Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  It was as if, at the age of thirty-five, she had resigned herself to a life divided between work and caring for her elderly mother, and didn’t give a damn how she looked. If he had the courage to give her a makeover, the way he had modernized Roy Grace, he could transform her into a beautiful woman, he often thought. But how could he say that to her? And besides, in today’s politically correct world, you had to walk on eggshells all the time. She might fly back at him and accuse him of being sexist.

  Both of them turned at the sound of another car. A blue Ford Mondeo swung into view, pulling up next to them. Branson recognized the driver, PC Dan Pattenden from the Road Policing Unit. Beside him, hunched forward, sat an arrogant-looking man in his early fifties, with slicked-back silver hair and a suspicious expression. As he turned his head, he reminded Branson of a badger. A woman sat behind him.

  The badger climbed out and yawned, then peered around, blinking, with a weary, defeated expression. He was wearing an expensive-looking fawn Crombie coat with a velvet collar, a loud orange and brown tie and brown loafers with gold buckles, and he sported an ornate emerald ring on his wedding finger. His skin had the jaundiced pallor of fake tan and a sleepless night.

  He’d just lost his son and, regardless of who he might be in the US crime world, Glenn could not help feeling sorry for him at this moment.

  The rear door of the car flew open as if it had been kicked. Branson breathed in a sudden snatch of perfume as the woman emerged, swinging her legs out and then launching herself upright. She was a little taller than her husband, with an attractive but hard face that looked tight with grief. Her short blonde hair was fashionably styled and immaculate, and her camel coat, dark brown handbag and matching crocodile boots had a quietly expensive aura.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Revere?’ Branson said, stepping forward with his hand outstretched.

  The woman looked at him like he was air, like she didn’t speak to black people, and tossed her head disdainfully away from him.

  The man smiled meekly and gave him an even meeker nod. ‘Lou Revere,’ he said. ‘This is my wife, Fernanda.’ He shook Glenn’s hand with a much firmer grip than Glenn had expected.

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Branson and this is Detective Sergeant Moy. We’re here to take care of you and help you in any way we can, along with PC Pattenden. We are very sorry about your son. How was your journey?’

  ‘Fucking awful, if you have to know,’ the woman said, still not looking at him. ‘They had no ice on the plane. You want to believe that? No ice. And just a bunch of stale sandwiches. Do we have to stand out here in the fucking rain?’

  ‘Not at all. Let’s get inside,’ Glenn said, and indicated the way forward.

  ‘Honey,’ the man said. ‘Honey—’ He looked apologetically at the two detectives. ‘It was a last-minute thing. An associate had just flown in, luckily, and had the plane on the tarmac at La Guardia. So it picked us up from our local airport. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been here until much later – if not tomorrow.’

  ‘We paid twenty-five thousand dollars and they didn’t have any fucking ice,’ she repeated.

  Glenn Branson was finding it hard to believe that anyone whose son had just died was going to be worried by something so trivial as lack of ice, but he responded diplomatically. ‘Doesn’t sound good,’ he said, stepping forward and leading the way around to the front of the building. Then he stopped in front of the small blue door, with its frosted glass panel, beneath the gaze of the CCTV camera up above, and rang the bell.

  It was opened by Cleo Morey’s assistant, Darren Wallace. He was a cheery-looking man in his early twenties, with black hair gelled in spikes, already gowned up in blue scrubs, his trousers tucked inside white gum boots. He greeted them with a pleasant smile and ushered them inside.

  The smell hit Glenn Branson immediately, the way it always did, almost making him retch. The sickly sweet reek of Trigene disinfectant could mask, but could never get rid of, the smell of death that permeated the whole place. The smell you always took away with you on your clothes.

  They went through into a small office and were introduced to Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer. A tall, lean man, wearing a sombre dark suit, he had swarthy good looks beneath dark, buzzcut hair and thick eyebrows, and his manner was courteous and efficient.

  The Assistant Anatomical Pathology Technician then led the way along the tiled corridor, past the glass window of the isolation room. He hurried them past the open door of the post-mortem room, where three naked corpses were laid out, and into a small conference room. It had an octagonal table with eight black chairs around it and two blank whiteboards on the wall. A round clock in a stainless-steel frame was fixed to the wall. It read: 7.28.

  ‘Can I offer you any tea or coffee?’ Darren Wallace asked, indicating for them to sit down.

  Both Americans shook their heads and remained standing.

  ‘I didn’t know this was a goddamn Starbucks,’ Fernanda Revere said. ‘I’ve flown here to see my son, not to drink fucking coffee.’

  ‘Hon,’ her husband said, raising a warning hand.

  ‘Stop saying Hon, will you?’ she retorted. ‘You’re like a fucking parrot.’

  Darren Wallace exchanged a glance with the police officers, then the Coroner’s Officer addressed the Americans, speaking quietly but firmly.

  ‘Thank you for making the journey here. I appreciate it can’t be easy for you.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Fernanda Revere snapped. ‘You do, do you?’

  Philip Keay was diplomatically silent for some moments, sitting erect. Then, ignoring the question, he addressed the Reveres again, switching between them as he spoke.

  ‘I’m afraid your son suffered very bad abrasions in the accident. He has been laid on his best side, which might be the way you would like to remember him. I would recommend that you look through the glass of the viewing window.’

  ‘I haven’t flown all this way to look at my son through a window,’ Fernanda Revere said icily. ‘I want to see him, OK? I want to hold him, hug him. He’s all cold in there. He needs his mom.’

  There was another awkward exchange of glances, then Darren Wallace said, ‘Yes, of course. If you’d like to follow me. But please be prepared.’

  They all walked through a spartan waiting room, with off-white seats around the walls and a hot-drinks dispenser. The three police officers remained in there, as Darren Wallace led the Reveres and Philip Keay through the far door and into the narrow area that served as a non-denominational chapel and viewing room.

  The walls were wood-panelled to shoulder height and painted cream above. There were fake window recesses, in one of which was a display of artificial flowers in a vase, and in place of an altar was an abstract design of gold stars against a black background, set between heavy clouds. Blue boxes of tissues for the convenience of grieving visitors had been placed on shelving on both sides of the room.

  In the centre, and dominating the viewing room, was a table on which lay the shape of a human body beneath a cream, silky cover.

  Fernanda Revere began making deep, gulping sobs. Her husband put an arm around her.

  Darren Wallace delicately pulled back the cover, exposing the young man’s head, which was turned to one side. His bereavement training had taught him how to deal with almost any situation at this sensitive moment, but even so he could never predict how anyone was going to react at the sight of a dead loved one. He’d been present many times before when mothers had screamed, but never in his career had he heard anything quite like the howl this woman suddenly let rip.

  It was as if she had torn open the very bowels of hell itself.

  25

  It was over an hour before Fernanda Revere came back out of the viewing room, barely able to walk, supported by her drained-looking husband.

  Darren Wallace guided each of them to a chair at the table in the waiting room. Fernanda sat down, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and lit one.

  Politely Darren Walla
ce said, ‘I’m very sorry, but smoking is not permitted in here. You can go outside.’

  She took a deep drag, stared at him, as if he had not said a word, and blew the smoke out, then took another drag.

  Branson diplomatically passed his empty coffee cup to her. ‘You can use that as an ashtray,’ he said, giving a tacit nod to Wallace and then to his colleagues.

  Her husband spoke quietly but assertively, with a slight Brooklyn accent, as if suddenly taking command of the situation, looking at each of the police officers in turn.

  ‘My wife and I would like to know exactly what happened. How our son died. Know what I’m saying? We’ve only heard secondhand. What are you able to tell us?’

  Branson and Bella Moy turned to Dan Pattenden.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have a full picture yet, Mr and Mrs Revere,’ the Road Policing Officer said. ‘Three vehicles were involved in the accident. From witness reports so far, your son appears to have come out of a side road on to a main road, Portland Road, on the wrong side, directly into the path of an Audi car. The female driver appears to have taken avoiding action, colliding with the wall of a café. She subsequently failed a breathalyser test and was arrested on suspicion of drink driving.’

  ‘Fucking terrific,’ Fernanda Revere said, taking another deep drag.

  ‘At this stage we’re unclear as to the extent of her involvement in the actual collision,’ Pattenden said. He peered down at his notepad on the table. ‘A white Ford Transit van behind her appears to have travelled through a red stop light and struck your son, the impact sending him and his bicycle across the road, into the path of an articulated lorry coming in the opposite direction. It was the collision with this vehicle that probably caused the fatal injuries.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Articulated lorry?’ asked Lou Revere. ‘What kind of a vehicle is that?’

  ‘I guess it’s what you would call a truck in America,’ Glenn Branson said helpfully. ‘Or maybe a tractor-trailer.’

  ‘Kind of like a Mack truck?’ the husband asked.

  ‘A big truck, exactly.’

  Dan Pattenden added, ‘We have established that the lorry driver was out of hours.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Lou Revere asked.

  ‘We have strict laws in the UK governing the number of hours a lorry driver is permitted to drive before he has to take a rest. All journeys are governed by a tachometer fitted to the vehicle. From our examination of the one in the lorry involved in your son’s fatal accident, it appears the driver was over his permitted limit.’

  Fernanda Revere dropped her cigarette butt into the coffee cup, then pulled another cigarette from her handbag and said, ‘This is great. Like, this is so fucking great.’ She lit the cigarette contemptuously, before lowering her face, a solitary tear trickling down her cheek.

  ‘So, this white van?’ her husband queried. ‘What’s this guy’s story? The driver?’

  Pattenden flipped through a few pages of his pad. ‘He drove on without stopping and we don’t have a description of him at this moment. There is a full alert for the vehicle. But we have no description of the driver to go on. We are hoping that CCTV footage may provide us with something.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Fernanda Revere said. ‘You have a drunk driver, a truck driver who was over his permitted hours and a van driver who drove away from the scene, like a hit-and-run. I have that right?’

  Pattenden looked at her warily. ‘Yes. Hopefully more information will emerge as we progress our enquiries.’

  ‘You hope that, do you?’ she pressed. Her voice was pure vitriol. She pointed through the closed door. ‘That’s my son in there.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Our son. How do you think we feel?’

  Pattenden looked at her. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you feel, Mrs Revere. All that I, my Road Policing Unit and the Collision Investigation Unit can do is try to establish the facts of the incident as best we can. I’m deeply sorry for you both and for all of your relatives. I’m here to answer any questions you may have and to give you assurances that we will do all we can to establish the facts pertinent to your son’s death.’ He passed her his card. ‘These are my contact details. Please feel free to call me, any time, twenty-four-seven, and I’ll give you whatever information I can.’

  She left the card lying on the table. ‘Tell me something. Have you ever lost a child?’

  He stared back at her for some moments. ‘No. But I’m a parent, too. I can’t imagine what it would be like. I can’t imagine what you are going through and it would be presumptuous to even try.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said icily. ‘You’re right. Don’t even try to go there.’

  26

  Tooth and his associate, Yossarian, sat out on the deck area of the Shark Bite Sports Bar, overlooking the creek at the south end of Turtle Cove Marina, on Providenciales Island. Thirty miles long and five wide, Provo, as it was known to the locals, sat in the Caribbean, south of the Bahamas. It was the main tourist island in the Turks and Caicos archipelago, although it was still mostly undeveloped and that suited Tooth. The day it got too developed, he planned to move on.

  The evening air was thirty-six degrees and the humidity was high. Tooth, dressed in denims cut off at the knees, a T-shirt printed with a picture of Jimmy Page and flip-flops, was perspiring. Every few minutes he slapped at the mosquitoes that landed on his bare skin. He was smoking a Lucky Strike and drinking a Maker’s Mark bourbon on the rocks. The dog sat beside him, glaring at the world, and occasionally drank from a bowl of water on the wood-planked floor.

  It was Happy Hour in the bar and the air-conditioned interior was full of expat Brits, Americans and Canadians who mostly knew each other and regularly got drunk together in this bar. Tooth never talked to any of them. He didn’t like talking to anyone. It was his birthday today, and he was content to spend it with his associate.

  His birthday present to himself was to have his head shaved and then fuck the black girl called Tia, whom he visited most weeks in Cameos nightclub on Airport Road. She didn’t care that it was his birthday and nor did Yossarian. That was fine by him. Tooth didn’t do caring.

  There was a roar of laughter from inside the bar. A couple of weeks ago there had been gunshots. Two Haitians had come in waving semi-automatics, yelling at everyone to hit the deck and hand over their wallets. A drunk, pot-bellied expat English lawyer, dressed in a blazer, white flannels and an old school tie, pulled out a Glock .45 and shot both of them dead. Then he had shouted at the bartender for another pink gin.

  It was that kind of a place.

  Which was why Tooth chose to live here. No one asked questions and no one gave a damn. They left Tooth and his associate alone and he left them alone. He lived in a ground-floor apartment in a complex on the far side of the creek, with a small garden where his associate could crap to its heart’s content. He had a cleaning lady who would feed the dog on the occasions, two or three times a year, when he was away on business.

  The Turks and Caicos Islands were a British protectorate that the British did not need and could not afford. But because they sat strategically between Haiti, Jamaica and Florida, they were a favoured stopover for drug runners and illegal Haitian immigrants bound for the USA. The UK made a pretence of policing them and had put in a puppet governor, but mostly they left things to the corrupt local police force. The US Coast Guard had a major presence here, but they were only interested in what happened offshore.

  Nobody was interested in Tooth’s business.

  He drank two more bourbons and smoked four more cigarettes, then headed home along the dark, deserted road with his associate. This might be the last night of his life, or it might not. He’d find that out soon enough. He truly didn’t care and it wasn’t the drink talking. It was the hard piece of metal in the locked closet at his home that would decide.

  Tooth had quit school at fifteen and drifted around for a while. He fetched up in New York City, first doing shift work as a warehouse
man, then as a fitter in a Grumman fighter aircraft factory on Long Island. When George Bush Senior invaded Iraq, Tooth enlisted in the US Army. There he discovered that his natural calm gave him one particular talent. He was a very accurate long-range rifle shot.

  After two tours in that particular theatre, his commanding lieutenant recommended he apply for the Sniper School. That was the place where Tooth discovered his metier. A range of medals testifying to that hung on one wall of his apartment. Every now and then he would look at them in a detached way, as if he was in a museum looking at the life of some long-dead stranger.

  One of the items was a framed certificate for bravery he’d received for pulling a wounded colleague out of the line of fire. Part of the wording read, A Great American Patriot.

  That drunk English lawyer, in the Shark Bite Sports Bar, who had shot dead the two Haitians, had once insisted on buying him a drink a few years ago. The lawyer had sat there, knocking back a gin, nodding his head, then had asked him if he was a patriot.

  Tooth had told him no, he wasn’t a patriot, and had moved on.

  The lawyer had called out after him, ‘Good man. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel!’

  Tooth remembered those words now, as he took one last look at those medals and those framed words, on the night of his forty-second birthday. Then, as he did each year on his birthday, he went out on to his balcony with his associate, and a glass of Maker’s Mark.

  He sat smoking another cigarette, drinking another whiskey, mentally calculating his finances. He had enough to last him for another five years, at his current cash burn, he figured. He could do with another good contract. He’d accumulated about $2.5 million in his Swiss bank account, which gave him a comfort zone, but hey, he didn’t know how much longer he had to live. He had to feed his boat with fuel, his thirty-five-foot motor yacht, Long Shot, with its twin Mercedes engines that took him out hunting for his food most days.