Yeah, sure. Except that I was the one waiting for him outside the police station. Let it go, Teresa.
“Did Anthony ever come to the poker games?”
“Oh, no,” said Janet. “He was appalled that I went! I started going before we got involved, and at first he reacted with this stern disapproval mixed with concern. I told him it was my life, and then after a while, it became a kind of strange in-joke between us. We’d been friends for a long time, and I teased him sometimes with these anecdotes about what went on there. It didn’t make him want to go, but maybe…”
“Maybe it inspired him to start thinking of you romantically,” I suggested.
She nodded. “His kids were grown. His wife is a wonderful person, but they had grown apart. The usual. He insisted the poker games were sordid, but I’m sure he liked some of the spicy details.”
“But he never tried it himself?” I asked again. “Not even once?”
She shook her head again. So did Helena.
“What are you thinking, darling?” Helena asked me.
“About motive,” I said. “Yes, it stands to reason our killer would assume you’d confide in Anthony about the blackmail. But this is a guy who never came to the games, was outside the circle. In fact, he made almost as good a target as you. High-profile solicitor, well paid, loving wife—perfect for blackmail.”
“Yes,” said Janet softly. “And now he’s dead.”
“I’m convinced this is definitely not about sex, and Anthony’s murder will prove it.” I pointed to Janet. “Is there any chance Anthony would have given you keys to his office for any reason?”
“No,” she answered. “No, he had no reason to these days.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I guess it’s back to breaking and entering.”
They call it “scrubbing.” Basically, you use the lock pick to “scrub” back and forth over the pins while you adjust the amount of torque on the plug, the cylinder that rotates when you insert the proper key. I could get into the whole thing about wards and sheer line and all that jazz, but no, I’m not supposed to have these kinds of tools, and you should go blame Steve, a tall, bearded shoe-repair and key-cutting guy who looks like a Wookiee and who taught me this stuff at his shop in Stanmore. It’s useful to make different kinds of friends.
God bless these traditionalists who had yet to put in alarms.
I was using my picks on a door not far from that quiet island of Barrister Central that sits between the Victoria Embankment and Fleet Street. You turn off the Strand and duck into these mazes and courtyards, and you’re passing buildings that go back to the 16th century. You need a map, not because it’s big, just confusing, and when I passed the spacious lawn and Temple Church, I knew I had to be crazy. There were regular foot patrol constables that wandered through here and the surrounding streets, and the stunt I had in mind was really dangerous.
But since Anthony Boulet had been a solicitor, not a barrister, his office wasn’t at one of the Inns of Court—he’d rented it a short distance away on one of the main streets. Slightly less conspicuous. Helena insisted on tagging along to play getaway driver, but we made Janet wait back at the house in Richmond.
I was in Anthony Boulet’s office in ninety seconds. Steve would have been ashamed of me. What can I say? Out of practice.
There’s a wonderful company in Hounslow that sells beds. They’ll deliver them and actually set them up for you, and when they come into your house they put on these slippers that must be made out of the same material as cheap shower caps. Nice considerate touch, respectful of your clean floor and all that. So I’m inspired to wear these over my shoes every time I go out on one of my little trespassing whims, which, yeah, are more frequent than I’d like to admit. I promise I’ll get therapy. Right after Helena writes me a big fat cheque. Or maybe after the next one.
Anthony Boulet’s office had a décor like most solicitors. If you can afford the rent, you probably have enough to decorate to impress, and this looked like a showroom for The Bombay Company. Books. Antiques. Stuffy. Pompous. Old World globe in the corner. Brass astrolabe as a curio on his desk in between stand-up framed photos of his wife and kids. I couldn’t see any evidence that the cops had been here yet, but I assumed they had and would probably come back.
They’d be trying to figure out if anything in Anthony’s work could be connected to his murder. But since he wasn’t with Crown Prosecution, had never defended your average thug in court and had dealt with corporate and quango clients I bet they’d think there were slim pickings.
I sat down at his desk. And when I booted up his computer, I saw something interesting. Up came the annoying blue screen with that message or a similar one that most of us know:
Because this program was not properly shut down, one or more of your disk drives may have errors on it. Scanpal is now checking drive C for errors.
If he hadn’t shut down properly, was it because he’d been in a hurry? Or perhaps he was interrupted.
A bit frustrating, trying to type in gloves. Helena was outside, sitting with a digital camera around her neck, trying to play tourist. She also had a whistle, which she would blow if it looked like a presence of the Met was about to set foot near the door. Since it was Sunday, I was hoping they would wait.
I clicked on “Recent Documents” and got a long list of files. The older ones had surnames, and when I called them up, they were password protected. Frankly, it was the newer ones that caught my eye, files with incomprehensible names like “capac.doc” and “tan.” (As in the colour “tan”? For what, though? Maybe a company name?)
But when I tried to bring them up, all I got for each one was the little flashlight icon that told me the computer was searching. All deleted.
When I checked in his Internet Properties folder, someone had wiped his links and cleared the history.
Shit. Whatever had happened to Lionel, Anthony had definitely been murdered over something bigger than the strip poker games. The answer was on this computer despite what the killer thought. Just because you delete files doesn’t mean they’re not still sitting on your hard drive, where brilliant geeks can do their voodoo to call them back to life.
I knew a few such geeks, guys as handy with computer viruses and “worms” as my buddy was with a lock pick, but to involve them in this would be a major risk and pain in the ass, since I would have to bring them here (ha, ha, yeah, right, Teresa) or remove evidence from a crime scene, which would be a major no-no.
Maybe I didn’t have to.
I crouched down to use my smaller picks on Anthony’s desk drawers, and that’s when I saw it. I don’t think I would have noticed had I not bent on my knees and got the lower perspective to work the drawers.
Lying on the rug, a little under the desk at the opposite end and barely perceptible, was a tiny pile of white powder. What the heck was it and what was it doing there? Then it came to me, because this is what you get when you drop a pill and you accidentally step on it. Paracetamol pancake or whatever it was.
And the desk had been moved. There were two deep indentations for one of its legs, as if it had been pushed, and then someone had realized it had better be pushed back. And since this was a small room, there was no logical reason why it should be moved at all except that one or perhaps two people had hit it with enough force.
A struggle. Anthony had met his killer here in his office first.
I got up and went around to the front of the desk. It was difficult to see, given the darkness of the stain on the dark oak, but it was there, and Carl’s forensic colleagues would pick it up. Tiny spatters of blood. My guess? They came from Anthony’s defensive wounds in a struggle. Cut knuckles, a scrape, something small.
Anthony Boulet was strangled—a rope, a cord, something that would have left marks on his neck, identified by the authorities. The choice of murder weapon dictated how much attention the killer paid to covering his tracks. Had Anthony been knifed with a large blade, there would have been more blood—enough th
at the killer would make an attempt at cleaning up. After all, he moved the body so the police would think the murder didn’t happen here.
Clever bastard. He must have overheard Anthony phone the minicab company, or he was sitting right across from him when he placed the call. He dumped the body back at his victim’s house, and the minicab showing up would bolster the idea that Anthony must have been murdered there.
It was a tight window, but he had made it. The cab was to show up at 1:00 AM, and Anthony was discovered at 1:12 AM.
My mobile rang. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Helena.
“Are you going to be much longer? This is starting to wear on my nerves, darling.”
“Come to the door and bring that camera of yours.”
“Oh, God! We’re going to get caught. Teresa, I cannot handle small spaces with bars. I don’t want to be some horrible guard’s sex slave!”
“I’ll visit you every day in the exercise yard. Now get over here.”
I watched her approach from the window, and when she was outside the door, she stretched out her arm to hand me the camera like it was a bomb. Poor Helena. A fantastic Madam. Great at Scotch and sympathy, brilliant hostess. Lousy at special ops.
I clicked off a dozen or more pictures of the room with fine close-ups of the powder, the blood spray and what sat on Anthony’s desk. I had no idea if they would be useful or not, but I thought I’d better have them for reference.
Then I rifled through the desk drawers and discovered something else important. There were limits to our killer’s imagination. And he definitely wasn’t a lawyer. I knew this, because if he were, he wouldn’t even have to remember that lawyers write things down on legal pads. Nice long yellow foolscap sheets with blue lines. But in our wonderful age of technology, you get a bit of tunnel vision about other people’s habits.
Sure enough, there was a pad with Anthony’s chicken scratches, leaving me only a little better off than I was moments earlier. I knew I was on the right track because I could make out the date he had scribbled out, which happened to be for the very night he died. The pages underneath were dated going back two weeks, some pages marked with only a couple of lines, some filled to bursting with tinier scribbles into his self-made margins.
“Tan” on his machine became “tant” on the yellow paper. Tant. Tant? Whatever it meant to him, he must have simply abbreviated it further when he named the file. I got lucky in that “capac.doc” finally made sense in his handwriting as “electronic capacitors.”
There were references to manufacturing plants, components named and where they came from, statistics on quantities. One of the companies named in a list was Lionel’s. Buccaneer Cape Mining. Warmer, getting warmer—
But what did Anthony Boulet care about mining? And what did he care about the manufacture of electronic capacitors and where the raw materials came from?
I went to the photocopier, turned it on and let it warm up. Then I dashed off legal-size copies of all the pages. That would certainly show up on the machine’s count, but there was nothing I could do about that. Hopefully, the police would overlook that minor detail. Done, I replaced the legal pad exactly as I’d found it, locked up the drawers of the desk and beat the hell out of there.
Helena was standing on the curb, tugging on her ring finger and bouncing a little on her heels like she had to wee. The perfect accomplice.
When we got in her car, I rang Carl at his home.
“What’s up?”
“I’m psychic,” I announced. “Let me test it out on you. Your lab people have found thanks to the post-mortem lividity that Anthony Boulet’s body was moved.”
I heard Carl groan at the other end. “Teresa. I’m getting another one of my headaches. Sandra is pushing Mark’s stroller even now to Tesco’s, and I had this nice afternoon all to myself with Dostoyevsky. Why are you pissing down on my sunshine, mate?”
“Dostoyevsky’s overrated. Listen. If you go to Boulet’s office, you’ll see a struggle happened there. Tiny blood splatter residue and what looks like a crushed pill on the floor. Could be nothing, but I’d really like to know what it is. Will you tell me?”
“Teresa…”
“And the killer deleted files from his hard drive.”
“I am not hearing any of this—”
“Good news is,” I rolled along, “he overlooked Anthony Boulet’s notes in his desk. Carl? About that pill left on the floor?”
“Teresa, if this is about his work, does she know anything?”
She. Well, he’s not an Inspector for nothing. Might as well be honest with him.
“I don’t think so,” I sighed. “Whatever it is, it won’t leap out at you from the page.”
“I’ll have to bring her in for more questions.”
“When do you want to talk to me?”
Another groan. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Not much.”
“If I dragged you into an interrogation room, would it make any difference?”
“To be honest…”
I glanced at Helena sitting next to me driving, looking more relaxed and back to her old self. She could get a shark of a solicitor in half an hour if I needed one.
“Thought so,” sighed Carl, and he rang off.
Damn it, what was this guy after?
Earl’s Court. Hot bath. Herbal tea. Telly on mute. Playing a Girlfriends rerun in the middle of the afternoon. On the stereo, Skunk Anansie singing “Just Because You Feel Good.”
I was thinking about our bad guy. Mulling. He had killed Lionel and had enjoyed himself doing it. He had murdered Anthony Boulet, but it looked like that was a rushed job, one prompted by necessity. Boulet had to have been close to tripping over something incriminating.
So what the hell was it? What tied a mining company executive to a solicitor investigating the sale of electronics parts to a black female politician and made them all so important that—
The fog lifted. Suddenly it was all so obvious. Janet would have seen it herself had she not been so close, distracted by her own conflicted feelings for Anthony and Neil and what to do if she got the new appointment. I towelled off and practically ran to my desk.
I booted up the computer and went online. Google fed me a whole bunch of archived links on Janet’s speeches, and it was all there.
Maybe innocuous to you and me, but ringing an alarm for somebody.
Somebody with money. Somebody who had enough of it to hire operatives.
I rang Helena. “I need to see you and Janet.”
There was a sigh from the other end of the phone. “That might prove a little difficult. She’s lying low at her house in Notting Hill until the reporters lose interest in Anthony Boulet.”
“She’ll want to come out for this,” I answered. “I think I’ve discovered what this is all about.”
A surprised silence from the other end of the line. “Oh,” she said gently.
“And Helena, I think I’d better move in with you for a little while.”
“I pay you enough to make rent, darling.”
“Very funny. It’s the safe thing to do. Trust me.”
A sigh of mock exasperation. “If you must. Well, don’t expect a mint left on the pillow. But don’t you think you ought to stick close to Janet? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
“No, I think she’s safe for now. I’ll explain more when I get there.”
I rang off before she could ask any more questions. I didn’t want to confirm her fears over the line, and it was bad enough that she suspected what I was thinking—that she could be targeted as the next murder victim.
A quick ride on the District Line, and I was at the house. I was surprised when Janet showed up only twenty minutes later. I expected her to have more trouble ducking the journos camped outside, but she informed us their numbers were down. There was a good reason for that.
The good news was that the TV reporters were still calling Anthony a “trusted colleague” and “friend” of Ja
net Marshall and not picking up on the innuendoes in the tabloids or the occasional hint of speculation in the broadsheets. If it became a nightly story for BBC or Channel Four, she could kiss the ambassadorship goodbye.
Thankfully the coverage took a hard right turn that very day because of the Met investigation.
There was my old pal, Carl Norton, unflappable in the scrum of cameras and microphones, making a public statement.
“We now believe,” he told the reporters, “that Mr. Boulet was murdered not over any personal grudges or involvements but because of an investigation into criminal activity he was conducting himself and was close to bringing to the attention of the authorities.”
Bless you, Carl.
“What’s the nature of this criminal activity?” asked one of the reporters.
“We cannot divulge that at this time.” But in point of fact, I was pretty sure they simply didn’t know. I did, but it had only come to me in a lightning flash of insight about an hour before the news conference.
In the jumpy, hand-held camera view, Carl kept marching towards the double doors of a police station. “I’ve read our statement, and I’m sorry, but we can’t answer any further questions regarding the case—”
Of course, the reporters ignored this. “Is Ms. Marshall aware of what Mr. Boulet was working on?”
There was a millisecond pause before he decided to field that one. “No, Ms. Marshall has no knowledge whatsoever of what Mr. Boulet was looking into. We now believe he was trying to contact her that evening to divulge his findings, and that his late hour of the cab booking was due to his feeling of urgency.”
“Then you’ve formally questioned Ms. Marshall?”
“I’m sorry, no more questions. You have our statement.”
The flurry of fresh questions started up again, but the doors closed behind him, and the scrum was faced with three burly constables making sure they didn’t follow him in. Helena muted the sound on the television.
I turned to Janet. “When did they question you again?”
“Very early this morning. That detective was quite a gentleman about it, I must say. He apologised and said it would be better if we met at about five. His men would create a distraction for the photographers downstairs. So five o’ clock came, and from my window, I watched them all scrambling down the road because a couple of tow trucks came along for their cars. I have no idea what excuse the police used, but I can’t say I felt very sorry for those men.”
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