by Jan Swick
On his hand, under ZWEIG-HOFMANN, he'd written the product name. "ZH microcamera LP46". He typed it in, got a hit, and began to read.
Twenty minutes later, he sat back and said, "Fuck," loud enough to turn every head at the computer tables, even that of the girl listening to loud music through headphones.
Matt took a seat at one of the outdoor tables while Lisa went into the cafe for their drinks.
The cafe was just forty metres from the library, and he hadn't said a word during the walk. That type of silence between a man and woman on a first date would spell doom, but this wasn't a first date, a getting-to-know-you thing. They knew each other well. And, Matt suspected, Lisa was well aware of the cause of his silence, of the terrible information he'd found. He suspected that she had already read what he'd read. She had gone after a different type of information, on another angle, and had left him to learn for himself what she already knew. He wondered about what she'd been reading in the Haiti Times. What did she know?
He unfolded and looked at the sheet he'd printed in the library. Product stats and reviews of the ZH Microcamera LP46.
Zweig-Hofmann specialised in surveillance and security. They sold everything from listening devices to burglar alarms, and their product range was vast. The LP46 wasn't the only camera of its type they sold. For instance, there was the LPL41, which was their best-selling camera. Like the LP46, it was the size of a pencil sharpener, it had a sticky backing for attachment to skin or wall or car, and it was fragile, designed to be crushed in the hand by a spy who didn't want anyone who caught him to know it was a camera. If the LPL41 was captured, there was nothing anyone could pull from it, because whatever it had recorded was gone, stored in the receiver, which could be buried or hidden as far as two miles away. But that was where the two cameras differed. The LP46 was a little more secure than that. The LP46 was for real paranoid people. Its receiver didn't record, only displayed. To record, you needed a programme on a computer that the receiver was hooked to, rather like using a video recorder to record a live TV programme. And there was no auto record - you needed someone right there at the computer to press a button. If you didn't press record, you didn't keep. A hidden dongle full of vital spy info could still be found. The LP46 didn't have that fault.
Lisa returned with their teas. She met his eyes and he read anticipation in them. He knew she already knew what he'd just learned.
If the LP46 camera whose fragment he'd found had been used to record the killing of his sister, then whoever had committed the crime had planned it. Planned it to death. With the LPL41, you could stroll around and tape what you wanted and go fetch your receiver and play your video back at your leisure, alone, and no one else need know. But the killer had used the LP46, which meant he had had to have someone sitting at a computer, to click record. More than one person involved didn't suggest a random act, a tryst gone wrong. It said pre-meditated murder.
"This was a conspiracy," Matt said.
For a few seconds she said nothing. Then: "I read about the camera before we met up, as you probably know. I just didn't want to sway your opinion, because it still might not be true. You don't even know how that camera piece got in there, remember."
"I understand and I partly agree, although it would have saved time if you'd told me right out. But now you're ahead of me and I need to know."
She looked concerned. Sipped her tea nervously. "Nothing is concrete here, you must understand."
He nodded.
"I know you, Matt. I know your brain. I know how you obsess. You sweat the small stuff like nobody on this planet. And this isn't small stuff, if what I suspect is right."
He nodded.
"It's just a theory, based on something way back, some fragment of information my brain collected and stored for God knows what reason. You need to keep an open mind, though. It's just one crazy idea based on a loose clue. Understand?"
This time he didn't nod. He didn't speak. He just waited.
She lowered her gaze into her cup. Seconds passed in silence. Then:
"I hope this is not the answer. More than likely, it isn't. But I have to mention it, just in case. "
He thought he might love this woman. Certainly he liked her a lot. But her dawdling was beginning to get annoying. He reached across the table and lifted her chin until their eyes met.
"Who the hell killed my sister?"
She took three folded sheets of paper from her pocket. Printouts from the library. She handed him one. Just one. He almost snatched it. For half a fraction of a second, he expected to see the killer's name in big, bold letters. What he was looking at instead was a printout of a webpage that had a photo of a newspaper page. Haiti Times. The photo of the newspaper was bad quality and the main article was too small and messy to be readable. But the webpage's creator had typed the article below the photo. The date was over three years ago. He read quickly.
In Cap-Haitien, a city on the north coast of Haiti, there had been some kind of gas explosion in a run-down tenement building overlooking the harbour. No one hurt. Four families squatting in the abandoned building had done something to the gas supply to get it working after it was disconnected. Some DIY mess that had ultimately resulted in the explosion, but luckily far from any of the apartments inhabited by the squatters.
He looked at her, and he knew his face clearly showed his puzzlement. In answer, she simply handed him the second sheet. It was an article from the entertainment section of the same newspaper. This time it was the paper's website. Dated the same day.
Etienne Frecker, a Haitian actor, had had his boat stolen from the harbour in the Cap-Haitien. Same night as the gas explosion. It was a big, sleek yacht worth millions of dollars, but the reward Frecker was offering was for the return of photographs of his children, which had been stored in a wall safe aboard the boat. There was a picture of the yacht alongside a photograph of Frecker, who looked like an over-tanned Tom cruise with Lee Van Cleef's moustache. Matt slapped the sheet of paper onto the table.
"Lisa..."
She thrust the final sheet at him. He took it. Another article from Haiti Times’ online publication. Dated three weeks after the previous two.
Haiti National Police today announced the arrest of a man in conjunction with the disappearance of TV star Etienne Frecker's luxury yacht. Investigators clearing the rubble from a collapsed building overlooking the harbour at Cap-Haitien, where the yacht was moored, found a battered but usable DVD, which contained shocking footage. "Easy on the Eyes" star Etienne Frecker's yacht was believed stolen until police viewed the DVD's footage, which they say showed a man sinking the boat. The video was recorded from a camera on a hat worn by the saboteur.
Police identified Manno Bellile and later arrested him at his home.
According to police, the video shows Bellile, 42, of Port-au-Prince, swimming out to the yacht during the night and climbing aboard before breaking into the cabin. Despite stringent safety features aboard the high-tech vessel that prevent such a thing, Bellile flooded the ballast tanks to over-capacity, which caused the sinking. Bellile does not deny the crime and claims that he learned how to bypass the yacht's safety features by researching on the Internet. He also claims he used the Internet to purchase a lock picking tool that the video shows him using to enter the locked cabin of the yacht.
Bellile strenuously denies any involvement in an explosion that destroyed the disused apartment building where the DVD was found, but admits going there to watch the boat sink. He has not yet given a motive for his actions.
As soon as Matt looked up from the sheet of paper, Lisa said, "The papers worked it out. Those printouts were the biggest pieces, but I got the rest from snippets in forums and things. Etienne Frecker was sleeping with Manno Bellile's wife. They'd split, but Bellile was pissed off. You would be if some guy with women on tap was having a throwaway affair with a woman you'd loved for years."
"I'm still not following." But he could feel the relevance of all this. It felt like some kind of
Deja vu. But an integral piece of the connective tissue between this story and Karen's murder was missing, the biggest piece, and nothing could progress until he had it.
"Bellile was nobody," Lisa said. "He didn't have the skills to sneak aboard a yacht and bypass security and play around with safety features so he could sink a yacht. But what he did have was savings. Eighty grand in our money. All gone around the time the yacht sank."
She was feeding him information and waiting for the penny to drop. He could see it right there on her face. But it wasn't a game. It wasn't her place to put ideas and theories in his head. He had to come up with those himself.
"Bellile went to jail. Only got nine months for wilful destruction, but three weeks in he was killed by another inmate."
Matt snatched up all three sheets of paper and scanned them. He didn't read, he just threw his eyes all over, hoping they'd latch onto something. It was when they whizzed across the word "overlooking" that they froze. He read part of the sentence again: "building overlooking the harbour..." And something slotted into place.
Matt rose from his seat. He gave Lisa a slight grin. "Excuse me, I need to do my... I'll be back in five minutes. Will you wait?"
He hoped he wasn't asking too much of her. This was his problem, not hers, and she'd done more than enough already. She had a life to get back to.
She reached out and took his hand. Her way of saying he was being silly. "I'm in this till you don't need me, Matt."
I'll need you forever, he almost said. Instead he said nothing. He squeezed her hand and walked away, into the cafe.
He went straight for a door near the back, by the counter. Once through, there was another door ahead. Thankfully it was wide open, displaying nothing but a toilet inside. He went in, locked the door behind him. There was no light switch, but the bulb was a simple thing hanging by a wire, which he unscrewed. In darkness, he lowered the toilet seat, sat, and put his hands over his eyes. Matt Armstrong liked to imagine things when he was alone, but for what he was doing now he needed an empty head. Usually deduction was a process much like putting a jigsaw together. But sometimes answers came to him like a brain seeing the image in a Magic Eye drawing: not there one moment and then displayed fully and completed and starkly obvious the next. He needed that now, because the jigsaw was missing too many pieces.
It took three minutes, not five. His head snapped up, arms dropping by his sides. He was screwing the bulb back in when someone knocked on the door, and a voice asked him if he'd fallen in. He went out and past a woman who looked annoyed, like she'd been waiting forever, not a maximum of three minutes.
Lisa was still at the table, waiting. Not reading or playing with her tea or her phone. Waiting, however long it took. She knew his habits and idiosyncrasies.
"Thank you," he said. "Leave your car here. We'll take mine." He took Lisa's hand. She let him. He thought nothing of it. He took her hand because he had somewhere to go and wanted to get there at his pace. She let him half-drag her, because, again, she knew his habits.
Edding Street, half a mile south of the shopping centre. Shops along one side of the road, small industrial complexes and offices along the other. And the wasteground.
A good place to hunt a victim, he remembered thinking. And to begin his own hunt. He was back here with new information, but it niggled him that he hadn't had that information the first time. Then he wouldn't have had to backtrack. If he'd had that info the first time, where might he be now? How much further forward along the path?
He was parked by the wasteground. He asked if Lisa would mind waiting in the car. She said she didn't mind at all. For a moment he wondered if, again, Lisa was way ahead of him. Had already worked out what to do and was, again, letting him make his own way there.
He needed to do it himself this time, however.
He got out of the car and looked all around him. There were no residences except those above the grimy shops. No way the men involved in Karen's murder would have used those. They'd know the cops would knock on all the surrounding doors, seeking witnesses. And it had to be indoors. They'd need time and privacy.
He looked up, over the roofs of the offices ranged along the other side of the road. Turned, looked up and over the roofs of the shops. Looked north and south. He couldn't see what he was looking for. The sky directly above the offices and shops was clear. He felt his theory start to unravel. But this was the wrong position anyway.
So he scaled the fence and moved across the wasteland. Stood in the spot. Where she had lain, dead, killed, murdered. Turned a circle, looking, seeking. And then he stopped, with his back to the road.
The position of the body in the wasteground had bothered him. It had been all wrong. What he saw now cleared all that up.
He had moved fifteen feet into the wasteground and at this new position the left quarter of the top four fifths of a tower block was visible beyond the back corner of the office building next door to the wasteground, the bottom fifth obscured by something white - part of a shed, he thought – just behind the structure. Between the back corner of the offices and a row of large liquid storage tanks painted bright green, there it was, a thin sliver of stone and glass, easily half a mile away. The tanks were to the side and slightly in front of the back corner of the offices, so when Matt moved to his left, or forward, the gap closed. If he moved right, or backwards, the gap widened but the fragment of tower block that was peeking out slipped behind the offices. Certainly not visible from the fence, where he'd stood last time he was here.
He knelt and watched the high rise sink behind the white shed as he lowered himself. Then he lay down. Lay as his dead sister had laid and turned his head to look at the tower block. Only the top eight floors, left side, were visible now: a tiny oblong strip nestled in the backwards L-shape where the offices and the shed met. He felt his hopes rise.
The only spot in the entire wasteground where you could see a distant building was here, right where he lay. Conversely, right where he lay was the only section of wasteground that could be seen from a distant tower block.
The spot where his sister's body was dumped.
Matt told Lisa to get the car and make her way to the building. She hadn't seen it from the street, of course, but he gave her a direction and a guessed distance and a description. He went on foot. Her route would be a winding trail through the city, taking corners and roundabouts, tackling traffic jams and traffic lights. His was the path of a bird, or a freerunner. He kept the building in his sights at all times as he moved towards it. Past the storage tanks and the office building. Through the industrial estate. Over a sports field. He climbed fences and walls, crossed roads and gardens, all the while keeping a straight line. He beat Lisa to the building by three minutes.
He climbed over a brick wall and found himself in a car park with a sign that said BROOK HOUSE RESIDENTS ONLY. Brook House towered above him sixty metres ahead.
Over to the right was the car park entrance, guarded by an automatic barrier. As he stared up at the dark grey building, he caught movement and saw his Ford Mondeo approach the barrier. The barrier didn't rise. The car backed off behind a wall of shrubbery and fifteen seconds later Lisa approached the barrier on foot. She ducked under and came to his side. Neither said a word as they craned their necks and stared up at the top of the tall tower block. Twenty-one floors. They were focussing on only the top eight, left side. On eight large windows that reflected the cloudy white sky. In some of the windows were curtains and ornaments, and they both realised the significance of this at the same time.
"Residential," Lisa said, and Matt nodded. "How do we do this?"
The impatient way, Matt wanted to say. He was a methodical and calculating man, but he worked like a distance track runner at times: he could pace himself, but when the end was in sight he broke into a sprint. A dangerous fault that he often couldn't help. "Follow me," he said.
The entrance to the main block was a new addition to the building. Brutalist architecture from the sixties w
ith modern glass doors operated by a card reader. The old trick was to push the intercom for various flats and claim either to have forgotten your key or to be a tradesman who was getting no answer from the flat you needed. Matt didn't waste his time. He pushed the HELP button.
He turned and scanned the car park. Latched onto a white van with a company name on it: Dave Anderson Kitchens & Bathrooms. He turned back to the building.
When a gruff male voice barked a hello over the intercom, Matt said, "Hi. I'm looking for Dave Anderson. He's doing my bathroom. Gave me this address, but I can't remember the flat number. Brook House, yeah?" There was a pause. Matt worried that the kitchen and bathroom specialist was parked here because he was doing a job. He had figured this was a council block, and that the council would undertake all their own repairs, meaning that Dave Anderson was a resident. Was he wrong?
"Hang on," the voice said eventually.
Thirty seconds later a guy came to the doors. He was the caretaker of the building, clearly. Fifties, in coveralls, with wild grey hair. He looked through the glass at the couple with clear suspicion. This was probably a dodgy part of London, Matt figured. The guy opened the door and stepped into the frame. Stood his ground. He didn't appear concerned. Matt figured the guy had probably been some tough cookie in his younger years. Pub doorman, policeman, general hellraiser maybe. Not easily spooked by strangers.
Matt smiled. "Do you know Dave? I never met him. Spoke on the phone. Do you think you could buzz him and tell him Barry's here. From Smith Crescent."
The caretaker seemed to decide Matt and Lisa weren't trouble. Although he wasn't nervous, Matt saw his shoulders relax a little nonetheless. And then he just looked annoyed. He'd been dragged out of his flat for something trivial and now this visitor was asking him to do another job.