by Peter James
She should be travelling down through France in a beautiful Roller like that, too. One day, she vowed, she would. One day people would be staring up at her with envy, as she passed them in the fast lane.
It wasn’t a dream, she knew. It was her destiny.
The following week they stayed three nights in Como. Not in the famous Villa d’Este on the waterfront of the glorious lake – the kind of place where the girl in the crimson Rolls-Royce would have stayed – but in a B&B in a narrow, dusty backstreet, where she was kept awake in the small bed she had to share with Cassie by the constant blatter of mopeds and scooters.
As a treat, their parents took them for a drink at the Villa d’Este the first night. At the table next to them, at the lake’s edge, sat a beautiful family. The tanned father wore a silky white shirt, pink trousers and black loafers. The mother looked like a contessa, or maybe a movie star. They had a daughter, a few years older than herself, who was wearing a very cool dress, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had an elegant Chanel handbag. Jodie wondered if they were famous, because a waiter in a smart red jacket fawned over them repeatedly, topping up their glasses from a bottle of champagne then replacing it in the shiny silver ice bucket. The three of them were talking, animatedly. The father puffed on a large cigar and the mother was smoking a slender filter-tip cigarette.
There were beautiful people at the other tables, too. Elegant women with silk scarves and jewellery; handsome, tanned men in white shirts and sleek trousers.
Her parents seemed so drab in comparison. Her father was wearing a yellow shirt with a fish pattern, boring grey chinos, socks and sandals. Her mother was looking a little smarter but the effect was ruined by a dreary white cardigan. Cassie wore an Oasis T-shirt and jeans. It took her father an age to attract the attention of a waiter, and when one finally came he seemed so aloof, as if he could tell they did not belong there.
God, Jodie wanted to slide under the table and vanish. These are not my parents. This is not my family. I don’t know these people. Really, I don’t.
At least the weather was better here. Sunny and hot. On the second day they went on a cruise on a tourist lake-boat. She sat with her parents and Cassie on the upper deck, listening to the running commentary from the boat’s guide, as they sailed from Como to Bellagio, where they were due to stop for an hour for lunch.
Rising up behind the shoreline of the dark green water of the lake were steep, green hills, dense with olive, oleander and cypress trees. There were small towns and villages with yellow, pink and white houses, apartment blocks, church towers and factories, printing silk for the world scarf trade, the guide said. Then right on the waterfront, with their private docks and moored launches, were the grand villas of the rich and famous.
The guide pointed out each spectacular house in turn. The Versace villa, the Heinz holiday home. The Avon Cosmetics family’s summer residence. A vast extravaganza under construction by a Russian oligarch. Another vast and slightly vulgar edifice being restored by a London hedge-fund gazillionaire.
While her father took endless photographs, and Cassie, bored, played Tetris on her Gameboy, Jodie stared in awe. She’d never, in her life, seen houses like this. Their home felt like a shack in comparison. She wanted one of these places. Felt a yearning, a pang of desire deep inside her. This was the kind of place she was born to live in. She could picture the chauffeur opening the rear door of her crimson Rolls-Royce as she stepped out onto the driveway, with a clutch of designer carrier bags from Gucci, Versace, Hermès and YSL.
As the guide talked about an island they were passing on their right, which had a famous restaurant with no menu, Jodie turned to her father.
‘Daddy, how do you become rich?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How do I get to afford a place like any of those villas we’ve just seen?’
She could see the same envy she had, reflected in her father’s face. It was as if he was looking at all he had never achieved in his life, she thought. ‘How do you get to afford one of those?’
‘The way you do it, Jodie, is you marry a millionaire.’
‘Yeah, but,’ Cassie said, raising her head from her computer game. ‘Only beautiful women marry rich men.’ She turned to Jodie. ‘Which kind of rules you out.’
Jodie glared at her sister. Cassie was almost seventeen, two years older than her. It was always Cassie who got the new bicycle, which would then be passed on to her three years later. The new music system, again handed down to her when Cassie was given a newer more modern one. Even her clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from Cassie.
They were cruising past a huge villa, set back a short distance from the lake with immaculate gardens in front of it. She saw a group of people sitting at a table beneath a huge cream parasol, having a lunch party. A large, beautiful wooden Riva powerboat was moored at the bottom of stone steps down to the dock.
She stared at it. At the group of people. At the boat. She was feeling deep envy, and even deeper resentment. Why wasn’t this her?
Her father ran his fingers through Cassie’s blonde hair. ‘How are you doing, my angel?’
Cassie shrugged and nodded.
Her mother smiled at Cassie, then at her father, then took a photograph of the two of them together, as if Jodie did not exist.
‘I’m going to live in a house like that one day!’ she announced.
Her mother gave her a sweet smile. Humouring her.
22
Tuesday 24 February
‘Where the fuck did you get this, doll?’ Graham Parsons held up the memory stick. They were seated at a corner table in the Hove Deep Sea Anglers’ club on the seafront, with a blurry view through a salt-caked window of upturned fishing boats on the pebble beach. In front of him was a pint of beer. In front of Jodie was a half-pint of lime and soda. A handful of the other tables in the pub-like room were occupied on this wet Tuesday lunchtime. There was a quiet murmur of conversation in the room, and a smell of fried food.
‘Does it matter, Graham?’ she asked.
He sat in his smart suit and tie, a silk handkerchief protruding flamboyantly from his breast pocket. She was dressed in jeans, a roll-neck sweater and a black suede bomber jacket.
‘Yeah, it does. Quite a lot, doll.’
‘Oh?’
He stood up. ‘I need a fag. Be back in a minute.’
‘I’ll come with you. I could do with one, too.’
They stepped outside onto the terrace, with its empty tables and chairs. Head bowed against the icy wind and rain, Graham cupped his hand over his lighter and lit her cigarette, then his. ‘Do you have any fucking idea who you’re messing with?’
She stared out at the grey, roiling sea. ‘No, that’s why I gave it to you.’
He smoked his cigarette, holding it between his forefinger and thumb, as if it were a dart. ‘What do you know about the Russian Mafia?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘Yeah, well, you’ve just bought yourself a front-row seat. Ever hear about blood eagles?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve met a few members of the American Mafia in my time. They’re all right, in as much as you can say that. They get rid of their enemies by killing them quickly and efficiently – a double-tap – two bullets to the head. But the new generation of Russian and Eastern Bloc Mafia are different. They like to send out signals, yeah?’
‘Signals?’
‘Screw us and you’re not just going to die. You’re going to go through living hell first. Understand?’
‘What kind of living hell?’
‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone pisses them off, they’ll go into their home. Torture and kill a child in front of the family. Just to teach them a lesson. Or they’ll make the kids watch their parents being tortured to death, so they’ll know never to mess with them.’
‘I’m not scared, Graham.’
‘Yeah? Well you should be.’
They finished the
ir cigarettes and hurried back inside. Their plaice and chips was waiting for them.
As they sat down, he picked up the bottle of ketchup and shook it over his chips. ‘I heard from my sources, there was a low-life Romanian found in a posh hotel room in New York a few days ago. He’d been blood-eagled.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Believe me, you don’t want that happening to you. It was what the Vikings used to do to their enemy leaders. Place them on their stomach and flay all the skin from their backs. Then they’d use their axes to chop all the ribs away from their victim’s spine, while he was still alive. Next, they’d pull his ribs and lungs out with their bare hands and leave them sticking out, between his shoulders, so they looked like the folded wings of an eagle. If he suffered in silence, he’d be allowed into Valhalla. But if he screamed, he’d never enter.’
She shivered. ‘That happened to . . . ?’
‘That’s how the police found him in his suite at the Park Royale West. A bloke called Romeo Munteanu. Name ring a bell?’
She felt sick. A deep unease swirled through her. ‘Ro-Romeo Mount-what?’
‘Munteanu.’
She shook her head, vigorously. ‘No. Never heard that name.’
‘Good. Good to hear that.’ He gave her a long, hard stare. Then he held the memory stick up in front of her again. ‘If you don’t want to wake up one morning with your innards all pulled out, you get rid of this pretty smartly. You don’t want to mess about with these people.’
‘What does it contain?’
‘Names and addresses of the Premier League Eastern European and Russian organized-crime members in the US and their associates around the world, together with their phone numbers and email addresses – and their bank account numbers in several countries. There are police forces around the globe that would have all their Christmases come at once if they got hold of this.’
She reached forward and took the memory stick from him, slipping it into her handbag. ‘Thanks for the warning. So you cracked the password?’
‘I cracked the password.’
‘Let me have it.’
‘You want me to hand you your death warrant?’
‘I said I’m not scared. Not of anyone, Graham.’
‘You bleedin’ well should be.’
‘I’d much prefer to think they should be scared of me,’ she said. ‘If they’ve gone to those lengths to torture and kill, it tells me that someone wants this back rather badly. And might be willing to pay serious money for it.’
‘That’s not how these people do business,’ he replied.
‘Well, it’s how I do.’ She tipped some ketchup onto her plate, speared a chip and dunked it in the red sauce, then ate it, hungrily.
‘You’re playing with fire.’
‘So what’s new?’
23
Tuesday 24 February
Roy Grace was seated behind his desk, with a sandwich beside him, scanning the weekly Brighton & Hove Independent newspaper. When he ate alone, he always liked to read – particularly about the city – and to get as balanced a view as possible from different sources. When he had finished the paper, he turned to the ream of paperwork from the Lyon police, via Interpol, on their processing of Dr Edward Crisp. It had come through, frustratingly, in French. A local firm he’d used before, Tongue Tied, did a fast-turnaround translation job for him.
Attached was the DNA and fingerprint confirmation that this was, without doubt, the Brighton serial killer. As Grace began to eat, a prawn fell out of the sandwich onto a sheet of the report, marking it. Cursing, he picked the prawn up and put it in his mouth. His phone rang.
‘Detective Superintendent Grace,’ he answered, chewing.
‘Hey, pal, how you doing?’
Instantly he recognized the Brooklyn accent of his NYPD friend, Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, who was on the New York Mafia-busting team. ‘Doing good, thanks! How are you? How is Francene?’ He dabbed the smear off the printout, as best he could, with a paper napkin.
‘Yeah, she’s good! Listen, hope you don’t mind my calling you direct?’
‘Of course not, always!’
‘I kind of guessed I’d get a quicker answer from you than by going through the Interpol bureaucracy.’
‘Tell me?’
‘I’m dealing with a homicide here in New York. A pretty nasty one involving torture. It’s looking organized-crime related – a courier for a Russian Mafia organization we’ve had under observation for some months. He was found dead in his hotel room, at the Park Royale West. Name’s Romeo Munteanu – a Romanian national. But that’s probably not going to mean anything to you. Word on the street is he lost a bag containing a large wad of cash he was carrying for a drug deal, and no one believed his story.’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred thousand dollars. We’re trying to trace an English-woman who was with him in the bar of the hotel, we believe under an assumed name, the last time he was seen alive. Probably a long shot, but I thought you might be the person to help us find her. We’re not sure she’s necessarily connected – the bar staff we’ve interviewed say he appeared to have picked her up in the cocktail bar around seven in the evening on Wednesday last. They left the bar together around half eight. Then she checked out of the hotel just after ten that night. According to the staff she seemed pretty agitated.’
‘Do you have her name?’ Grace asked.
‘The name she checked in under was Judith Forshaw. But we’re pretty sure her real name is Jodie Bentley. It looks that way from the CCTV footage. Earlier in the day she had checked into the Four Seasons under her real name, and gave her address as her fiancé’s apartment on Park Avenue. We think she was being hounded by the media and may have switched hotels and identities to get away, although we don’t have all the details yet – the Four Seasons had a problem with their video, they’re trying to recover it, but I can send you a copy of the Park Royale’s CCTV footage if that would be useful?’
Grace jotted the names down on his pad. ‘What do you have on this Jodie Bentley, Pat?’
‘Her fiancé was a big-time financier, Walter Klein, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and about to be charged. Rather conveniently for him, he died in a skiing accident two weeks ago. Possibly suicide. According to Klein’s lawyer, she was a fortune hunter, but knew nothing about his true financial situation. The lawyer told us she’s from Brighton – which is why I’m calling, in case she’s on your radar. The address the Park Royale has for her is in a street called Western Road, in Brighton.’
‘Doesn’t ring an immediate bell,’ Grace said. ‘But she sounds quite the grieving bride-to-be, picking someone up in a bar barely two weeks later, under a different name.’
‘Oh, I hear she’s a regular sweetheart. It gets even better. Her first husband died from a snake bite some years back.’
‘She might be very unlucky – or perhaps there’s more to it,’ Grace said.
‘Well, that’s what I’m hoping to find out, Roy. There’s two other things that may or may not be related to this. In the early hours of the morning, this character, Munteanu, looking a wreck, came down to reception at the Park Royale West, frantic to find this woman. He went bananas when they told him she’d checked out and left. He tried to bribe the desk clerk into giving him her address and any other contact details. He was offering a huge amount. The clerk had to get the night manager to try to calm Munteanu down – and it was only when the manager threatened to call the police that he finally went back to his room. He was subsequently found dead, and that’s when we got involved. It was pretty nasty – a Russian ritual killing.’
Lanigan paused for a moment then continued. ‘Around midnight, earlier that same night, a cab driver in the city brought a bag of cocaine – street value of around ten thousand dollars – into the 10th Precinct police station. Said he’d found it in the back of his cab – one of his passengers had sat on it and handed it to him. He gav
e a statement about all the passengers he could remember picking up that night. One was a woman, who he said seemed in a bit of a state. He’d picked her up from the Park Royale West Hotel, and she kind of fitted the description and time. Seems like she was undecided about which airport she wanted him to take her to – she eventually decided on LaGuardia.’
‘How did she pay?’
‘Cash. Gave him a big tip, he said.’
‘Which airline terminal did he drop her off at?’
‘American. The only flight at that time of night was a badly delayed one to Washington. Judith Forshaw was on it.’
‘Judith Forshaw. Presumably she had ID?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘But she flew into the US under the name Jodie Bentley, presumably with a full ID for that, too?’
‘Uh-huh. I’ve checked with Immigration.’
‘Interesting. Why does she have multiple IDs – and even more to the point, how did she get them?’
‘It’s sounding like her dead fiancé is a very big fraudster, Roy. Word here is that it could be on the Bernie Madoff scale, a Ponzi scheme that’s defrauded investors of billions of dollars. I wouldn’t think coming up with alternative IDs would be much of a problem to a guy like him.’
‘Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot for someone to lose,’ Grace said.
‘It is. We’ve run checks on Washington flights to the UK that she might have taken. There were fifteen to the UK the following day. We have CCTV footage of this same woman arriving at Dulles Airport in Washington around midnight – a match from the CCTV footage of her in the Park Royale West lobby. We have her crossing the departures concourse, but then she seems to have disappeared into thin air.’
‘Did you check outward flight passenger manifests?’ Roy Grace asked.
‘Sure. Nothing. She vanished like a ghost.’
‘I’ve been to that airport, it’s massive,’ Grace said. ‘Wouldn’t she at least stay in New York for her fiancé’s funeral?’