One of Us Is Dead

60 Monday 10 October 2022

Paul Anthony opened the What3Words app on his phone screen, and tapped the area he had selected on the map, along the coast a few miles east of Brighton. Within his target area, up came:

He smiled. Fear. That was a good omen for sure. Insulated? He’d need to figure that one out. Or maybe not. Perhaps the meaning was crystal clear. Insulated meant protected. Yes! Another good omen!

Omens were everything. Portents. Or whatever they were called. When things were meant to be!

Although the boss inside his head wagged a finger at him, like someone chanting in a pantomime. Oh no they’re not!

He always came close to convincing himself that he did not obey the boss inside his head. But never quite close enough. The boss had been there all his life, like a mocking, domineering shadow he could not shake off. Sometimes it told him to be brave, to remember he was the best, the smartest, the toughest, King of the Hill. Other times it told him to rein it in, take his foot off the gas, lie low.

Organist.

This was a very good omen indeed.

His next victim, Toby Carlisle, had expressed a wish to be lowered into his grave to the sound of an organ — a live one, not recorded — playing sea shanties. Apparently Toby Carlisle had a love of the sea and wanted to be buried at sea. Paul was very happy to expedite his wish. A bit sooner than Carlisle had anticipated — a good forty years sooner, perhaps, but that was what his client had ordered. So unfortunately Toby Carlisle wasn’t going to have any say in the timing of his demise.

But, hey, he thought breezily, do any of us?

His client, a charming guy called Steve Lampard, was Toby Carlisle’s husband, a tall, fit, muscular hunk who had made a fortune out of nightclubs, bars and gyms.

Assuming Steve Lampard was telling the truth, and he did believe he was, Toby Carlisle was an ungrateful little shit. Under the cover of his hobby of deep-sea fishing, Carlisle had for some years, before meeting Lampard, operated a very lucrative drug-smuggling business, regularly collecting consignments of heroin and crack cocaine in floating containers fitted with transponders in the middle of the English Channel, dropped by a French fisherman counterpart, and then passing them to a third party in a dinghy, in the dead of night, a few hundred yards off the Sussex coast.

All had been fine for a while, until one night, approaching the agreed rendezvous location with the dinghy, he’d been dazzled by searchlights from almost every direction. His boat was boarded by the Coastguard and impounded, along with his cargo of drugs, with a street value of over £800,000.

With all his assets frozen under the Proceeds of Crime Act, Carlisle was flat broke and unable to afford private legal representation. He had no option but to throw his lot in with a harassed, overworked and underpaid legal aid solicitor, who cheerfully advised Carlisle he was looking at the wrong end of a ten-to fifteen-year sentence for drug trafficking.

Out on bail, Toby Carlisle met Steve Lampard in a Brighton bar and it was lust at first sight. Followed by love, at least on Lampard’s part. And his first act of love was to hire a top solicitor and top brief. The brief found a small but vital error in the chain of evidence and an elated Toby Carlisle walked free.

He and Steve married a month later at the Brighton register office.

Steve bought him another boat so he could continue with his passion for fishing — but hopefully not any more drug trafficking. He’d never been on the boat himself. He told Paul he got seasick just looking at ads for cruises.

Two months later, Lampard arrived home at his Tongdean Road mansion unexpectedly, in the middle of the afternoon, to be greeted by the sight of his husband’s naked white bum pumping up and down on a lounger by the indoor pool. The recipient beneath him was a younger man Lampard had never seen before.

Paul Anthony would have preferred a bigger gap of time between arranging Dermot Bryson’s demise and then Toby Carlisle’s. The boss inside his head felt the same and told him so. The boss warned him to put the brakes on, slow it down, let the dust settle first. Give it a month at least. But Steve Lampard was one angry man. He wanted it NOW.

And, hey, Paul had given a lot of workload to his very able assistant. Between them, surely they could cope with fitting this one in?

It was all going so well again, apart from that little hiccup a couple of years back — now almost forgotten. Even the cynical boss inside his head had been forced to admit he was impressed with how well he had recovered from that little blip.

It had gone brilliantly to plan with Barnie Wallace. Until a random, dumb, middle-aged lady golfer who didn’t know a mushroom from a banana, had gone and stuck a spoke — or more appropriately a five-iron — into all his careful plans.

But Dermot Bryson — that had been textbook perfection!

Although now he had the James Taylor shaped blip. That would just be a blip. One more wrong move by him and Taylor would be history. Nothing was going to stand in the way of Paul’s new incarnation in his slightly stepped-back role, and blossoming love.

So lucrative and such fun, to boot!

The boss was saying, Slow down, man. Wait. Give it a month or so.

The smart thing, he knew, would be to go to ground, lie low, let the dust settle. It wasn’t smart to execute another contract (he liked that term, just so apt...) so soon after this situation, when the police would for sure be all over Barnie — and perhaps Professor Llewellyn too. But he had already agreed the delivery date with his new client, and Mr Oswald’s reputation for always delivering on time was impeccable.

And, besides, with this one there really was very little that could go wrong.

He stared at the word organist again.

According to Steve Lampard, he and his husband, Toby, had shared with each other the kind of funeral they wanted, in case one of them died suddenly. Sweet that they loved each other so much, Paul thought. Never mind a burial at sea with an organ playing as his body went overboard; with Steve Lampard’s money, Toby Carlisle could have the entire London Symphony Orchestra playing. But Paul guessed it would be difficult to get them all assembled on a boat, and not great if the sea state wasn’t calm — and the English Channel wasn’t calm most of the time. Not so great to have all your mourners vomiting over the side.

He looked again at the What3Words.

Definitely an omen.

The boss inside his head warned him that not all omens were good ones.

Paul Anthony told the boss to get lost.