Love You Dead (40 page)

She didn’t do problems.

At 12.30 p.m. Roy Grace did the Asda run to get his lunch and something to drink. He’d eaten nothing since a few mouthfuls of porridge at 6 a.m., and a muffin in the
café, and he was hungry again.

His eyes ran along the superstore’s sandwich shelves, and he was tempted to get an all-day breakfast bacon and egg feast. But guilt held him back. Cleo had repeatedly warned him of the
dangers of the rubbish diet that so many police officers survived on. He looked at several cakes and doughnuts, too. Often in the past he had ignored her – and Sandy’s –
entreaties for him to eat healthily. But Noah and Cleo had added a new dimension and purpose to his life. He felt an extra strong need to take care of himself, for his family. So in the end he
bought a tuna and sweetcorn on brown bread and an apple, and allowed himself just two naughty treats, a Diet Coke and a KitKat.

As he walked across to the ‘10 Items or Less’ till he saw a rack of
Argus
newspapers. The headline read:

Good! The seed had been sown. He bought a copy.

Back in his office, Grace laid the paper in front of him. The front-page splash was accompanied by a photograph of the stocky, tanned billionaire barely recognizable, even to
himself, as Norman Potting. The accompanying story, written by a reporter he didn’t know, told of one of the city’s favourite sons, born on the Whitehawk Estate, who had truly gone west
to make his fortune in California’s Silicon Valley
.
He was now terminally ill with prostate cancer, and had decided to return home to his roots for the last months of his life.

Instead of buying a home in the city, because the doctors had told him he had so little time left, J. Paul Cornel had moved into a suite at an undisclosed hotel for a few days, before returning
to California to tie up his business affairs there. With no dependants, he was intending to look at worthy local charities to leave the bulk of his estate to, and something by which the city would
remember him. He said he hoped, if his health permitted, to return to Brighton to spend his remaining days here.

As he peeled open the wrapping round his sandwich, Roy Grace read on. J. Paul Cornel’s journey from Dorothy Stringer School – winning a scholarship to Boston’s MIT, the leading
technology university in the USA – was documented in detail as were the visionaries he’d met and helped finance on the way, including acolytes of Danny Hillis, the founder of Thinking
Machines Corporation and pioneer of the parallel processor, and of Nicholas Negroponte, head of the MIT Media Lab, plus half a dozen former employees of Apple and Microsoft.

Due to smart tax planning, the article continued, just as the
Sunday Times
Rich List team had found, Cornel’s true wealth was impossible to estimate. But many financial analysts
put it as not far short of the $17.4 billion of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.

Yes
, Grace thought.
Brilliant stuff! Yes, yes, yes!

Jodie Carmichael walked through the busy concourse of Victoria Station to the Brighton line platforms. She was in a foul mood after a distinctly unsatisfactory meeting with her
lawyers. She used a top London firm of solicitors as she felt more anonymous there than with a local Brighton firm.

She reflected, as she walked, on the costly hour and a half of advice she had received from one of the firm’s senior matrimonial law partners, Drendia Ann Edwards. Jodie had been correct,
Edwards had told her, the captain of the ship was a certified registrant and the marriage was indeed legal and binding. But, with almost unprecedented speed, a marker had already been put down by
the law firm acting for Rowley Carmichael’s children. Alarmed at the haste of their late father’s marriage – and subsequent death – she confirmed they were not accepting the
Goan Coroner’s report and, despite the fact that their father’s body was embalmed, were demanding a second post-mortem. They were prepared to take their fight to any level – and
they had pockets deep enough to do so, Edwards had warned.

Which meant she would almost certainly be in for a massive fight over Rowley’s estate, too. Something that could easily drag on for a couple of years, maybe longer, with costs that could
run into tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, which she would have to fund. At the end of the day she should certainly inherit some of his fortune – but that could easily be some while into
the future.

Most of her inheritance from her first husband, Christopher Bentley, had gone on buying the house in Roedean, and on living and travel costs. She had the $200,000 windfall from the Romanian in
New York, which would see her through for a bit, and she had a small emergency fund stashed away, but bloody Walt Klein had caused her to eat into that. She’d had to pay for everything out in
Courchevel on her own card, because both Walt’s card and the one he had given her had been declined at checkout; on top of that, she was out of pocket for that ridiculously expensive coffin
she’d bought him.

If she didn’t find another source of funding quickly, she might need to sell one of her properties. The Roedean house had soared in value in the years since she had bought it, but having
to sell and downsize would be a worst-case scenario. An admission of defeat, and an end – even if only temporarily – to her plan, to the goals she had set herself.

Perching on her Standard Class seat – the first time in years she’d not travelled First – she was feeling a slight sense of panic that she was going to have to start making
economies. She decided the first thing she would do when she got back home was sift through all the replies from the internet dating agencies that would be in her inbox, and contact a few of the
most promising ones.

She slumped back and picked up an abandoned copy of the paper on the seat next to her, which had been left open part way through. She liked to keep updated on local Brighton and Sussex news
– and especially anything that might refer or relate directly or indirectly to her.

The page seven headline of the
Argus
read:

She scanned it. A gang was operating in Brighton and Hove, breaking into houses not to burgle their contents but to get the keys to high-end cars, particularly Range Rovers and top of the range
sports cars.

She thought back to the break-in at her home. Was that what the thief had been after? Her Mercedes?

She turned a few pages and saw another, smaller headline.

She speed-read the article, which said that the police were mounting a series of spot checks in the city to catch people still over the drink-drive limit the following morning. She flipped
through a few more pages then closed the paper, and immediately the front page splash caught her eye.

She looked at the photograph of the man, read the article, then looked back at his photograph again; not that she really cared what he looked like. She was thinking to herself,
OK, I could
shag you for seventeen billion dollars. Not a problem. I could definitely be the love of your life. For the short amount you have left of it!

She actually found him quite sexy. And, she noted, the
Argus
said Cornel would be in Brighton for just a few days before returning to California to tie up his affairs there. Shit, she
was going to have to strike fast to catch him while he was here. She read on, avidly.

So how many hotels in this city would I go to ground in? she wondered. The Hotel du Vin? The Hilton Metropole? The Grand? One of the other smaller boutique hotels?

A rather
grand
hotel.

Oh, you wonderfully clever bitch of a reporter!

Tooth removed his hat and coat, and the really uncomfortable flat ladies’ shoes, which he had bought, with the rest of the outfit, from a vintage clothing shop. He
discarded the walking stick he’d picked up earlier in a charity shop, propping it against a wall, and hobbled, unaided, through to the bathroom, where he leaned on the side of the washbasin
and stared at his face in the mirror.

A hideous old lady, with Pan-Cake make-up, stared back.

She reminded him of his mother.

Taking out a face wipe, he rigorously cleaned his face of all the gunk.

Changed back into the clothes he felt comfortable in – navy chinos and a grey T-shirt – Tooth set to work. His first task, as always in a hotel room, was to cover the smoke
alarm.

Next, he lifted a corner of the bed’s mattress and saw the coil springs that held the base in place. Removing one of the springs, he took it over to his temporary workbench, the desk. He
unwound a few inches of the coiled wire, then cut it off with the pliers. Next, he folded the wire into a U-shape, and pushed it into the end of the heavy-duty insulated wire he had bought
earlier.

He programmed the mini relay for thirty seconds and connected it, via the wire, to the mercury tilt switch. Then he angled the switch downward. The mercury inside slid down to complete the
circuit to the motion sensor, which in turn would set the timer going. After exactly thirty seconds there was the flash of a spark, and a smell of burned electrics reached his nostrils.

Excellent! It worked fine.

Good, very good. He disconnected the timer.

He plugged in the coffee grinder, filled it with potassium chlorate oxygenating tablets from the aquarium supplies store, and switched the machine on. When they were ground into a small mound of
powder, he tipped it out onto the scales, and then into a tumbler from the bathroom. He repeated the process with further tablets until he had the exact amount he required.

Next, he measured out and carefully weighed some of the aluminium powder from the art shop, and tipped it into another tumbler from the bathroom. Then, very carefully, he mixed the two compounds
together.

When he was satisfied, he unscrewed one end of the steel tube and poured in the concoction.

Then he pushed in the end of the insulated wire with the bent metal of the coil spring, working it through the mixture until it was completely embedded, and secured it in place with the hot-glue
stick. As an extra safety precaution, he carefully wound insulating tape round the two exposed wires at the other end of the cable, then pushed them into the tube, followed by the mercury tilt
sensor and the Arduino relay, which fitted snugly. He replaced the screw-cap. It had been some years since he’d last made one of these, but the good thing today, he thought, was if you were
unsure about anything you could always look it up on the internet.

He searched around for a suitable hiding place for his bomb and the timer that would detonate it. One secure place presented itself: the air-conditioning grille above the door. He removed his
Swiss Army penknife from his suitcase, stood on a chair and undid the four screws holding it in place.

Five minutes later, the grille securely back in place, he climbed down off the chair, and then began to do some exercises on his legs. He had to get everything working again. He was on the mend,
but he needed to be in a lot better shape before he attempted to complete his mission. And he knew what he had to do. He checked the temperature of the gel-pack, which he had placed in an ice
bucket, wrapped it in a towel then pressed it against the worst bruise on his right leg.

To occupy himself for the ten minutes that he was going to hold it there, he opened his laptop and took a look at what was going on in Jodie Carmichael’s house.

J. Paul Cornel, installed in his vast fourth-floor suite at the Grand Hotel shortly after 4 p.m., walked around exploring his plush new surroundings. He could fit his little
flat about five times in here.

The suite, overlooking the English Channel, had a master bedroom with a huge ensuite bathroom, a second bedroom and a living room, which was decorated in Regency style with two large sofas
beneath an ornate chandelier. The four large suitcases that had accompanied him, as part of his cover, lay unopened, two of them on the trestles which the porter had helpfully placed there for him.
They were filled with clothes that had been purchased for him from an array of clothing stores around the city, as well as a classy washbag crammed with toiletries.

He put the iPhone he had been given on charge. It was loaded with hidden software, which relayed his position, down to six feet, to a round-the-clock monitored screen in an Intelligence Team
office at police HQ, as well as a voice-activated sound recorder. He popped each of the cases open and unpacked, hanging up the jackets and trousers and putting the shirts and underwear away in the
drawers. Many of the clothes bore American designer labels. An hour later he had truly moved in. The next step was to find this dangerous lady, Jodie Carmichael. Or, if his colleagues had laid the
bait according to plan, to let her find him.