Dead at First Sight

120 Friday 12 October

Roy Grace sat, worriedly, at his workstation in MIR-1, staring at the clock on his screen: 5.01 p.m. Less than ninety minutes, if their intel was correct, until Jules Copeland was due to arrive at Primrose Farm Cottage for a loved-up weekend with Lynda Merrill — not.

He had been toying with alternative possibilities. Had Copeland boarded a flight at Gatwick Airport? The Ghanaian was distinctive-looking and had two large suitcases with him. But no CCTV cameras had picked him up. Sure, they didn’t cover every square inch of the passenger areas, but the average person walking through the departure lounges of either the South or North Terminals would be picked up several times. Inspector Biggs’s team had shown Copeland’s photograph to all check-in staff and no one there had recognized him either, nor had any security staff. The Gatwick Hilton hotel had also been checked.

The Kia that had crashed outside Marina Heights this morning had been rented from a firm at Gatwick on Tuesday night to a man fitting Copeland’s description, using one of his aliases, Samuel Jackson. He’d assaulted the driver of the van he’d collided with and done a runner. The cab he’d taken to Gatwick Airport would have dropped him there around 8.45 a.m. So where had he spent the past eight and a half hours?

Was he still within the vicinity of the airport? Grace suspected not.

Was he still in the country?

Grace wrote down on his pad what he knew of the man. Resourceful. Ruthless. Driven by greed. Wife and child in Bavaria. £300,000 for the taking.

Then after a few moments further mulling over, he thought about Copeland’s red shoes and added vain to his list. And then:

Vain = arrogant = brazen

= Hubris

A man who was happy to murder two people who’d threatened to expose him, and to maim a third for daring to warn people about internet romance scammers.

Copeland, he decided, almost certainly was not going to let that money go. He was going to turn up.