Want You Dead (3 page)

‘To
who
? Tut tut, Dr Murphy. Didn’t they teach you grammar at school? To
whom
!’

‘I’m not writing any damned note to anyone,’ he said defiantly.

His captor walked away. Karl struggled, tugging desperately at his bindings with his free hand. Moments later his captor returned, holding a large, dark object. He heard the sloshing of liquid. The next instant he felt liquid being poured all over his body, and smelled the unmistakable reek of petrol again. He squirmed, trying to roll away. More petrol was tipped over his head and face, stinging his eyes. Then he saw, in the beam of the torch, a small plastic cigarette lighter, held in a gloved hand.

‘Are you going to be a good boy, or do you want me to use this?’

A tidal wave of terror surged through him. ‘Look, please, I don’t know who you are or what you want. Surely we can discuss this? Just tell me what you want!’

‘I want you to write a goodbye note. Do that and I’ll go away. If you don’t, I’m going to flick this and see what happens.’

‘Please! Please don’t! Listen – this is a terrible mistake. I’m not who you think I am. My name’s Karl Murphy, I’m a GP in Brighton. I lost my wife to cancer; I have two small children who depend on me. Please don’t do this.’

‘I know exactly who you are. I won’t do anything if you write the note. I’m going to give you exactly ten seconds. Write the note and that will be the end of it, you’ll never see me again. Okay, the countdown starts. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .’

‘Okay!’ Karl Murphy screamed. ‘I’ll do it!’

His captor smiled. ‘I knew you would. You’re not a fool.’

He straightened the clipboard and stood over him. A car was approaching. Karl stared, desperately hoping it might stop. A thicket of trees and shrubs and the man’s handsome face were fleetingly illuminated. Then he could hear the sound receding into the distance. Thinking hard, Karl began to write.

When he had finished, the clipboard was snatched away. He saw the torch beam jigging through the trees, and again, alone in the darkness, tried desperately to free himself. He felt a twinge of hope as he picked at the plastic tape and a small amount came free, then tore away. He dug with his fingernails, frantically trying to find the join again. Then the torch beam reappeared through the trees.

Moments later, he found himself being hoisted into the air, slung over his captor’s shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and carried away, unsteadily, into increasing darkness.

‘Put me down!’ he said. ‘I did what you asked.’

His captor said nothing.

‘Look, please, I need to phone someone, she’s going to be worried about me.’

Silence.

The journey seemed like an eternity, occasionally lit up by stabs of the torch beam into the wooded undergrowth ahead.

‘Please, whoever you are, I wrote the note. I did what you asked.’

Silence.

Then his captor said, ‘Shit, you’re a heavy bastard.’

‘Please put me down.’

‘All in good time.’

A short while later Karl suddenly felt himself being dumped into long, wet, prickly undergrowth.

‘Arrivé!’

Hope rose in him as he felt his captor begin to loosen and remove his remaining bindings.

‘Thank you,’ he gasped.

‘You’re very welcome.’

As his legs finally became free, although numb, he gave a sigh of relief. But it was short-lived. He saw his captor step out of his overalls and discard them on the floor. An instant later he felt himself being shoved hard over onto his side, then shoved again, and he was rolling, over and over, down a steep slope, for just a few moments, before he felt himself squelch on his back into mud.

Then a waterfall of liquid was tumbling onto his face and all over his body. Petrol again, he realized, in almost paralysing terror. He tried to sit up, to haul himself to his feet, but the petrol continued to pour down. Then in the darkness above him he saw the tiny flame of a cigarette lighter.

‘Please!’ Karl screamed, his voice yammering in fear. ‘Please no! You promised if I wrote the note, you promised! Please no, please no! You promised!’

‘I lied.’

Suddenly, Karl saw a sheet of burning paper. For an instant it floated like a Chinese lantern high above him, then sank, fluttering from side to side, the flame increasing as it fell.

Bryce Laurent stood well back. An instant later, a ball of flame erupted, rising above him into the darkness. It was accompanied by a dreadful howl of agony from the doctor. Followed by screams for help that faded within seconds into choking gasps.

Then silence.

It was all over so fast.

Bryce felt a tad disappointed. Cheated, almost. He would have liked Karl Murphy to have suffered much more.

But hey, shit happened.

He bent down and picked up his overalls, which reeked of petrol, and walked back to his car.

8

Thursday morning, 24 October

Although it had been over three months now, Anthony Mascolo’s sense of pride had still not worn off as he reversed his Porsche into the parking bay marked
RESERVED FOR CAPTAIN
.

Haywards Heath Golf Club, a few miles north of Brighton, was one of the county’s most prestigious courses; becoming Captain had been his dream, and he felt a real sense of achievement at having accomplished one of his life’s ambitions. Plus, as a bonus now that he had retired from running a hairdressing empire, he was able to devote all the time this demanding role required. It was such a joy to be able to play on a Thursday morning, like today, or indeed any other day of the week, without the guilty feeling that he was skiving off work.

He savoured the scent of freshly mown grass as he removed his golf bag and trolley from the boot of the car. It was just after 8 a.m. on a glorious, late-autumn morning, the fairways sparkling with dew, and the sun climbing low through a steely blue sky. There was a chill in the air and a sense of anticipation in his heart. If he could play again today the way he had been playing for the past two weeks, he had a real chance of his handicap dropping, for the first time ever, into single figures.

That would be such a damned good feeling!

Twenty minutes later, fortified by coffee and a bacon roll, he stood with three friends and fellow members beside the white tee of the first hole, practising his swing with his driver.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Oh yes, the lessons he’d been having with the club pro throughout the summer had improved his game no end, especially getting rid of his tendency to hook the ball left. He felt confident this morning, sublimely confident.

‘Four-ball better ball, tenner a head?’ his partner, Bob Sansom, suggested.

The other three nodded. Then Anthony Mascolo teed off first. A cracker, straight off the sweet spot; he raised his head and watched the dead straight flight of the Titleist 4. The ball rolled to a halt in the wet, shorn grass, a good two hundred and fifty yards ahead, smack in the centre of the fairway.

‘Nice shot, Anthony!’ all three of his companions said, with genuine warmth. That was something he loved about this game: it might be competitive, but it was always friendly.

His second shot took him to the edge of the green, and he sank it in two putts for a very satisfying par on the first hole.

As he knelt to retrieve the ball, he smelled, very faintly, the aroma of barbecued meat. Probably coming from one of the houses surrounding the wooded course, he thought, although it was a tad early for someone to be cooking a roast. But, despite his recent bacon roll, the smell was making him feel hungry. He patted his stomach inside his jumper, aware that he had put on weight since his retirement, then concentrated on filling in the score card.

As they reached the end of the second hole, which the Captain won again, the aroma of cooked meat was even stronger. ‘Smells like someone’s having a barbecue,’ Bob Sansom said. ‘Pork chops – there’s nothing like barbecued pork chops!’

‘No, you want a rib of beef on the bone,’ Anthony Mascolo said. ‘The pink bits and the charred bits, they’re the best!’

Terry Haines, a retired stock-market analyst, frowned and looked at his watch. ‘It’s a bit bloody early! Who’s having a barbecue at 8.30 a.m.? I didn’t think the halfway hut was open this early.’

There was a catering shack at the start of the tenth hole, which was open on most fine days, selling hot dogs, bacon sarnies and drinks.

‘It’s not,’ Anthony Mascolo said.

‘Hope it’s not bloody campers again!’ said Gerry Marsh, a retired solicitor.

They’d had problems on a couple of occasions during the summer with young holidaymakers camping illegally within the grounds of the club, but they had been politely moved on.

Anthony Mascolo teed off first; but, distracted by the smell, he sliced the ball, sending it way over to the right into a dense clump of trees and shrubbery, where there was only a slender chance of ever finding one’s ball, let alone playing out of it.

He waited until the others had teed off, then played a provisional, again slicing it, but not so badly this time. It rolled to a halt a few yards short of the hedgerow and trees.

‘Fuck it!’ he murmured to himself, then strode off, his electric cart propelling itself along in front of him. His companions, all of whom had played decent shots landing on the fairway, strode over to help him look for his ball.

Taking an 8-iron from his bag, Mascolo stepped into the thicket, probing his way through a cluster of dying nettles, peering hopefully for the glint of white dimples that might be his ball. The smell of barbecued pork was even stronger here, and that made no sense to him. He lifted some brambles out of the way with his club head, trying to calculate from the path of the ball just how far it might have gone in – and what it might have struck and bounced off. Then, to his gloom, he saw the deep ditch on the far side.

It would be just his rotten luck that the ball had rolled into that. Then there really would be no recovery, and he’d have to play his provisional, which meant his next shot would be his fourth. No chance of a par on this hole.

‘This smell is making me really hungry!’ Bob Sansom said. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast because I’m trying to lose weight – now I’m bloody ravenous! I’m hallucinating roast pork and crackling!’

‘Lucky for you I’ve got a jar of apple sauce in my bag!’ joked Gerry Marsh.

‘And I’ve got gravy and potatoes!’ said Terry Haines.

Anthony Mascolo hacked his way through dense brambles to the edge of the ditch and looked down into it, gloomily expecting to see his ball lying at the bottom, probably half submerged in muddy water.

Instead, he saw something else.

‘Oh my God!’ he said.

Gerry Marsh joined him and peered down also. When he saw what his companion was looking at, he turned away, his complexion draining to sheet white, and moments later he threw his breakfast up over his two-tone golf shoes.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Terry Haines said, backing away shaking, his face drained of colour. ‘Oh God.’

In the perverse way the human brain sometimes works, as Anthony Mascolo pulled his mobile phone out of his golf bag and dialled 999, he was thinking,
Hey, we’re going to have to abandon our game here today, so I don’t have to worry about screwing up this hole!
As the full horror of what he was looking at struck home, and the reek of Gerry Marsh’s vomit hit him, he continued to stare, mesmerized, shaken to the core, then backed away, unable to look further.

A disembodied voice said, ‘Emergency, which service please?’

It was coming from his phone.

He didn’t know which service. He really didn’t. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘Ambulance. Police.’

His phone slipped from his hands into the undergrowth, and he turned away. His head was spinning. He felt giddy. He clutched a thin tree trunk for support.

9

Thursday morning, 24 October

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace sat in his office on the second floor of Sussex House, which housed the Force Crime and Justice Department and the Brighton HQ of the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team. He was sipping the remnants of an hour-old coffee, which was now somewhere between lukewarm and tepid. Several stacks of paper lay on his desk, which, along with some sixty emails in his inbox, he had been steadily working through since 7 a.m., with his tired and addled ‘baby brain’.

His son, Noah, now almost four months old, was not allowing him or his beloved Cleo much peace at night. But he didn’t mind, he was still overwhelmed with joy at having become a father. Although just one night of unbroken sleep would be nice, he thought – and soon, hopefully, he would have four!

Saturday week, in just under ten days’ time, he and Cleo were getting married. They’d originally planned their wedding, which had been subsequently postponed over legal difficulties in getting his long-vanished wife, Sandy, declared dead, to take place in a country church in the village where Cleo’s parents lived; but they’d now decided on the pretty church in Rottingdean, a coastal village annexed to the eastern extremity of Brighton, because they both liked the vicar, Father Martin, who they had met on various occasions through their work.

They were heading off for a short honeymoon the following Monday to a surprise destination for Cleo – four nights in Venice. She had mentioned a couple of times in the past how much she had always wanted to go there. He was so much looking forward to that time with her, although he knew they would miss Noah badly – but not the sleep deprivation.

However, despite his intense love of Cleo, his joy was tinged with a dark shadow. Sandy. He could not escape the guilt that continued to haunt him; the fear that just maybe, while he was getting on with his life, and happier than he had ever been, Sandy might still be suffering somewhere at the hands of a maniac who had captured her and was keeping her prisoner – or that she had died, suffering a terrible death. He did his best to push these thoughts aside, in the knowledge that he had done everything humanly possible during the past decade to find her. He turned his attention back to his workload.