Requiem

by Clare Francis

  ‘But my things – ’

  ‘Send them to the cleaners.’

  She closed her eyes and took a slow breath.

  ‘While you’re on,’ she said, opening her eyes, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ The cautious tone.

  ‘Have you got a mole at the Home Office?’

  ‘A mole? What sort of a mole?’

  A journalist’s answer if there ever was one. ‘The normal sort,’ she said. ‘Someone who can find something out.’

  A pause, a tinge of resentment. Was he still miffed because she hadn’t told him what she was doing up in Chelmsford? Had he, the champion of discretion, taken exception to being on the receiving end of his own brand of secrecy?

  ‘What department?’ he asked.

  She told him.

  ‘I might know someone. Near enough anyway,’ he conceded.

  ‘It’s a favour for a friend,’ she said. ‘He wants to know why there’s a delay in issuing a project licence to a company called Octek Ltd.’ She spelt out the name and gave him the date and reference number of the application. ‘He thinks there’s a problem they’re not telling him about. He thinks someone might be blocking things.’

  His ears pricked up at that. ‘Oh? Well, if I’m to have any hope of getting that sort of information, I’ll need to know why anyone would want to block it.’

  ‘My friend didn’t say.’

  Simon sighed fretfully. ‘Really, I don’t think there’s anything I can do with so little information.’

  ‘There could be a story in it.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he accused sharply.

  A trap, a Simon-trap. ‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘There is a bit more to it than I’ve told you, but I can’t say what it is. I’m sorry.’

  ‘This wouldn’t be anything to do with your new job by any chance?’

  What was one more lie? She raised her eyes towards the remains of the ceiling. ‘No.’

  ‘Well …’ He made dubious noises. ‘I don’t suppose my contact’ll be much use anyway.’

  ‘But he’s worth a go?’

  ‘I don’t know till I try.’

  ‘The story – if anyone’s going to get it, it’ll be you, you know. You’re the only one who could do it properly.’

  That mollified him a bit. He always responded to a bit of flattery. It was one of his more endearing features.

  ‘Okay,’ he said grudgingly. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Someone walked across the floor above Daisy’s head and disturbed a sprinkling of plaster dust which floated down around her. ‘Simon, I couldn’t come over, could I?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I’m a bit homeless, at least for tonight.’

  ‘Look, I’d love to see you, but I can’t.’ He trotted out a story about having to meet a Euro-MP for dinner then drive straight down to Bristol. She noticed that he didn’t offer her the use of his flat, although she still had a key.

  ‘Can’t you stay at Jenny’s?’ he asked, putting some concern into his voice.

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  ‘Well, then …’

  There was a silence, the sort that says almost everything. Mainly goodbye.

  She said it. ‘Goodbye, Simon.’

  It was a moment before he replied, but when he did she could tell that he’d read and absorbed the message in her voice. ‘Goodbye, Daisy,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll drop your keys in some time.’

  He didn’t put up much of a fight about it. ‘Thanks.’

  She put the phone down and poured herself another glass of wine and sat in silence for a long while. She remembered Campbell and dialled his number. She was relieved when there was no reply. Half the wine had disappeared before she found the energy to bundle her clothes into plastic sacks, pile up the soggy linen, and scoop the saturated sugar, flour and rice bags from the top of the kitchen units into the rubbish.

  One of the few cupboards that was both dry and relatively free from dust was the one in the bathroom above the hot-water tank. Standing on the bath, unable to see into the recesses of the cupboard, she restacked the contents she could reach – the ones at the front mainly – and loaded in her clothes that were still dry and undamaged.

  After that, there didn’t seem much point in staying. She locked up the flat, lugged the plastic sacks of clothes and linen down to the car, and left a set of keys with the downstairs neighbours, along with a note, asking them to let the repair men in. It was already growing dark. She could go and grab a bath and a bed off Jenny, or she could fight her way across London to her mother’s, or she could head straight back to Mrs Biddows’.

  There was no debate really and, starting the faithful Metro, she headed north-east, back to Chelmsford.

  Removing the earpiece, Hillyard switched off the recorder and pulled out unhurriedly. He remained some distance behind until he reached an arterial road, where the traffic thickened and he was forced to close up. A few miles up the A10, he had an annoying few moments trapped behind some red lights, and thought he would have to rely on the pinger, but he managed to catch sight of her distinctive unmatched rear lights just in time to follow her onto the M25, heading east. After that it was easy. He kept two cars behind her all the way to the turn-off for the A12. Then it was a nice gentle run along the dual carriageway towards Chelmsford with the sound of the direction-finder pinging softly on the seat behind him.

  He had just prepared himself for a drive into the depths of East Anglia when she left the Chelmsford bypass at the first roundabout and headed towards the town centre. They came to a straggling suburban high street lined with small shops and pubs. She indicated left, slowed and drew up in front of a Chinese take-away. He went past and, looking in his mirror, saw her get out of the car and enter the shop without looking to left or right.

  He parked and waited. Beside him, Beji woke and pulled herself up to peer out of the window. She gave a tentative sniff, then another. He reached across and ruffled her head playfully.

  The girl emerged from the take-away with her boxed dinner, got into the car again and drove straight off. Again, she didn’t hesitate, didn’t look about her. She hadn’t used the journey to think too much then, hadn’t linked the little water-tank disaster with anything more significant. Hadn’t realized she’d been had. Not quite as smart as she thought she was. This idea offered him some consolation for the two months that she had managed to evade him.

  As he followed, it occurred to him that she knew her way around this town. There was no hesitation in her driving, no pausing at junctions or craning to look at road signs. She was cutting skilfully across the suburbs with the confidence of someone who had used the route many times. After five minutes they came into a semi-industrial area where there was far less traffic. He dropped back a little and turned up the pinger. Suddenly, with hardly any warning and only the briefest flick of her indicator, she turned left into a slip road.

  He slowed as he approached the turning, and took a quick look down it. The road looked more like an access road than a public thoroughfare. Making up his mind, he accelerated past, took another sideways glance, and realized he had made the right decision. It was a private road leading to some sort of industrial estate, and undoubtedly a no-through road. A little further on he turned around and made his way slowly back.

  Just short of the entrance he drew into the kerb and twiddled with the dials on the direction-finder. The volume and direction of the pings were constant. He allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.

  He gave it a full two minutes before turning into the estate and driving purposefully along, not too fast, not too slow. After a short distance the road forked. He continued along what seemed to be the most likely turning. Fifty yards on, he noticed a light flickering on in a building which lay ahead to the right. Simultaneously he spotted the Metro parked outside the perimeter fence. He drove steadily on, taking a careful look at the building as he passed. Lights were showing behind closed venetian blinds
in a front room and in the entrance hall. Above the entrance was a sign: Octek Ltd. That, he remembered, was the name she’d mentioned on the phone, the company she’d asked her boyfriend to look into, though Hillyard would play back the recording later to make sure.

  The road formed a loop, coming back on itself at the fork just before the main road. He drove out of the estate and turned right in the direction of the town centre. Plenty of time now. Time for a beer and a sandwich, a walk for Beji, and a call to Beryl. She would be pleased, she would chortle lunacies down the phone at him, she would call him a clever boy. And, he thought to himself, she would be absolutely right.

  Too much sweet, too little sour, and some dubious ball-shaped protein that was, presumably, the promised prawns. Nourishment of a sort. Daisy folded some rice into the glutinous mixture and with her free hand leafed through the pile of papers that had found their way onto her desk.

  Turning over an invoice, she found a message in Mabel’s upright schoolmarmish script. A Mr Hotstart had telephoned. There was an office number and a home number. Hotstart? She must mean Hopkirk. Hopkirk, she said aloud, as if Mabel were in earshot. Hopkirk was Nick Mackenzie’s accountant.

  A home number – he’d never left a home number before. What did it mean? News? Bad news?

  She dialled the number. It rang without reply. It was nine thirty. Out to dinner perhaps. What time would he get back – eleven? Twelve? Well, she would keep trying. There was plenty of work to fill the time.

  But her mind kept sliding back to what the accountant might want, to what he might say. That the last instalment couldn’t be paid next month as she’d requested? Or, even worse, that there would be no last instalment at all?

  Finally, at ten forty-five, Hopkirk answered.

  Mr Mackenzie was back, he said casually. If she wanted to see him, he was free at ten on Saturday morning. Would that be convenient? He gave her an address in West London – Mr Mackenzie’s new house, he said – and a telephone number.

  He rang off and she leaned weakly back in her chair. Did she want to see him? Did she! God, she would have trekked to Scotland, flown to America … What a question! The relief was warm and sweet. In her mind she was already going through her story with him, already explaining how the budget had managed to blossom, how the project needed this last injection of cash. He might be reluctant to listen, of course, he might be even more reluctant to provide the money, but he’d do it, she felt sure he would. At heart, he was all right. It was just a matter of getting to his heart, reaching him one more time. She checked herself, ashamed at such a manipulative thought. It was, she realized, a measure of her desperation.

  Somewhere there was a sound. She listened but it didn’t come again. She tried to place it. Muffled, from somewhere deep in the building, it had sounded like something falling or banging. A door perhaps.

  She went down the passage and, unlocking the door to the labs, passed through and listened again. There was silence. She made her way down to the passage, into BLab’s robing room and put her head round the door of the lab itself. It was quiet and dark. The windows were closed, the ventilation system whirring softly. Turning back, she looked into each of the store rooms in turn before coming to A-Lab. She switched on the lights and blinked for a moment. Then she saw a high narrow window which had been left open. Finding the pole, she inserted the hook into the ring on the frame and slammed the window shut.

  She looked around to see if anything had been knocked over by the wind but nothing had been disturbed. It was very quiet. It didn’t sound as though there was any wind at all. The sound must have come from somewhere else altogether, another building perhaps.

  She left, double-checking each door before setting the alarm. Barring accidents, she should be asleep by eleven thirty.

  She locked the gates, started the Metro, did her customary U-turn and accelerated towards the main road.

  If you want to see him. What a question.

  It was only when she drew up outside Mrs Biddows’, where the dial of the telephone was firmly locked against improvident guests, that she remembered that she had forgotten to call Campbell. Wearily she turned the car around and headed back towards the lab. A half-remembered phone box came into sight in a street radiating from the first roundabout. She took the unfamiliar road and, approaching the box, saw the green sign of a card-operated phone. She stopped and, delving into her purse, found three phone-cards, none of which had more than two or three units on it.

  If Campbell had a lot to say, she could always reverse the charges, or even go back to the lab and call again from there.

  Campbell’s number didn’t answer. She left it ringing for a long time in case he was sleeping heavily, but there was still no reply. Then, despite the time, she tried Mrs Bell.

  She answered straight away. ‘Ahh,’ she said flatly. ‘I thought it would be you. They’re holdin’ him for the night. There’s a hearin’ in the morning.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Campbell. I thought you knew,’ she said without surprise. ‘There was trouble.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘With the therapist woman.’

  ‘What therapist?’

  ‘A psychotherapist, she called herself. Sent by the social services. She came twice in a week, all the way from Glasgow. Said she’d be comin’ regularly. Campbell heard what she was sayin’ to Adrian. He didna’ like what he heard.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There was an incident.’

  ‘What sort of incident?’

  ‘Well … They’re sayin’ it was assault.’

  Daisy sighed aloud. Wonderful, Campbell, bloody wonderful.

  The call meter started flashing a nil-units warning. Daisy said hastily: ‘Listen, I’ll be up. I’ll try to get up as soon as I can – ’

  The line went dead.

  Daisy leaned against the side of the box while she worked out what time she would get to Scotland if she grabbed a few hours’ sleep and started at four.

  Placing the car was half the art. Too far away and you could say goodbye to any hope of a quick bunk, too near and it was like hanging up a sign to say that you were in there, uninvited. There was another alternative, of course, and that was to look like you owned the place. Hillyard used a spike to spring the padlock, then swung open one of the gates and reversed the car close into the side of the building and, returning to the gate, latched it loosely shut behind him.

  He marched purposefully up the side of the building until he was in the shadows, then went slowly about his business. He never hurried a recce, especially one like this. In fact, it was possible he might not go in tonight at all. It all depended on the alarm system, if there was one.

  There was one. Shining a pencil beam through one of the windows, he sighted a magnetic contact attached to a window frame opposite. After that it was a question of cataloguing the type and location of each security device. It wasn’t difficult. The windows around the rear of the building were numerous and large, revealing two laboratories full of equipment but not, as far as he could see, a great deal of security. There was no sign of heat sensors, nor of floor beams. The system appeared to be a fairly primitive mix of magnetic contacts and vibration sensors, though it never paid to make up one’s mind about these things too soon.

  It took him half an hour to decide that his first assessment had been right, and the system was as basic as he had first thought. It took him another twenty minutes to decide on the best way in. The front of the building was out: too well lit. On the open side where he had left the car there was a side door, but it was solid and well bolted, and all the windows were covered by vibration sensors. On the other side however, reached by a narrow strip between the building and the one next door, there was a frosted metal-frame window which looked as though it belonged to a washroom of some sort. As far as he could tell by peering through the distortions of the glass, the opening half of the frame, a conventional vertically hinged window, had only a single magnetic contact.
More to the point, the other, fixed, window had a revolving draught-operated vent cut into the glass.

  From his tote-bag he selected some tools and, taking his time, began to work on the vent. In the end he had to cut around the fitting and lift the thing out wholesale. This was not ideal – the refixing would require clips and putty and a lot of fiddling about – but it was safer than trying to drill out the fixings from the wrong side.

  Padding the sharp edges of the cut glass circle with his jacket, he reached through up to his shoulder until his fingers touched the latch of the other window. It moved under his fingers: it was not locked. He then checked the alarm fitting to make certain that it was indeed magnetic.

  From his bag he took a magnetic contact and, passing it through the hole, stuck the magnet to its brothers on the frame, ensuring that a circuit would be maintained when he opened the window. Then, dropping his hand down to the latch, he levered it upwards.

  He pushed open the window. The alarm did not go off.

  Climbing through, he came out of the washroom and into the passage and made his way softly towards the front entrance, looking for floor beams or heat sensors. Finding none, he looked into the rooms to right and left – offices, a stationery and equipment store – until he came to the office at the front of the building, the place where he had seen the light flicker on. This looked like the centre of operations: a large desk, a smaller one, two phones, filing cabinets.

  He doubled back and went down to the other end of the corridor, to a pair of swing doors, just to check he hadn’t missed anything. The doors were locked. He thought of trying to pick them, but it might not be possible and, since they undoubtedly led to the laboratories he had seen through the windows, it was unlikely to be worth the effort.

  He returned to the front hall. Tracing the lightweight cable from the alarm touch pad inside the main doors, he found the alarm control box tucked inside a utility cupboard in a corner of the main office. It was a standard if outmoded model. He made a note of the model type, and the number of circuits.

  Then he settled down to his main work of the night. Closing the venetian blinds, he draped his jacket over a desk lamp and risked turning on the light. Reading through the files, it took him half an hour to get the picture. Even then, he went back over some of the material a second time, just to be sure. Well, well. Cunning bitch.