Love You Dead

89 Wednesday 11 March

After the meeting ended, Roy Grace called DC Maggie Bridgeman, who was the liaison officer at the Covert Policing Unit.

He gave her the specifics. He needed a male officer immediately available, who could pass as someone terminally ill in their sixties, and someone who had local knowledge.

Unfazed, as if she dealt with requests like this all day long, Bridgeman said she would check with Resourcing and get back to him.

A few minutes after ending the call, Pat Lanigan rang him back from New York.

‘Hey, pal! I got some of the other aliases you wanted. Try James Beam and George Dickel.’

‘Aren’t they American whisky distilleries?’ Grace asked.

‘You got it. Amazing to us all, seems like our mutual buddy, Tooth, has a sense of humour.’

There seemed to be so many false names involved that Grace was starting to wonder if this operation’s name should be changed from Operation Spider to Operation Alias. As soon as he ended the call, he passed the information to one of his team.

Ten minutes later a Detective Constable Ballantine called him back from the Waterfront Hotel’s front desk. They had a guest named George Dickel in room 407.

Grace sometimes let excitement rule his head. That had led to Glenn Branson being shot. Had the bullet gone an inch to the right his mate would have either been dead or paralysed from the waist down. He remembered that and other lessons. Yet at the same time adrenalin surged through him. Tooth would be a major prize — a massive prize. He had to be certain the man did not slip through his fingers this time.

First he asked the reception desk to check that Mr Dickel was in his room, suggesting they phone up on a housekeeping pretext of checking he was happy with the way his room had been cleaned. Then he phoned the Ops-1 Inspector, and was glad to hear the voice of the one he trusted the most, Don Mark, on the line.

Grace spoke with the Silver Commander who, within ten minutes, had an Armed Response Unit, two dog handlers and members of the Tactical Firearms Unit heading towards the Waterfront Hotel. And as an extra precaution, Silver had the helicopter NPAS 15 on standby — hoping it wasn’t called away to another police or medical emergency, as Sussex Police no longer had an exclusive helicopter of their own.

It wasn’t often, in his current role as Head of Major Crime, that Grace was present at operations, but this one was different. It was personal. He’d led the last manhunt for this monster from the front, when after a ferocious struggle with Glenn Branson, Tooth had dived recklessly into a dock at Shoreham Harbour and vanished. If this really was him, and he was still alive, Grace was determined to be the officer who finally read the evil bastard his rights, although he knew that the TFU — Tactical Firearms Unit — officers would have to secure him first.

So for the first time in some while he grabbed his Kevlar vest off the hook on the back of his door, pulled it on and headed downstairs.