by Peter Watson
On the desk there was a small stack of opened letters, with an airline ticket on top and a passport. Next to the passport was an expensive pen and a watch, both of which Haydon immediately pocketed. He wasn’t a thief, but in case he was disturbed a few valuables would help cast him in the role of a thief and deflect attention from what he was really interested in.
As he was pocketing the pen, he also noticed, in the wall between two of the shelves, a small safe. Now this was interesting. He smiled. The safe was British and he knew the model well. He put his ear to the dial and listened carefully, concentrating hard. The difference in sound when he moved the dial to the right position would be miniscule and the feel in his fingertips would be the lightest of touches.
It took him more than fifteen minutes to feel the first one. That was always the most difficult, however. Now he knew how the dial felt. How many numbers would there be? Five? Six? Eight? He couldn’t remember from his training but this wasn’t a new model. Six, he guessed.
Within half an hour he had three done: two, three, zero. Then he had a thought. He went back to the desk and picked up Leondaris’s passport. He opened it and found what he was looking for. Leondaris was born on 23 May 1950 – 23.05.50. It was embarrassingly simple.
He went back to the safe, turned it to five, five again, then zero. He pulled on the door – and it swung open.
Haydon grunted in pleasure at his own cleverness and reached inside. He came first to some small velvet bags. He opened one and a large gem fell into the palm of his hand. More of Leondaris’s wife’s handiwork. He put the stone into his pocket and then emptied another little pouch. This time there were three small stones but they still caught what light was going in the darkened study: diamonds. They too went into his jacket pocket.
But now he turned back to the safe. His fingers searched the space at the back and touched some smooth cardboard folders. Ah! Was this what he was looking for? He moved more little pouches out of the way and gripped the documents.
At that moment, a red flash seemed to erupt inside his head and a hot pain zipped across his skull. He went to cry out but had barely begun when his breath was cut short. The dark-red world went black.
Edward nodded to the policeman at the gate of Kensington Palace. He was becoming familiar with the night staff. The midnight committee was giving him very late nights and keeping him away from the Albatross. Not that he was tired – far from it. Lockwood’s tone in Downing Street had been upsetting and demeaning.
Edward walked around the side of the palace, parallel to a wall with some rosebeds adjoining it. He unlocked a door which led to his staircase, climbed the steps and let himself into his flat. It was more untidy than ever. Dictionaries and other reference books stood in their own pile next to his desk.
The glow of the answering machine greeted him. He walked over to it: a figure 1 stared up at him. Not Nancy again? He pressed the button.
‘Edward, it’s Barbra. Call me – I’ve got a surprise for you.’
He looked at his watch. One-thirty a.m. in London meant it was five-thirty, early evening, in California. Barbra would probably still be in her office.
She was. ‘Look,’ she said, after the briefest of greetings, ‘I’ve turned over all my contacts – everything and everyone from the phone book to the local CIA resident. So I can categorically tell you that there is no Tucker Icecream Company, no Trucco Icecream Company or any variant, anywhere in California between Stanford in the south and Mendocino, which is some 160 miles north of the Golden Gate. There are several Tuckers in the book, of course and there’s a Tucker’s Timber, a Tucker’s Grain Company and a Tucker & Peabody Law Firm. But I can’t find a Nancy Tucker anywhere, not in the places I’ve tried, anyway.’
Edward closed his eyes. ‘And Trucco? What about Trucco?’
‘Only one – and that’s a man. Aldo Trucco, MD.’
Edward massaged an eye with the ball of his hand. Barbra’s news appeared to settle things. ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘And I won’t forget I owe you a favour.’
‘Now, on that, you may be able to help, sooner rather than later. We’ve been gazumped on the Ferrari. Some Italian offered a hundred thousand dollars more than your father. He’s livid but won’t compete. Which means,’ she added, a note of triumph creeping into her voice, ‘which means that a picture is back on the agenda. I want you and me to choose something together. Think of something suitable I might like and can eventually persuade your father to like – yes?’
‘I’ll do my best, Barbra. Can you give me a couple of weeks to come up with something?’
‘Great. Well, it must be late in London. You’d better get some sleep.’
After he had rung off, sleep still seemed a long way away. Nancy had to be involved. Barbra’s evidence confirmed everything that had gone before. But how could Edward tell anyone now? If he did, what with his delay and his mistake over the negotiations, Lockwood would go wild. Edward himself might even become a suspect.
As he stood by the window of his flat, looking down on the policeman he had greeted moments before, another conviction took root inside him. Nancy had deceived everyone, but Edward most of all. She had singled him out. If he told Leith or Lockwood, he would certainly be made a scapegoat, should anything go wrong, and then they would deal with Nancy. He didn’t want that. He would deal with Nancy himself.
‘Will there be an alarm?’ O’Day inspected his watch. It was just coming up to two-thirty.
‘This is Switzerland,’ whispered Riley. ‘They have alarms on their wallets.’
Both men were dressed in their darkest clothes. That afternoon they had bought dark caps, leather gloves, long silk scarves to wind around their heads to obscure their faces below their eyes. They had watched Zakros’s house from two in the afternoon until dark. No lights had come on, so he wasn’t at home. They had waited until now to be certain he wasn’t coming back and to give everyone in the street time to slip into their deepest slumber.
‘Let’s finish the soup and get started,’ grumbled O’Day. ‘It could take a while to unscramble the alarm.’
Riley passed him the thermos flask which contained the remains of the soup. He himself took a nip of whisky from a flask and held it out to O’Day.
The other man shook his head as he swigged down the soup. He took a breath. ‘Afterwards.’
He put the cap back on the thermos, set it down on the back seat of the car and slipped on his gloves. He wound the scarf around his head and put on the cap, pulling it well down. Riley did much the same. They got out of the car, eased the doors shut, but did not lock them. They walked quickly across the road and were soon in among the shadows of the trees surrounding the house. They split up, O’Day going to the right, Riley to the left, as they had agreed in advance. A few minutes later they came across each other at the back of the building.
‘I have what looks like a window into a small loo on the ground floor, steps down to a basement and these french windows just here, which open into a dining-room.’
O’Day thought for a moment. ‘I think I may have something better. Look.’ He retreated the way he had come, with Riley following. He stopped outside a big sash window made up of small panes of glass. ‘I think this is the study. Anyway, there are curtains on the inside, with a pelmet. The pelmet covers the top layer of panes.’
Riley nodded. He knew what O’Day meant. O’Day took a large sheet of plastic wrapping which they had bought on their way to Zakros’s house, along with a glazier’s knife. He laid the plastic sheeting under the window.
O’Day took the glazier’s knife from his pocket and climbed on to the window-sill. With one hand he held on to the window as he started to cut away at the putty round one of the panes in the top row. It was difficult work and having to do it one-handed didn’t help. Flakes of dried putty fell on his hair and into his eyes, causing them to itch. He worked steadily, unhurriedly, telling himself he had hours if need be. Riley stood below, watching that the putty fell on to the s
heet, breaking off every now and then to scurry to the trees at the front of the house and check that there was no one else about.
After perhaps forty minutes, O’Day handed down the knife and said, simply, ‘Tape.’ Riley handed up a role of heavy-duty masking tape they had bought that afternoon in the same shop as the other things. O’Day unrolled a length of tape, then tore it off with his teeth. He flattened the strip against the window-pane but left about six inches free, twisting it to give it added strength. He repeated this five or six times, spreading the tape out over the pane of glass in a rosette. Each strip was left with a loose, twisted piece near the centre. When the circle was complete, he passed the roll of tape back down to Riley.
‘Ready,’ he whispered. He gathered up all the loose strips into his one hand. With the other he gripped the window for balance. Then he began to pull. The window budged and he thought it was going to come. But no, it held.
He saw a place where putty jutted out from the window-frame. ‘Knife!’ he called down. He cleared the putty and returned the knife to Riley, who laid it carefully on the plastic sheeting. They would replace it later, if they had the chance. He gathered the strands of tape and pulled again. This time, after a moment’s pause, the pane came away. One or two of the strips dislodged from the glass but enough of them held to prevent the pane falling to the ground. He lowered it to Riley. Now O’Day got down from the window-sill and took off his shoes. He climbed back on the sill and, using the frame where the glass was missing as his holding-point, he put his weight on one of the lower frames and lifted himself up. The open pane was too small for him to crawl through but instead he reached inside and undid the clip that fastened the top half of the sash window to the bottom half. He got down again and put on his shoes. ‘Now, the alarm,’ he whispered. ‘That’s your department.’
‘It will be an infra-red alarm,’ replied Riley. ‘One that detects movement or sudden changes in temperature. Leave the window an inch open for half an hour. With the air that gets in through the pane you removed, and through the gap between the two halves of the frame, the temperature will go down, but too slowly to trigger the alarm.’
‘You mean we’ve got to wait for another –’
‘Yes.’
And so they waited. They were good at that.
At half past three, Riley got up from where he had been sitting against the wall of the house. ‘Now, here’s the plan. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred have their alarms set to cover only the main rooms and the stairs. Burglars have to move around via the stairs, after all. Also, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand have the control panel of their alarms somewhere in the hall – usually you’ve got to be able to reach it within thirty or forty seconds. To judge from the layout of the house, our man’s control panel is either in this room here or somewhere in the main hall next to it.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
‘It isn’t. We’re sunk.’
Riley eased the window up a little more and waited. No wail from the alarm. Gingerly he rolled himself through the gap and dropped gently on to the floor inside. He stayed there for a while, letting his eyes adjust and surveying the room. It was a study. A desk, easy chairs, a computer. Bookshelves and a filing cabinet. He scanned the room but he already knew there was no sensor unit in here; otherwise it would have detected him the minute he dropped through the window. But the control panel might be in a desk drawer or a filing cabinet. He walked across. There was no control panel in any of the desk drawers. There was no control panel in the filing cabinet. There was nowhere else it could be in the study.
Riley grunted. Now it got tricky. The panel must be in the hall and there would certainly be a sensor there. Fortunately, the door between the study and the hall was open. That might have been awkward, if he had had to pull back the door; that alone could trigger the alarm. He dropped to the floor and started to crawl forward. This wasn’t foolproof but it did minimize the risk that he would be detected by a sensor. He inched towards the door, a wider vista of the hall opening up before him as he did so. There were some stairs, there was a table with some flowers on it – a light from the street shone in through the glass in the front door. Beyond the stairs was a desk, untidy with papers. This was more like it. There was a phone on the desk, more bookshelves lining the wall by the desk. But Riley’s eye fixed upon a small door beneath the bookshelves. A small cupboard – perfect for a control panel. He inched forward further – there it was! He jerked back, his breath producing a reedy sound in his throat. A tiny red eye was affixed to the cornice, above a door that led out to the garden at the back of the house. The sensor, exactly where he would have put it himself. Although he had been momentarily disconcerted by the red bead, now – as he got to his feet – he reflected that it was, in its way, reassuring. The owner of the house had employed an alarm company which appeared to be very conventional in its habits. That could mean – he prayed it would mean – that they also sited the control panels in conventional places too. Like that cupboard near the desk.
Riley now took from his pocket a small tube, barely three inches long. From that he extracted a very fine metal rod, thinner than a refill for a ballpoint pen. He slid the end of it back and forth, to check that it was working. At the far end a small metal circle opened out, like a tiny umbrella. He repeated the process several times. Satisfied that it was working smoothly, he set it down on the desk in the study. Now he took from another pocket a small metal container, shaped not unlike a Coca-Cola bottle, except that this had a thin spout on the end and what looked like a trigger. He depressed the trigger for the briefest moment and a fierce whoosh of compressed air shot out of the nozzle. Satisfied that his tools were working, he went back to the window.
‘O’Day!’
O’Day emerged from the shadow he had been hiding in. ‘Here.’
‘In a very short while this alarm will start to pulse, before it screams, unless it’s rigged to the police station only. I want you to go and start the car. If I’m not galloping across the road in thirty seconds, which is all I’ve got, stop the car and come back. It will mean I’ve fixed the alarm. Clear?’
‘Yes.’
‘I won’t make a move until I hear you start the car.’
O’Day walked back across the road, got into the car and switched on the engine.
Riley stood near the door to the hall, just out of range of the red eye, and juggled his tools in his hands, getting the feel of them. As soon as he stepped into the hall a pulse would beat throughout the house. Within thirty seconds, forty at the most, that pulse would burst into a screeching wail and, most likely, set off a bell at the local police station. All alarms gave their owners a period of grace, so they could deactivate them with a simple key. Even if he was right and the control panel, with the all-important lock, was in the cupboard next to the desk, he wouldn’t have time to pick the lock. That was where the ‘umbrella’ and metal bottle came in. He gripped them more tightly, counted to three and rushed into the hall.
He was four steps down the corridor before the pulses started, like someone insistently banging the wrong key on a computer. Four more steps and he had reached the cupboard. He yanked back the door – yes! the control panel was there. He put the bottle on the carpet as he knelt down. Quickly, he reached towards the lock and inserted the metal rod. He missed the first time! The pulses were still insistently throbbing down the hall – ten seconds must have elapsed already. His fingers found the lock and hurriedly he inserted the rod. If it jammed almost immediately, it meant the lock had a blind end and he wouldn’t need the rod. No, the rod slid through until it must have come out the other side. He slid the slot at the end so that the ‘umbrella’ would have opened. Now he pulled the rod towards him until it would come no further. The ‘umbrella’ now covered the other end of the lock, converting the chamber into a closed cul-de-sac. Fifteen seconds. Holding the metal rod with his left hand and pulling it towards him as hard as he could, he picked up the bottle. He manoeuvred t
he nozzle into the keyhole of the lock below the other metal rod. Seventeen seconds. Now, as he pulled hard again with his left hand, he pressed the trigger of the bottle with his right thumb. A hissing sound filled the hallway as the jet of high-pressure air zoomed into the lock. The theory was simple: the pressurized air would force itself against the entire surface of the lock interior, making any movable parts yield. The only problem was whether the ‘umbrella’ was wedged tightly enough against the back of the lock, and whether the parts of the lock itself fitted snugly together, preventing too much air escaping and making the pressure drop. Riley counted to four to give the jet a chance to work.
The pulse raced on, ricocheting around the hall. Twenty-one seconds.
He stopped the air, slackened his grip on the metal rod and twisted the ‘umbrella’ into a different position. Then he pulled hard on the rod again. Twenty-three seconds. He jabbed the nozzle against the mouth of the lock for the second time. He pressed his thumb against the trigger and held it there. The hissing all but drowned out the pulsing sound, but not quite. And then it did. The pulse had stopped and now only the hissing, the awful hissing was to be heard. The lock parts had moved. Riley eased back his thumb.
Not a sound, save his own breathing, disturbed the night there in the hall. Calmly, he pocketed his tools. With his handkerchief he wiped the front of the lock so as to obscure and minimize any scratches he might have inflicted on the metal barrel. He closed the door. Then he went back to the study.
O’Day was outside the window. He rolled through. ‘Brilliant.’
Riley bowed slightly. He looked at his watch. ‘Quarter to four. Let’s work together – it’s easier to communicate if we’re disturbed. We’ll start at the top.’
Upstairs there were four bedrooms and as many bathrooms. Two bedrooms were empty, save for carpets and curtains. Zakros obviously hardly ever did any entertaining. There was one guest bedroom but that was scarcely any different from the other rooms – just an empty room with a bed.