Double Identity

by Alison Morton

  Mel carried on bagging items, thinking how boring this was compared to the first minutes of the raid, but knowing they had to be thorough. That was true in this life as in her military one – hurry up and wait. She progressed to the small bookcase hanging halfway up the inner wall. She took down a volume on the history of maritime trade, shook it, but nothing fell out. She repeated this with all twenty-two volumes. She was about to turn away, but her eye was caught by three metal rectangles, each about two centimetres long on one side of the bookcase where it met the wall. She looked at the other side. Ditto. Was it anything more than a design feature? She reached up to test one and a shriek erupted from Duchamps as he leapt to his feet.

  ‘Non! Touche pas!’

  McCracken pushed Duchamps back into his seat, then came over to join Mel.

  ‘Now what do we have here?’

  Mel prodded the three on the right side. McCracken copied her on the left. A tiny hiss came from behind the bookcase followed by a click and one side swung away from the wall.

  ‘Well,’ said McCracken, ‘one of us has the magic touch.’

  Behind the bookcase was a combination lock safe.

  ‘We have two ways to do this, Duchamps,’ McCracken said. ‘Either you tell me the combination and I mention your cooperation or you can have your sentence increased for obstruction. You decide.’

  Duchamps shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Come on. We will get into the safe, but it’ll save time if we do it the normal way.’

  Duchamps hesitated, then shook his head again. McCracken leant in.

  ‘Very well. But I’ll remember this.’ He strode to the open door and shouted. ‘Get me a safebreaker. Now.’

  * * *

  ‘I wondered why Billy the Kid in there was being so cooperative about his passwords. He wanted to divert us from that hidden safe.’ McCracken handed Mel a plastic cup of water from the machine in the general office.

  ‘Billy the Kid? Do you always give people nicknames?’

  ‘Just a way of talking.’ He looked her up and down.

  ‘Oh, God, don’t tell me what you call me!’

  ‘All right, I won’t. Tell you, I mean.’

  ‘You have a hell of a nerve.’

  He grinned at her.

  Mel swallowed her water and looked the other way. But she felt warmth rising up her neck. Pure embarrassment.

  ‘He could just have been terrified of you,’ Mel said after throwing her empty cup in the recycling bin.

  ‘I’m a pussycat compared with some of the ATU lot.’

  ‘Ha!’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Where the hell is that locksmith?’

  ‘Is this him?’ She pointed at the main office door where an officer was checking the ID of a young blond man. He was carrying a square steel toolbox almost half as big as him.

  ‘Blimey, have they let him out of school for the day?’ McCracken said.

  The solemn young man shook hands with them both and followed them back to Duchamps’s office. After peering at the safe from different angles, he knelt down and fished out a circular device that looked like a miniature space telescope. He clamped this onto the front of the lock and ran a thin cable to an LCD screen which he placed on McCracken’s empty chair. He knelt back.

  ‘Okay, son, how long is this going to take?’ McCracken said.

  The young man shrugged. ‘As long as it takes, dad.’

  McCracken scowled at him. Mel chuckled.

  ‘Let’s be adult. Give me an idea.’

  ‘Could be an hour or two or anything up to twenty hours, even with the autodialler. I’ll leave it to run now. Any coffee around here?’

  ‘Twenty hours. You are joking,’ McCracken said.

  ‘So, the first numbers could show up after an hour. You gonna get me a coffee?’

  As soon as the young safebreaker was out of earshot making for the tiny kitchen in the company of one of the officers, McCracken jerked his head at Mel to follow him out of Duchamps’s office.

  ‘Would you mind checking how they’re doing out here? It’s gone seven and I don’t want to keep them here all night.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Mel smiled at him. Perhaps under all that rough exterior, he did have some fellow feeling for others.

  ‘It’s not for their benefit. I don’t want to do the paperwork for extra shift hours for a double team from a different force.’

  ‘You’re all heart, McCracken.’

  ‘Aren’t I just?’

  * * *

  A standard relief team came in at eight after the last office worker had left, apart from Barbara Winters and Duchamps. She refused to leave but McCracken told her he wasn’t going to release her anyway. Duchamps was slumped in his chair, hands over his face. He had refused to give them the combination despite McCracken’s questioning him. The City policeman had packed Duchamps’s tower, keyboard and monitor up for removal. Since then, a uniform was keeping a very careful eye on the trader. His business partners had been taken back to Friars Green for further questioning.

  McCracken surveyed the eviscerated office. Every shred of paper had disappeared. Drawers hung open, dust shadows marked where cabinets had stood and the polished wood floor showed scuff and wheel marks. A dour expression on her face, Barbara Winters sat straight-backed on a padded chair by the window watching the white figures of the forensics team flit around the office.

  ‘I’ll let Evans sort out Duchamps’s partners, but Tweedy Woman there told me they more or less work their own accounts and share the admin between them.’

  ‘She’s a bit fierce, but she cares for her staff – more so than the three partners, I’d say.’

  ‘Having a girls’ heart-to-heart, were you?’

  ‘For God’s sake, McCracken. There are other ways of extracting information than threatening people.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ a young voice interrupted them. ‘If you’re not having a domestic, you may like to know some of the numbers have come up.’

  The safebreaker knelt down, checked his screen and jotted some figures down. He handed the note to McCracken.

  ‘Mean anything? Like a birthday, or phone number? They’re usually something like that,’ the young safebreaker said with the twin tones of professional smugness and the confidence of youth.

  Mel read the figures over McCracken’s arm. 016-------

  ‘Bon Dieu! I know the rest.’

  20

  Still slumped at his desk, Duchamps dropped his hands and looked up. He peered at Mel, his head tilted. He frowned as if trying to recall something. Mel turned her back on him immediately, cursing herself for calling out like that. Had he recognised her voice?

  McCracken rolled his eyes at her. He turned to Duchamps.

  ‘Right, I’ll talk to you further at the station.’ He pointed to the uniformed officer behind Duchamps. ‘Go with this officer who will read you the caution. Bring your wallet with ID. Don’t try any funny business or he will have to handcuff you. Understand?’

  Mel watched Duchamps shuffle through the general office with the officer. She felt sorry for him; he looked utterly crushed by what was happening to him.

  ‘When you have a moment?’ McCracken’s sarcastic tone of voice pulled her back. She pulled her phone out, tapped in her contacts list and displayed the number 01.63.45.87.99, the row of figures she’d found in the Bible flyleaf in the London hotel room and thought was a Paris phone number. She thrust her phone under the nose of the locksmith, raised one eyebrow and nodded at him.

  ‘If it’s wrong, we’ll have to start again,’ he said. ‘I mean completely, from zero. We could be all night.’ He looked like a teenager who had a hot prom date lined up.

  ‘Tough shit,’ said McCracken. ‘Just do it.’

  The younger man sniffed and wriggled his shoulders. After a moment, he pressed ‘Cancel’ on the autodialler program. He took his time packing it away in a soft cloth as if it was the finest porcelain. He reached into his toolbox for a stethos
cope, stuck the earpieces in his ears and placed the resonator near the combination lock.

  ‘Just in case…’ he mumbled and glanced up at Mel. She beckoned McCracken to stand back. The young prima donna didn’t need to feel crowded in by them breathing on the back of his neck.

  Within less than a minute, the safe door was open. Inside lay a wad of fifty-pound notes – flight fund, Mel guessed – three C4 manila envelopes and a plastic folder containing about twenty printed sheets. Mel placed it all into a brown evidence bag, sealed it and stood back to let forensics into the room.

  Out in the lobby, McCracken pressed the button to call the lift.

  ‘Well, now we have a direct link between your boyfriend and Billy the Kid.’

  ‘They knew each other, but I didn’t think that closely,’ Mel said as they stepped into the lift. ‘But why did Gérard have Billy’s safe combination?’

  * * *

  ‘Good work,’ Stevenson said back at Friars Green. ‘Joanna Evans will lead the detailed logging in team overnight. The doctor’s checked Duchamps and given him a sedative to let him rest. He’s too hysterical to be interviewed. You two turn in now. You can start with him early in the morning.’

  Too tired to protest, Mel accepted McCracken’s offer of a lift to her temporary home – an anonymous flat in an anonymous, but gated, block in Knightsbridge. He even heaved her case out of the boot as she stifled a yawn.

  ‘Pick you up at seven sharp tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why? Where are we going?’

  ‘First to the secure storage place to check the plan for going through all that crap from the raid, then the station to question Duchamps.’

  * * *

  Just before 7.30 the following morning, McCracken eased his car out of the rush-hour traffic on Westway into a boulevard of a 1950s industrial estate. Red-brick buildings, some renovated and panelled with fascia board but most not, were set back from the road with wide drives and small car parks.

  He drew into an unlit side road leading to the entrance of one with no company name board, but a high security gate, two guards and a searchlight bearing down on the road. Mel glanced to each side of the gate. Double curls of razor wire ran round the top of high iron railings as far as she could see. Their EIRS passes guaranteed them access, but they still had to get out of the car and sign a book in the gatehouse.

  After parking the car on the ridged concrete courtyard, McCracken led Mel towards the tallest building, the height of a squash hall. The mortar was flaking on some of the brickwork, but it looked sturdy enough. Inside, a vinyl-floored corridor led to a set of double doors which opened up into a huge hall. Half of the dozen rows of collapsible village hall type tables were covered in towers, keyboards, monitors, and printers gushing out mountains of paper; the other half with files and black plastic bin bags. Three tables placed short edge to short edge ran perpendicular to the rows of tables. At the end was a treble-size incident board. Sound echoed from the machinery, reinforced by talking and people striding around.

  ‘Shite acoustics,’ McCracken shouted to her. ‘But it’s free and ours.’

  In the centre of the long table, Joanna Evans looked shattered. Her phone was clamped to her ear while her eyes were fixed unfocused on her laptop screen. She looked up as Mel and McCracken advanced.

  ‘Ah, here comes the cavalry. That was quick.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Mel said.

  ‘I was just calling you. We need help.’

  ‘We were just popping in to check you had everything you needed and collect Duchamps’s safe contents. What else do you want?’ McCracken fidgeted, transferring his weight from foot to foot.

  ‘The City of London Police have sent us some of their Economic Crime Directorate, plus drafted in some of their specials, mostly accountants who only deal in complex fraud investigations. That’s great, but we need an international perspective. Well, European at least.’ She waved her hand in the air. ‘We might be missing all kinds of things we’re not aware of.’

  ‘We also need to match it up with the stuff we originally hauled in from Gérard Rohlbert’s office as background,’ McCracken added.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Mel said.

  ‘As part of the murder investigation, we searched his London office and took away his computer, laptop and files. The senior partner there was, let’s leave it at snotty, but the super insisted. I think it’s all in the evidence store. Get that all brought here, Joanna.’ Both women stared at McCracken. He’d actually remembered Evans had a first name.

  ‘Did you liaise with the French police about searching Gérard’s flat in Paris?’ Mel asked.

  McCracken frowned. ‘There wasn’t any real reason to do it before.’

  Mel grabbed her phone and tapped.

  ‘Maurice?’ Pause. ‘C’est Mélisende.’ Pause. ‘Oh, ça va, vous savez. Écoutez, une petite demande…’ She chatted for five minutes, scribbled a name and address on a scrap of rough paper, then clicked the phone off. ‘We have the keys to Gérard’s apartment. His father owns the lease and hasn’t cleared the place, let alone re-let it yet. I’ll have to go and help him do that once we’ve finished the case.’ She swallowed. ‘Nobody thinks about that sort of thing once the person’s dead, do they?’ A knife twisted in her heart. Not only was Gérard dead, but they had a definite link through the damned safe combination to Duchamps and his dubious trading. She dreaded examining the safe contents in detail. She looked from McCracken to Joanna and back. Neither said a word.

  ‘Anyway, Maurice Rohlbert will leave an envelope with his lawyer for collection.’ She waved the slip of paper. ‘I’m happy to go,’ she lied. Nothing would be worse in reality.

  ‘No, I think you’re best here,’ McCracken said. ‘Besides, I need somebody there with solid investigation experience. What about you, Joanna? You speak Frog, I mean French. I can put somebody else in here to supervise the paper-pushing. Fancy a trip to Paris with a CSI of your choice?’

  * * *

  Back at Friars Green, they reported to Patrick Stevenson.

  ‘A little off-piste,’ he said to Mel. ‘But a sound idea. All due respect to the French police and our legal colleagues, it could take weeks to get the search done. The chief procureur de la république there is an old nemesis of mine. An ancient case, now cold, but he has the memory of an elephant. He’d take great pleasure in injecting administrative delay.’

  ‘I told Joanna to go home for some sleep first,’ Mel said. ‘She looked exhausted.’ Mel glanced at Stevenson. ‘I hope that was within the procedure. They can take the evening train, then start early tomorrow morning. Ostensibly, they’re collecting some things of mine I left at Gérard’s flat but haven’t had the heart to fetch.’ Ironic in that it was perfectly true. ‘I’ll write a letter of authorisation for the concierge. She knows me and won’t phone the police when a couple of strange Englishwomen turn up.’

  ‘You seem to have worked it all out, Mélisende,’ Stevenson said. ‘They’ll only have a day, but if they find anything significant, we’ll have to request a formal search.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Stevenson.’ She looked away and he smiled. ‘One more thing. Joanna Evans has asked for some specialist international expertise for the financial analysis. May I suggest a name?’

  ‘Who do you have in mind?’

  ‘Andreas Holzmann. I met him on my police course. He’s in organised financial crime at the Bundeskriminalamt in Germany.’

  ‘Hopefully not as a practitioner,’ Stevenson said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My little joke. Tell Mr Ellis to set it up. We need all the experts we can get our hands on.’

  Mel knocked on the door of Ellis’s office, went for the handle, but was halted by a peremptory ‘Wait.’ She could just hear the sound of his voice on the phone but not the words. After nearly five minutes, the door opened and he ushered her in. He sat back down in his padded leather chair.

  ‘I’m so sorry for making you wait – bit of a confidential, personal thing.
Family illness, you know. I’m sure you understand.’ He wiped his hand across his face and forced a smile. ‘Now, how can I help you?’ he said.

  She explained Stevenson’s instruction.

  ‘Oh? Is it really urgent? Would you write it up and send it through the usual channels, please?’ He was still grasping the edges of his smartphone. He looked down at it and frowned. A second later, he looked up and gave Mel the blandest of smiles in dismissal, but she didn’t move.

  ‘I have the details here,’ she said. ‘Mr Stevenson said as soon as possible. I rather think he wants you to telephone them now.’

  ‘Ah, of course.’ He hardly glanced at the slip of paper with Andreas Holzmann’s name and number she laid on his desk. Had he really taken in Stevenson’s request? He looked completely distracted. He pushed his fingers through his blond hair and rubbed the side of his head.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Mr Ellis?’ Mel asked. He usually had a ready smile to charm anybody and everybody, but he didn’t seem at all focused at present. A bit of a lightweight for his current role, she thought, and probably unnerved by the bombing.

  ‘No, no, thanks,’ he said. ‘Just something I have to attend to. Leave it with me.’

  21

  In the observation room Mel watched the camera feed from Duchamps’s interview. Old-fashioned as it might be, she had a pencil and notebook to hand. Nobody could trust their memory that much and rerunning the video could take forever. Five split screens joined along the back with a nightmare tangle of cables perched on desks for which there were only two seating spaces. Nevertheless, two other officers squeezed in with Mel; one reeked of cigarette smoke.