‘Fred,’ he called to the dog, who got up reluctantly and nosed at his hand. ‘Reckon you can give us another lift back round,’ he asked, not really bothered which of the officers responded.
‘Something up?’ The young female officer looked up hopefully, like she’d welcome something to do.
‘I can’t raise my partner on the radio and … I don’t know, I’ve just got a bad feeling.’
She shrugged, then led the way to the car. Another patrol had arrived, making her even more superfluous. She drove fast and Bill was grateful for that. He’d tried Tony again; still no response.
Man, woman and dog made their way into the building. ‘What do you do here?’ she asked.
‘Not a lot. Most of it’s been given over to storage. We sublet to one of those companies that charges people to keep their stuff here between house moves and what have you. Round the other side there’s a couple of little industrial units. This was all one big engineering plant, back in the day, that folded and the owners subdivided. It’s been up for sale this past year, but no one’s even come to look.’
He led the way up the stairs to their little control room. ‘We’ve got CCTV feeds from all over the industrial estate,’ he said. ‘Most people can’t afford much in the way of security, we’ve got excess capacity now, so the owners repositioned and now rent out the other cameras. We watch it all from up—’ He broke off, stopped dead at the door. Tony lay slumped half on and half off his chair, his head a mess of blood and bone.
SIX
September 24th
Slicing rain, the cold kind that felt like iced buckshot when it hit.
Adam thought, not for the first time, that he really ought to find somewhere warmer. Escape to the sun. Southern France, Spain, maybe. Anywhere but endure months of the fickle-minded British weather. It was still only late September but the rain was wintry. Although, he argued, if he did leave, he would miss the hard, lustrous frosts and those precious mornings when he woke to find that snow had fallen and that the world was bright with it.
Adam quickened his pace, almost running along the narrow high street, pulling his coat collar high and wishing he remembered where he’d left his umbrella.
Traffic roared by, much too close for comfort, showering the filthy rain from the overloaded gutters over Adam’s polished shoes and already too wet trousers.
He swore, irritably and miserably as the icy wetness soaked though his socks and into his shoes, then quickened his pace again.
Almost there now, a few more paces, then Adam Carmodie dived rapidly through a shop doorway and stood, slightly breathless, just inside the door.
‘My God! Just look at you, you’re soaked through. Get yourself into the back there before you catch your death and I’ll make coffee.’
The woman bustled from behind the counter, all hands and good intentions, flicking his wet hair back from his broad forehead and fumbling with the large black buttons on his sodden overcoat.
Adam chuckled warmly and allowed himself to be relieved of his coat and ushered through to the back office. Billie had been with him for years and fussed over him like a mother with a rather wayward child, despite her being a good deal younger than himself.
‘It’s filthy weather,’ he complained. ‘I’ve only come from where I parked the car and look at me.’
Billie nodded sympathetically, and smiled a smile that framed her grey eyes in deep, upsweeping lines. She hung Adam’s coat, lengthwise, over the backs of two swivel chairs placed close to the radiator and then turned to switch on the already filled kettle.
‘You sit and get warm again,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be back to make a coffee in a moment.’
Adam sat down and settled back with a deep sigh.
He was still at his happiest here. This tiny shop had been his first business and still, despite all of his success, the only part of Carmodie Electronics he felt to be truly his.
He glanced around him. Things hadn’t changed much in all the years he’d owned the place. The little shop out front; the poky back room office and the storeroom beyond, filled with stock, mainly for the mail order side of the business.
Billie ran the place, really. Had been there long enough to view it as her own domain and, since last Christmas, had held a quarter share of the stock on her own behalf. A gift from Adam.
She knew the business back to front and inside out. Had a couple of part timers to help with the office work and packaging and Adam himself, though officially retired, came in on several days a week to keep his hand in.
He looked up as Billie bustled in to see to the kettle. Picking up, as she did so, the thread of a conversation with him she had been carrying on in her head since leaving the room.
‘So the last ad in that new monthly, it’s done us a power of good and there’s been terrific interest in the catalogue.’
She filled the mugs and turned to him again. ‘So you see, we were all telling you the truth, folk don’t mind paying for a good-sized catalogue, especially if they get their cash back off the first order and even our Internet customers like something physical they can browse through.’
She paused and perched herself on the desk edge, handing him his coffee as she did so.
‘There’s a pile of new catalogue requests in the in tray. Do them, if you get around to it, will you. Judy phoned in sick this morning and I know I won’t have time. And there are a few general enquiries, one about the range of those new transmitters. Oh, and there was this …’
She reached across to the other desk and picked up a plain, Manila envelope, handed it to Adam.
‘I didn’t open it,’ she said. ‘If you look at the address, it looks kind of personal.’ She paused, as though about to say some more but then the doorbell rang and the shop door clanked noisily. Someone else in a hurry to escape the rain.
‘Customers!’ Billie announced with deep satisfaction, put her coffee down and left Adam to the mail.
Adam laughed softly to himself and drew the in tray close, preparing to work his way through the morning mail. Whoever it was who’d just come into the shop, they were likely to be there for quite some time. They might have come in only for a fuse, but they’d be sure to leave with a good deal more, even if it was only the memory of friendly conversation. Billie was just like that. It was as well, he reflected, for the sake of the business that mail orders didn’t need any talking to.
He rifled quickly through the catalogue requests, separated out the more specific queries and then turned back to the Manila envelope Billie had handed to him.
The address was, to say the least, a little vague.
Adam Carmodie, Carmodie Electronics, Lentonstone. And that was all.
He slit it open and thoughtfully extracted the single sheet of headed notepaper inside.
A hospice? A request for charity, perhaps.
But no.
A letter that began, ‘Dear Mr Carmodie, you don’t know me, but I’m writing on behalf of …’
Curious now, Adam began to read, a small frown creasing between his eyes.
He read the letter twice and then, the frown deepened and he laid the page aside.
Joseph Bern. After all this time. Joseph Bern.
For several minutes, Adam stared blindly into space, his mind flooded with old memories.
It had been, what, ten years since they had last met. Their contact even before that had at best been inconsistent and erratic; sometimes, almost the closest of friends, then parting for months when some irritation had pushed them apart or Joseph had once more decided to travel.
And now this.
For moments more, Adam hesitated, his mind filled with the memories of their first meeting. The heat of the sun, the bright blue afternoon filled with green scents and the sounds of birds and buzzing insects. Joseph staggering on to the road and falling in front of Adam’s car, blood oozing from a deep gash in his left cheek, his right arm cradled against his side and bloody footprints from bare feet, torn and abraded from long w
alking over hard terrain, marking the roadway.
Adam closed his eyes, all of those things as clear as morning, in his memory.
Then he reached out for the phone and dialled the number on the hospice letter head.
SEVEN
Bill sat in the front seat of the police car and watched the ambulance take Tony away. He was alive, they said, but no one was very hopeful. There were police everywhere and Bill felt like a spare part, watching them scurrying here and there, looking purposeful.
Fred snuffled sleepily in the rear seat and Bill wondered for a moment what would have happened if he’d been with Tony when his friend had been attacked. He had no doubt that Fred would have done his bit, but anyone capable of hitting someone as hard as they had obviously hit Tony, would probably have dealt with the dog just as harshly and efficiently. Bill could not help himself; he was glad that Fred hadn’t been there and guilty because he felt like that.
He thought also about those two men in the van. Whoever they were, whoever had organized this, those men had been considered expendable too. Someone had sealed them into that van, known that when they woke up from whatever gas had been pumped into the space through that little valve in the bulkhead, they’d be sure to make a racket, sure to try and get out. They’d counted on someone hearing the noise and on someone going to help. They’d counted, specifically, on Bill hearing them and calling for help. On Bill and probably Tony as well, leaving the building so that whoever it was would have had access. If Tony had been with Bill and Fred and the police officers on the outside of the fence, he wouldn’t have been hurt. Whoever it was would have gone in, got what they wanted and that would have been that.
And even while he wrestled with that conclusion, he couldn’t help but wonder at how elaborate this ruse had been. It went, in his mind, from making little sense, to making none.
Prentiss came out and opened the car door, and crouched down beside the passenger seat. ‘We’re going to need you to come back in and take a gander at the system,’ he said. ‘It looks like someone wiped all the CCTV records for the past week, maybe longer. Do you have back ups?’
Bill shook his head. ‘The recording is on a loop,’ he said. ‘The past ten days will be kept, the first of the ten drops off as a new day is recorded over the top. It’s a digital system,’ he said more hopefully. ‘I hear they can recover digital records even though they’ve been wiped or overwritten.’
Prentiss shrugged. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. ‘Apart from that I need you to come and look inside at the storage units, see if you can see what they might have got into. It all looks locked up tight.’
Bill nodded and got out of the car. ‘Why’d they have to hit him so hard? Tony wasn’t a big lad, he’d have given them no bother.’
Prentiss gestured that he didn’t know.
‘He should have been with me,’ Bill said. ‘He offered to come out and I said to him, no, rules are one of us stays in the viewing room. One inside at all times, that’s the rules.’
‘The rules your boss laid down?’
‘Company rules,’ Bill said. ‘The day shift is the same. One person in the control room, one to go and patrol. We switch round every two or three patrols. Tony liked to watch the telly, so I generally did the two last walks. We never had trouble here. Worst we got were drunk teenagers and a couple of graffiti artists. And they got scared off when Fred barked at them.’
‘I don’t know, Bill, I really don’t. But the thing that strikes me is how bloody elaborate it was. Those two in the van … no one would go to that much trouble just so they’d be a diversion. It’s like they already had them available, in the van, so someone thought they may as well put them to another use.’
Bill looked sideways at Prentiss. ‘I thought the same thing,’ he said. ‘It seems like too much trouble to go to, just to get us out of the building.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Didn’t even work for that, did it?’
‘Not your fault, Bill. You mustn’t even start to think that.’
‘Hard not to.’
Prentiss led the way to the back of the building and the storage units that had been in Bill’s care. ‘There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere, Bill. Anything you see that’s different, that’s unusual? CSI would like to know where’s best to make a start as there’s a hell of a lot to go through.’
Bill stood back and looked at the row of storage lockers. This had been one big room; the owners had sectioned it off with stud walling and put cage doors on the front, secured with padlocks, all of which appeared to be in place. There were a row of lock-ups along each wall and a double row down the middle of the big space. On the face of it, the lockers seemed solid and secure, but Bill knew the stud wall between was cardboard thin. A good punch and you could put your fist through it.
He began to walk down the row, patrolling now as he did every night; not that he’d ever expected to find anything wrong but just because that was what the job description said he had to do. Normally, he’d have tugged on each of the padlocks. He told Prentiss so and the officer handed him a pair of gloves.
‘Do what you usually do,’ he said.
‘What if they’ve left prints?’
‘They won’t have left prints,’ Prentiss asserted.
Bill absorbed that. Slowly, he walked down the rows, glancing at the numbers on the front of each cage and that linked, somehow, to the computer records. He looked through the little window in the cage door, trying to remember how the stacks of boxes and shelves had looked earlier that day. He tugged at each of the locks, checking as he always did. Prentiss paced slowly behind.
The first row and there was nothing. The second row, again, all seemed to be as he expected. Bill turned back down the row of central cages and pulled the padlock on the first enclosure. He paused. Looked inside again. Had something been moved?
Not certain, he moved along the row, but something nagged at him that he couldn’t quite place and once he’d finished checking that block, he headed back and looked again.
‘I’m not sure what it is,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure something’s been shifted about in there.’
‘OK.’ Prentiss beckoned to the waiting CSI. ‘It’s as good a place to start as any.’
Bill nodded and slowly checked the final block of cages, but the more he thought about it, the more he was certain only that particular one had been disturbed. He came back round to where the two CSI had now cut the lock and opened the door.
‘It belongs to an old woman,’ he said. ‘I remember her. She came in about a year, eighteen months ago, picked up an old chair and then came back maybe six months ago and fetched a box. Just an old tin thing. I remember her because she got a taxi all the way from town and had it wait for her while she came in. It was before the day shift came on, that was what struck me, both times. She came early. I remember the fight she had with the driver of the black cab because she wanted to take the chair back in the cab and he said he didn’t carry furniture.’ Bill laughed. ‘She won that one. I got the impression she won most of her arguments, come to think of it.’
Prentiss nodded. ‘Can you find her address?’
‘I can’t, it’ll be on the computer at head office. The people who use these lockers, they have a key and a pass card. I scan the card and it comes up with their number, then I show them where the locker is. Actually, it’s not usually me. Usually the day shift. Most people don’t arrive in the middle of the night. The customer then lets themselves into the cage and they’re responsible for locking up after themselves.
‘And what sort of people use the storage facility?’ Prentiss asked.
‘Oh, all sorts. Mostly they leave stuff here for a month or so. The company lets them out in a three-month block, but usually it’s, like, people who are moving house and there’s a gap of some sort between the moves. The lock ups are quite small, so if you’ve got to store your furniture, it can mean hiring two or three of them, and for a three-month block even if you don’t need it. It’s not the cheapest around,
but a lot of people like the fact there’s always security around and that if they need to they can come any time. We get a lot of early starts on moving days, vans turning up here just before I go off shift and that, not so many at three in the morning.’
‘And that’s when the old lady arrived?’
Bill nodded. ‘You remember that sort of thing. Not that I’d have forgotten her anyway. She was a right … character.’
They stood and watched as the CSI moved carefully inside. Everyone seemed a bit jumpy, Bill thought, but then, in their place and after what he’d seen in that van, he’d have been a bit jumpy. Thoughts of bombs and booby traps jostled in his head and he took an involuntary step or two back, then told himself not to be a daft sod. If something blew in here, he’d need to be a lot further away than he could reasonably get. The desire to leave was suddenly overwhelming. Bill took a deep breath.
‘You said you wanted me to look at the control room?’
Prentiss nodded. ‘See anything?’ he asked the two CSI.
‘Looks like a box might have been moved. The dust’s been disturbed back here.’
Prentiss nodded. ‘We’ll leave you to it, then,’ he said and, much to Bill’s relief, led the way back upstairs.
EIGHT
Alec and Naomi had gone out house hunting. Truthfully, neither of them really wanted to settle in this current location in the Northamptonshire countryside, beautiful though it was. It was just that bit too far from the sea for Alec’s liking. They examined what Alec told her was a very nice looking bungalow in a quarter acre garden and while Naomi agreed that there seemed to be lots of space in the big rooms and the roses in the garden were lovely, the kitchen and one of the bedrooms smelt of cats and she wasn’t convinced that even stripping out the carpets and scrubbing the boards would get rid of that particular stink. Napoleon forgot himself for a moment and hoovered eagerly at the new scents, then remembered he was supposed to be working and pressed himself close to Naomi’s leg.
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