Two minutes later we were standing in front of a now opened locker number eighteen. I had to admit, I was a little bit disappointed. A part of me had hoped that we would open the locker door and immediately find ourselves in front of one of the most famous paintings in the world. But unfortunately, it looked, well, surprisingly normal. There were a few cardboard boxes piled against the wall, and a couple plastic ones as well. But nothing especially stood out as being especially out of the ordinary for a place like this.
“Well, let us find out what Jenny Lin went to such lengths to hide,” Violet said, making her way toward one of the boxes. I grabbed one of the plastic ones myself and opened it carefully, wondering what I was about to find. I let my imagination run wild. Maybe Jenny Lin hadn’t stopped at paintings; maybe she decided to smuggle drugs on her return trips into the UK. Maybe she had filled these bags with expensive purses, and I could borrow one for a few days. Maybe there were bodies in here that the Triads made Jenny hide. No, that was ridiculous; we’d be able to smell decomposing bodies, easily. Of course, all of those options—except maybe the second one—were ridiculous, and I wasn’t exactly surprised when I opened the box to find it was completely empty.
“There’s nothing in here,” I said to Violet, surprised.
“There is nothing in my box, either,” Violet replied, and I had to admit I felt a bit of perverse pleasure at the sound of confusion in her voice. Violet was always so confident, so sure of herself, it was different to hear her confused.
I opened another box and once again, it was completely empty.
“This one’s empty too,” I said, grabbing a third, but I knew before I opened it what would be in it.
“They are all empty,” Violet said. “But if MI5 had come here and emptied it, which I doubt they would as they would not have been able to find the unit in Jenny Lin’s name. Nor would they have bothered to make it look nice.”
“It’s almost as though Jenny wanted to make it look like this was a normal storage unit,” I muttered, half to myself.
“Yes, yes, you are right. That means there must be something here. Something that we are missing. But what?”
Violet looked around the room, and as she did so I was suddenly reminded of something a friend of mine back in college used to do. Whenever she wanted to hide something, she would put it behind the door of her bedroom in her apartment; since the door was always open whenever someone else was in there, they would never find whatever she wanted to hide.
It was almost always pot.
I made my way to the roller door that was all the way up, reached up and just managed to grab the end of it, then pulled it down. I smiled as I saw a piece of duct tape on the other side of the wall.
“Ah, mais I am impressed!” Violet exclaimed as I pulled the piece of duct tape off the back of the door. On the other side of it, stuck on, was a small silver key.
“A safe deposit box key,” I groaned. “Great. How are we possibly going to find what this belongs to?”
“We will find it. Look on the bright side. We did not know before that Jenny Lin had a safety deposit box. Now, we do. That is one half of the problem solved.”
“The second half had better not involve more breaking and entering,” I warned. “I’m drawing the line at robbing a bank.”
“Well, I will keep that in mind, and hopefully things will not come to that.”
Chapter 14
By the time we got back to Eldon Road it was nearly three in the morning. I made my way back to my little apartment, grumbled at Biscuit that he had to leave a little bit of space for me in my bad, got grumbled at by Biscuit as I moved him to the side slightly, and then promptly fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning around ten, expecting to have heard from Violet, but I didn’t hear from her the whole day. By the time five pm rolled around, I texted her.
Any news on the safety deposit key? I got a reply back a minute or so later.
Nothing yet. I have no ideas yet. I will talk to you tomorrow.
I was surprised; this safety deposit key thing must have had Violet stumped. I had never seen Violet stumped before.
And yet, at nine the next morning, I got another text from Violet.
I have an idea. Come and meet me at my place.
I had a really bad feeling about Violet’s “idea”. However, since meeting Violet I’d broken into two places of business, had been threatened by MI5 and been held at gunpoint by a room full of Triads, and I wasn’t dead or in jail yet, so maybe she knew what she was doing after all. Despite a part of my brain telling me this was a terrible idea and I absolutely shouldn’t do it, I texted that I was on my way.
“You know,” I told Biscuit as I fed him his breakfast and he meowed at me happily, “I’m starting to wonder if I’m not turning into a crazy person myself.”
“Good morning,” she greeted me when I entered the house. “I hope you are prepared for a long day; we have a lot of places to visit. I hired a car for the day; it will be here shortly. Good, you look sufficiently unlike yourself.”
“What’s your plan, and does it involve doing anything illegal?” Violet’s hair was actually fully blonde today. “Oh my God! What did you do to your hair?”
“What do you want me to answer first? My hair is fine, it is only temporary. There will be nothing illegal. Put your mind at ease. We will simply be traveling from bank branch to bank branch in the city, and we will see what happens. Luckily for us, there has been an enormous push in the UK to get rid of safety deposit boxes. HSBC and Barclays, for example, have zero safety deposit boxes left in the whole country.”
“Wow, that is big,” I said, stunned. Those were two of the biggest banks in the country.
Still, Violet’s plan sounded much too simple, and I couldn’t see how it was going to help us figure out what bank the key belonged to, but I was sure there must be some sort of reasoning to Violet’s madness. So when, five minutes later, a black Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb, I followed Violet into it. She told the driver we were first going to the NatWest bank branch in Belgravia, only a few blocks from where the Lin children lived.
A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a small, white-bricked building lined with Corinthian columns, with orange bricks making up the apartment blocks above. We were right on the corner of two streets, and Violet made a show of admiring the view outside for a couple of minutes before we entered.
“I hadn’t picked you as the kind of person who would appreciate a building’s architecture,” I noted as we walked into the lobby.
“I was simply ensuring that our friends had the opportunity to see us before we entered,” Violet said.
Great. That meant MI5 were after us again. Instead of going to a counter, however, Violet simply walked up to one of the courtesy desks and played on her phone for about five minutes, then we went back into the car.
“What was that? Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I told you, we are simply visiting banks. When we have reached the right one, we will know.”
“How will we know?”
“You will see,” Violet said slyly. We continued that way, visiting random bank branches that Violet gave the driver, for about two hours.
“Elementary makes the sort of thing you do look so much more interesting,” I complained as we sat in the lobby of the Lloyds branch in central London.
“I recall you not even forty-eight hours ago complaining that what we were doing was illegal. I would have thought that this would be right up your alley.”
“There is a healthy middle ground between committing felonies and sitting in banks all day doing nothing,” I retorted. A few minutes later we left the bank and made our way back to the Mercedes, but there was a difference. Agent Tompkins was standing right there. He had the same two bulldog agents with him; at least, I thought they were the same two. To be honest they looked so much alike with their dark sunglasses, matching suits and wide stances that I couldn’t be sure.
“I told you to stay away from this case, Despuis. I told you I would arrest you. I warned you. First you go to Chinatown and do… something, and now you’re visiting the victim’s bank? I’m arresting you on charges of perverting the course of justice.” The smile on his face was that of a child who’d just seen all the presents under the tree at Christmas. I knew my face looked more along the lines of a certain Edvard Munch painting. This was it. We were going to an MI5 prison. They were probably going to put us in a cell with terrorists. If they even put us in a cell at all. What if they just took us to a black site and shot us? After all, this was the security services. They were involved in all that anti-terrorism stuff. They could do all that, couldn’t they? My mind raced with possibilities, but Violet simply looked confused.
“I’m sorry,” she finally replied with a perfect English accent. “I’m afraid I don’t understand who, or what, you’re talking about? I’m simply visiting banks in the area as a favor to my half-sister, Violet.”
The two other agents glanced at each other, and even Tompkins’ face fell for a moment.
“Half-sister?”
“Yes. I do not see my sister often; I have been living in Singapore for the last four years. I have come to stay in England for an extended stay with my job, however, and with the help of Violet’s friend Cassie who has recently been through the same life-changing move, we have been exploring various banks.”
I could tell that all three men were troubled by Violet’s lie. I couldn’t believe she was being so brazen. Surely there was no way this could work; just dying her hair blonde and changing the style a little bit couldn’t be enough to fool three MI5 agents.
“I want proof. Show me some ID, now,” Tompkins ordered, and Violet rustled through her bag. “You,” he said, pointing to me. “Is she telling the truth?”
“Of course she is!” I exclaimed, trying to look realistically shocked at the question. “I can’t believe you’d actually confuse a blonde woman for Violet.”
Just then, Violet pulled out a UK passport and handed it to Tompkins. “There you are, I think you’ll find that you’ve truly just made an innocent mistake. I may look like Violet, but I am very much Antonia Leicester.”
Tompkins practically ripped the passport out of Violet’s hands and scrutinized it. Finally, he handed it to one of the other agents. “Go to the car and run this passport, see if it comes up as legitimate,” he ordered, and the man silently did as he was bidden.
“I don’t believe you,” Tompkins hissed. “I just don’t.”
“It’s all right, when your man comes back with the passport you’ll find that I really am who I say I am. I do look a lot like Violet though. We both take after our mother, our mutual parent.”
I was worried about what would happen when the other agent came back with the passport. After all, there was no way it could be legitimate; Antonia Leicester didn’t exist. I found my heart pounding as he came back from the SUV where the agents had double parked on the other side of the street. This was it. We were going to be arrested, taken to a black site and shot.
“It checks out, Sir,” the man said to Tompkins. “It’s a legitimate passport.”
No way. How on earth had Violet pulled that off? I knew I wasn’t the only person standing there wondering that.
“Arrest her anyway,” Tompkins ordered.
“Um, Sir, we can’t do that; we have nothing to charge her with or arrest her for.”
Tompkins seethed with barely supressed rage.
“Fine. Fine, off you go then. But you tell your ’sister’,” he said, doing air quotes around the word, “that if I ever see her near this investigation, I will personally ensure she receives the maximum jail sentence possible for the crime she’s been committing.”
“I will Sir. And do not worry, I bear no ill-will toward your organization for the mix-up. Mistakes happen to all of us.”
Tompkins practically had to be dragged back away to the waiting SUV. Violet and I got back into the Mercedes, and I gaped at her.
“What on earth just happened back there?” I asked. “Why haven’t we been locked up in the Tower of London?”
Violet grinned. “We just found out where Jenny Lin’s safety deposit box is,” she replied. Her usual strong French accent was back.
“No, I need more details than that. Where did you get a fake passport?”
“Oh, I have a number of them at the ready in a variety of identities, ready for when I need them, like in situations like this.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“No, not at all. It is only prudent to have a number of different identities available at all times. Sadly, I will likely have to let this one go. I will need to contact Nathan for a replacement.”
“Who is Nathan?”
“My passport supplier.”
“Because of course you have a passport guy. How come the passport came up as legitimate?” I had so many questions to ask about what had just happened.
“Nathan is very good. It is why I use him. His passports always pass muster.”
“Where did the English accent come from?”
“I have lived in this country for many years, did you not think I would master the accent?”
“Well… no, I didn’t really. Besides, if you’re so good at it, why don’t you use it all the time?”
“Because I find that people react differently when you are obviously a foreigner. And besides, this accent is more natural to me. Just because I can do an English accent does not mean I enjoy speaking that way.”
“Ok, fine. What did almost getting arrested and then using a fake passport to convince the security services that you’re someone else get us?”
Violet grinned at me. “That was particularly intelligent of me, I must say.” At this point, I rolled my eyes at Violet’s complete lack of humility. “I knew that we were being followed by MI5. And while I had Jenny Lin’s credit card records, I did not know where she banked. MI5, however, would have pulled her financial information by now. They may not have looked at it in great detail as of yet, but they would know where she banked. And in a stroke of luck for us, there are in fact very few banks left in London that offer safety deposit boxes. The Lloyds branch we were just at, for example, refuses new customers. The only safety deposit boxes left belong to clients who have had them for at least four years. So we did not have too many branches to visit.”
“Are you kidding me? We went to like at least fifteen other branches before we got here.”
“Yes, but if safety deposit boxes were still widely available we likely would have had to visit hundreds.”
Ok, things definitely could have been worse.
“So now we know where Jenny Lin banked?”
“Yes. And because safety deposit boxes are so hard to come across these days, I imagine she would not have gone elsewhere for hers. There is a very good chance that this key belongs to that box.”
“How are we going to get access to it though? It’s one thing to dye your hair blonde, I’m not sure even you can make yourself Asian.”
“It is simpler than you might think. But unfortunately we have a larger problem than simple makeup can solve: Jenny Lin’s murder has been all over the news. Someone attempting to enter her safety deposit box would look fairly suspicious, seeing as she is supposed to be dead.”
“Great. So now we know where the safety deposit box is, and we have a key for it, but we can’t get in.”
“You are always so pessimistic. It is a problem, yes. But it is not an unsolvable problem. We will have access to the safety deposit box; I promise you that.”
I had no idea how Violet intended to get access to it, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.
Chapter 15
As soon as we pulled up in front of the Paddington Green police station, I had an idea of where Violet was going with this. We made our way to the second floor, which was a bustle of activity. Filled with police detectives making their way across the room, speaking
with people on the phone and having discussions with coworkers, this part of the police station was always a hive of activity. We found DCI Williams, a tall man with a head of red hair, sitting at a desk filling out paperwork. When he looked up and saw Violet, I noticed a flash of worry come into his eyes.
“What has happened now?” he asked. “We haven’t had any interesting cases in this district since the soup killer.”
“Do not worry, I am not here to help you do your job today. In fact, I need you to help me do mine. Also, I need you to not tell anyone else about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because MI5 will arrest me if they find out.”
DCI Williams leaned back in his chair and groaned. “You’re involving yourself in the Lin case,” he said quietly, looking around. “Come on, let’s go into a private room.”
DCI Williams got up from his desk and led us down the hall into one of the empty interrogation rooms. With grey walls and a simple metal table that was screwed into the floor, and a couple of metal chairs, this wasn’t exactly an inviting place. DCI Williams sat on the edge of the table while I grabbed a chair and sat down. Violet stayed standing.
“So, what special hell am I in for today?” DCI Williams asked with a playful smile, and I couldn’t help but smile myself. I liked DCI Williams; unlike most of the other police officers he wasn’t outright hostile toward Violet, and even appreciated her help at times, but he still understood that working with her wasn’t the easiest thing on the planet.
“I need you to get me a warrant,” Violet said.
“Well, if I was a judge, it would be simple. Unfortunately, you know I can’t just walk in and demand a warrant. What do you need a warrant for, anyway? You simply break into anywhere you need to go.”
“Wait, you know she does that?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course we do. She knows we know, too. We’ve never caught her, but the day she is caught I know a lot of cops who will do their best to make sure she goes to jail.”
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