Dead at First Sight

88 Thursday 11 October

Roy stormed out of the meeting, fuming. He felt let down by his legal team. In all his career, so far, he had encountered only a handful of people who could come close to Jodie Bentley for sheer evil. Why the hell didn’t they get it?

Glancing up at the statue of Lady Justice, as he always did, he recalled that some other cultures depicted her holding a snake rather than a sword. Maybe along with her holding some dice, they were more appropriate, he thought. Justice so often seemed to be a slippery serpent. And that was never more apposite than with Jodie Bentley, who had used snake venom to kill at least one husband and possibly more.

As he headed back towards the tube station, his phone rang. It was Glenn Branson.

‘How’re you doing, boss?’

‘Not great, actually. Got anything to cheer me up?’

‘I’ve just heard back from your pal, Marcel Kullen. He organized a team to go to the house linked to one of the phone numbers in Germany. There is a young lady living there.’

‘What do we know about her?’

‘Not much — I’ll — hang on a sec, can you? Kevin Hall’s trying to get my attention, looks like something’s up. Call you back in two?’

‘Fine.’

It was nearly ten minutes later when Glenn called him back. ‘Boss, we have a development this end.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Donald Duck’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘He’s dead. Donald Duck.’

‘Awwwww, think about all the kids around the world.’

‘This is serious, Roy. Kevin had a call from a deputy governor at Lewes Prison. Okonjo’s been murdered.’

‘What details do you have?’

‘It sounds like he’s been stabbed — shanked. Good and proper — in the stomach and the chest.’

When murders happened in prisons — relatively rare occurrences — they were mostly as a result of disputes. But just occasionally, in Grace’s experience, there were contract killings to silence a potential witness. Okonjo hadn’t been there long enough to have got into a murderous dispute, he was still in the First Night Centre. Had he been targeted by someone anxious to stop him talking — perhaps to stop him squealing on his accomplice who was still at large? But how did they access the First Night Centre?

Had his murder been masterminded by someone outside who knew how the remand-in-custody system worked?

At the magistrates’ court hearing, such as the one Okonjo had attended yesterday, there would usually be more than one prisoner remanded in custody. Could someone, paid to kill Okonjo, have had themselves arrested deliberately for an offence serious enough to be remanded, so they would be in the same wing as Okonjo in the first few days?

His thoughts went to Tooth. The man had been positively identified outside the house in Withdean Road, where Okonjo had been based, and now Okonjo was dead. Tooth was a contract killer. And Okonjo’s death had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.

‘OK, two things, Glenn,’ Grace said. ‘First, check out the duty SIO roster and get one assigned to the killing. Then check out if there were any other prisoners remanded alongside him and get their profiles. In particular, make sure Tooth wasn’t one of them, under a bogus identity, although with what he knows that we have on him, he’d have to be nuts to allow himself to get processed through the prison system. But he’s surprised us all more than once before.’

‘On it, boss.’