Dead Man's Grip

the gentle but direct approach.

‘No, Susan, we haven’t come about your handbag – I don’t know about that, I’m afraid. We’re from the Road Policing Unit,’ he said, registering her sudden look of confusion. ‘According to the records from Brighton University, you are living with Tony Revere. Is that correct?’

She nodded, eyeing each of them with sudden suspicion.

‘I’m afraid that Tony has been involved in a road traffic accident on his bicycle.’

She stared at him, suddenly fixated.

‘I’m sorry to say, Susan, that following the injuries he received he didn’t survive.’

He fell silent deliberately. It had long been his policy to let the recipient of the message come out with the words themselves. That way, he found, it sank in better and more immediately.

‘You mean Tony’s dead?’ she said.

‘I’m very sorry, yes.’

She started reeling. PC Upperton caught her arm and guided her down, on to the large brown sofa opposite a glass coffee table. She sat there in silence for some moments, while the two officers stood awkwardly. There was never an easy way. Each time the reaction was different. Susan Caplan’s was to fall silent and then start to shake, little tremors rippling through her body.

They remained standing. She was shaking her head from side to side now. ‘Oh shit!’ she said suddenly. ‘Oh shit.’ Then she seemed to collapse in on herself, burying her face in her hands. ‘Oh shit, please tell me it’s not true.’

The two officers glanced at each other. Tony Omotoso said, ‘Do you have someone who could come round and be with you today? A girlfriend? Any member of your family you’d like us to call?’

She closed her eyes tight. ‘What happened?’

‘He was in a collision with a lorry, but we don’t have all the details.’

There was a long silence. She hugged herself and began sobbing.

‘Susan, do you have a neighbour who could come round?’ Omotoso asked.

‘No. I – I don’t – I – we – I – oh shit, shit, shit.’

‘Would you like a drink?’ Ian Upperton asked. ‘Can we make you a cup of tea or coffee?’

‘I don’t want a sodding drink, I want my Tony,’ she sobbed. ‘Please tell me what happened?’

Omotoso’s radio crackled. He turned the volume right down. There was another long silence before eventually he said, ‘We’re going to need to make sure it is Tony Revere. Would you be willing to identify the body later today? Just in case there’s been a mistake?’

‘His mother’s a control freak,’ she blurted. ‘She’s the one you’re going to have to speak to.’

‘I’ll speak to anyone you’d like me to, Susan. Do you have her number?’

‘She’s in New York – in the Hamptons. She hates my guts.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She’ll be on the first plane over, I can tell you that.’

‘Would you prefer her to identify Tony?’

She fell silent again, sobbing. Then she said, ‘You’d better get her to do that. She’d never believe me anyway.’

18

Tooth was small. It was an issue he’d had to deal with since childhood. He used to be picked on by other kids because of his size. But not many of them had ever picked on him twice.

He was one of the tiniest babies Brooklyn obstetrician Harvey Shannon had ever delivered, although he wasn’t premature. His mother, who was so off her face with junk she hadn’t figured out she was pregnant for six months, had gone to full term. Dr Shannon wasn’t even sure that she realized she had actually given birth, and staff at the hospital told him she kept looking at the infant in bewilderment, as if trying to figure out where it had come from.

But the obstetrician was worried about a bigger problem. The boy had a central nervous system that seemed to be wired all wrong. He appeared to have no pain receptors. You could stick a needle in the tiny mite’s arm and get no reaction, while all normal babies would bawl their lungs out. There were any number of possible causes, but the most likely, he figured, was the mother’s substance abuse.

Tooth’s mother died from a rogue batch of heroin when he was three, and he spent most of his childhood being shunted around America from one foster home to the next. He never stayed long because no one liked him. He scared people.

At the age of eleven, when other kids began taunting him about his size, he learned to defend himself by studying martial arts and soon responded by hurting anyone who angered him, badly. So badly he never stayed in any school for more than a few months, because other kids were too frightened of him and the teachers requested he be moved.

At his final school he learned how to make a buck out of his abnormality. Using his martial arts skills of self- control, he could hold his breath for up to five minutes, beating anyone who tried to challenge him. His other trick was to let kids punch him in the stomach as hard as they liked, for a dollar a go. For five bucks they could stick a ballpoint pen into his arm or leg. Letting them do this was the closest he ever came to any of his fellow pupils. He’d never had an actual friend in his life. At the age of forty-one he still didn’t. Just his dog, Yossarian.

But Tooth and his dog weren’t so much friends as associates. Same as the people he worked for. The dog was an ugly thing. It had different-colour eyes, one bright red, the other grey, and looked like the progeny of a Dalmatian that had been screwed by a pug. He’d named it after a character in one of the few books he’d read all the way through, Catch-22. The book started with a character called Yossarian irrationally falling in love, at first sight, with his chaplain. This dog had fallen irrationally in love with him at first sight, too. It had just started following him, in a street in Beverly Hills four years ago, when he was casing a house for a hit.

It was one of those wide, quiet, swanky streets with bleached-looking elm trunks, big detached houses and gleaming metal in the driveway. All the houses had lawns that looked like they’d been trimmed with nail scissors, the sprinklers thwack-thwacking away, looked after by armies of Hispanic gardeners.

The dog was wrong for the street. It was mangy and one eye was infected. Tooth didn’t know a thing about dogs, but this one didn’t look much like any recognizable breed and it didn’t look designer enough to have come from this area. Maybe it had jumped out of a Hispanic’s truck. Maybe someone had thrown it out of a car here in the hope of some rich person taking pity on it.

Instead it had found him.

Tooth gave it food, but no sympathy.

He didn’t do sympathy.

19

‘What – what happens now?’ Carly asked the police officer.

‘I’d like you to sign your name here,’ Dan Pattenden said, handing her a long thin strip of white paper, which was headed SUBJECT TEST. Halfway down it had her name, date of birth and the words SUBJECT SIGNATURE. Below was a box containing the words Specimen 1: – 10.42 a.m. – 55 and Specimen 2: 10.45 a.m. – 55.

With her hand shaking so much she could barely hold the pen he gave her, she signed her name.

‘I’m going to take you to a cell where you’ll wait for your solicitor to arrive,’ he said, signing the same form along the bottom. ‘You will be interviewed with your solicitor.’

‘I have a really important meeting with a client,’ she said. ‘I have to get to the office.’