by Peter James
Then he picked up his gun again and pressed it to his temple.
Yossarian looked at his master and barked, balefully.
‘You want the bullet?’ Tooth asked. ‘That what you’re telling me? You don’t need to worry about me dying, you’ll be all right when I’ve gone. Got you taken care of. Mama Missick likes you. Dunno why, but she said she’d take care of you if anything happened to me. My lawyers have my will. I’ve left everything to you. You’ll be taken care of.’
Yossarian looked at him with his one grey and one red eye, staring him out.
‘Playing mind games with me?’
He put the gun back to his temple and, still staring at the dog, pulled the trigger.
Click.
As he lowered the gun, he could swear the goddam creature was grinning at him.
‘Think that’s funny, do you?’ He aimed the gun at the dog’s head and tightened his grip on the trigger. The dog continued to grin.
Then he raised the gun in the air and pulled the trigger all the way back.
There was a loud bang. Plaster from the ceiling showered down on him. Yossarian continued grinning. Like his master, the dog didn’t do fear.
15
Thursday 19 February
Jodie had plenty of time to think on her journey back to England. She’d caught a late flight at LaGuardia to Washington and checked into an airport hotel before returning to the airport first thing and buying a ticket on another internal flight, to Atlanta, using another alias, Jemma Smith.
From there she bought a ticket on a Virgin flight to London. She figured people would be less likely to be looking out for her here in Atlanta, although due to the US immigration system, she would have to leave under the same name that she came in on, Jodie Bentley.
She had bought a thriller by a British writer called Simon Toyne, because she had liked the cover. It helped to distract her, but with all the thoughts going through her mind it was hard to concentrate for any length of time.
She had made use of her enforced stay in Washington, having her hair dyed blonde at a salon she found in the airport. And she bought some new clothes. Several times she’d thought about phoning Romeo Munteanu through the hotel, to see how much he’d pay to have the memory stick returned, but held back. She needed to know what was on it before making a move – if she made one at all.
One thing she knew for sure was that it had a value to someone, otherwise he would not have gone to such trouble to conceal it in his suitcase. And she knew for sure, too, he would be trying to track her down, although she was pretty certain, with what she had done, that she’d bought a time advantage.
On the plane to London whilst waiting for boarding to be completed, she flicked through the airline magazine. There was a travel article on Venezuela. It brought back a memory.
Emira.
Emira del Carmen Socorro! Her Venezuelan-born best friend at the posh school Jodie’s parents had sent her to – but could barely afford – The Towers Convent. Unlike Jodie, Emira Socorro was genuinely posh. Like Cassie, she was beautiful. And like Cassie, boys flocked around Emira at parties, charmed by her exotic accent. Emira’s parents had a huge Georgian country house, with both an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a lake and a butler.
Emira had taken an instant shine to Jodie and they had become firm friends, smoking secretly together, getting drunk, occasionally taking drugs. It wasn’t until some years later that Jodie realized quite why it was that Emira stuck to her so closely. It was because she was useful to her in many ways. Her plain looks made Emira shine. She lost count of the times that she played gooseberry to Emira’s endless conquests with guys. And she learned, at the age of sixteen, that the one way she could keep up with Emira was to put herself out to guys.
She became a regular one-night-stand merchant. The easy shag for drunken guys at parties who’d failed to pull the girls they were actually after. Unceremonious humps behind sofas, on piles of coats in a spare room, in the back of their mummy or daddy’s cars. And once in a potting shed that smelled of mushrooms.
She found she actually enjoyed her reputation as the local bike. She enjoyed it a lot more than the sex itself, which she didn’t mind. She carried a stash of condoms in her handbag and used to delight in boasting of her own conquests to an often-astonished Emira.
When they were eighteen they lost almost all contact. Emira went off to finishing school in Austria. Jodie went to Southampton University to study Sociology – and to get away from her parents.
The last time she saw Emira was at her friend’s twenty-first birthday party – a swanky affair at her parents’ Sussex mansion, filled with beautiful people, and where the band The Manfreds had been hired to play. Hardly anyone she knew was there and Jodie wandered around getting increasingly pissed and aggressive. Eventually she’d found herself staggering up the driveway to her family home, sometime after dawn had begun to break, unsure whether she had just shagged the guy who’d given her a lift or not.
Two years later she’d opened a copy of Hello! and seen a six-page spread of Emira’s society wedding to a young, gorgeous aristocratic rock promoter who owned a chunk of prime London real estate, a stately home in Scotland, a clifftop mansion in Barbados and a villa on Cap Ferrat.
‘It’s just so nice having a private jet. It means not having to share one’s plane journey anywhere with a bunch of strangers,’ Emira was quoted as saying. Then she was further quoted, making Jodie cringe: ‘I’m really not a snob. I have friends from all walks of life. Those are the kinds of people I grew up with, you know. Just ordinary people.’
16
Friday 20 February
Landing at Heathrow at 6.30 a.m. on Friday, Jodie had a slight hangover and was red-eyed from tiredness. She’d been too wired to sleep, so instead had watched a couple of movies, but had been unable to concentrate on them.
Now, after a shower and breakfast in the arrivals lounge, her top priority was to go home, get into her Mercedes and drive to the cattery at Coriecollies Kennels, near Lewes, to collect her beloved cat.
Her second was business.
Graham Parsons had been waiting for her at the rear of Marrocco’s, on Hove seafront, seated beneath a huge painting, almost the width of the wall, of a happy-looking fat man tucking into a lobster.
The front part of the establishment was a colourful ice-cream parlour. The rear, smart and subdued, with comfortable seating and modern art on the walls, was a seafood restaurant. A bottle of champagne sat in an ice bucket, and he had a plate of oysters in front of him.
He was a solidly built, hard-looking man, just shy of his sixtieth birthday – so he had told her the first time they met, in the downstairs bar one Saturday night in Bohemia. It was one of the few cool places in Brighton for middle-aged singles, and he was drunk, having gone out after an argument with his wife. He had poured his life story out to her. A career villain, Parsons had spent the first half of his criminal life as a professional armed robber, for which he had clocked a total of eighteen years behind bars before ‘seeing the light’.
Cybercrime.
For the past twenty years – both in prison and out – he’d been an internet criminal mastermind, running a ring that made millions out of mortgage frauds with non-existent properties, and further millions by cloning credit and debit card details from cashpoint machines.
But as with so many criminal masterminds, Proceeds of Crimes legislation had clawed back much of his gain. He was comfortably off but needed an income to maintain his lifestyle – which came in the form of a number of lucrative sidelines. One of these was creating identities to accompany the highly authentic passports he could provide – thanks to five years of sharing a cell with a master forger at the maximum security prison, Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight. Jodie was a good customer.
Parsons was living testimony to the old saw that British prisons were Universities of Crime. He was smartly dressed as always – today in a pinstriped suit, shirt and tie, sporting a gold
wedding band, a rhinestone ring on the opposite hand and a fancy watch. His hair was jet black – from a bottle, she deduced from the grey roots that were showing. Yet he wore a permanent slightly lost expression – as if freedom never really agreed with him and the only place he had been truly comfortable in his life was behind bars, running prison rackets.
‘Jodie, doll! How are you?’ He stood up, embraced her and gave her a smacker on both cheeks.
As she settled into the chair opposite him, he tugged the bottle out of the ice bucket, wiped the drips with the cloth and filled her glass. ‘Have one!’ He indicated the oysters.
She eyed them dubiously. ‘Thanks, I’m good.’
He shook some Tabasco onto an oyster, squeezed some lemon, then spooned some vinaigrette on, lifted the shell and tipped the bivalve into his mouth. ‘They’re in season!’
She smiled. ‘I’m told they make you randy.’
‘Probably why they never served ’em in prison,’ he said and grinned. ‘So, you wanted to see me urgently?’
Even though she knew they were in a safe environment, Graham never chose the same place twice to meet, she looked around discreetly before slipping the envelope across the table to him. ‘Yes.’
In an almost magician-like sleight of hand movement, it disappeared into his inside pocket. ‘So what can you tell me about it?’
‘I was given it by a friend in the States. He thought I might find it interesting. But it’s password protected.’
‘Leave it with me, doll.’ Then he shoved a menu at her. ‘Great seafood here. I like this place. Been here before?’
‘Bought an ice cream once, years ago.’
‘Pistachio – I recommend the pistachio. So you found yourself Mr Right yet?’
She sipped the champagne. ‘I thought I had. But it seems not.’
‘Yeah? When all else fails, bell me, right?’
Jodie smiled. Then she raised her glass. ‘I don’t think your wife would be too impressed, would she?’
‘Charlaine? You know what, doll – she’d get over it!’
17
Saturday 21 February
It was 5 p.m. and growing dark. The yellow Nissan cab stopped to drop off a passenger outside Macy’s department store in Herald Square, New York City, then switched on its Off Duty lights. But before it could move away, the rear door opened.
A short, shaven-headed man, carrying two Macy’s bags, head bowed against the falling snow, gave a silent job-done acknowledgement to the exiting passenger, clambered into the warmth of the rear and pulled the door shut behind him. Shit, it was cold.
There were 13,471 medallions currently issued in New York, allowing the owners to run yellow cabs. Most cabs operated twenty-four-seven, two drivers each doing twelve-hour shifts. CCTV footage from a camera outside the Park Royale West Hotel had identified the cab that had picked up Judith Forshaw at 10.17 p.m., Wednesday 18 February. It took a private detective hired by Tooth’s Russian paymaster less than two days to find it.
‘Sorry, I’m off duty, sir,’ the turbaned driver said, turning his head to see a wodge of ten-dollar bills being pushed through the small hole in the bullet-proof Perspex separating him from his passengers.
‘Start driving.’
‘I don’t think you are understanding. I am off duty now, going home.’
‘Drive!’
A car behind hooted, angrily.
‘Please, I am going home—’
‘Drive!’
There was another even longer blast of a horn behind them.
The cab lurched forward.
Tooth pressed his face up to the partition. ‘You picked up a lady at Park Royale West on Wednesday night. Remember?’
‘Wednesday?’
‘You handed in a bag of cocaine later that night. You’ve already told the police everything you know, right?’
‘I don’t remember, sir.’
Another wodge of dollar bills – hundred-dollar bills this time – came through the hole. ‘I’ll give you enough cash you won’t need to work for a week. She was my wife. I need to find her. Tell me something you didn’t tell the police.’
As they pulled up at a stop light the driver said, ‘I told them everything.’
Before he knew it, the front door opened and a moment later his passenger was sitting beside him, with a stiletto blade in his hand. Then the knife was digging into the base of his throat. ‘No, you didn’t tell them everything, did you?’
‘Please, yes, yes, I did,’ he said, terrified.
There was a bright Duane Reade sign visible through the window. Tooth clocked it out of the corner of his eye. ‘What else did she say to you?’
‘Nothing! She said nothing!’
‘Can you feel how sharp this is?’
The driver gave a terrified nod.
Tooth pressed the blade in between the man’s legs. ‘You want me to cut your dick off?’
The driver shook his head. ‘No, no, please.’
‘What did you talk about? You and the bitch?’
‘Nothing. Please, sir, nothing! I am swearing!’
‘Want me to cut your testicles off and ram them down your throat? Or would you prefer a thousand-dollar tip?’
A van hooted loudly and swerved in front of them.
‘Please, what do you want?’
‘She gave you a big tip, yes? You told the police, when you handed in the cocaine, that she gave you a hundred-dollar tip. Right?’
‘Yessir, yes, she did.’
‘Where is that hundred-dollar bill now?’
‘I – I—’
‘Don’t fuck with me. Where is it? This isn’t your cab, right?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You’re a journeyman. You drive this for someone else. What’s your name?’
‘Vishram, sir.’
‘Vishram what?’
‘Singh.’
‘OK, Vishram, where is it? The banknote? The one-hundred-dollar bill? At home? You didn’t hand it to the cab owner, did you?’
‘No,’ he stammered. ‘No. I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t bank it either, did you? You wouldn’t want to have to pay tax on that. Did you spend it?’
‘No – not yet.’
‘So you still have it?’
‘In my home, sir.’
‘Where is that?’
‘In Queens, sir.’
‘Tell you what, Vishram. I’ll do a deal with you. I’ll give you a one-thousand-dollar tip if you drive to your home right now, give me that bill, then drop me off back in downtown Manhattan. Or would you prefer I tell the cab owner you ripped him off on this tip?’
‘No, please. Please. This money I need. My wife is very sick. No insurance. I need the money for her medical bills.’
‘Do we have a deal?’
‘Yessir. Deal. Yes, please.’
Tooth suddenly wrinkled his nose in disgust at a vile stench filling the interior of the cab, and opened his window as the man drove on.
18
Sunday 22 February
My darling Jodie,
I cannot believe we are going to meet on Tuesday! Just two more sleeps, isn’t that what they say these days? I’m as excited as a teenager! You’ve said in our previous correspondence that you love fish and seafood, so I’ve booked a restaurant I’ve heard good things about, GB1 at the Grand Hotel. Meet for a drink in the bar first? How does 7.30 p.m. sound?
Your lover-in-waiting, Rowley. XX
Jodie, sitting in her den on the first floor of her house, blinds drawn against the darkness of the cold winter night – and just in case anyone might be lurking out there, watching her – typed her reply, then sent it. As she did so she heard scratching out in the corridor, behind her. ‘Tyson!’ she called out, sternly. ‘Tyson, stop that!’
The room was functional, comfortably furnished in the modern style she liked, all in white and beige, with abstract prints of no value on the walls. There were just two photographs. No memorabilia. A flat would ha
ve been more convenient, but at this stage in her career path – as she liked to think of it – a flat would not have been practical – not for what she kept here.
After her bad experience with Walt Klein, she was being more careful with Rowley Carmichael. He’d checked out fine. A high-profile London art dealer specializing in Impressionists, he seemed genuinely to have amassed a fortune and sold out to a major auction house at the top of the market. Nowhere on any of the sites on which he was mentioned was there any hint of scandal.
My gorgeous handsome Lover-In-Waiting (love it!!!). 7.30 p.m. Tuesday, in the bar of the Grand, cannot come a moment too soon. Don’t quite know how I will be able to wait until then . . .
J. XXXX
She heard more scratching. This time, exasperated, she stood up.
The cat, Tyson, whom Jodie had picked up from the cattery straight after returning home, scratched the wall at the end of the first-floor landing, repeatedly. He could smell something intriguing and possibly tantalizing on the other side. To his owner’s annoyance, Tyson came up here and did this every day. He had scratched away the paint, and was now starting to wear away the plaster behind. That’s how desperate he was to find what was on the other side.
Hearing her footsteps approaching, he turned and greeted her with a plaintive meow.
‘Tyson!’ she said with real fury – and some panic – in her voice. ‘TYSON! I told you to stop scratching!’
She’d tried everything, from spraying the wall and the carpet in front of it with stuff she had bought from a pet shop, to putting up a child-gate on the stairs, to locking him out altogether. But he always got in, always found his way back up here, always scratched away at that very same place. Because there was something on the other side, something with a strong smell. Something that was clearly driving him insane with curiosity.
‘You know what they say, don’t you, about curiosity, Tyson? Eh? Is that how you nearly died before? Curiosity? Well, just stop bloody scratching, OK?’