Drenched in perspiration, he crunched the car into gear and jerked forward, then stalled again. He was losing track of where he was and why he was here.
He’d engaged third instead of first. The lights behind him again flashed angrily. He started the car once more, got first, then shot forward, right in front of a taxi coming across the roundabout which also flashed its lights and hooted angrily at him. He accelerated hard onto Marine Parade, the front of the taxi filling his mirrors, still flashing its lights and hooting at him in fury.
He changed up a gear, holding the accelerator pedal to the floor, looking at the lights behind him, in front of him, all around him. Mesmerized. Two big orange globes like setting suns loomed ahead.
Then, right in front of him, almost in silhouette, he saw a woman pushing a buggy.
Zebra crossing.
The orange globes.
The woman staring at him. Frozen.
He was closing on her.
His foot stamped on the brake pedal. But it wasn’t the brake, it was the accelerator.
He swung the steering wheel wildly to the left. Almost instantly the car stopped dead, with a massive jolt, a metallic boom and, simultaneously, a loud bang, like a gunshot.
He smelled cordite.
Had he been shot?
He could see nothing through the windscreen except for the buckled bonnet pushed right up. Had he killed the woman and the child?
He stared, bewildered, around him, his ears popping. Then, in the moments before he passed out, he noticed what looked like a large spent condom hanging out of the steering wheel.
Or it could have been an octopus.
He heard someone shouting.
Then a massive bang above him sent his head crashing forward into the wheel.
44
Sunday 1 March
The wind had died down and the rain had stopped, as Tooth climbed out of the taxi at the junction of Roedean Road and Roedean Crescent. He gave the driver a ten per cent tip, knowing he was more likely to remember the people who didn’t tip than the ones who did, and strolled off into the darkness. He wore Lycra beneath his clothes and a hairnet beneath his baseball cap, to minimize any risk of dropping anything that could give an investigating team his DNA.
There were smart, detached houses all around. Mostly mock Tudor, reminding him of houses in Beverly Hills where he had once done a hit, and where he had met his dog. This was a much more likely place for Jodie Bentley to be residing than Western Road, he thought. He turned right into Roedean Crescent, and began to walk along it, looking at the house numbers and counting them down until he reached No. 191.
He stared at it. The house sat a short distance below the street. There was an alarm box high up on the front wall. A light was on in an upstairs window, and another downstairs. A swanky place, architecturally in keeping with the neighbourhood, and with an integral double garage. There was a builder’s sign by the entrance, and scaffolding had been erected along one side of the house. Behind the scaffolding, one first-floor window looked securely boarded up.
He stood still, watching the house for several minutes for any signs of movement inside. To his right he saw a bobbing light and the flash of a hi-viz jacket under a street lamp. An approaching cyclist. He took a few tentative steps down the tarmac driveway, keeping close to the bushes on the right. The cyclist passed. A few seconds later he heard a car. He held his breath, ready to step right into the bushes. But it carried on along the road above him.
He hurried down the drive and into the porch, rang the front-door bell and heard a faint, shrill ring. It was followed by silence. No frantic barking of a dog, which was good. He didn’t like having to kill dogs; it wasn’t their fault their owners were assholes. After some moments he rang again. A third time.
Then a fourth time, a real long ring.
He pushed open the letter box and peered through. The place had a feminine look about it. Parquet flooring. Contemporary furniture. Modern art on the walls.
No sign of life.
He’d figured that most likely she lived on her own. And was out right now. On a date? Gone to a movie? Away for the weekend? In another home she also owned, perhaps?
With gloved hands he pulled from his pocket a tool he had made himself, some years back. Its shell was the casing of a Swiss Army penknife. If any customs officer had searched his hold luggage, they would have dismissed this innocuous-looking piece of a traveller’s kit. But he had removed all of its tools, apart from the large blade to which he had fitted a locking device, turning it into a flick knife, the marlin spike, which also could lock into place and was the perfect length to stab someone through the eye or ear and pierce their brain, the screwdriver and the scissors which always came in handy. The rest of the tools were replaced with his set of lock-picks.
If he needed further proof about the dubious nature of the occupant of this house, it was in the length of time it took him to work away at the three heavy-duty locks that secured the front door. It was a full five minutes before it finally swung open.
He stepped into the hall, the spike protruding between his fingers, and closed the door behind him, listening for any beeps of the alarm being triggered. Then he clocked the internal keypad on the wall, close to the door. A steady green light was glowing. It had not been set. Was someone in the house?
He called out, loudly, ‘Hello?’
Silence.
The house had an empty feel and was cold. Scattered on the floor was a small amount of junk mail and one brown, official-looking envelope addressed ‘To The Occupier’. Nothing else. Switching on his torch, he went through a door on the right, into a tidy living room. There were two modern white sofas, a curved-screen television on the wall, a coffee table on which sat a glass ashtray, and two framed photographs on the mantelpiece above a large fireplace with an empty grate. One photograph was of a grey and white cat, curled on a rug on the floor. The other was a woman in jeans and a black roll-neck, grinning at the photographer, with an enormous python coiled round her neck and part of her body.
He didn’t need to check the photographs he had in his inside pocket to know this woman was his target. The woman using the names Jodie Bentley and Judith Forshaw.
He went back into the hall and down a short corridor on the far side, which led to a washroom. Then further along the hall he entered a large, high-tech kitchen, with an island unit in the centre. Lying on it was a notepad, with a blank top sheet of paper and several previous pages torn from it. In a corner, on a shelf next to a fancy oven range with an induction hob that looked like it had never been used, was a cordless handset sitting in an answering-machine cradle.
The display showed no messages. He picked up the handset and opened the calls list. It was empty. Maybe, like himself, she only used a cell phone, and kept this landline for emergencies, he speculated.
He noticed a strange, square stainless-steel machine that looked like it belonged in a laboratory rather than a kitchen. It had a raised section in the middle with several tube connectors, and a heavy-duty porthole on the front with a row of dials and switches beside it. The manufacturer’s name on it was Lyophilizer, and the model number was LABGO MN4. It was a freeze dryer. Why did she have one of these? he wondered.
On a work surface there was a box of cat-food pouches. She had a cat. Where was it? Inside or out — or was it here at all? Had she gone away and taken the cat with her? Or put it in a cattery?
He went over to the fridge. It was one of those big American fridge-freezer affairs, all plumbed in with an ice and cold-water dispenser on the outside. He opened the door and peered in, interested to see what the sell-by dates of its contents were. He noticed a pack of smoked salmon, eggs, butter, an open carton of soya milk and a half-empty bottle of skimmed milk, with four more days of life according to the date stamp. Some apples, blueberries and grapes.