Want You Dead (26 page)

He looked like thunder.

66

Thursday, 31 October

‘I’m telling you, if there was a ruddy bomb on the boat, I’d have seen it. I’ve been sailing her for damned near thirty years and I know every nut, bolt and rivet. There was no bomb. What part of that don’t any of your people understand?’ her father fulminated at Glenn Branson from the rear seat.

‘Darling, you can’t be sure,’ Red’s mother said, trying to pacify him.

‘I think it’s very nice of Detective Inspector Branson to see you home!’ Red said breezily, trying to calm them down.

‘So I suppose they’re going to blow the ruddy boat up now, are they?’ her father said.

They were travelling more slowly now, heading north on the A23 past Pyecombe. ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ Glenn Branson said from the front passenger seat. ‘They’re going to keep it under observation.’

‘It?’ her father said. ‘Boats are female. They’re going to keep
her
under observation – all right?’

‘Next left,’ Red quietly said to the driver.

They forked off, passing a garage to their right, went over a roundabout, then carried on up an incline. Red turned to her mother. ‘How are you feeling, Mummy?’

Her mother, her hair wild and windswept, was looking traumatized. ‘Have you ever tried getting into a life raft?’ she responded.

‘No.’

‘Then being winched up into a helicopter? They had the straps right up in my armpits. I thought I was going to be torn in half!’

‘At least you’re safe, Mummy.’

‘I was quite safe before, thank you, darling. Your father’s right, there was no bomb. This is all that dreadful man, isn’t it?’

The police had not wanted her parents to return to their house, for safety reasons. But they had been insistent and could not be persuaded otherwise. Like Red, they were not prepared to kowtow to Bryce. Instead, the police were now, reluctantly, having to make preparations for covert surveillance teams to protect the whole family.

They drove through the high street of the village of Henfield in silence, then turned left at the baker’s. They wound down, passing the church on their left, over a mini-roundabout, past a pub on their right, some houses on their left, with wide open fields to their right. The road narrowed to a single track.

‘Coming up on the left, one hundred yards,’ Red said.

A police car, on blues and twos, was coming towards them at high speed. Their driver braked and squeezed over to the left into the hedgerow. But instead, the patrol car turned across them and disappeared.

‘Follow him,’ Red said, conscious of the sudden prick of anxiety in her throat.

Omotoso turned left into the even narrower country lane. Almost instantly, Red smelled it. Pungent, acrid smoke. Burning paint, timber, plastic. One hundred yards on, as they rounded a bend, the stench growing worse, Red felt a sudden hard knot in her stomach. The lane was blocked with emergency vehicles. Two fire engines, a smaller fire officer’s car. Police cars and a motorcycle. An ambulance.

She could see orange flames leaping skywards. Consuming the thatched roof of a house.

Her parents’ house.

She pushed open her door before PC Omotoso had even brought the car to a total standstill, and leapt out, running, weaving through the small crowd of onlookers, stepped over two hosepipes, and finally reached the front of the house.

‘Please step back,’ a female voice said.

She ignored her, lunging on forward.
Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

Tears flooded down her face, the hideous smoke stinging her eyes. It seemed that every inch of the house was ablaze. Burning fragments of the straw roof drifted in the air like the dying embers of Chinese lanterns. She turned her head back, towards her parents, then stopped.

She did not want to see their faces. She didn’t want to see anyone’s face. She covered her own with her hands and sobbed.

Ten miles away, in his room at the Strawberry Fields guest house, Bryce Laurent smiled in satisfaction. He liked to hear Red cry.

It was the best sound in the world.

67

Thursday, 31 October

‘We’re dealing with a ghost,’ Roy Grace said to his assembled team at the start of the evening briefing. It was a few minutes past 6.30 p.m., and he had moved the meeting into the conference room of the CID HQ, as MIR-1 was now too small to accommodate all the members of Operation Aardvark. Since the events of this morning, the extra recruits he had drafted in, including the forensic behavioural psychologist Dr Julius Proudfoot, had swelled the number on his team to thirty-six. Proudfoot was a tubby man in his late forties, with small, piggy eyes, dimpled cheeks, and thinning greying hair combed and gelled forward in a manner that did nothing for him or his hair, but his appearance belied his abilities; he came with a fine pedigree in his field.

Most of the room was taken up with an open-centred rectangular table with just enough chairs for everyone present. He had pressure coming down the line, top down. Nicola Roigard, the Police and Crime Commissioner, had raised her concerns about the spate of arson attacks to the Chief Constable, who in turn was leaning on ACC Rigg. And the buck stopped with himself, Roy knew. Every attempt was being made to locate Bryce Laurent, but for the moment he had vanished.

How the hell could he?

Extensive checks were being carried out on all of Bryce Laurent’s known aliases. Checks on credit cards, which he would need to stay in most hotels these days. Checks on car rental firms, airline tickets, railway ticket purchases, ferry passengers, fuel purchases, restaurants, food purchases at supermarkets. So far nothing. Checks had also been made on all hospitals in the area for anyone who had gone to casualty with burns of any kind, but they had revealed nothing.

No phone calls had been made for several days on the number Red Westwood had given them, which was no surprise to Roy Grace. Laurent was almost certainly now using untraceable pay-as-you-go phones, paying cash and not accessing the internet to avoid detection.

‘Sir, he might already have left the country,’ suggested DS Exton. ‘He could be anywhere in the world now, couldn’t he?’

Grace looked at him. ‘What makes you think that, Jon?’

‘Because we only know some of his aliases, and he may well have others. He could have slipped abroad without us knowing under another name and passport.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Grace saw Ray Packham from the High Tech Crime Unit slip into the room, mouthing an apology for being late and looking excited. ‘I don’t think Bryce Laurent has gone anywhere,’ Grace said. ‘Why would he? What’s he doing, and what is he doing it for? Let’s look at the pattern – if indeed he is behind it all: he’s murdered Red Westwood’s new lover. He’s torched the restaurant where he took her on their first date – and where Karl Murphy also happened to take her on their first date. Her Volkswagen Beetle car which went up in flames was tampered with – is that correct, Tony?’ He looked at Tony Gurr, the Chief Fire Investigator.

‘Yes, Roy. We would not ordinarily have examined a car of that age that had caught fire – all too commonly problems with the wiring. But because you asked us to, we looked more closely than normal, and found evidence of very subtle tampering with the car’s coil and fuel pipe. Within minutes of the engine running, the coil would have overheated, with a small amount of petrol spraying on it until it combusted.’

Grace thanked him, then continued. ‘Laurent knew how much she loved that car. He then smoked her out of her regular convenience store, and used the smokescreen to put the engagement ring he had originally given her back on her finger. Next he scares her witless with the queen of hearts on the mirror, the cartoon of her parents’ boat blowing up. And while all attention is diverted on that he sets fire to their house – Red Westwood’s family home.’ He looked back at DS Exton. ‘Do you really think he’s finished, Jon? I don’t. I think he’s on a sick campaign to terrify her by setting fire to everything she loves. But that’s not his endgame. He hasn’t finished yet. I’ve been studying patterns of other past cases of obsession, and in my opinion he’s only just started. The worst is yet to come. I don’t think he’ll have gone anywhere. He’s here, in Brighton. I’d bet the ranch on it.’

‘He is, boss,’ Ray Packham said. ‘I can take you to exactly where he is!’

68

Thursday, 31 October

Red had no appetite and no conversation. She sat having an early supper with her parents in the dining room of the Quincey Hotel on Eastbourne seafront, pushing her grilled plaice around the plate while her father dissected his steak and her mother toyed with her chicken.

‘Good piece of beef, this,’ her father said.

‘Nice chicken,’ her mother added.

Then a numbing silence.

The dining room was pleasant enough. A tad old-fashioned, with pleasant, caring staff. A chill draught blew through the windowpane, and there was bleak darkness beyond. And inside Red’s heart.

The police had put her parents in here – a safe house, they told them. They’d been booked in under assumed names. If she looked through the window hard enough, she could see a small saloon car parked a short distance along the road with two figures in it, and wondered if they were the covert police. Must be a shit job, she thought, sitting there all night, waiting for something that almost certainly was not going to happen. Bryce wasn’t stupid.

She was the stupid one.

Just what the hell had she brought on them all?

Their home razed to the ground. All their memories. Photographs. Everything. Gone.

Her fault.

The only fragment of good news was that the yacht was still intact, towed to an isolated mooring and being kept under observation by a Navy bomb disposal unit for the next forty-eight hours. If nothing exploded, it would be boarded by an expert and checked.

She sipped her wine, a heavily oaked Australian Chardonnay too sweet for her taste, but it was what her mother liked, and her ever dutiful father had ordered it for her. At least the alcohol was helping a bit. But she had to be careful because she was driving home soon, against police advice about returning to her flat.

Home.

Shit.

Fortress Westwood.

She apologized to her parents for the umpteenth time tonight, and both of them lifted their glasses and told her not to blame herself. She half hoped, at any moment, that her father would say, ‘Don’t worry, darling, things happen.’ Instead her mother said, ‘We need to know about the boat.’

Her father nodded sadly. As if the house was merely an appendage and the boat was all that mattered in their lives. ‘They promised not to blow her up,’ he said. ‘They were going to keep her under observation.’

‘I’m really sorry, you guys,’ Red said.

‘For what?’ her father asked.

‘For putting you in this situation. For that bastard setting fire to your house.’

‘We don’t know that Bryce was responsible,’ her mother said.

Red stared at her. Like she had just ridden into town on the back of a truck. ‘He is,’ she said. ‘Believe me.’

‘Is madam finished?’ the waiter said with a frown, looking at her almost untouched dish.

She nodded at him and gave a shrug. She had never felt less hungry in her life.

An hour later she entered her apartment, checking the undisturbed hair she had placed this morning high up on the front door, then slid both safety chains shut behind her. But even so, she checked the bathroom, the loo, her bedroom and then the safe room, leaving the door ajar for a quick entry if she needed it.

Then she went into the living room, poured herself a glass of wine, and lit a cigarette, inhaling the smoke gratefully. It was a bit pathetic, she thought, but although she was thirty-one years old, her parents did not know she smoked. And she knew they would not approve.

She turned the main light off for a moment, walked over to the window and peered down, always looking for a vehicle she did not recognize that might be Bryce’s.

There was no sign of her covert police team, but she presumed they were nearby. To her concern, she saw the front of a small van parked up. That had not been there five minutes ago when she had arrived home.

She felt a cold prickle of fear.

69

Thursday, 31 October

Shortly before 8 p.m., Roy Grace turned right at the bottom of Hove Street and drove along Hove seafront, with Glenn Branson, Ray Packham and Norman Potting with him in the unmarked Ford. The wind had risen, buffeting the car. To their left was lawn, the promenade, then the sea beyond; to their right a mix of modern apartments and Victorian terraced mansion blocks. He knew this area well; just a few streets along was where he and Sandy had lived.

‘This is one hell of a way to spend your stag night,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘We’re going out for drinks with the lads, however late. Yeah? They’re looking forward to it.’

‘We’ll see,’ Grace replied.

‘It’s not an option,’ Branson replied. ‘We’re getting you wrecked.’

Ignoring him, Roy Grace turned right opposite the bowling club into Westbourne Terrace, a street of elegant detached and semidetached Victorian houses, mostly painted white, and pulled over to the kerb. There was a narrower road off to the right, Westbourne Terrace Mews, with a small Victorian mansion block on either side.

The street was dark, illuminated only by streetlamps and the ambient light of the city. On their right was another unmarked Ford, with the figures of Rob Spofford and a woman PC inside. Directly in front of them was a plain white van containing a team of eight officers from the LST – the Local Support Team – which Grace had summoned. These were the tough officers, trained in public order, who were the ones equipped with body armour, who bashed doors down and went in first in any potential confrontation. Around the corner, Grace also had a dog unit on standby.

The four detectives, all wearing coats, climbed out into the chill wind, and walked over to Spofford’s car. He got out immediately he saw them. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said to Grace.