by Peter James
She had found the grey and white moggie as she had arrived home one night, three years earlier, when the headlights of her car had picked out something lying by the kerb at the entrance to her driveway. It had been this cat, one she had never seen before, lying there barely conscious, making tiny little crying sounds. He’d had blood leaking from one ear, a broken leg and such a swollen area around his eye she thought he had lost it. He’d clearly been hit by a vehicle and just left there.
She’d scooped him up, brought him into the house, wrapped him in a blanket, then found a local twenty-four-hour emergency vet service and phoned them. When she’d told them the symptoms they’d said to come in right away but that it didn’t sound good.
The vet scanned the cat for a microchip, to see if its owner could be traced. But there wasn’t one. The unfortunate animal had a fractured skull, broken leg and ribs, bruised spleen, and a number of minor injuries as well. The vet was doubtful it would last the night. But it did, making a surprisingly rapid recovery. She’d never owned a cat before and had had no desire for one. But when the vet told her it would be put into a local animal rescue centre, she had softened and taken him home herself, regardless of the high veterinary bills yet to come for the creature’s continued recovery.
She’d done a tour of the neighbourhood, heavily disguised so no one would subsequently be able to identify her, trying to find out if anyone had lost a cat or knew who he might be, but had drawn a blank. Then she gave him every chance to wander off to his home, but he just hung around, not interested in going anywhere.
She named him Tyson, after the boxer, because he was clearly a tough guy. He was sullen, too, never quite giving her the unconditional love and affection she thought that maybe, considering what she had done, she deserved. Instead, generally regarding her as little more than his personal can-opener, he spent much of his time outside in the garden, in all weathers, or else scratching away on that wall upstairs.
Just occasionally, if she left her door open, he would stroll into her room in the middle of the night, jump onto the bed and then, purring, nuzzle up against her face affectionately, licking her and waking her up.
‘You know what, Tyson,’ she said to him one time, wide awake in the middle of the night. ‘I love you, but I just can’t figure you out. But then again, I guess you can’t figure me out either, can you? And the thing you really, really can’t figure out is what’s behind that wall, isn’t it?’
19
Sunday 22 February
Tooth, in a leather jacket, black T-shirt and chinos, sat on a sofa in a quiet corner at the rear of the Macanudo cigar bar on 63rd Street in New York, whiling away the Sunday evening by chain-smoking his Lucky Strikes and drinking Diet Cokes. A group of guys sat in front of the wall-mounted television screen at the far end of the room, watching a re-run of the Superbowl.
He didn’t do football games.
He didn’t do cold, either, and right now outside at 7 p.m. it was freezing cold, dark and sleeting. He shot a glance around the room, which was decorated like a gentleman’s club and dimly lit. It was the way bars used to be in the years before the smoking ban had turned smokers like him into exiles in most places in the western world.
Apart from the waitress, who occasionally came over to check on his drink, no one took any notice of him.
He took from his wallet the one-hundred-dollar bill that Vishram Singh had handed him, and looked at it. Looked again at the serial number printed on it. 76458348.
One phone call yesterday evening had established it came from a sequence of numbers from the new one-hundred-dollar bills, totalling $200,000, that had been in the suitcase apparently taken from the Park Royale West suite of a scumbag Romanian called Romeo Munteanu. He was a bagman for a bunch of Russian businessmen based in the enclave called Little Odessa, down in Brooklyn, near New York’s Brighton Beach, who had become his main paymasters in the past year.
The first part of this job, for which he had been paid his requisite total fee of one million dollars in advance, into his Swiss bank account, had been accomplished. It had been to teach Romeo Munteanu a lesson that would send a signal to anyone else that his bosses were not to be messed with. That had been easy. The next part was more challenging.
Five thousand dollars, handed over in the back office of the night porter, had secured him a copy of the videotape of the woman who had checked in to the hotel under the name Judith Forshaw, and a copy of the registration form she had signed. But the porter reckoned he knew who she really was. Just as he was about to tell Tooth, a news bulletin came on the small television in the office. It featured further revelations of indicted financier Walt Klein’s misconduct, stating that the scale of his fraud was even greater than at first thought. It referred to the arrival back in the USA, the previous week, of his body, accompanied by his distraught fiancée, Jodie Bentley. The images showed Jodie, looking bewildered in a storm of strobing flashlights in an airport arrivals hall, then subsequently entering the New York Four Seasons hotel.
‘No question, buddy,’ the porter had said. ‘She was all nervous, had a British accent, I think that name was a cover or something. Guess maybe she’s trying to escape the paparazzi, you know.’
The blade of his stiletto, which still had fresh blood on it from Romeo Munteanu, accompanied by his threat that the trembling porter would end up the same way as the man in Suite 5213 if he breathed a word to anyone, had also secured him the man’s silence.
The address Judith Forshaw had put on the registration form was in Western Road, Brighton, England. A seaside city he had gotten to know. He’d been there twice before, once to kill an Estonian sea captain who’d attempted to run off with a cargo of drugs, in a harbour to the west of the city. And on a second occasion to avenge the death of the son of a New York mobster – which had nearly ended badly for him. If he needed to make a transatlantic trip to Brighton, at least he would be returning to a city he knew. Most of his assignments were to places totally alien to him.
With earphones plugged in, he played the video of her in the foyer of the Park Royale West Hotel. Judith Forshaw. She had taken $200,000 that wasn’t hers.
As well as something much more important to his paymaster. Something worth more than the million-dollar fee he had been paid. A USB memory stick that his paymaster needed back. Urgently.
Tooth studied her face for some moments. He would remember it now forever. He never forgot a face.
Judith Forshaw or Jodie Bentley. He would find her.
She might have gone to LaGuardia Airport, but he reckoned that was a false trail. Her fiancé, Walter Klein, was dead. Klein was a Jewish name. He knew the Jewish tradition was to bury their dead very quickly. He imagined the funeral would be taking place sometime this coming week, assuming his body was released by the Medical Examiner. As his grieving fiancée, Jodie Bentley would surely attend. Or would she?
Walt Klein was all over the news. His assets had been frozen. Clearly Jodie had been left high and dry – why else would she do a dumb thing like robbing a stranger? Desperation?
Was she going to risk hanging around Manhattan? To see an old crook, who’d left her penniless, being put in the ground?
Would he have hung around, in her situation?
He didn’t think so. He’d have gotten the first plane out of this freezing hellhole.
20
Monday 23 February
Shelby Stonor’s mate, Dean Warren, had sat opposite him in the pub a few weeks ago.
‘You know what you is, don’t you? An effing dinosaur!’ Dean said. ‘No one burgles houses no more. Why you faffing around, being out late at night, taking all those risks? Anyone what’s got anything worth stealing has burglar alarms, safety lights, dogs, CCTV cameras. There’s much better stuff, and with less chance of getting caught – and lighter sentences. You could make several grand a week dealing drugs or doing internet scams, yeah? Or nicking high-end cars, like what I’m into right now. Range Rovers pay the best. A simple bit of tec
hnology that scoops up their keyless door and ignition codes lets you open and drive one off in minutes. They’re paying ten grand for a top-end Rangie right now! Five grand for a convertible Merc SL! Within twelve hours of nicking ’em, they’re into a container being shipped out of Newhaven to the Middle East or Cyprus!’
‘All you have to do is nick it and deliver it somewhere?’ Stonor asked him.
‘Piece of piss,’ Warren replied. ‘You could learn to use the kit in a couple of hours. That and the garage-door opener – opens any door in seconds – I could teach you. It’s quicker with two people – we could do a bunch of cars in a night – or better, in a day. Daytime is favourite. Less chance of being stopped in daytime. Really, you could learn to use the kit, easy mate.’
But Shelby Stonor wasn’t into technology – he just didn’t really understand it – beyond the basics of texting and the internet, and taking the occasional photo on his phone. ‘Not my thing. I like my burgling, mate.’
‘All right, but you could still help me, yeah? Well – we could help each other.’
‘How?’
‘I could give you commission on any cars you spot. Rangies, Bentleys, Beemers, Mercs, Porsches – anything high value that I nick. I get given orders, like a shopping list of cars, yeah? So if you see any on your travels – like in garages, on your burgling – text me their registration and address, and I’ll give you five per cent of what I get. Fair?’
‘I just have to text you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When I see a car that might be on your list?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sounds like money for old rope.’
‘It is. That and drugs. Money for old rope.’
Stonor didn’t reply. They’d had this discussion before, arguing late into the night, increasingly less coherently as they got drunker and drunker. Dealing in drugs was immoral in a way that, in his mind, burgling wasn’t.
Drugs destroyed people’s lives. Whereas burgling was a game – always had been. You took stuff from rich people’s homes and the insurance replaced it. What was the problem? Yeah, fair dues, occasionally you took a precious heirloom, some geezer’s war medals – sentimental shit like that – and the old bloke got upset and had a whole page in Brighton’s Argus newspaper showing him looking all sad and bewildered. But people had to remember all that biblical stuff about possessions. We all come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing. Shelby hadn’t had much in his life to be sentimental about. Taken into care by social workers at the age of seven from his alcoholic mother, after her divorce from his father, he had been shunted from foster home to foster home up until the time of his first incarceration. Shelby didn’t have much understanding of sentiment. Nobody ever got a meal paid for by sentiment. But he’d had a lot of meals paid for from burgling.
He’d done his first house at the age of fifteen – a neighbour in the Whitehawk suburb of Brighton. Stupidly, he’d not worn any gloves, and he’d been nicked for that offence a few weeks later, after being arrested for joyriding. His fingerprints matched those on a video camera he’d flogged to a Brighton fence who in turn had flogged it, unwittingly, to an undercover CID officer.
By the time he came out of a young offender institution two years later, older and more streetwise, if not actually wiser, he had figured out that you faced pretty much the same length of prison sentence regardless of whether you did a poor house or a posh house. So he’d decided to specialize in Brighton’s high-end homes, where there would always be rich pickings to be had.
For the next twenty years this had netted him a good living, despite being caught on almost too many occasions to count. But prison was fine. He enjoyed reading and being inside gave him time to indulge that passion. There was television in his cell, the food was all OK and he had plenty of recidivist mates.
Now he’d been out for nearly a year – one of the longest periods of freedom he could remember – and he had been doing a lot of taking stock of his life. A decade ago his wife, Trixie, had finally tired of his endless spells in prison while she was stuck at home with their three small kids. She’d met someone and moved abroad with the kids, Robert, George and Edie, whom she’d poisoned against him.
He’d never heard from her or the little bastards again. And when he stopped to think about it, he couldn’t really blame the kids. Just how many days in all their years had he ever spent at home with them? He’d felt a stranger every time he’d walked in through the front door.
What he really wanted now, he realized, was what he had once had and lost. To be married, have kids, live in a nice house, drive a nice car. But above all to be a proper father. A parent. The father he’d never had.
But how?
Approaching forty, with 176 previous offences, that was not going to be so easy, he knew. Not many people would give him a job – and most of the limited options were menial and poorly paid. His best hope was to carry on with the lucrative trade he knew – and just hope to hell he could be smart enough not to get caught and arrested yet again.
He was seeing a new lady, Angi Bunsen. She was thirty, had her own house and a job as a book-keeper with a firm of accountants. She knew all about his past and didn’t mind. She’d told him last night, in bed, that she loved him. She wanted to have his child. He’d proposed to her as he held her in his arms and she’d said yes, she would marry him. On one condition. No more burgling. She didn’t want a husband she’d only get to see in a prison visiting room. She didn’t want to have to fib to their children that Daddy was away on business or, worse, have to take them to see him in his prison clothes and with his prison complexion.
So he’d promised her previously. Told her a white lie that he had a job stacking pallets in a car spares warehouse, often working late and night shifts, and she believed him. He felt happier tonight than he could ever remember. He wanted to buy her a ring, a great big rock, put it on her finger and take her away to somewhere beautiful in the sun, somewhere that she deserved to be.
Angi!
He really did love her. Loved her name. Loved her tenderness. Her trusting eyes. If he could only get a bit of money together to give her all the things he wanted to, and that she deserved. There were a few ways for ex-cons to make big money legally. Telephone sales was one. He’d heard from a fellow cellmate a few years ago that some telesales companies didn’t care about your background, so long as you could sell. But he wasn’t sure he was much of a salesman. Driving a cab was another option which appealed more. An owner cabbie could gross fifty grand a year in Brighton. A journeyman driver got a lot less.
But to buy a taxi plate in the city was currently £48,000. And the gap at this moment between that and what he had in his bank account was precisely £47,816. He could probably get another few hundred quid towards it from flogging his shit heap of a car – his fifteen-year-old, clapped-out rust bucket of a Fiat Panda. But for a while longer, he needed it.
Forty-eight thousand quid wasn’t an insurmountable gap. The Argus from time to time very obligingly printed a list of the top-twenty most expensive properties in the city.
It was as if they printed it just for him!
He’d wised-up in this past year out of prison. There was no point stealing cheap shit – just like the lesson he’d learned when he’d been caught burgling in Whitehawk. So he’d been doing his research on the internet, learning to identify expensive jewellery and high-value watches. He reckoned himself now to be a bit of an expert. And he’d identified a group of houses where he was likely to find these. Watched the movements of the owners over the past weeks.
He felt ready.
21
The past
It was the last summer holiday that the four of them would spend together. As usual Jodie and her sister, Cassie, sat hunched and jammed-in in the back of their mother’s ageing Saab convertible, surrounded by luggage for a three-week motoring holiday touring through France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, being blasted by the wind. They’d have be
en more comfortable in their father’s much bigger Jaguar, but he was adamant that a convertible was more fun for their holiday.
It was a cold, damp August day and their father insisted on keeping the roof down as they travelled along the French autoroute; the two girls, hair feeling like it was being torn from the roots, had a flapping tartan picnic rug over them for warmth. As their father drove, their mother attempted to keep their spirits up and boredom at bay by playing endless games. I-spy was their default game. Sometimes, instead, they would make up words from the letters on the number plate of the car in front of them. And the other game they played was spotting green Eddie Stobart and red Norbert Dentressangle lorries.
Cassie was five lorries ahead of Jodie. Cassie was always ahead of her in everything. Cassie had their mother’s blonde hair and beautiful features. Jodie had her father’s dark-brown wire-brush hair and hooked conk of a nose.
‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with R!’ their father said, glancing in the mirror. They were two hours south of Calais, in the Champagne region.
‘Rheims!’ Cassie shouted out as a sign for the city loomed ahead.
‘No!’ he replied.
‘Road sign?’ said their mother.
‘No!’
A large, crimson limousine with GB plates glided past them. Jodie saw, in the back seat, a snotty-looking girl of about her age, wearing Walkman headphones, looking down at them disdainfully.
‘Rolls-Royce!’ Jodie said.
‘Yep!’ her father said, as the Rolls pulled away into the distance.
Jodie stared at it, enviously. Why weren’t they in that car, instead of this crappy old Saab?
‘Your turn, Jodie!’ her mother said.
‘I’m bored with this silly game,’ she replied, sullenly, still watching the sleek car that was now barely a speck on the horizon. Where were those people going? To somewhere special with swimming pools and discos? They wouldn’t be staying in the kind of crummy hotels they stayed in every night, she bet.