by Tom Bale
‘He can’t leave it here, though,’ Gordon pointed out. ‘Not where Hank’s sister can easily see it.’
‘Unless she’s already signed the property over,’ Stemper said. ‘But I tend to agree. Chances are, he’ll be back to move it before long.’
Patricia cleared her throat. ‘Let’s return to the immediate problem, shall we?’
Stemper nodded. ‘The paperwork. Yes.’
****
They marched across the grass to a pair of timber sheds. Stemper immediately noticed that the door of the smaller one wasn’t latched properly.
He opened the door, then held it to let Patricia go in first. The shed was filled with discarded furniture and appliances, with barely enough room for the three of them to stand inside.
A heavy bookcase stood out at an angle from the wall. Patricia stepped around it, and swore softly. Stemper and Gordon each took a turn to ease past and see what she had found: a large space beneath the floor, lined with thick plastic waterproofing. The perfect hiding place for a stash of incriminating documents.
But it was empty.
‘This is where he kept it,’ Patricia gasped, one hand on her chest, as if winded by the discovery. ‘It was here. And somebody beat us to it.’
‘But who?’ Gordon said. ‘Robert Scott again?’
‘It must be,’ Patricia said.
‘How did he find it? More to the point, how did he even know to look?’
Stemper sighed, loudly enough to capture their attention.
‘I fear I was wrong,’ he said, and made no attempt to disguise how much the admission cost him. ‘Perhaps it isn’t two separate conspiracies, after all. Perhaps it’s just the one.’
CHAPTER 78
Robbie arrived home in a stinking mood. Pity Jed was out; otherwise Robbie might have found the nerve to evict him there and then ...
Except he couldn’t, because Jed’s buddy hadn’t yet collected the Fiesta. It made him want to scream, all these obligations: Jed, Bree, Cate, Dan. Dragging him down.
He checked that Hank’s money was still in his safe, and celebrated this minuscule victory by helping himself to fifty quid. The document boxes were on top of his wardrobe. He took them down and transferred the contents to a big old sports bag. Then he walked round the corner to a pub, the Palmeira. Ordered a cheeseburger and a pint of lager.
The first few papers bored him rigid, and had him wavering in his determination to read every word. But he knew he might not find the diamond in the rough unless he was prepared to be slow and methodical.
An hour and two pints later, his eyes were glazing over. The pub had a lively lunchtime crowd and Robbie felt like Billy No Mates, languishing in a corner with only memos and contracts for company.
And his phone stayed quiet, which struck him as odd. Maureen Heath was bound to have complained to Bree by now. Unless Bree was with Jim and couldn’t get away to make a call ...
He thought about another pint, then decided not to bother. Five minutes and he’d call it a day. Perhaps go to the gym to clear his head.
Pushing aside a pile of loose photocopies, he reached for a tatty A5 notebook and flicked through it, seeing a mass of handwritten entries in the form of a diary or journal. He opened a page at random and read it.
Mon 15 – Wednes 17 June 2009 – Dunstable, Bedfordshire
Auditing at TWinEx, Templeton subsidiary. Stayed till 1am on second night and managed to copy six invoices, memos and contract for Dept for Work and Pensions for data analysis and ID verification project running 2003 to present day. (Ref documents DWP081-97: shows true costs of projects inflated from approx. £336,000 to £681,000.)
Robbie read a couple more in a similar vein, then turned to the beginning. There he found an introduction of sorts, or a disclaimer. The first paragraph made him laugh out loud, drawing glances from several neighbouring tables.
This journal serves as the record of a project to gather evidence of long-term systematic fraud committed by the group of companies owned by my employer, Mark Templeton. What follows is strictly confidential. If you are reading it without my consent, I am probably dead. If my death occurred in violent or unexplained circumstances, the perpetrators are almost certainly acting for Templeton himself, or I was killed by my co-conspirators: Patricia and Gordon Blake of 8 Gadbrook Lane, Brockham, Surrey. The project was initiated at their suggestion, with the aim of extorting money from Mark Templeton. That sum is likely to run into tens of millions.
Robbie had to stop and read that part again, to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
Yep. That was what it said: Tens of millions.
‘Oh, my sweet Lord.’
Robbie had always believed he was lucky; had kept faith that at some stage his life would take a spectacular turn for the better. It was this belief in his destiny that had prompted him to tell Dan that he didn’t really regret what had happened on Tuesday.
As if he’d already known, deep down, that he had something truly priceless here.
****
With the position between herself and Dan agreed, Hayley seemed eager to leave the cafe. Dan was in no particular hurry, so he stood up and offered her a quick, hesitant kiss on the cheek – not unlike the one he’d given Cate on Thursday night – by way of farewell.
‘Going home?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Into town.’ A pause. ‘I might see Tim, for a quick drink.’
‘Right. He’ll be waiting to hear how it went.’ Dan didn’t care for the sarcasm in his voice: a remnant of a wounded male pride that was frankly perverse in this context.
With Hayley gone, he sat and looked around the cafe, reflecting on how much he’d love to own a place like this: a great size, nice decor, plenty of passing trade, incredible views out to sea.
It reminded Dan that a whole world of possibilities was opening up. He was a free agent. A single man. Not only that, but the damaged car had gone; the threat of exposure no longer existed. A painful chapter in his life was ending; a new chapter was about to begin.
So why did he feel so miserable, even slightly cheated? It was completely irrational. The last thing he needed was to make an enemy of Hayley, especially now she’d come so close to guessing the truth.
The problem, he realised, was a bruised ego. It bothered him that she was already cosying up to Tim Masters, while her allegations of an affair between him and Cate were completely without foundation.
He finished his coffee and decided to walk part of the way back to Brighton along the undercliff promenade. As he emerged into the blinding glare of the midday sun, the parallels with a newly released prisoner couldn’t have been clearer. But still the unease persisted, a nagging feeling that this was all too straightforward, too painless.
He couldn’t be that lucky, could he?
****
Stemper had never seen Patricia so disorientated by a setback. Gazing, bereft, at the void in the floor, she kept repeating, ‘It was here for us to find. It was here for us.’
‘We did say that, all along,’ Gordon added, almost as if to goad her into an explosion. ‘We knew Hank would keep it close at hand.’
‘Thursday night.’ Patricia made a fist and thumped the top of the bookcase. ‘It should have been ours on Thursday night.’
‘But the search was curtailed by an intruder,’ Stemper reminded them. ‘Killing him would have attracted a lot of attention to this place. Remember that the barmaid knew the burglar was coming here.’
Patricia, steely-eyed, said nothing. It was Gordon who protested.
‘But after you’d sent him packing, why didn’t you—?’
‘He made threats about an accomplice. I didn’t believe him, but that’s not to say he wouldn’t have been capable of rounding up a few like-minded pals to return and settle the score. At that stage my brief was to go unnoticed. I didn’t think you’d welcome a bloodbath.’
‘Nobody’s suggesting a bloodbath.’
‘My point is that we’re discussing this with the be
nefit of hindsight. At the time it was prudent to abandon the search. Unfortunately, Hank’s sister arrived the following day.’
Patricia gasped. ‘Do you think she found this?’
‘I doubt it. There’s another consideration, too.’ With Gordon’s help, Stemper moved the bookcase back against the wall. They all shuffled round into gaps between the junk and surveyed the shed as it must have looked prior to the discovery.
Patricia saw what he was getting at. ‘It was very skilfully hidden.’
‘Exactly. I can’t say for certain that I’d have found it on Thursday night.’
‘And yet this man Scott had no such difficulty.’
‘The only explanation,’ Gordon ventured, ‘is that he knew where to look.’
Stemper nodded. ‘We can’t rule that out.’
‘So he’s our number one priority?’ Gordon turned to Patricia for confirmation. ‘And he should be back here for the car—’
‘Caitlin Scott’s our best route,’ Patricia cut in. ‘We already know where she lives. We can make her talk, can’t we?’
A savage glance at Stemper, who said, ‘She’ll be unwilling to betray her brother, once she appreciates the danger he’s in.’
Impatiently, Gordon said, ‘What are you getting at?’
‘After I’ve questioned her, she’ll probably have to die. She’s a young, attractive female lawyer. And the police already know of her link to Hank O’Brien. Her death is guaranteed to generate a huge amount of police activity, not to mention media interest.’ He looked at each of them in turn, his face solemn. ‘You have to be convinced it’s the right step.’
Patricia made a growling noise. ‘I’d dearly like to see all three of them hung, drawn and quartered, and to hell with the consequences. But what other options do we have?’
The question seemed rhetorical: certainly Gordon made no move to answer it. Instead they regarded one another for a moment, and Stemper had a sense of marital telepathy at work.
‘No. I’m not sure that we have any,’ Gordon said at last.
Patricia nodded vehemently. ‘Not with time running out.’ She addressed Stemper: ‘The way I see it, we’ve come this far – now we have nothing to lose. We do whatever’s necessary.’
CHAPTER 79
Robbie hurried back to the flat, the sports bag slung over his shoulder. He had the twitchy, watchful paranoia of a man in possession of a winning lottery ticket, with a big neon sign above his head proclaiming that fact to the world.
But he made it home unscathed. Jed was still out, so Robbie bolted the front door to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed, then emptied the papers on to the kitchen counter. He made coffee and fired up his laptop. Googled ‘Mark Templeton’ and came up with thousands of relevant hits, most of them relating to the group of companies that went under the name Templeton Wynne. A big business – and about to get a lot bigger, if the rumours of an American takeover were to be believed.
While he surfed, Robbie was simultaneously browsing through the journal. A strange scribbled phrase seemed to be repeated throughout the document, often placed close to an entry that pointed to massive overcharging or downright fraud. It said: More in the box.
An odd comment, given that the journal entries were carefully cross-referenced with the rest of the paperwork, each document marked in hand with a date and a reference number. More in the box seemed far too vague.
It plucked at his concentration until, after swiftly draining a mug of coffee, he hurried into the bedroom and retrieved the empty document boxes. First he held them, one in each hand, comparing the weight. Maybe there was a secret compartment.
He turned them over, examining the undersides, then reached into each one and felt around the base and sides, his fingertips carefully tracing the smooth metal surfaces. With the second box, something interrupted the glide of his fingers: a small bump just beneath the rim. Looking closely, he saw a tiny square of plastic: a micro SD card.
****
It had been attached with a dab of Blu-Tack. Robbie prised it off and stared at it for a moment. His heart was pounding in a way that made it feel entirely separate from his body: a discomforting and vaguely nauseous sensation. But he could withstand a little nausea in return for a discovery on this scale.
He’d had a similar card to this in one of his mobile phones. Somewhere there was a plastic sleeve that would convert the micro SD into a standard SD card, and thus fit into the card reader on his laptop. But where was it?
He swore the place blue as he searched, riffling through the drawer full of office stuff and junk: rubber bands wrapped in dust and half-bent paper clips, pens and coins and batteries, instruction books and chargers for electronic devices that had been thrown out years ago. Finally he yanked out the entire drawer, breaking one of the runners in the process, and upended it on his bedroom floor. A hell of a mess, but ten seconds later he had the adapter.
The memory card, no larger than a fingernail, had a capacity of 32 gigabytes. Less than half of this was used, which had Robbie wondering how much more data Hank had been hoping to collect.
The files were arranged in a couple of dozen folders, and each one had dozens of documents. The first few he checked appeared to be high-resolution scans of the physical paperwork already in his possession. Feeling slightly disappointed, he broke off for another coffee.
Back at the laptop, he studied the folders and selected one with the intriguing name Primafacie. It contained a number of sound files, a sequence called Templeton1, 2, 3 and so on, and a similar sequence: Blakes 1-4. There was also an AVI file, called Blakes July10.
Robbie double-clicked, then remembered that he probably should have run a virus check on the contents first. Too late now.
****
The media player opened and brought up a grainy image of a place Robbie knew quite well: Hank O’Brien’s living room. For a moment he thought he was going to be seeing a clip of the movie that had been filmed there.
Instead, Hank O’Brien was in the shot, wearing a garish summer shirt and indecently tight shorts. A well-groomed, snotty-looking couple were with him, sipping from tall glasses that might have contained Pimm’s. Robbie had the impression that they were unaware of the camera’s presence, whereas certain subtle movements on Hank’s part suggested that he knew it was there.
A covert recording, then. With the benefit of sound. The clip lasted just short of six minutes, but Robbie heard what he needed within the first thirty seconds.
The woman – it had to be Patricia Blake – was holding forth in a fashion that reminded him of Hank’s sister, Cheryl.
‘We knew exactly what you’d find because it’s in the nature of the man to steal from others. Mark Templeton is a thief, a liar and a cheat. He deserves nothing, so what we’re going to take from him is remarkably fair.’
Hank was nodding. He was red in the face, his piggy eyes gleaming, and Robbie thought of how he’d looked in the ditch on Tuesday night. I had the last laugh, Hank.
On screen, O’Brien said, ‘I’m concerned about how he’ll react, when the time comes to approach him. I mean, it’s blackmail, pure and simple.’
The woman was dismissive. ‘I don’t care how he reacts. As long as he pays up, that’s all that matters.’
‘And he’ll have to pay up,’ her partner cut in, his voice smooth to the point of annoyance. ‘We’ve got him by the short and curlies, as they say.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Patricia assured Hank. ‘We’ll be there to look after you, every step of the way. We’ve put a great deal of effort into this. Just keep on playing your part, and we’re all going to be very rich.’
Laughing, Robbie hit pause and said to the screen, ‘Correction, my dear lady. I’m going to be very rich.’
****
It wasn’t the happiest of journeys back to Surrey. Before leaving, the Blakes had discussed with Stemper what they required, and what actions they would sanction to achieve their aims. It was a heavy, sombre conversation, stretched tight wit
h a palpable sense of desperation. Now they were on the move again, just the two of them, and Gordon did his best to lift the mood. But he knew he was pushing a boulder uphill.
‘We don’t know for sure that it’s a conspiracy. It could be just a run of ghastly luck.’
‘Oh, Gordon. Please ...’
‘All right, bear with me. If they don’t have prior knowledge of our plan, the chances are that this paperwork will be completely meaningless to them.’
‘Whether it makes sense or not, the very fact of its concealment tells them something.’
‘True. But it’s bound to take them a while to figure out what they’ve got ...’
Encouraged, Patricia said, ‘By which time Stemper will have them. We hope.’
‘Hmm.’ Choosing his words carefully, Gordon said, ‘Did you, ah, detect anything awry?’
‘With Stemper? Yes, I did.’
‘My impression was that he seemed almost unwilling to act.’
‘I never thought I’d say this, but I hope he’s not going the way of Jerry.’
Dead? Gordon thought. He choked back a laugh. ‘Oh. Losing his touch, you mean?’
‘Well, he’s been comprehensively outwitted, hasn’t he?’
‘And he can’t like that one bit,’ Gordon said with unconcealed relish. ‘A man with such ridiculous levels of pride. Hubris, even.’
Patricia said nothing. They ate up another mile, crossed a roundabout, overtook a lorry, the silence easy but building to something, a slow ratcheting of the tension in the air around them.
‘You know,’ Patricia said at last. ‘Once we’re concluded, I’m not sure if it’s wise that Stemper should be permitted to waltz off into the sunset ...’
‘I won’t argue with that. But how would we prevent it?’
‘It depends on the final outcome, I suppose.’ A short laugh. ‘Fifty million pounds ought to buy one rather a lot of options.’