Opening the bottom freezer section, he recoiled in revulsion. It was full of packs of dead mice and rats. He loathed these creatures. He hated rodents. Vermin. What were they doing here — treats for the cat? Was that the reason for the freeze dryer? He closed it, turned away and opened an internal door which led to a large garage, housing a dark-blue Mercedes 500SL convertible, shiny clean. He had a good look around the garage, then went back into the house, going upstairs and continuing his search.
There was a landing with a wall at the far end and five rooms leading off. He checked each of them in turn. A bedside light, plugged into a timer switch in a large bedroom, was on. It was as luxurious but as sterile as a hotel room. Three guest bedrooms equally could have belonged in a hotel. Then a small den, with a desk, bookshelves, wiring for a computer which wasn’t there, and a router.
Something struck him as strange. There were barely any photographs anywhere in the house — only the two in the living room.
He went through all the drawers in the desk. In one he found two bunches of keys, both with a yellow tag marked ‘Front Door’. He pocketed one set. Next he checked the bookshelves. There were companies that sold fake books, with hollow interiors where you could hide things like jewellery and keys. But all the books were real.
He went back out onto the landing and shone his torch up and down, noticing some scratches low down on the wall at the end of the landing.
Curious, he walked up to it and knelt. His training as a sniper in the US army had honed his eye to look for anything out of the usual in any environment he found himself in. Any signs that someone else might be there, maybe waiting to kill him.
Something had been scratching away at the paintwork, but only up to a height of about two feet. He thought about the pouches of cat food on the countertop. Had the cat been scratching? Why? Was there a mouse in the cavity beyond? He shone the beam of the torch over it. He’d learned to read tracks in the ground. Animal and human tracks. Fresh tracks and old tracks. Some of these scratches were recent, some much older. A family of mice or maybe rats breeding in the cavity? He rapped on the wall. It was hollow.
He thought about the layout of the house. The scaffolding outside. With the boarded-up window. But he’d not seen a boarded-up window in any of the rooms he’d been in.
He went downstairs and outside, and looked up at the scaffolding. The boarded-up window was, he realized, on the other side of that wall. What was behind it?
What was the cat so anxious to get at?
45
Sunday 1 March
PCs Jenny Dunn and Craig Johnson, responding on blue lights and wailing siren to the Grade One call, saw several cars pulled up ahead, just past the roundabout in front of the brightly lit Brighton Pier. A knot of people stood around, several of them vulture-like, as was usual these days at an accident scene, taking photographs on their phones.
As they drew close, slowing down, they saw a small Fiat embedded in a lamp post a short distance from a zebra crossing, its rear sticking out into the road at a skewed angle. The top half of the lamp post had snapped off, crushing the roof of the car.
Both unclipped their seat belts before the patrol car had come to a full halt. Jenny Dunn pulled on the handbrake and Johnson switched the response car’s lights to their stationary flashing mode. They jumped out, all their training for this kind of incident kicking in, and ran forward. It looked like a single vehicle RTC. Sunday night in central Brighton — possibly a drunk driver. Some of the onlookers, enjoying the last hours of the weekend, certainly looked like they’d had a drink or two. The ones standing out in the road were in danger themselves. A man in jeans and a bomber jacket was tugging frantically at the Fiat’s jammed driver’s door.
As quickly as possible, they needed to establish the status of anyone inside the car, clear the area around it, call the ambulance service — if no one had already called them — and, from the look of the impact, even from here, the Fire and Rescue would be needed too, with their cutting gear.
They pushed their way, urgently, through the growing crowd.
‘I saw it ’appen!’ a man shouted at them.
‘Bastard nearly killed me and me kid!’ shouted a woman with a pushchair.
They ran up to the car. It was an old model Fiat Panda, its bonnet embedded, in a V-shape, into the lamp post, the broken top half of which had partially flattened the roof. One person, unconscious, in the driver’s seat, his head pinned at an unnatural angle, by buckled steel, against the steering wheel. PC Dunn shone her torch in and saw the limp white airbag. A chill ran through her.
‘Oh, shite,’ she said in her strong Northern Irish accent.
PC Johnson ran back to the car to grab a roll of police cordon tape. PC Dunn radioed for an ambulance and Fire and Rescue Service — and was told both were already on their way.
46
Sunday 1 March
‘Remember,’ Johnny Spelt had said earlier that afternoon to the director of the Latest TV crew who had been shadowing them for the past week, making a documentary about the Kent, Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance service, ‘the pilot is always the best-looking person aboard the helicopter!’
In the rest room at the rear of the hangar at Redhill aerodrome, where the duty crew relaxed between call-outs, the pilots in green and the medics in red jumpsuits were seated around the table, ribbing Spelt for his remarks.
‘Best-looking?’ said Dee Springer, a short, ginger-headed Australian who was over in the UK on secondment, training for a career as a flying doctor back in her homeland. ‘In yer dreams!’
‘So in that case,’ said Declan McArthur, a tall young doctor with a shaven head and easy smile, ‘I guess we’re going to have to switch roles, Johnny!’
‘Haha!’ He bit into his cheese and pickle sandwich. It had been a long day and they were all tired. In an average twenty-four hours the Air Ambulance was called out five times. But today, in addition to interviews with the documentary film crew, they’d done five on their shift alone — the last to a motorcyclist suffering severe head injuries after a collision with a van in Eastbourne. They’d flown him to the best specialist unit for head trauma in the south-east of England, St George’s in Tooting, and had only just returned. In thirty minutes they would be going off duty. Exhausted, they were all hoping there would not be another call.
The best chance patients have of recovering fully from severe head injuries is to be treated within four hours. Had the motorcyclist been transported by road, by the time the ambulance had reached and transferred him, it would have been a good four hours and probably longer. The helicopter crew had him on the operating table in just under ninety minutes.
‘Declan,’ the former military pilot said, good-humouredly. ‘You want to take the controls? Be my guest. So long as I’m not on board when you do.’
‘Wuss!’
‘Live dangerously for once, Johnny,’ Dee Springer said.
‘Live dangerously?’ the pilot retorted. ‘I flew missions in Afghanistan. OK?’
‘Respect!’ Declan McArthur raised his hands.
‘Yeah, I’ll grant you that!’ the Australian said. ‘So don’t you find this work a bit tame after a war zone?’
‘You know what I like about this job?’ Johnny replied.
‘No, but I think you’re about to tell us,’ said Declan.
‘It’s very nice to land a helicopter without anyone shooting at you.’
Suddenly the purple phone in the room rang.