by Peter James
But at this moment, Jane Diplock was more worried about the young Albanian woman seated beside her. The woman was sweating profusely and her pupils were dilated. Just a few minutes earlier she had vomited into a sick bag.
‘Would you like me to ask one of the cabin crew to get you a wheelchair?’ Jane asked her, kindly.
Florentina Shima looked at her, vacantly. ‘No, thank you, I fine. I fine.’
All the same, the retired couple insisted on staying close to her as they navigated the seemingly endless airport corridors. Martin and Jane each took one of her arms, as her walk became increasingly unsteady.
The couple were very seriously concerned about her as they approached the passport control. Reaching the point where they were due to be separated, the Diplocks going into the E-Passport line and the young Albanian woman into the long, snaking queue for non-EU passport holders, Jane Diplock again asked her if they should find someone to assist her.
But the young woman vehemently rejected the suggestion.
‘I’m fine, I’m good. OK? Thank you! Nice to meet you!’
Wishing her well, they parted and said they would see her down in baggage reclaim.
Florentina joined the queue.
She was feeling terrible. Her vision blurring. She looked at her watch, calculating.
Her head swam. She was feeling increasingly giddy, remembering something Frederik had told her. Watch the time. Watch the time. Sixteen hours, the absolute maximum.
The clock had started ticking early this morning, Albanian time.
Two hours of delay.
She was fast approaching sixteen hours.
But she was nearly there. Nearly. Nearly. Just one person in front of her and she would be at the passport desk, where there was a nice-looking Border Control Officer, wearing a hijab.
The officer’s name was Shakira Yamin. As with all Border Control Officers on passport duty, she had been trained to look up and look ahead. To keep a constant, vigilant eye on everyone in their queue, to spot anyone loitering, hesitant, or whose body language was nervous.
Five minutes earlier, she had already clocked the elegant, attractive young woman with a pallid complexion, unsteady on her feet and looking at her watch anxiously.
The floor seemed to be moving beneath Florentina, as if she was standing on a conveyor belt.
The Border Control Officer in the hijab turned into two people. Then four. Then back to two again.
To her horror, Yamin saw the young woman, now one back in the line, fall sideways. She lay on the floor, her face sheet white and clammy, like a heart-attack victim.
Yamin hit the panic button beneath her desk, summoning the airport emergency medical team and her own security team.
34
Saturday 12 August
18.30–19.30
Kipp Brown drove home from the Amex almost on autopilot, immersed in thought. He hit the clicker for the gates and drove in, round the wide driveway, his tyres crunching on the gravel. He circled in front of the lawn, which was dominated by a mature monkey-puzzle tree, and pulled up in front of the house. Stacey’s Volvo wasn’t there; a small relief in one way as she would become distraught the moment she knew. That was one thing less to face right at this moment, while he tried to keep his thoughts focused.
But just to check, he pressed another clicker to open the garage double doors. Her convertible Mercedes SL was in there, but not her Volvo. Then he remembered – she was playing in a tennis tournament at her club in Hove, the Grasshoppers. Several deep barks came from inside the house, from their German Shepherd, Otto.
Despite the evening sunshine, Wingate House had a dark and foreboding feel. When they’d come to view it, ten years ago, Kipp had instantly fallen for its imposing, baronial look. The 1920s seven-bedroom Edwardian mansion made a statement. One of the grander houses in the city, with its snooker room, basement cinema, swimming pool and hard tennis court, it would be a showcase for his success, as well as a great place to entertain clients. And a far cry from the tiny house where he had grown up.
Back then, when Stacey had cautiously asked him whether they could really afford to buy this place, he had assured her yes, they could comfortably afford it. His business was growing rapidly, profits piling up; he couldn’t put a foot wrong. He really believed he had the Midas touch, and so did his clients. Word of mouth spread and spread. He became the go-to man in Brighton if you needed a mortgage, wanted the best return on investment funds or a good deal on the numerous other services he offered. Anything you required in the world of finance, you could ‘Trust Kipp’ to get it for you.
Back in his schooldays at Dorothy Stringer, his best friend was Charlie Lang. Charlie’s dad, Neil, was a well-known bookmaker. They lived in a fancy house, with sea views, in Brighton’s ritzy Tongdean Avenue, and his father drove a two-tone beige and brown Rolls. Whenever Kipp went there for tea, Charlie’s dad would regale him with racing stories about big winnings.
When Kipp was nine, his father had died suddenly from a heart attack. Kipp liked to boast he got his taste for gambling, whether on the stock market, the horses or the gaming tables, from his mother. His earliest childhood memories were of her forever sat in front of the television, fag dangling from her lower lip, the racing pages of the Mirror open on her knees, shouting at the horses on the screen. Or of her coming back from bingo after a big win and throwing an armful of notes into his bedroom. He didn’t know then that she was gambling away the life insurance money she had received after his father’s death.
His early childhood was constant feast or famine. Days when there was nothing to eat in the house except mouldy bread and the scrapings from an already scraped-out Marmite jar. And other, rarer days, when his mother had a big win and they’d trundle a trolley around a supermarket, his mother telling him to grab anything he wanted and put it in.
At some stage of his childhood, he could not pinpoint exactly when – perhaps around the age of fifteen – he’d begun to realize he had a talent for mathematics. He started taking an interest in the way his mother bet on the horses. And on bingo. From tips he gleaned from Charlie Lang’s dad, he found himself giving her advice on odds, and her winnings became more frequent and bigger.
He left school early, having talked himself into a job as a bookie’s runner with Neil Lang. He did this for a couple of years, making what he thought was good money at the time. Then, at a race meeting at Brighton Racecourse, he got chatting to a big punter, called Steve Crouch, who seemed to take a shine to him and offered him a job.
Crouch was boss of a successful Brighton Independent Financial Advisor and Wealth Management company. Over the next few years, Kipp rose from the bottom rung of the ladder to become one of their top advisors, before deciding at the age of twenty-eight to go it alone. Now, seventeen years on, he was one of Crouch’s most formidable competitors. Or had been.
It seemed sometimes as if for years he’d been blessed with almost magical powers of prophecy, that any investment he made for his clients came good, way above the annual average for fund managers; then, suddenly, after Kayleigh’s death, the wheels fell off.
He knew the reasons. He had begun drinking heavily, and gambling heavily, too, as a way of taking his mind off his grief. Stacey had retreated into a shell, not letting him touch her for over a year. Then, stupidly, he’d had a fling with an old flame he had bumped into by chance. Sadly, a short while after, the woman had been found murdered, and he was briefly a suspect. Although he’d tried to keep it under wraps, Stacey had found out. He’d been trying to repair the damage by regularly coming home with flowers or a surprise gift of a piece of jewellery or tickets to see a favourite band of hers, but with little effect, so far.
His wealth management performance – once an impressive 14 per cent year-on-year growth for his clients’ money – had diminished to just 2 per cent last year, barely above bank interest rates. In his view, part of the business of wealth management was pure gambling. You bet your clients’ money for them
at different levels of risk, which they dictated. From the high risk, gambling on something like coffee bean crops being abundant or failing, down to the more mundane areas, such as fixed-interest government bonds. In this currently turbulent world there were huge gains to be made – or lost – on commodities, and on metals like gold. He’d managed throughout this past year to get most things badly wrong. On some occasions, spectacularly wrong.
As Stacey had become increasingly distanced and withdrawn, he’d found solace in gambling. Online poker and blackjack, and sometimes online roulette, too. Gambling had always been his way of relaxing. And always remembering the grand lifestyle of Neil Lang’s family.
These days his favourite places, locally, were the Premier Bar at Brighton Racecourse on race days – doing the maths, placing accumulator forecasts with the Tote on race meetings around the country – or playing the tables at Brighton’s Waterfront Casino. Just as in his early days in financial management he’d had that golden touch, it had always been the same with the casino. Stacey used to love coming with him back then, agog at how he always seemed to walk away from a roulette wheel thousands of pounds up, and on more than one occasion, hundreds of thousands.
Not any more. His magic touch, if it was ever that and not simply a long winning streak, had deserted him. Online, in the casino, at Brighton Racecourse and, even more crucially, at work. He blamed it on his marital problems distracting him.
But his clients, many of whom had entrusted their entire life savings to him, weren’t interested in his marital problems.
And when the ransom demand came in, as surely it would, the people who had taken Mungo wouldn’t be interested in his marital problems either.
35
Saturday 12 August
18.30-19.30
Just when Keith Ellis thought his shift couldn’t get any more hectic, it did.
It began with another FLUM, flashing in red on his screen. An emergency that one of the call-takers here would handle. Many of these 999s turned out to be time-wasters – drunks or children misdialling or some idiot whose pet parrot had gone AWOL. But, equally, often the emergency was real. He would never forget one that had been given to him to handle, a distraught young woman telling him her boyfriend owed money for drugs and that he would have his kneecaps done if he didn’t pay.
Followed by the screams of both of them as the threat had been carried out.
‘Sir!’
He turned to his deputy for the shift, Matt Johns, a former Chief Petty Officer who had been a civilian call-handler for the past twenty-one years, and one of the most experienced members of staff here.
‘Yes?’
‘Got a paramedic from the ambulance service attending an accident at Shoreham Harbour. He’s just called in to say that he’s seen a suspected human body part in the bucket of a JCB digger.’
‘Oh yes?’ Ellis said, a tad cynical. He’d dispatched a unit two weeks ago to a construction site where a suspected human arm bone – a humerus – had been discovered. Subsequently, on examination, forensic archaeologist Lucy Sibun had informed him it was the leg bone – tibia – of a sheep.
‘It looks like a human arm, sir.’
‘Never did anyone any ’arm, did he?’ Ellis replied.
His gallows humour fell on deaf ears.
‘Armless, eh?’ he tried again.
To be greeted by more silence.
‘Before I send an on-call SIO, can you give me a good reason for the paramedic’s suspicion? That it’s not just the bone of a cow or a pig or a sheep?’
‘Yes, sir. None of those animals wear wristwatches. Not as a general rule.’
36
Saturday 12 August
18.30–19.30
A white lorry, with the logo and name PORTSLADE DOMESTIC APPLIANCES, drove slowly down Dyke Road Avenue, the exclusive residential street that ran along the spine of the city, dividing Brighton from Hove.
The driver, Mike Roberts, was known affectionately to his colleagues, on account of his muscle mass, as Gorilla. His colleague in the cab with him, Iain Scotland, was short, with no neck and the build of a bulldog. Scotland had begun his working life as a removals man, before a major change of career. Both men had been selected as suitable for this job for their physical strength – which they were about to need.
Dressed in the company uniform of green T-shirts with logos front and back, and blue dungarees, they were travelling slowly, peering at the house numbers and names as they cruised past gated mansion after mansion.
‘This is where I’d live if I won the lottery,’ said Roberts.
‘Yeah?’ said his colleague. ‘Well I won it three weeks ago, but I still can’t afford a pad like one of these.’
‘You won the lottery, Iain?’
‘Yup.’
‘You never told me! How much?’
‘Thirty-seven quid.’
The driver laughed. ‘And how much did that cost you?’
‘A fiver a week for the last six years, if you want to know, Mike.’
He did some quick mental arithmetic. ‘Fifteen hundred quid. Not a great return on your investment. I read you’ve more chance of being hit by lightning than winning the jackpot.’
‘You did? I read you’ve more chance of being killed by a goat.’
‘Goats kill people? How?’
‘With their horns, I suppose.’
‘I’d better beware of the missus in future.’
Iain grinned, then peering across through the driver’s window, he suddenly called out, ‘That’s it, there, Wingate House, on the right!’
The driver braked, switched on the hazard lights and pulled sharply over to the left, blocking the cycle lane. Opposite them was a substantial residence, set well back from the road, with an in-and-out circular gravel driveway and tall wrought-iron gates. An ostentatious matt-black Porsche was parked close to the front entrance.
Opening his door, Iain Scotland said, ‘I’ll run across and get him to open the gate.’
He jumped down, then looked up and down the road, taking in everything with his trained eye. There was a small blue van some distance up the road, but no parked vehicles close, and no one obviously lurking anywhere on the ground or up in any of the trees. He crossed over, up to the left-hand gate, and pressed a button on the entry panel, which had a camera lens above it. After a short delay, a wary-sounding voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘Apple,’ Iain said. Then immediately added, ‘Delivery for Mr Brown.’
After a brief pause the gates began, jerkily, to open.
He stepped out into the middle of the road, with his hands raised to stop the traffic, and the lorry began to swing across it. He walked backwards through the gates, waving the vehicle in. The driveway was wide enough for the lorry to pull up alongside the Porsche.
There was the sound of barking from inside the house. As the hydraulic hoist at the rear of the vehicle began lowering a massive cardboard box, seven feet high by four feet wide, to the ground, the front door opened and a tall man emerged, restraining a large German Shepherd by its collar. ‘It’s OK, Otto, it’s OK!’
‘Mr Kipp Brown?’ Iain Scotland enquired.
‘Do you have any news?’ Brown asked anxiously.
‘I’m afraid not, sir. May we bring this in?’
‘Yes – you OK with dogs?’
‘Fine, sir,’ he said, presenting him with an electronic pen for signature. ‘The fridge-freezer you ordered.’
Brown took it, giving him the faintest smile of acknowledgement, and scrawled his name between the two black electronic lines.
Then he stood in the doorway, still holding the dog, as the two men manhandled the vast package onto a porter’s trolley.
‘Shit!’ one said.
‘Fuck!’ said the other.
They trundled it to the bottom step, then swearing and cursing more, they manhandled it up all three steps to the front door, inside and into the hallway, where they stopped and levered the box off.
The h
all was elegantly lined with framed black-and-white photographs, some portraits of Kipp Brown, his wife and their children, one of a pretty young girl in a riding hat, astride a horse, one of a much younger Mungo, standing with a fishing rod in one hand and a large fish, and several atmospheric ones of the skeletal remains of the West Pier.
Kipp Brown shut the door behind them, but continued to keep a restraining hand on the dog’s collar.
‘Shit, you are heavy bastards!’ said Mike Roberts, addressing the package. Then both he and his colleague produced their warrant cards and showed them to Brown.
‘Detective Constable Roberts and Detective Constable Scotland of Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, sir.’
‘Nice of you to bring me a fridge I didn’t order. Just what I need,’ Brown replied sourly.
Scotland produced a Stanley knife from his dungaree pocket and proceeded to work the blade carefully down one side of the package to create an opening.
Brown was astonished to see a huge black man-mountain with a shaven head step out, immaculately attired in a sharp suit. He was followed by a slim, tall man in his twenties, also suited. Otto, startled, barked at both of them.
The man-mountain looked warily at the dog, then grinned at the creature. ‘I reckon you’re just a big wuss, aren’t you?’ He knelt and stroked him. ‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Otto,’ Brown replied.
‘Otto, you and me are going to be fine,’ he said and stood up. He pulled a warrant card out and held it up. ‘Detective Inspector Glenn Branson, Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team, sir, and this is my colleague, Acting Detective Sergeant Jack Alexander. We’re your covert negotiation team – and I’m desperate for a pee.’
Brown pointed towards the end of the hall. ‘Last door on the left.’
Branson hurried off.
Brown looked quizzically at the three remaining police officers. ‘So, where’s my fridge?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘Couldn’t fit it in the box, sir,’ Scotland said, apologetically. He pointed a finger towards the disappearing figure of Branson. ‘That big bugger took up most of the space.’