Dead Man's Grip

by Peter James

  Sarah could not, because of her father, whose wrist was indeed broken, but she said that Justin had taken the week off to do some work on their new house and she was sure he could pick Tyler up. She said she would call back in a few minutes.

  Tooth made himself another coffee and smoked another cigarette. Then his laptop pinged again and he listened to Sarah telling Carly Chase that everything was fine. Justin, who was presumably her husband, would pick Tyler up from school at 11.15 tomorrow. Carly Chase gave her the address and thanked her.

  Tooth stared down at his notepad, on which he had written Carly Chase’s flight details. She’d only booked one way, on an open ticket. He speculated about where she was going, and had a good idea. He wondered what she was like at ten-pin bowling.

  Except he did not think she would get as far as the Reveres’ bowling alley.

  He just hoped they wouldn’t kill her, because that would spoil all his plans.

  76

  ‘We can’t let her do this,’ Roy Grace said, placing his hands on the workstation top in MIR-1 and leaning over towards Glenn Branson.

  ‘We don’t have any legal power to stop her,’ Branson replied. ‘And she’s terrified out of her wits.’

  ‘I know. I could see that. I would be, too, in her situation.’

  It was an hour since Carly Chase had left his office. Grace had a ton of urgent stuff to deal with, one of the most important of which was organizing a press conference. A lesson he had learned a long time back was that you got much better cooperation from the media by telling them about a murder, rather than waiting for them to tell you. Particularly in the case of Kevin Spinella.

  But he hadn’t been able to focus on any of that. He was desperately worried for this woman’s safety. It was 5.30 a.m. in New York and Detective Inspector Pat Lanigan’s phone went straight to voicemail. It was probably switched off. Sensible man, Grace thought. And lucky. Since he became Head of Major Crime he no longer had the luxury of being able to turn his phone off at night.

  Branson’s mobile phone was ringing. The DS raised a hand to his boss, answered it, then said curtly, ‘Can’t speak now. Bell you back.’ He killed the call. Then, looking down at the phone, said, ‘Bitch.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. Why does she hate me so much? I could understand if I’d had an affair, but I didn’t, ever. I never looked at another woman. Ari encouraged me to better myself, then it’s like – like she resented it. Said I put my career before her and my family.’ He shrugged. ‘Did you ever figure out what goes on inside a woman’s head?’

  ‘I’d like to figure out what’s going on inside this mad woman’s head,’ Grace replied.

  ‘That’s easy. I can tell you that, without a two hundred and fifty quid per hour bill from a shrink. Fear. All right, old-timer? She’s sodding terrified. And I don’t blame her. I would be, too.’

  Grace nodded. Then his phone rang. It was one of his colleagues asking him if he would be joining their regular Thursday poker game tonight. For the second week running Grace apologized, but no, he wouldn’t be. The game had been going for years and fortunately they were all police officers, so they understood about work commitments.

  ‘Got to be a shit situation when someone feels we can’t protect them. Right?’ Branson said, as Grace hung up.

  ‘We can protect them – but only if they want to be protected,’ the Detective Superintendent replied. ‘If they’re willing to move and change their identity, we can make them reasonably safe. But I can understand where she’s coming from. I wouldn’t want to leave my home, my job and take my kid out of school. But people do it all the time – they up sticks and move – and not just because they’re being hunted.’

  ‘We’re just going to let her go to New York alone? Shouldn’t we send someone with her? Bella?’

  ‘Aside from the cost, we don’t have any jurisdiction there. Our best hope for her safety is to get the New York police guarding her. We’ll keep a watch on her house – with her mother and her son on their own in it – and as a precaution, we should put a tail on the school run. Our contact in New York, Detective Investigator Lanigan, sounds a good guy. He’ll know what to do far better than anyone we can send over.’ Then Grace grimaced at his friend. ‘So, no change with Ari?’

  ‘Oh, she’s changed all right. She’s grown fucking horns out of the sides of her head.’

  77

  Carly stood in a long, snaking queue in the crowded Immigration Hall at Kennedy airport. Every few minutes she looked anxiously at her watch, which she had set back five hours to New York time, then she checked and rechecked the white Customs form she had filled in on the plane.

  Her nerves were jangling. She’d never felt less sure of herself in her life.

  The flight had been almost two hours delayed and she hoped the limousine she had ordered online was waiting. It was 10.30 p.m. in England, which meant it was 5.30 p.m. here. But it seemed like the middle of the night. Maybe that Bloody Mary, followed by a couple of glasses of Chardonnay on the plane, had not been such a good idea. She’d thought they might calm her and help her to sleep for a few hours, but now she had a blinding headache and a parched mouth, and was feeling decidedly spaced out.

  It was strange, she thought. She’d brought Tyler to New York as a pre-Xmas treat last December. They’d both felt so excited in this queue then.

  She dialled home, anxious to check on him. But just as her mother answered an angry-looking man in a uniform was in her face, pointing at a sign banning the use of mobile phones. Apologetically, Carly hung up.

  Finally, after another twenty minutes, she reached a yellow line and was next. The immigration officer, a cheery-looking plump black woman, chatted interminably with the spindly man carrying a backpack who was in front of her. Then he moved on and Carly was summoned forward. She handed over her passport. She was asked to look into a camera lens. Then she was told to press her fingers on the electronic pad.

  The woman might have smiled and joked with the previous person, but she was in no laughing mood now.

  ‘Press harder,’ she dictated.

  Carly pressed harder.

  ‘I’m not getting any reading.’

  Carly pressed harder still and finally the red lights changed to green.

  ‘Now your right thumb.’

  As she pressed down hard with her right thumb, the woman frowned at her screen.

  ‘Left thumb.’

  Carly obeyed.

  Then the woman suddenly said, ‘OK, I need you to come with me.’

  Bewildered, Carly followed her behind the line of immigration desks and through a door at the far end of the room. She saw several armed immigration officers standing chatting and several weary-looking people, from a mix of ethnic backgrounds, seated around the room, most of them staring vacantly ahead.

  ‘Mrs Carly Chase from the United Kingdom,’ the woman announced loudly, seemingly to no one in particular.

  A tall man in a checked sports jacket, plain white shirt and brown tie, ambled over to her. He spoke with a Brooklyn accent.

  ‘Mrs Chase?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Detective Investigator Lanigan from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. I’ve been asked by your police department in Sussex, England, to take care of you while you’re over here.’

  She stared back at him. In his fifties, she guessed, he had a powerful physique, a pockmarked face beneath a greying brush-cut and a concerned but friendly expression.

  ‘I understand you have the home address of Mr and Mrs Revere for me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m going to take you there.’

  She shook her head. ‘I have a car booked. I need to go alone.’

  ‘I can’t allow you to do that, Mrs Chase. That’s not going to happen.’

  The firm way he spoke made her realize that the decision had been taken and was not going to be reversed.

  Carly thought hard for a moment. ‘Look, OK, follow me to their place, but at least let me go in alone
. I can handle myself. Can I please do that?’

  He stared at her for some moments.

  ‘It’s about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from here. We’ll go in convoy. I’ll wait outside, but here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to text me every fifteen minutes so I know you’re OK. If I don’t get a text I’m coming in. Understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Do I have any option?’

  ‘Sure, you do. I can have Immigration put you on the first available flight back to London.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome, lady.’

  78

  In the back of the Lincoln Town Car it was dark and silent. Carly sat immersed in her thoughts, occasionally sipping water from one of the small bottles in the rack in the central armrest. Maybe she should have said yes to the New York detective and let Immigration put her on a flight back to England. She felt a lump in her throat and a chill of fear running through her, worsened by the cold air-conditioning in the car.

  The black leather seats and blacked-out windows made the interior feel as gloomy as her mood. The driver seemed in a bad mood, too, and had barely said two words to her since leaving the airport. Every few minutes his phone rang. He would gabble a few angry words in a language she didn’t know and hang up.

  Each time it irritated her more. She needed silence. Needed to think. She’d phoned home again as soon as she’d got into the car and her mother told her all was fine. She reminded her about Tyler’s dental appointment in the morning and wished her good luck with the scan.

  Her grandmother had died of colon cancer and now there was something in her mother’s tummy her doctor did not like the look of. Since Kes had died, her mother had been the total and utter rock in her life. And if anything happened to Carly, her mother would become Tyler’s rock too. The thought that she could get sick and die was too much for Carly to bear at this moment. She just fervently hoped and prayed the scan wouldn’t show anything.

  Then she turned her thoughts back to what she was going to say when she arrived at the Revere family’s front door. If they even let her in.

  From time to time she turned her head and looked out of the rear window. The dark grey sedan which Detective Investigator Lanigan was driving remained steadily on their tail. She felt inhibited by his presence and her instinct was that she had to be seen to be alone if she was going to have any chance with Fernanda Revere.

  Most of the time she stared out at a dull landscape of seemingly endless straight road, bordered by green verge and low trees. The sun was setting behind them and dusk was falling rapidly. In another hour it would be dark. In her mind, the meeting with the Reveres was going to have taken place in daylight. She looked at her watch. It was 7.30. She asked the driver what time he expected to arrive.

  The surly reply came back, ‘Nine or thereabouts. Lucky this isn’t summer. Be ’bout eleven then. Traffic no good in summer.’

  Her headache was worsening by the minute. As were her doubts. All the confidence she’d had earlier today was deserting her. She felt a growing slick of fear inside her. She tried in her mind to reverse the roles. How would she feel in this woman’s situation?

  She simply did not know. She felt tempted, suddenly, to ask the driver to turn around and go to the hotel she had booked and forget all about this.

  But what then?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe those two killings had been coincidental? Maybe they’d been all the revenge the family wanted? But then, thinking more lucidly, she wondered how she would ever know that. How would she stop living in fear?

  And she knew that she could not, ever, without resolving this.

  Her determination became even stronger. She had the truth on her side. All she had to do was tell the woman the truth.

  Suddenly, it seemed only minutes later, they were arriving in a town.

  ‘East Hampton,’ the driver said in a more friendly tone, as if he’d woken up to the fact that he was close to blowing his chances of a tip.

  Carly looked at her watch. It was 8.55 p.m., which meant it was 1.55 a.m. in the UK. Her stomach tightened. Her nerves were in tatters.

  Her fear deepened as the car made a right turn in front of a Mobil Oil garage and headed down a leafy lane with a double yellow line in the middle. All her clear thinking suddenly turned into a fog of panic. She was breathing deeper, perspiring, close to hyperventilating. She turned and through the rear window she saw the headlights of Detective Investigator Lanigan’s car following, and now, instead of feeling irritated, she was comforted by his presence.

  She felt a lump in her throat and a tightening knot in her stomach. Her hands were shaking. She took a few deep breaths to calm down. She tried to organize her thoughts, to rehearse that crucial way she would introduce herself. The driver’s phone rang again, but as if sensing her mood he killed the call without answering it.

  The double yellow line ended and the lane narrowed to single track. In the glare of the headlights Carly saw trim hedges on both sides of them.

  The car slowed, then halted. Directly in front of them were tall, closed gates, painted grey, with spikes along the top. There was a speaker panel and a warning sign beside that which said ARMED RESPONSE.

  ‘Want me to ring?’ the driver asked.

  She turned and peered through the rear window and saw that the detective was getting out of his car. Carly climbed out too.

  ‘Good luck, lady,’ Lanigan said. ‘Let’s see if they let you in. If they do, I’ll be waiting here. I’ll be waiting for that first text in fifteen minutes’ time. You don’t forget that, right?’

  She tried to reply, but nothing came out. Her mouth was parched and it felt like there was an iron band around her throat. She nodded.

  He entered his number on Carly’s phone and tapped in ‘OK’. ‘That’s what you’re gonna text me, every fifteen minutes.’

  The air was still and mild. Carly had dressed casually but conservatively, wearing a lightweight beige mackintosh over a dark grey jacket, plain white blouse, black jeans and black leather boots. Every shred of her confidence seemed to have deserted her and, despite the adrenalin pumping, she felt even more spaced out now. She tried to block from her mind the fact it was past 2 a.m., body time.

  She pressed the square metal button. Instantly a light shone in her face. Above it she could see a CCTV camera pointing down at her.

  A voice speaking in broken English crackled. ‘Yes, who is this?’

  Carly stared straight back at the camera and forced a smile. ‘I’ve come from England to see Mr and Mrs Revere. My name is Carly Chase.’

  ‘They expect you?’

  ‘No. I think they know who I am. I was in the accident involving their son, Tony.’

  ‘You wait, please.’

  The light went off. Carly waited, clutching her iPhone, her finger on the Send button. She turned and saw Detective Investigator Lanigan leaning against his car, smoking a cigar. He gave her a good-luck shrug. She caught a whiff of the rich smoke and it reminded her for an instant of Kes.

  A minute later, the gates began to swing open, in almost total oiled silence. There was just a faint electric whirr. Feeling sick with fear, she climbed back into the car.

  79

  Carly stepped out into the silence of the night. Above her loomed the façade of a huge modern mansion. It looked dark and unwelcoming, with barely any lights showing. She turned back to look at the limousine, having second thoughts. It was parked a few yards away on the woodchip-covered drive, close to a Porsche Cayenne sports utility vehicle. Floodlights printed stark shadows of shrubs and trees across an immaculate lawn. Her nerves shorting out, she sensed faces peering from the darkened windows down at her. She swallowed, then swallowed again, and stared at the front door, which was set beneath an imposing portico with square, modern pilasters.

  Christ, am I up to this?

  The silence was pressing in all around her. She heard the faint, distant, restless sound of the sea. She breathed in tangy, salt
y air and the scent of freshly mown grass. The normality of that scared her. These people, their life going on as normal. Their son was dead, but they still mowed the lawn. Something about that spooked her. She had not mown the lawn after Kes died. She’d let the garden go wild and the house turn into a tip around her. It was only for Tyler’s sake she eventually pulled herself together.

  Before she had a chance to change her mind, the front door opened and a woman emerged, unsteadily, dressed in a turquoise tracksuit and sparkly trainers. She had short, blonde hair, an attractive but hard face, and held a martini glass tilted at an angle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her whole demeanour was hostile.

  Carly took a few, faltering steps towards her. ‘Mrs Revere?’ She tried to put on the smile she had been practising, but it didn’t feel like it was working. ‘Fernanda Revere?’

  The woman stared at her with eyes as cold and hard as ice. Carly felt as if she was staring right through her soul.

  ‘You got fucking balls coming here.’ The words were slightly slurred and bitter. ‘You’re not welcome in my home. Get back in your car.’

  The woman scared her, but Carly stood her ground. She had been preparing herself for a whole range of different responses and this was one of them, although she had not factored in that Fernanda Revere might be smashed.

  ‘I’ve flown from England to talk to you,’ she said. ‘I just want a few minutes of your time. I’m not going to begin to pretend I understand what you must be going through – but you and I have something in common.’

  ‘We do? We’re alive, that’s about all I can see we have in common. I don’t believe we have much else.’