His shoulders slumped slightly.
“I can assure you that I am a man of discretion,” I reminded him of who it was that I worked for. “I’m used to keeping secrets.”
“Oh all right,” he gave in and pulled the cord on the blinds.
Beyond the window was a large cavern. It wasn’t very high, but it ran off into the distance as far as the electric lights could illuminate, reflecting back off the surface of the lake. It was a breathtaking sight, but there was something else in the foreground that stole the breath away long before the cave even got a look in. In the water, not a stone’s throw away from a window, were three large creatures. I wouldn’t have thrown any stones at them in any case because they were as big as the model whales hanging from the ceiling in the Natural History Museum (those being the only whales I had ever seen in real life) and a whole lot more animated. Their humpbacked shapes cruised effortlessly through the water and their long necks curved gracefully up towards their small heads, just below the cavern roof. One of the trio was significantly larger than the other two and seemed to be in charge, the other two following where that one led. The sudden spill of light from the windows as the blinds were retracted caught their attention for a moment, but interest soon waned and they went back to their full time job of swimming aimlessly around.
“Is that what I think it is?” Miranda gasped, as surprised as I was. “I mean what I think they are?”
“Yes. Styxosaurus snowii of the elasmosauridae family, genus plesiosaur.” Helliman gazed at the creatures with far less awe and far more affection than we did, but just as raptly.
“Well that’s certainly what I thought it was,” I whispered in an irony heavy undertone to Miranda. The United Nations had declared that all the dinosaur plateaus and lost valleys had now been thoroughly mapped, but I’d kept up with my knowledge of dinosaurs just in case, though the creatures swimming around in front of us were technically marine reptiles rather than dinosaurs. I’d only got as far as identifying the genus though. “I didn’t think there were any of these left.”
“They’re an evolutionary dead end,” Helliman explained. “Incredibly good at hiding. It’s their greatest strength and their worst weakness.”
“Weakness? How so?” Miranda asked, genuinely intrigued.
“They’re so good at hiding that even prospective mates can’t find them.” I thought that he was pulling our legs for a moment, but he was perfectly serious as he continued, “This is a breeding programme that’s been fully authorised by the Global Wildlife Fund and supported by the government, but it’s being kept secret to keep the gawkers away. They don’t like to procreate in front of an audience. We’re hoping one day to release them back into their Scottish habitat.”
“Well, I don’t see how this could have any bearing on our case, so we’ll go and let you get back to your work. Thank you once again,” I agreed with him and, with one last long look at the creatures beyond the glass, we departed. Our guide was waiting for us in the corridor outside the laboratory to take us back to the reception. From his shifty expression, I suspected he’d been having a quick fag that he’d just managed to stash before we caught him. The new Safebac cigarettes were almost completely odourless, unless you chose one of the perfumed brands, so I couldn’t prove it, but I knew the behaviour.
As we walked back towards the car Miranda asked me, “Did you learn anything useful?”
“Not much and all of it negative,” I told her honestly. There wasn’t much point in lying since she’d been there at the time and must have known it for herself. “Your brother worked his notice, didn’t seem stressed and wasn’t knocking around with any of his workmates.” It didn’t sound a lot like the behaviour of a man who needed to suddenly run away from something. If you need to run you don’t work your notice period. But Helliman had said that Arnold had told him that he had ‘something’ to go on to. Not ‘a new job’, not a ‘family crisis’, not a ‘friend in need’ but simply ‘something’. It was that something that gave me pause for thought.
37 Old Hob End, Slough
The house that was the last known residence (and, for all we knew, was the current residence) of Arnold Harcourt turned out to be a broken down Georgian affair in what had once been a leafy suburb of Slough before it had fallen on hard times. Council tax and utility bill rises had made it impossible for anyone to own entire houses in the area and so they had been split up into three or four flats that could be rented out to raise the necessary cash. It was something that had happened throughout the centre of Oxford as well only there the buildings had been taken over by organisations that just wanted to get the city name on their letterheads even if all they did there was store a few records or process the mail. New York, Paris, Oxford looks so much better on the advertising than New Jersey, Lille, North Wapping.
The building itself was in a reasonable state of repair, which is to say that I had no fear that it was going to fall down on my head whilst we were inside, but it was in dire need of a coat of paint or three and a new set of windows to replace the wood-framed ones that were currently rotting away and threatening to no longer keep a grip on the panes of glass. It might be dangerous to anyone passing underneath if the windows on the upper floors were opened. The small yard in front of the house had been concreted over at some point in the past (before the rain drainage laws were passed and grassed garden areas became compulsory), but patient, determined weeds had found cracks and holes to exploit and now flourished everywhere. They presented a jungle of undergrowth dense enough to have housed a tribe of pygmy warriors. The numbers had long since fallen off the door (or had been nicked, this not being one of Slough’s more salubrious areas, though what use they would be to anyone willing to steal them is questionable since there is no thriving black market in door numbers), but the painted surface of the door had faded badly before that happened, leaving the darker stain beneath to denote the actual address.
The landlord met us in front of the house and he was in almost as run down a state as the house itself. Grossly overweight, he wore clothes that seemed designed to emphasise his girth. They may have been a few sizes too small as well (it was hard to see where he might have found clothes to fit) judging by the way that they strained at every seam and buttonhole under the gargantuan task of holding him inside. I felt sure I could hear them creaking under the stress each time that he moved. Like anyone his size would, he perspired freely in any weather from the sheer effort required in moving all that weight from place to place and his face was a shade of red that in most people would have called for an emergency ambulance ride to the nearest A&E department. Since he had lost most of his hair to age, he looked like a red lightbulb stuck in a mound of mashed potato with some clothes on. It was a sight likely to put you off red lights and mashed potatoes for life.
“Are you Ward?” he asked sharply as we pushed our way through the weeds to the door. I was relieved that he didn’t offer his hand since I didn’t have anything to wipe mine with afterwards and a handshake refusal often offends. The question set his jowls to shivering.
“That’s right,” I said, doing my best not to grimace. I’d seen worse things in my life, but most of them didn’t call themselves human.
“It’s about time,” he complained, looking at a watch whose strap was extended by a couple of elastic bands to get it to go all the way around his podgy wrist. “I’ve been waiting here for ages.”
“That so?” I said, not really caring whether it was or not. His timekeeping was not my problem. We weren’t late. Well, not excessively so.
“Yes it is so,” he continued, not picking up on my carefully selected tone of indifference. “I am a busy man. This is taking time out of my day. Is someone going to compensate me for that? I don’t expect so. The last lot didn’t.”
“Last lot?”
“Police,” he revealed, pulling a face to suggest that he and the local law enforcers were not the most bosom of buddies, which was fair enough because I couldn’t imagine an
yone who would want to get anywhere near his bosom. “At least that’s who they said they were, though they didn’t have any warrant or anything.”
“I don’t have a warrant or anything either,” I told him sharply, making a point of challenging him. He was the kind that liked to complain a lot, but never followed up on the complaints. As I expected, he averted his watery-eyed gaze. “Are you going to let us in or what?”
“All I’m asking is to be properly paid for my valuable time,” he grumbled into his chest, but he pulled a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket and started trying them in the lock one by one. He was into the high teens before a key slid home and turned easily, opening the door. I could have picked the lock in a tenth of the time this process took and kicked it open in a hundredth, but this was supposed to be a low key investigation. Normally I would also have told him that he could download an expenses claim form from the Agency website and given him the case number to quote for reimbursement, but since this job was off the books there wasn’t going to be a case number and so there couldn’t be any payments against it. I was pretty sure that he didn’t take Visa and I wasn’t going to hand over any cash.
“Apartment you want’s on the third floor,” he told us gracelessly.
“You’re not coming up?” Miranda asked, surprised, but he just shook his head. The flesh around his neck took a few seconds longer to stop moving.
“Nah. You’re Agency aren’t you? You’re not going to pinch anything.” Whether it was because he wasn’t sure that he could squeeze himself through the doorway or because he knew that he couldn’t climb the stairs without either them collapsing under him or his collapsing on top of them that kept him outside, he wasn’t going to admit to either. Certainly it wasn’t his faith in the honesty of anyone who worked in any branch of law enforcement that made the decision for him.
“How are you going to let us in then?” she asked.
“Don’t need to,” he explained, taking a stained handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe across his sweaty forehead. I wasn’t going to speculate on what had caused the stains since they weren’t all the same colour. “The key’s in one of the plant pots. It’s 3B you want.”
“You’ll be here when we come out in case I’ve got any questions?” I asked, though it was asked in the manner of an order rather than a request.
“Sure, sure,” he acceded grumpily, moaning. “It’s not like my time’s valuable to anyone is it?”
I assumed that the question was a rhetorical whinge and refrained from telling him exactly what I thought his time was worth. Instead, I went inside. Since we didn’t know what to expect this was no time to be chivalrous and let ladies go first.
The inside of the house was an improvement on the exterior, but that was mainly because the light in the hallway wasn’t working and it was too gloomy to make out most of the details. The carpet was a bit tatty and we had to be careful on the stairs not to trip on any of the frayed sections. The handrail was a bit sticky to the touch and I didn’t really want to know what had made it that way. Virtually every floorboard squeaked or groaned as we ascended. There was no way that anyone was going to sneak up behind us that way. Not that I expected anyone to try. That was just the normal agent’s way of thinking, always sizing up situations, looking for ways of making a quick getaway or avenues of attack for anyone that might be of a mind to.
Flat 3B was on the third floor, as the fat man had promised, just below the roof. Outside the door were a number of flowerpots with a variety of very ill-looking plants wilting in them. As a place to hide the spare key it was so obvious that any self-respecting burglar would have felt majorly insulted. It took only a few seconds to find the key and let ourselves into the flat.
I have to say this for Arnold Harcourt, shiftless he may have been with a short attention span and an IQ in the problematic range, but he came tidy with it. Everything in the flat was laid out immaculately. He didn’t quite go so far as arranging the pencils on the desk in order of remaining length, but that might only have been because he was abducted (or left or whatever) before he could get around to that job. The bedcovers were fitted to military precision with the extra blanket folded neatly on top. I was tempted to bounce a penny off the top cover, but didn’t want to seem insensitive in front of his sister. The books on the bookshelves (and there were a few of those) were all ordered alphabetically. Several of them had markers, or pages with turned down corners, but the pages in question were all filled with chemical engineering details that were far beyond my understanding. It struck me as odd that a man who chose to use markers at some times would then turn down the corners of pages on others. I took photographs of the pages with my phone and e-mailed them back to the Enquiries Desk for analysis. The only spot in the entire flat that wasn’t in pristine condition was the whiteboard that was propped up on an easel in one corner. I think that was the first time that I had actually seen an easel in anyone’s home before, except the small ones used for children to draw on. The entire face of the board was covered with scribbled chemical formulae that made even less sense to me than the contents of the books. It was mainly notations in different colours of ink and sizes of symbols. It was probably his sounding board, where he worked out all his ideas and set his mind running free through the meadows of modern chemistry theory. I sent photos of that as well.
There was one obvious absence from the room that Miranda picked up on quickly, “His computer’s missing.”
The desk in the corner of the room was surrounded with all the paraphernalia that comes with a laptop computer, but the top of the desk itself was clear. There was a printer, mouse, voice interface, speakers and instruction books (all still shrink-wrapped and neatly placed to one side – he had a high IQ after all), but the connecting cables all dangled loosely. There were no portable hard drives, flash drives or data discs anywhere in evidence. It was possible that he had just taken all of those things over to a friend’s house to play the Grand Theft Batmobile game, but there was a laptop carry bag down by the side of the desk and nobody carries their laptop around without putting it into its bag first.
“What are the chances that he would go somewhere without his computer?” I asked, disappointed. People nowadays like computers and store all kinds of information on them that they really shouldn’t store anywhere. More cases have been solved by bringing up the undeleted browser history or e-mail recycle bin records of a personal computer than by any brand of deductive reasoning. Sherlock Holmes would have had a much easier time of it had they had computers back in his day. The computer is the detective’s friend. Except when it’s not there.
“None whatsoever,” Miranda said with conviction. “He’s had it since he was seven.”
“Really?” The computers that had been around when I was seven were practically steam-driven and a kid with the intellectual smarts of Arnie wasn’t going to be satisfied with a clunky old thing that couldn’t access the interweb.
“He upgrades it himself whenever he needs a bit more power or memory or whatever,” she said with a shrug, clearly as well-informed about computer upgrades as I was about advanced theoretical chemistry.
When the computer is missing the very next place that the seasoned detective goes to is the rubbish, in this case the waste paper bin by the side of the desk. It was certain that the landlord didn’t supply any cleaning services to his tenants, so there was a chance that there might be some clue cunningly scribbled on a screwed up bit of paper. It’s a cliché sure, but a cliché’s a cliché because it happens all the time. Not this time, however, since the waste paper bin was as well ordered as the rest of the room and decidedly empty of anything at all let alone anything resembling a clue.
As I bent down to look, however, something did catch my eye. Stuck away in a small crack between the desk and the wall, just behind the waste paper bin, was something that oughtn’t to have been there. The crack was too small to get my fingers, or even a pen, into so I took the pair of scissors from the stationery tidy and u
sed the blade to tease the object out into the open. Arnie’s tidiness bug must have been catching because I placed the scissors back where I had found them rather than just tossing them back onto the desk. The paper that I extracted from the gap was an advertising flyer for a club on the edge of town, the kind of club that does all of its advertising in small, discreet messages so as not to upset the neighbours. There was nothing scribbled on it or circled in red pen to helpfully mark out anything significant. I handed it to Miranda.
“What’s this doing here?” she asked, a quick scan of the flyer’s images telling her everything that she needed to know about what kind of entertainment it was offering.
“Not Arnie’s kind of scene?”
“No,” she replied immediately. “And nobody uses that phrase any more.”
“What? ‘Scene’?” I hadn’t actually been on a case that involved normal humans for quite a while and my familiarity with current street slang was a bit stretched at best.
“No, that went out with flairs and afghans,” she informed me, “the coats not the people or the dogs. I mean I suppose he might be interested in this sort of … entertainment, but he never mentioned anything about it to me before.”
“Because every brother shares his peccadilloes with his sister?” I suggested with just the right amount of irony not to come off as a supercilious jerk. It’s a fine line, but I like to think that I mastered the balance some time ago.
“Isn’t that some sort of ant eater?” Miranda quipped back.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 6