Dead at First Sight

64 Tuesday 9 October

Bright lights. Headlights. Lighting up the gates from the far side. A car was approaching from the house. It would take several seconds for the electric gates to open.

Ample time to cross the road and pump a double-tap into the driver’s head.

Tooth weighed his options. He’d not been expecting any further movement until sometime tomorrow. Rush across now — or follow?

He decided on follow. Hopefully, Jules de Copeland would lead him to his colleague and he could despatch them both together. Job done. Then high-tail it out of here.

The Kia squeezed through the gates before they had finished opening. It turned right.

With his lights off, Tooth shadowed the car as it zigzagged through a network of residential streets, stopping twice — to check directions, perhaps? Then it joined a busy main road, Dyke Road Avenue. Tooth let a couple of cars pass then switched on his lights and pulled out behind them. They were crawling along and he was straining to keep an eye on the tail lights of the car he was following, which was pulling away.

It went over a green light. It was turning to amber.

Neither of the two idiots in front were going to make the light.

Recklessly, and gambling on no police cars being around, he accelerated hard past them.

The lights turned red a good two seconds before he reached them, approaching at over 60 mph. Holding his nerve, he shot across the junction, with headlights flashing at him and a horn blaring.

He glanced in his mirror. Nothing had followed him. The car was just a couple of hundred yards in front. It negotiated a roundabout, taking the third exit. Tooth followed, keeping well back, along a residential road and then down a sweeping hill beside Brighton railway station. It stopped at a red light and he pulled up well short.

When the light turned green, Tooth allowed the Kia to go on ahead for some seconds. Then he cursed as the lights changed again, much sooner than he had anticipated. Again he had to jump a red to keep up.

Where was Copeland going?

He followed the car down through the city centre towards the seafront, where it turned left. It passed the Palace Pier then carried on along Marine Parade, the upper seafront road, observing the 30 mph speed limit. Was he heading towards the channel port of Newhaven? A ferry to France? Or further, towards Folkestone and Eurotunnel, perhaps?

A mile on, still seemingly unaware of him, Copeland made a sharp left, without indicating, and drove into the entrance of a huge, old-fashioned apartment block overlooking Brighton Marina, called Marina Heights.

A rendezvous? With whom? Most likely, he figured, with Ogwang.

Tooth halted. He saw the Kia approach the underground car-park ramp. The gate opened upwards and the car went in, then halted just inside the entrance, brake lights on, engine running.

He knew what Copeland was doing. He was going to wait for the gate to close again behind him, to ensure no one followed him in.

So, he thought, Copeland had not rung any bell. No one had let him in, he must have used a remote that he had with him. Which meant he must be a regular visitor here. For what purposes?

The gate began lowering. The car waited until it was right down to the ground before continuing down the ramp.

Tooth drove around for a few minutes, until he spotted a good place to park on the street, behind a skip. He turned the car round, to give him a view of the car-park entrance and exit. Leaving the car, he sauntered towards the block, then when he was too close for anyone looking out of a window to be able to see him, he stood in the shadow of a tall shrub and waited. Hopefully another resident would drive in soon, and would be less vigilant with the garage door.

But half an hour passed and no vehicle arrived.

It was starting to rain. Deciding on Plan B, he strolled up to the main entrance and looked at the entry-phone panel, running his eye down the list of names and apartment numbers. Half just had a number and no name. There was no clue as to which one Jules de Copeland had gone to.

He pressed one bell at random. Nothing happened.

He tried another. Again, nothing.

Then a third. No. 23. After a short wait he heard a sleepy female voice.

‘Yes?’

Putting on his best effort at a drunk English man trying to sound sober, he said, ‘I’m sho shorry, John Michaels, one of your neighbours, Flat 39, keep putting in the code, not working. Could you let me in?’

There was a sharp click. Followed by an even sharper, ‘Thanks for waking me, I’m trying to have an early night, OK?’

He pushed the door tentatively, opening it a short distance, then wider, and stepped into the hallway. It was surprisingly small for the size of the block and smelled sterile, institutional. A row of metal mailboxes lined the wall almost up to the single lift. The indicator on the panel above showed ‘5’.

Assuming no one else had used it since Jules de Copeland, he was on the fifth floor.

Returning to the front door, he held it open, studying the names and numbers on the entry-phone panel even more carefully than before. But they revealed no clue as to which fifth-floor flat Copeland had gone to, and there appeared to be twelve, if not more.

He closed the door behind him, walked past the lifts to a fire door and entered the stairwell. As he had expected, there were concrete steps up and down.

He went down and at the bottom pushed through another doorway into the underground car park. He smelled tyres and engine oil. Looking carefully around in the total silence, he could see no sign of any CCTV cameras. Good.

Striding along past the bays, he located the Kia quickly. He’d already memorized the number plate, but just to be sure he placed a hand on top of the engine compartment. It was warm.

What was Copeland doing here? Did he have a regular hooker? A girlfriend? Business associate? Was this his and Ogwang’s bolt-hole? Might they leave together later or tomorrow?

Many apartment blocks had numbered parking bays corresponding to the apartment. But he was out of luck, there were no apparent number markings. It took him just a few seconds, kneeling behind the car, to place the magnetic tracker underneath and safely out of sight. Then, to buy himself enough time to go and grab something to eat, he let all the air out of the front right tyre, then put a deep slash into it with the Swiss Army penknife he carried in his pocket. Having done that, he crawled underneath the engine compartment and, using the metal file on his knife, he sawed through the fuel pipe, keeping his face away from the spray of petrol.

Next, he jammed wedges of Blu Tack into each end of the severed pipe and pressed them back together, winding tape around them. There’d be enough gas in the pipe, he figured, to get out of the car park, but to take it no more than a few hundred metres down the street before it ran out of gas, and its occupants ran out of luck.

They’d be sitting in the car, trying to restart it. The clatter of the starter motor would nicely mask the sound of his gunshots. With the engine turning over and over, any passer-by would put the noise down to a backfire. And by the time any police mechanic had figured out the problem, the two Africans would long be history.

As he walked back to the stairs, along the underground car park, he spotted a Polo, the same colour as his and the same model. Its tyres were soft and it was coated in dust. Clearly it hadn’t been driven anywhere in many weeks, and more likely months. Perhaps its owner was working abroad.

He went back up into the lobby and checked for any other exits. There was just one, at the rear, which went into a side street. He walked back to the front and, using a torn-off corner of a Thai restaurant takeaway leaflet, which he picked up from the floor, he disabled the lock, in case he needed to return.

Two minutes later he was back in his car, wiping grease and oil spots off his face with his handkerchief, before heading towards Brighton. A quick cheeseburger and a coffee would set him up fine. After that, he decided, he’d check out that house in Withdean Road, just to make sure Ogwang wasn’t still there.