in the back of a black Mercedes S-Class driven by a courteous man called Meehat El Hadidy, following directions on his satnav to East Grinstead.
Taking her towards her new beginning.
7
They called him Tall Joe, although he was actually very short. Two inches shy of five feet, with a shaved head that was snooker-ball shiny, and the body of a Sumo wrestler, he looked even shorter than his height. He had a problem with walking, due to knackered hips from too many fights, so that he strode along in a kind of pendulum motion that had something of the drunken sailor about it, swinging each leg past him and then sort of throwing his body forward. It looked pretty clumsy, but that was deceptive. Nothing about Tall Joe was clumsy. Joe Karter was a man of precision.
He was also a man of light and dark. On the light side, he was scrupulously polite, funny and charming – charming so long as you paid what you owed, when you owed it. On the dark, he was an Aikido 8th Dan black belt who had killed two men with his bare hands – and five in more painful ways – permanently disabled another eight, and had been a legend in prison when serving lengthy time for GBH for throwing a fridge down two flights of stairs during a tantrum.
Not many people messed with Tall Joe Karter, which was why Roel Albazi employed him. If you owed money to Albazi’s boss, Song Wu, you paid it, especially when Joe Karter, always dressed in a suit and tie and looking like an overgrown schoolboy, knocked on your door, or you made arrangements, fast. Albazi and his associate Skender Sharka always made sure any of their debtors who had fallen behind were made aware of Tall Joe Karter’s CV.
Albazi was stressed before he picked up the phone to call Joe, and the fact that his bag man was sounding so calm was making him even more stressed. Not just one but two people he’d given substantial loans to, to cover their gambling debts, had gone missing – done runners. And Joe was in the middle of sodding nowhere, in his car, cheerfully telling him that he didn’t know where they were.
The wife of Alan Mitten, who owed £30k plus £15k of interest, had just told Joe she hadn’t seen her husband in three weeks and if she never saw him again it would be too soon. She’d been served a foreclosure notice from the mortgage company, her car had been repossessed and the bailiffs were coming this afternoon to take their furniture. So far, Skender Sharka was making some headway but not quickly enough. Although he was confident of finding him within the next twenty-four hours.
Tall Joe was even more hopeful about Robert Rhys, a lawyer who owed £25k plus £15k interest. He was close to getting an address. And as soon as Rhys was located, Karter said he would meet him to arrange a payment plan.
‘What payment plan do you have in mind?’ Albazi quizzed.
‘I’ll ask him which bone of his body he would least like me to break, boss,’ Tall Joe replied in his deep, cheeky-chappie voice. ‘So I’ll break another one – a toe or a finger, tell him I’ll break another one every twenty-four hours, saving the one he really doesn’t want me to break to last, until he’s paid up. He’ll pay tomorrow, boss, I’m confident.’
‘He’s a card player isn’t he, Joe?’
‘Poker.’
‘So he won’t want you to break his fingers, will he?’
‘He won’t, boss.’
Albazi thanked him and hung up, fretting about Alan Mitten. He was a double-glazing salesman and his employers hadn’t heard from him for over two weeks. At least Robert Rhys had decent employment, and was a partner in a small firm of solicitors. Unlike Mitten he didn’t even own a house. He would at least have equity in the firm, although the fact that he was in his late forties and living in a rented flat gave a clue to his gambling habit – maybe he’d never amassed enough to afford a house. Gambled it all away. Hopefully Tall Joe would work his magic. Poker with your fingers in splints would not be a good prospect.
He leaned back in the swivel chair of his sixth-floor, white-carpeted penthouse office above his restaurant. It had a magnificent picture-window view to the south, across the river Adur to the houseboats on the far side, with the English Channel beyond, and another across Shoreham High Street to the north. He pulled up a map on his screen. His loyal right hand, Skender Sharka, towered over him, looking down at it, too.
Sharka, a freak of nature, was six foot six and totally hairless. He’d been nicknamed Deve at school, which translated into English as Camel, because he had two lumps on his skull. He was a gentle person in all he did, even when he killed.
They’d worked as a team for the past decade, he, Sharka and Tall Joe, collecting debts which weren’t legally enforceable – mostly drug debts – and then Albazi had been approached by a representative of Song Wu with an offer he could not refuse. Although subsequently he had realized the offer was too good to be true.
The tracking system of locating his debtors, devised by Sharka, was highly effective. People in hiding generally did not travel far. Those who needed to hide in a hurry rarely went out of their comfort zone. Albazi had had enough debtors go bad over the years to warrant his investment in tracking technology, with algorithms created by Sharka. So brilliant were they that Albazi had only ever lost one completely. But he had dealt with that swiftly, by having the man’s parents and then grandparents, back in Albania, tortured and murdered.
Sharka’s principal method of tracking people was through payments to a source on the Dark Web who had access to all the different phone companies’ records. By cross-referencing numbers they’d been able to see the burner phones each had bought in the mistaken belief they’d make them invisible and impossible to track.
Song Wu was not happy with him, and he cursed himself for getting reckless. In truth, he hadn’t done the full due diligence he would normally do on a customer before lending them the money, and had come to rely too much on his debt-collecting abilities. On top of Mitten and Rhys, with Sandy Grace failing to turn up and playing games, the situation was a whole lot worse.
He sometimes felt his relationship with the Song Wu organization was like being a man trapped in a watery cul-de-sac with a crocodile. So long as he kept throwing it chickens, the crocodile would keep smiling. All the time growing bigger and needing more chickens . . .
‘So where is she right now, Skender?’ he asked.
From the moment, a month ago, when Sandy Grace had first defaulted on a repayment instalment to his boss, Tall Joe had placed a tracking device on her car. It was a magnetic transponder, attached beneath the boot, so small she would only have found it if she had been searching for it specifically. Its current location showed as a small blue dot on the map on Albazi’s computer screen.
‘Gatwick Airport, boss. Looks like she’s gone into the South Terminal short-term car park.’
Albazi studied the screen carefully as he drilled a hole in the tip of a Cohiba Robusto, then put the stubby cigar in his mouth without lighting it. ‘So, she should have been here at midday, as she promised, with one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash – in fifty-pound notes. Instead, the stupid woman drives to Gatwick and parks in the short-term car park. Why do you think she might have done that?’
‘Maybe she meet someone who fly in? With the money for you? Or . . .’
‘Or?’
‘Maybe she flown somewhere to get the money, boss.’
‘Yeah? What about maybe she’s just flown?’
‘Leaving her car in the short-term car park? I don’t think so, not with their charges. She not planning to stay long.’
Albazi lit his cigar carefully with his gold Dunhill, turning the end over and over in the flame until it was burning evenly. His face disappeared into a cloud of blue smoke. His disembodied voice replied, ‘So wait. Watch the blue dot. Tell me when it moves again.’
Skender assured him he would.
‘I hope you’re not wrong. Know what’s going to happen to you and me if she disappears?’
‘No boss.’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘OK.’
‘Which is why I’m going to tell you.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter James is a UK number one bestselling author, best known for his Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, now a hit ITV drama starring John Simm as the troubled Brighton copper.
Much loved by crime and thriller fans for his fast-paced page-turners full of unexpected plot twists, sinister characters and his accurate portrayal of modern-day policing, Peter has won over forty awards for his work, including the WHSmith Best Crime Author of All Time Award and the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger.
To date, Peter has written an impressive total of nineteen Sunday Times number ones, and his books have sold over 21 million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-eight languages. His books are also often adapted for the stage – the most recent being Wish You Were Dead.
www.peterjames.com
@peterjamesuk
@peterjames.roygrace
@peterjamesuk
@thejerseyhomestead
@mickeymagicandfriends
Peter James TV
The Detective Superintendent Roy Grace books in order:
DEAD SIMPLE
In the first Roy Grace novel, a harmless stag-do prank leads to deadly consequences.
LOOKING GOOD DEAD
It started with an act of kindness and ended in murder.
NOT DEAD ENOUGH
Can a killer be in two places at once?
Roy Grace must solve a case of stolen identity.
DEAD MAN’S FOOTSTEPS
The discovery of skeletal remains in Brighton sparks a global investigation.
DEAD TOMORROW
In an evil world, everything’s for sale.
DEAD LIKE YOU
After thirteen years, has the notorious ‘Shoe Man’ killer returned?
DEAD MAN’S GRIP
A trail of death follows a devastating traffic accident.
NOT DEAD YET
Terror on the silver screen; an obsessive stalker on the loose.
DEAD MAN’S TIME
A priceless watch is stolen and the powerful Daly family will do anything to get it back.
WANT YOU DEAD
Who knew online dating could be so deadly?
YOU ARE DEAD
Brighton falls victim to its first serial killer in eighty years.
LOVE YOU DEAD
A deadly black widow is on the hunt for her next husband.
NEED YOU DEAD
Every killer makes a mistake somewhere. You just have to find it.
DEAD IF YOU DON’T
A kidnapping triggers a parent’s worst nightmare and a race against time for Roy Grace.
DEAD AT FIRST SIGHT
Roy Grace exposes the lethal side of online identity fraud.
FIND THEM DEAD
A ruthless Brighton gangster is on trial and will do anything to walk free.
LEFT YOU DEAD
When a woman in Brighton vanishes without a trace, Roy Grace is called in to investigate.
PICTURE YOU DEAD
Not all windfalls are lucky. Some can lead to murder . . .
