Love You Dead

by Peter James

  He didn’t need to check the photographs he had in his inside pocket to know this woman was his target. The woman using the names Jodie Bentley and Judith Forshaw.

  He went back into the hall and down a short corridor on the far side, which led to a washroom. Then further along the hall he entered a large, high-tech kitchen, with an island unit in the centre. Lying on it was a notepad, with a blank top sheet of paper and several previous pages torn from it. In a corner, on a shelf next to a fancy oven range with an induction hob that looked like it had never been used, was a cordless handset sitting in an answering-machine cradle.

  The display showed no messages. He picked up the handset and opened the calls list. It was empty. Maybe, like himself, she only used a cell phone, and kept this landline for emergencies, he speculated.

  He noticed a strange, square stainless-steel machine that looked like it belonged in a laboratory rather than a kitchen. It had a raised section in the middle with several tube connectors, and a heavy-duty porthole on the front with a row of dials and switches beside it. The manufacturer’s name on it was Lyophilizer, and the model number was LABGO MN4. It was a freeze dryer. Why did she have one of these? he wondered.

  On a work surface there was a box of cat-food pouches. She had a cat. Where was it? Inside or out – or was it here at all? Had she gone away and taken the cat with her? Or put it in a cattery?

  He went over to the fridge. It was one of those big American fridge-freezer affairs, all plumbed in with an ice and cold-water dispenser on the outside. He opened the door and peered in, interested to see what the sell-by dates of its contents were. He noticed a pack of smoked salmon, eggs, butter, an open carton of soya milk and a half-empty bottle of skimmed milk, with four more days of life according to the date stamp. Some apples, blueberries and grapes.

  Opening the bottom freezer section, he recoiled in revulsion. It was full of packs of dead mice and rats. He loathed these creatures. He hated rodents. Vermin. What were they doing here – treats for the cat? Was that the reason for the freeze dryer? He closed it, turned away and opened an internal door which led to a large garage, housing a dark-blue Mercedes 500SL convertible, shiny clean. He had a good look around the garage, then went back into the house, going upstairs and continuing his search.

  There was a landing with a wall at the far end and five rooms leading off. He checked each of them in turn. A bedside light, plugged into a timer switch in a large bedroom, was on. It was as luxurious but as sterile as a hotel room. Three guest bedrooms equally could have belonged in a hotel. Then a small den, with a desk, bookshelves, wiring for a computer which wasn’t there, and a router.

  Something struck him as strange. There were barely any photographs anywhere in the house – only the two in the living room.

  He went through all the drawers in the desk. In one he found two bunches of keys, both with a yellow tag marked ‘Front Door’. He pocketed one set. Next he checked the bookshelves. There were companies that sold fake books, with hollow interiors where you could hide things like jewellery and keys. But all the books were real.

  He went back out onto the landing and shone his torch up and down, noticing some scratches low down on the wall at the end of the landing.

  Curious, he walked up to it and knelt. His training as a sniper in the US army had honed his eye to look for anything out of the usual in any environment he found himself in. Any signs that someone else might be there, maybe waiting to kill him.

  Something had been scratching away at the paintwork, but only up to a height of about two feet. He thought about the pouches of cat food on the countertop. Had the cat been scratching? Why? Was there a mouse in the cavity beyond? He shone the beam of the torch over it. He’d learned to read tracks in the ground. Animal and human tracks. Fresh tracks and old tracks. Some of these scratches were recent, some much older. A family of mice or maybe rats breeding in the cavity? He rapped on the wall. It was hollow.

  He thought about the layout of the house. The scaffolding outside. With the boarded-up window. But he’d not seen a boarded-up window in any of the rooms he’d been in.

  He went downstairs and outside, and looked up at the scaffolding. The boarded-up window was, he realized, on the other side of that wall. What was behind it?

  What was the cat so anxious to get at?

  45

  Sunday 1 March

  PCs Jenny Dunn and Craig Johnson, responding on blue lights and wailing siren to the Grade One call, saw several cars pulled up ahead, just past the roundabout in front of the brightly lit Brighton Pier. A knot of people stood around, several of them vulture-like, as was usual these days at an accident scene, taking photographs on their phones.

  As they drew close, slowing down, they saw a small Fiat embedded in a lamp post a short distance from a zebra crossing, its rear sticking out into the road at a skewed angle. The top half of the lamp post had snapped off, crushing the roof of the car.

  Both unclipped their seat belts before the patrol car had come to a full halt. Jenny Dunn pulled on the handbrake and Johnson switched the response car’s lights to their stationary flashing mode. They jumped out, all their training for this kind of incident kicking in, and ran forward. It looked like a single vehicle RTC. Sunday night in central Brighton – possibly a drunk driver. Some of the onlookers, enjoying the last hours of the weekend, certainly looked like they’d had a drink or two. The ones standing out in the road were in danger themselves. A man in jeans and a bomber jacket was tugging frantically at the Fiat’s jammed driver’s door.

  As quickly as possible, they needed to establish the status of anyone inside the car, clear the area around it, call the ambulance service – if no one had already called them – and, from the look of the impact, even from here, the Fire and Rescue would be needed too, with their cutting gear.

  They pushed their way, urgently, through the growing crowd.

  ‘I saw it ’appen!’ a man shouted at them.

  ‘Bastard nearly killed me and me kid!’ shouted a woman with a pushchair.

  They ran up to the car. It was an old model Fiat Panda, its bonnet embedded, in a V-shape, into the lamp post, the broken top half of which had partially flattened the roof. One person, unconscious, in the driver’s seat, his head pinned at an unnatural angle, by buckled steel, against the steering wheel. PC Dunn shone her torch in and saw the limp white airbag. A chill ran through her.

  ‘Oh, shite,’ she said in her strong Northern Irish accent.

  PC Johnson ran back to the car to grab a roll of police cordon tape. PC Dunn radioed for an ambulance and Fire and Rescue Service – and was told both were already on their way.

  46

  Sunday 1 March

  ‘Remember,’ Johnny Spelt had said earlier that afternoon to the director of the Latest TV crew who had been shadowing them for the past week, making a documentary about the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance service, ‘the pilot is always the best-looking person aboard the helicopter!’

  In the rest room at the rear of the hangar at Redhill aerodrome, where the duty crew relaxed between call-outs, the pilots in green and the medics in red jumpsuits were seated around the table, ribbing Spelt for his remarks.

  ‘Best-looking?’ said Dee Springer, a short, ginger-headed Australian who was over in the UK on secondment, training for a career as a flying doctor back in her homeland. ‘In yer dreams!’

  ‘So in that case,’ said Declan McArthur, a tall young doctor with a shaven head and easy smile, ‘I guess we’re going to have to switch roles, Johnny!’

  ‘Haha!’ He bit into his cheese and pickle sandwich. It had been a long day and they were all tired. In an average twenty-four hours the Air Ambulance was called out five times. But today, in addition to interviews with the documentary film crew, they’d done five on their shift alone – the last to a motorcyclist suffering severe head injuries after a collision with a van in Eastbourne. They’d flown him to the best specialist unit for head trauma in the south-east of England, St
George’s in Tooting, and had only just returned. In thirty minutes they would be going off duty. Exhausted, they were all hoping there would not be another call.

  The best chance patients have of recovering fully from severe head injuries is to be treated within four hours. Had the motorcyclist been transported by road, by the time the ambulance had reached and transferred him, it would have been a good four hours and probably longer. The helicopter crew had him on the operating table in just under ninety minutes.

  ‘Declan,’ the former military pilot said, good-humouredly. ‘You want to take the controls? Be my guest. So long as I’m not on board when you do.’

  ‘Wuss!’

  ‘Live dangerously for once, Johnny,’ Dee Springer said.

  ‘Live dangerously?’ the pilot retorted. ‘I flew missions in Afghanistan. OK?’

  ‘Respect!’ Declan McArthur raised his hands.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll grant you that!’ the Australian said. ‘So don’t you find this work a bit tame after a war zone?’

  ‘You know what I like about this job?’ Johnny replied.

  ‘No, but I think you’re about to tell us,’ said Declan.

  ‘It’s very nice to land a helicopter without anyone shooting at you.’

  Suddenly the purple phone in the room rang.

  ‘Bollocks!’ the doctor said, checking his watch as he walked over to answer it. ‘Just a few more minutes and we’d be off shift! Typical!’

  ‘Bad attitude!’ chided the pilot.

  47

  Sunday 1 March

  Tooth, standing on the wooden platform on the first-floor level of the scaffolding, heard the distinct thrashing of an approaching helicopter. A short while earlier, listening to the howl of sirens, he had waited, concealed in the garden, holding the chisel and hammer he had found in the garden shed, in case they were coming to this house. But some distance away, the sirens had died down.

  Emergency vehicles attending an incident – or accident – of some kind. He set to work on the window boarding. Someone had done a thorough job, and it was a full ten minutes before he’d removed enough of the wood to be able to see into the interior of the room.

  He didn’t like what he saw.

  It was a very well-equipped reptile room, lined with glass vivariums, lamps, water pumps and timer-controlled feeders. That was the reason why she had all the dead rodents in her freezer.

  He could see snakes, including a huge python, a boa constrictor and some much smaller ones, spiders, frogs and several vivariums teeming with scorpions. Nasty-looking beige ones with tiny claws. For his last mission in the army, to Iraq, he’d been given a lecture on identifying these critters. The smaller the claws, the more deadly the sting. And the ones he could see, in a row of vivariums lined against one wall, had claws that were all but invisible.

  Jodie Bentley had weird taste in pets, he thought. Not his thing at all. He hated all these fuckers. Not much scared him, but reptiles did.

  The cat had been lucky not to scratch all the way through the wall. Didn’t it know the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’?

  He could see a glass door, but it looked like there was a solid wall behind it, and that made him very curious. How come she had a room that had no apparent door into it?

  The helicopter was coming closer. He looked up and saw the lights only a short distance away. For a moment he wondered if it was a police helicopter looking for him, and flattened himself against the house.

  48

  Sunday 1 March

  The brightly lit skyline of Brighton was dead ahead of them in the clear night sky, as the twin-jet, black and white liveried MD 902 Explorer helicopter, flying on visual at 155 mph, tracked the A23 south. Johnny Spelt, the pilot, observed the familiar night landmarks of Shoreham power station to the west, the Palace Pier, as he still liked to call it, and the Brighton Wheel to the east of it. It was easy to see the entire shoreline – the long necklace of street lights, beyond which was the pitch dark of the English Channel.

  He lived in Brighton and knew the geography of the city intimately. A short distance in front of the Wheel was a whole cluster of flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Liaising on the radio with the police inspector on the ground, he descended to 500 feet and hovered.

  Below they could see a car embedded in a lamp post, part of which had fallen on the vehicle’s roof, with a cordon round the scene. Inside the cordon was an ambulance, a fire engine and several police cars.

  ‘Golf Kilo Sierra Sierra Alpha,’ crackled the inspector’s voice.

  ‘Golf Kilo Sierra Sierra Alpha,’ Spelt responded.

  ‘Please land in East Brighton Park, there’s a car waiting to transport you to the scene.’

  As he spoke, Spelt could see below them to the left the wide, dark area of the park at the bottom of Wilson Avenue. He pulled on his night-vision goggles, wiggling the strap around his headset, and looked down, studying the area carefully. Apart from a figure some distance away exercising a dog with a ball-thrower, and the flashing blue lights of the waiting police car, the area was deserted. Plenty of room for them. He removed the goggles and switched on the helicopter’s powerful search light, immediately able to see the greensward of the park.

  Two minutes later they touched down. With the rotors still turning, Dee Springer and Declan McArthur unclipped their safety harnesses, removed their headsets and hung them up. Then, clutching their bags of medical kit, they jumped out onto the grass, clambered into the rear of the waiting police car and were driven the half-mile to the accident scene.

  They were met at the cordon by a paramedic who briefed them quickly.

  ‘His head and legs are trapped and the fire crew is cutting him free. He appears to have severe head and spinal injuries as well as what looks like internal haemorrhaging.’

  The paramedic raised the blue and white police tape and they ducked under and ran across to the car, pulling on protective gloves and barely glancing at several police officers close by. The driver’s door had been cut free and was lying on the road, and two Fire and Rescue officers were crouched down, cutting through the front of the roof with a huge hydraulic pincer. Inside the car was a thin man, all in black, wearing a black beanie and leather gloves, his neck twisted. Dee Springer shone her torch in. The man was barely conscious. His face was the pallid colour common in any trauma victim, but blood was leaking from his eyes, nose and mouth. He was breathing in short, clearly painful bursts.

  ‘Fubar Bundy,’ she said under her breath. The gallows humour of her profession. It stood for ‘Fucked up beyond all recovery but unfortunately not dead yet’.

  Declan kneeled and spoke to the driver. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Lurrrrr,’ the driver responded.

  ‘I’m a doctor. What’s your name?’

  ‘Lurrrshhhh.’

  ‘Can you move your arms?’

  The driver raised them a fraction and half closed his hands.

  Declan heard the crackle of a radio and a siren wailing in the distance, coming closer. ‘We’ll have you out in a few minutes and we’re going to fly you to hospital.’

  Normal practice with trauma victims was to inject them with a ketamine-based anaesthetic, to restrict the capillaries and reduce blood loss. Clearly some major internal bleeding was occurring.

  He peeled off the man’s left glove, to take his pulse. Then stared in shock for some moments, as he looked at the man’s hand in the beam of his colleague’s torch. Blood was leaking out under his fingernails. He curled his finger round the man’s wrist and quickly found the median nerve. He’d been expecting him to have a weak pulse, but to his surprise it was hammering, dangerously. He counted, checking against his watch.

  One hundred and eighty, he estimated broadly after counting for twenty seconds. Enough to kill someone with a heart condition or give them a stroke. He looked back at the man’s bleeding eyes. His pupils were hugely dilated.

  ‘Have you been taking any drugs?’ he asked, gently.
<
br />   ‘Lurrrrrrrshhh. Lurrrrshhh.’ Without warning, he coughed up a large globule of bright blood which spattered on the white, sagging airbag.

  The doctor’s brain was racing. The man must have taken something – but what? Brighton was a party town. He’d attended people in a bad way here before, clubbers who’d swallowed a whole cocktail of stuff they’d bought from street dealers. But he’d never before seen symptoms quite like this.

  ‘Can you tell me what you’ve taken tonight?’ he asked, firmly but calmly.

  ‘Shnufog,’ the man murmured. His voice was almost drowned out by the grinding sound of the hydraulic cutter.

  ‘Could you say that again?’

  ‘Frog.’

  ‘Frog?’ Dee said, very gently, kneeling beside him. ‘Did you see a frog?’ she coaxed.

  The whites of his eyes were veined with red and blood ran, like tears, from between his lids. ‘Schfrog. Schnake.’

  ‘You saw a frog and a snake? Have you taken any drugs tonight?’

  The man’s eyes were closing. Declan took his pulse again. The rate was lower this time. He wasn’t sure whether this was a good or bad sign. He’d never encountered anything like this. He asked his colleague for the syringe and ketamine.

  ‘Shankle,’ the man said, suddenly. ‘Shankle.’

  ‘Stay with us!’ Dee said. ‘Please stay awake and tell us as much as you can remember. What have you taken?’

  ‘I think he said ankle,’ Declan said. He looked at the man’s face. ‘Is that it? Your ankle?’

  But his eyes were shut now and he no longer responded.

  The doctor leaned into the footwell, with his torch, pulled up the man’s trouser legs and pushed his socks down. He could see swelling and bruising round the right ankle, and two tiny pinprick marks.

  ‘Have you injected yourself?’ he asked, but got no reply.