Love You Dead (38 page)

‘Isn’t there a problem, sir?’ Tanja said. ‘That anyone checking would see there is no historic social media trail?’

Grace nodded. ‘You are quite right, Tanja. I discussed this with the Chief Superintendent of the Financial Crimes Unit at the City of London Police and with the Commander of the Scotland
Yard Fraud Squad.’ He smiled. ‘They’re well ahead of the curve and they anticipated these kinds of problems very early on. Almost from the get-go of so-called “social
media”, they’ve been on it. Seeding and creating false identities first on MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, and more recently on Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and all the others. Name
an identity and they have it. In our case, a reclusive multimillionaire, who’s a widower and has made the decision to leave the bulk of his estate to charity.

‘Bloody hell, that’s smart!’ Glenn said.

‘I thought so, too!’ Roy Grace replied. ‘Mostly in the police we’re constantly playing a game of catch-up with villains. Nice to think we have some visionaries who
occasionally put us ahead of the game. The Financial Crimes Unit of the City of London Police are sending one of their detectives down to advise us today.’

‘Do you have someone in mind for this undercover officer, sir?’ Tanja asked.

‘I don’t yet,’ he replied. ‘The Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team can approach the Covert Policing Unit to identify a suitable officer who has been trained in this
field. It’s actually been so well managed, historically, that no one knows who any of these people are. The normal procedure would be to use a detective from out of area, but that’s not
always possible.’

‘What about risk to the officer concerned?’ Tanja Cale asked.

‘That’s what we have to manage in the full risk assessment,’ Grace said. ‘But that’s what we all do, every day, isn’t it? We try to make our city a safer
place. To do that, all of us at some time have to take risks. I’ve never met a good police officer who, at some point, didn’t have their life on the line. The day we aren’t
willing to do that is the day to quit.’

Cale and Branson nodded.

After the meeting ended, Roy Grace called DC Maggie Bridgeman, who was the liaison officer at the Covert Policing Unit.

He gave her the specifics. He needed a male officer immediately available, who could pass as someone terminally ill in their sixties, and someone who had local knowledge.

Unfazed, as if she dealt with requests like this all day long, Bridgeman said she would check with Resourcing and get back to him.

A few minutes after ending the call, Pat Lanigan rang him back from New York.

‘Hey, pal! I got some of the other aliases you wanted. Try James Beam and George Dickel.’

‘Aren’t they American whisky distilleries?’ Grace asked.

‘You got it. Amazing to us all, seems like our mutual buddy, Tooth, has a sense of humour.’

There seemed to be so many false names involved that Grace was starting to wonder if this operation’s name should be changed from Operation Spider to Operation Alias
.
As soon as
he ended the call, he passed the information to one of his team.

Ten minutes later a Detective Constable Ballantine called him back from the Waterfront Hotel’s front desk. They had a guest named George Dickel in room 407.

Grace sometimes let excitement rule his head. That had led to Glenn Branson being shot. Had the bullet gone an inch to the right his mate would have either been dead or paralysed from the waist
down. He remembered that and other lessons. Yet at the same time adrenalin surged through him. Tooth would be a major prize – a massive prize. He had to be certain the man did not slip
through his fingers this time.

First he asked the reception desk to check that Mr Dickel was in his room, suggesting they phone up on a housekeeping pretext of checking he was happy with the way his room had been cleaned.
Then he phoned the Ops-1 Inspector, and was glad to hear the voice of the one he trusted the most, Don Mark, on the line.

Grace spoke with the Silver Commander who, within ten minutes, had an Armed Response Unit, two dog handlers and members of the Tactical Firearms Unit heading towards the Waterfront Hotel. And as
an extra precaution, Silver had the helicopter NPAS 15 on standby – hoping it wasn’t called away to another police or medical emergency, as Sussex Police no longer had an exclusive
helicopter of their own.

It wasn’t often, in his current role as Head of Major Crime, that Grace was present at operations, but this one was different. It was personal. He’d led the last manhunt for this
monster from the front, when after a ferocious struggle with Glenn Branson, Tooth had dived recklessly into a dock at Shoreham Harbour and vanished. If this really was him, and he was still alive,
Grace was determined to be the officer who finally read the evil bastard his rights, although he knew that the TFU – Tactical Firearms Unit – officers would have to secure him
first.

So for the first time in some while he grabbed his Kevlar vest off the hook on the back of his door, pulled it on and headed downstairs.

As Roy Grace raced down to the seafront in his unmarked Ford Mondeo, blue lights flashing, talking to Ops-1, he saw to his dismay that the traffic was gridlocked ahead with
roadworks.

He eventually parked up and approached the side entrance of the hotel. Guy Batchelor, also wearing a bulletproof vest under his coat, was waiting with Roy Apps, the Duty Inspector, and a tall
TFU sergeant, who quickly outlined the plan that had been agreed between him and the Silver Commander.

‘Tooth is in room 407. We’re ready to rock and roll, sir,’ Batchelor said.

‘Are we certain he’s there?’

‘There’s a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and the television’s on very loudly, which may have meant he didn’t hear the housekeeper’s call. He’s
due to check out tomorrow, so it would seem he must be here.’

‘OK, good.’

‘We’ve got TFU officers up on his floor, covering his door, the lifts and the fourth-floor fire-escape stairs, sir,’ the TFU sergeant said. ‘Up on the sixth floor, there
are more waiting. They’re ready to go in.’

That made Grace feel better. His biggest nightmare was to have another officer injured by a gunshot wound. The TFU knew what they were doing – and the risks.

‘OK,’ Grace said.

He heard from Ops-1 that the Silver Commander was satisfied everything was in place.

‘I want to be up there when they get the bastard, Guy,’ Grace said.

‘Be careful, boss,’ the DS cautioned.

‘I will. Which way are the stairs?’

Batchelor pointed.

Adrenalin surging, Grace ran up the stone staircases, his heart pounding harder with each floor. Two armed officers turned warily as he reached the fourth floor, then smiled at him.

‘All OK?’ he said, breathless and perspiring.

‘All good, guv,’ said one.

He went through into the corridor and saw the Firearms Team ready to enter the room. Two held semi-automatic rifles and two of them handguns. Another, a solidly built woman, wielded the heavy
red battering ram, affectionately known as the bosher. An instant later they all broke into a run, lumbering down the corridor and halting outside a door. Grace, standing behind them, had his view
of the room number blocked.

They paused for a moment, the two officers with rifles braced in front of the door, the two with handguns at their sides. Then their leader, a female sergeant, gave the signal. Grace had agreed
with the Silver and Firearms Commander that once the team had entered the room and secured the target, he would be called in to make the arrest.

As one officer put an electronic pass key against the door lock, the officer with the bosher standing ready, there was a click and a green light on the door lock. She kicked it open and in
unison they yelled out, ‘POLICE! POLICE! POLICE!’

The two holding the automatic rifles went through the door, yelling, ‘FREEZE! POLICE!’

At an empty room.

The television was on, with an afternoon game show playing. The bed was made, the room spotless.

Followed by the rest of the team, but with Roy Grace holding back outside for the moment, as he had been instructed, the armed officers raced across the floor and opened each of the doors for
the bathroom, the toilet and the cupboards.

But the room was bare, pristine, fully cleaned by the housekeepers as if awaiting a new guest to arrive.

Grace was given the all-clear to enter.

‘Shit!’ he said, looking around. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit!’ There was no sign that anyone had been in this room all day.

‘Do we have the right room?’ he asked the equally frustrated-looking sergeant.

‘George Dickel. Four zero seven, guv.’

Grace radioed down to Guy Batchelor and told him what they had found.

Two minutes later Batchelor radioed back. ‘That’s his room, chief. He checked in the Saturday before last.’

‘So where the hell is he?’

From behind the curtains in the sanctuary of his fifth-floor, sea-view room at the Royal Albion Hotel, Tooth watched the commotion on the seafront below him, concentrated
around the Waterfront Hotel a short distance to the west, with a wry smile.

Did that dickhead Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his team of morons really think he would make it that easy for them?

He had news for them. He was here to do a job; they could raid every hotel room in the city but they weren’t going to find him, because they weren’t going to catch up with him.

He had paid in advance for a week. But ten minutes later, unnoticed, he slipped out with his bags, then headed for the Russell Square car park to recover his rental Ford.

Roy Grace arrived back at Sussex House shortly after 5 p.m. in a despondent mood. Where the hell in this city, and under what name, was Tooth?

He went straight to MIR-1 and was pleased to see Glenn was there, as he wanted an update on Lyon. The DI apologized for Norman Potting’s absence – he’d told him he had to
attend a medical appointment – then gave Grace a short debrief on Crisp’s disappearance from custody in Lyon. It seemed the security in the hospital wing was severely lacking, but as
yet no one could explain how the man had escaped.

Disappointed as he was that the suspected serial killer had yet again evaded justice – for now – Grace was at least relieved this was not something he or any of his fellow Sussex
officers could be blamed for. He told his team the next briefing would be at 8.30 a.m. tomorrow and headed back to his office. He was badly in need of some time alone to think. But as he entered
his room, his phone was ringing.

It was Maggie Bridgeman from the Covert Policing Unit, sounding excited. ‘Roy,’ she said, ‘I think I have the perfect undercover operative for you. UC 2431. Can you give me
until tomorrow morning?’

‘Brilliant, thanks, tomorrow morning is fine!’ Then he asked, ‘Do you have a name for him?’

‘Yes – you’ll know him as J. Paul Cornel.’ She gave him some details.

Instantly, while he continued talking to her, Grace googled the name. A long list of Cornels appeared. A Paul J. Cornel on LinkedIn. One who was an attorney. One who ran a driving school. One
who had a web page on ‘Knowledge Management For Development’, whatever that was. One who was involved in the wine business. One who was an academic at Brighton University.

It was a smart choice for a name, he thought. Plenty of diversity. Then he googled images for J. Paul Cornel. A dozen different faces appeared, including a black electric guitar player, and
several other characters of differing ages and appearances.

He narrowed the search to ‘J. Paul Cornel, millionaire philanthropist’.

Over a hundred different faces and identities appeared, from John Paul Getty and a bloated John Paul Getty Junior, to people of every age and race, as well as cartoon drawings.

He tried ‘J. Paul Cornel, Brighton’.

A whole raft of hits appeared related to Brighton University.

Then, drilling down to the third page, he found what he was pretty sure was the target. An obscure photograph of a thick-set man in sunglasses, seemingly deliberately in semi-darkness, looking
as if the camera had caught him unawares and in hiding. The caption read: ‘One of the rare public appearances of reclusive Brighton-born technology billionaire J. Paul Cornel.’

It was followed by another hit, dated six years earlier. ‘English tech tycoon who made his fortune buying emerging companies in California’s Silicon Valley, stalks US baseball team
as his next trophy.’

And another: ‘Charles Johnson, 25 per cent owner of the San Francisco Giants baseball team, and Larry Baer, Chief Executive Officer, have successfully seen off a bid by reclusive ex-pat
Brit dot-com billionaire J. Paul Cornel for control of the team.’

Then a further related hit from five years ago. ‘US-domiciled billionaire and baseball fanatic Brit recluse J. Paul Cornel sets sights on Boston Red Sox after failing in bid to acquire
control of the San Francisco Giants.’

Grace smiled. Brilliant stuff ! He’d believe J. Paul Cornel was real. Hey, he’d even try to tempt him into sponsoring the rugby team!

He checked his emails; glancing down them he clicked on one he did not recognize, from someone called Kate Tate of the City of London Police Financial Crimes Unit, about the undercover
operation.

Tate said she would be with him mid-morning tomorrow.

Grace glanced at his watch. 5.30 p.m. He’d told Cleo he would try to be home early tonight. She’d sent him a picture of the inflatable baby play ring they’d ordered from Amazon
and it looked like Noah was loving it! He really looked forward to getting home and seeing it for himself.

His phone rang. It was Cassian Pewe returning the call Grace had put in half an hour ago to update him on the latest developments.

‘Maybe you should retrain as a magician, Roy,’ Pewe said. ‘I saw a very good one called Matt Wainwright. He works as a Fire and Rescue Officer and is a close magician in his
spare time. You ought to have a word with him.’