Love You Dead

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.

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?