Love You Dead (10 page)

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.

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?’

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?’

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.

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
technology 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.