Single Obsession

by Des Ekin

  And then the trellis gave way.

  He felt the thin nails ease out of the woodwork in agonisingly slow motion, like teeth being drawn by a dentist. The wooden struts began to warp in his grip. He knew it was just a matter of seconds before they yielded completely. The trellis would splinter and break, sending him plunging downwards. And then his worst nightmares would come true …

  ‘Hold on, Hunter!’

  He heard the urgent whisper just two seconds before the wooden trellis shattered and ripped from the wall. But by that time, two hands had seized his wrists in a solid, confident grip. With almost superhuman strength, they pulled him upwards into the roof garden, where he managed to get a foothold and scramble across.

  ‘Come on!’ hissed Mary Smith, hauling him to his feet. ‘We’ve just twenty seconds before the security bolts close!’

  ‘Wait! I have to find the laptop.’ Hunter searched frantically for the computer in the flowerbed beneath his feet.

  ‘No time! Leave it!’

  ‘It can’t be too far away. Just one second –’

  ‘Leave the bloody thing! That’s an order, Hunter!’

  ‘That’s a what?’

  ‘You heard me. Come on!’

  At that moment, Hunter stubbed his toe on hard plastic. Grabbing the laptop from its landing-point on the soft soil, he sprinted across the roof garden to the gate at the top of the fire-escape stairway. They were just in time. An instant after the gate closed behind them, they heard the electronic bolts snap back into place and a thousand alarm sirens join in a hellish chorus of shrieking across the rooftops of the city.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘DRIVE! To the Street Talk offices,’ Hunter panted as he hurled himself into the passenger seat of Mary Smith’s car.

  She started the engine and paused. ‘Why?’

  ‘If you don’t argue with me, I won’t ask why you screwed everything up and nearly got me killed. Just drive. Go!’

  She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged and drove off.

  ‘There’s nothing on the laptop. Nothing at all,’ he told her as they shot at 60mph on their way to his old office. ‘And I think I know why.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s all coming back to me. According to Orla Byrne he stores the diary on floppy disks. It’s possible that he writes each instalment on the computer, saves it on to a floppy, then deletes the original document from the hard drive.’

  ‘So there’s never anything left on the computer itself?’ Mary did a screeching handbrake turn into an impossibly narrow mews.

  ‘That’s what he thinks. But Valentia’s no computer expert,’ said Hunter, his voice juddering as the car bounced at high speed across cobblestones. ‘What he doesn’t realise is that deleted files are not totally destroyed. Fragments of his diary could still exist on the laptop’s hard drive. They may be in bits, tossed around all over the place, but they’re still in there.’

  ‘We could get our own computer expert on the job,’ Mary Smith said. ‘But it’ll take time. And it’s already ten past seven.’

  ‘I’ll give it a go,’ said Hunter. ‘I think I could retrieve those documents the same way we got Charlotte Valentia’s photo back from Martin’s machine.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Mary glanced at him for an unnervingly long time for someone driving at sixty down a tiny alleyway.

  ‘Never mind. If I can get into the Street Talk office, I can get my hands on Claire’s zombie programme, the same one we used last time.’ He gasped as Mary narrowly missed a brick wall and shrieked to an abrupt halt just around the corner from his old office. ‘Let’s go.’

  To his relief, Claire’s key still worked in the office door, and the building was deserted. It took only a few minutes to transfer Claire’s programme on to Valentia’s machine.

  ‘Now,’ muttered Hunter to the laptop, ‘let’s see what you’ve got.’

  The screen flickered, then cleared to reveal the chaotic hidden contents of the hard drive. There were hundreds of deleted files in various stages of disrepair. Some were too far gone to salvage. Others were still in good shape. Hunter tried the best ones first.

  He studied the screen and was immediately disappointed. Valentia’s diary was not, as he’d hoped, a lengthy soul-baring narrative. It was just the barest possible list of dates and times, with curt notes on the politician’s activities.

  26 June

  6.00pm – mtg with T on chnges to Aliens Act.

  6.30 – mtg in Dáil Bar with GT on Dublin Arprt expansion.

  7.00 – dinner with R in PG’s …

  ‘This is impossible,’ grunted Hunter. ‘It’ll take us all night to get through this lot.’

  ‘Sort it by date,’ suggested Mary. ‘Get the relevant days. Start with 15 December, the day Frieda Winter went missing.’

  The file for 15 December was badly fragmented. But still, it was abundantly clear that Valentia had passed through Cavan at the time the German silversmith had vanished in that county. And there was a single, chilling entry for 5.00pm:

  5.00 – SM. See SDB.

  ‘SM,’ breathed Hunter. ‘Single Mother.’

  ‘But what’s SDB?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. There’s nothing more. Nothing at all.’

  Mary frowned. ‘So there’s obviously a fuller account in SDB, whatever that is.’

  ‘Site of Dead Body?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘There were no clues with Kate Spain’s body. Talking of which, let’s try the date of Kate Spain’s disappearance, 21 October.’

  A few clicks revealed the disheartening truth. The entry for 21 October was too damaged to salvage.

  They had better luck with the file for 23 October. It was in almost-perfect shape. The diary entry showed that Valentia had returned to Dublin and was on his way to Leinster House for a debate.

  12.30 – Early lunch with MFA at PG’s on Schengen Agreement.

  1.25 – Phoned UK PM from PG’s re: situation in Belfast. He deeply unhappy with U’s.

  1.45 – My car not outside as expected. Forced to wait 10 mns for driver. NB: remember write memo of cmplnt to GS. Drove to Leinster House. Stopped at B to put SM items in SDB, so 15 mns late for debate. Intolerable. Heads must roll …

  For nearly a full minute, Hunter and Mary Smith stared transfixed at the screen.

  ‘Items about the Single Mother,’ whispered Mary at last. ‘In other words, the details of Kate Spain’s murder.’

  ‘At the SDB. Which in turn is located at B. What on earth could it be?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. My God.’ Hunter rubbed his eyes. ‘We’re so bloody near, and yet so far.’

  ‘B, SDB,’ Mary recited. ‘B, SDB.’

  ‘Look, just shut up, would you?’ Hunter shouted testily. Her incantation made it impossible for his brain to function. ‘This is pointless. Let’s approach it from a different angle.’

  ‘Is there a different angle?’

  ‘Yes.’ Hunter rose to his feet in agitation. ‘Yes, there is. His driver was late picking him up, and he was even later because he had to stop off at B.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if we find out which police driver was assigned to him that day, we can ask him where he stopped off.’

  For a long moment Mary Smith just stared at Hunter. Then, to his utter amazement, she leaned forward and planted a ferociously high-pressure kiss on his lips.

  ‘Hunter,’ she said when her mouth smacked noisily free, ‘you’re a bloody genius.’

  IT took Ian Arthur four phone calls to locate the garda driver who’d been assigned to Valentia on 23 October.

  He was a tall, skinny Kerryman, and he was just relaxing into his fourth off-duty pint when Arthur burst through the door of the Brazen Head pub.

  ‘Jaysus, boy, what’s your hurry?’ the driver protested in astonishment. ‘Hold your horses, there, and let me buy you a pint. Then we’ll talk.’

  ‘Just tell me everything I need to know within the next thirty seco
nds,’ said Arthur, ‘and you’ll be drinking on my tab all week. Do you remember picking up Joseph Valentia and driving him to the Dáil on 23 October?’

  ‘I do, and he’s a right bollocks, if you’ll forgive me saying so. All of the lads say the same. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, now, he’s a gentleman. A born gentleman. But Valentia …’

  He mimed a spit.

  ‘It was the day he lodged a complaint about you,’ said Arthur patiently. ‘Because you were ten minutes late.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault I was late. There was a street protest and –’

  Arthur raised a hand to stop him. ‘I know you weren’t to blame. But do you remember which route you took that day?’

  The driver nodded. ‘I picked him up at Patrick Guilbaud’s restaurant. And I drove him to the Dáil.’

  Arthur could hardly hear his own voice over the bassdrum thumping inside his heart. ‘But you stopped off somewhere first, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ The driver’s forehead creased in a frown as he tried to recall the details. ‘We made a detour and stopped off at his bank. To lodge something in his safety deposit box.’

  A FEW minutes after touchdown at Dublin Airport, Charley Valentia grabbed her holdall from the embassy official as a drowning woman might clutch at a lifebelt. Her grey-yellow face seemed to light up with the realisation of imminent salvation.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, hurrying towards the bathroom. ‘I have to pay a visit.’

  Bernard Sauvage’s alert eyes followed her. ‘Junkie,’ he said contemptuously, as the door slammed behind her.

  Emma wasn’t listening. She glanced nervously around the airport, hoping that Hunter might be there to greet her. But there was nobody. Not a single familiar face.

  ‘I’ve seen enough of them in my time,’ Sauvage was saying. ‘Mind you, very few of them were in as bad a state as she is. That yellow face – we’re talking chronic hepatitis, Doctor. Liver shot to hell. Cirrhosis, maybe. Am I right?’

  Emma ignored the question. ‘What happens now?’ she asked tensely. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  The Bear nodded towards the bathroom door. ‘As soon as your friend finishes shooting up, we rush you round to Valentia’s conference. We’ve a patrol car waiting outside. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes.’

  Emma stole a glance at her watch. It said 9.30pm.

  ‘Nine-forty-five before we get there. By that stage it will be nearly over,’ she said dully. ‘Addison will have apologised and handed over the money. Hunter will be ruined. Most of the witnesses will have gone.’ She grimaced. ‘If there hadn’t been that delay at Copenhagen, we might have made it.’

  To her intense annoyance, Sauvage burst out laughing.

  ‘I don’t see the joke, Inspector,’ she said irritably.

  ‘You would if you reset your watch.’

  ‘What?’ Emma looked at him blankly, then clapped her hand to her forehead in relief. ‘My God, you’re right. I’m stupid. Copenhagen time is one hour ahead of Dublin time. It’s really only …’

  ‘Eight-thirty,’ supplied Sauvage. ‘You’ll be fifteen minutes early for the conference, not forty-five minutes late.’

  As Emma gave him a quick hug of gratitude, the Inspector’s mobile rang.

  ‘Sauvage,’ he said tersely. Then: ‘What? Are you sure? You’re absolutely certain?’ He paused. ‘Okay, we’ve got the bastard. We’ve bloody got him.’ He listened. ‘Fine. You pick up the warrant and I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘What is it?’ Emma asked in confusion. ‘What’s going on?’

  But the Bear was already halfway to the door, punching numbers on his phone. ‘Go to the conference,’ he ordered. ‘Just stall it. Hold things up for half an hour. I’ll join you in thirty, forty minutes. Whatever you do, make sure Addison doesn’t apologise or hand over the money. Trust me.’

  Heads were turning all around the airport. Sauvage was already fifty feet away, and his voice was almost a shout.

  ‘And what will you be doing?’ Emma demanded.

  Sauvage paused, halfway through the exit door.

  ‘I’m just popping around to the bank.’

  ‘THIS is highly irregular,’ said the bank manager. He was a small, fussy man with five thin slicks of hair carefully positioned across his bald scalp. He was annoyed at having been forced to come into work at this time of night. He was doubly annoyed because he’d just been paged at the theatre in the middle of the first act of Les Miserables.

  ‘Never in my thirty-five years at the bank,’ he continued, ‘have I been asked to open a safety deposit box without the client’s express permission.’

  He paused at the door of the vault. ‘There are questions of individual privacy here, Inspector.’ His voice was a high, nasal whine. ‘Constitutional rights which may have to be addressed in the High Court.’

  ‘Just open it,’ the Bear ordered. He waved the search warrant that a judge had signed, just five minutes previously, at a special court session in the judge’s own front room. ‘Or do we have to go through all this again?’

  ‘No, that seems in order,’ sniffed the bank manager. ‘For what it’s worth.’

  He dialled the combination on the vault door and looked around at the other three people in the party. ‘But do all these people have to come in, Inspector?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Sauvage, shepherding Hunter, Mary Smith, and Ian Arthur ahead of him into a room lined with numbered deposit boxes. ‘They are all important witnesses in this case.’

  ‘But Mr Valentia will be most upset,’ fretted the manager. ‘And he is a most valued client.’

  ‘The keys, please.’

  The bank manager maintained a constant whine of anguish as he turned two keys and pulled open the steel drawer.

  Yet he still couldn’t restrain his curiosity when the contents were laid bare. His own stare was as hungry as everyone else’s.

  It was exactly six minutes before nine o’clock. Four people witnessed Sauvage sift through the contents of the safety deposit box. And even the most hardened stomachs lurched with nausea.

  ‘Jesus,’ breathed Hunter. ‘He took photos?’

  There were perhaps forty of them. Colour Polaroid photos, taken from every conceivable angle.

  There were four separate sets, each held together with an elastic band. One showed the body of Kate Spain, sprawled in a clearing somewhere. Two more depicted the battered corpses of women whom Hunter identified, with difficulty, as Frieda Winter and Karen Quinn. The fourth showed a victim no one recognised.

  ‘Yes, photos,’ said Sauvage. His voice sounded distant, uninvolved. ‘It’s not uncommon for sickos like Valentia to keep a record of their murders. Photos, drawings, written accounts, whatever. Every so often, they take them out and look at them. Keeps them going until the next time.’

  His gloved hand placed the pictures into an evidence bag, sealed it and tagged it.

  ‘What else is in there?’ asked Mary, peering over his shoulder.

  ‘Floppy disks – twelve, thirteen of them,’ said Sauvage. ‘Judging from what you’ve told us, Hunter, they probably contain his diary. Oh, and there’s a couple of videos, too. Chato Cook productions, no doubt. Jesus.’

  The tweed arm of his jacket wiped the cold sweat from his brow.

  ‘Call the Technical Bureau,’ he instructed Mary Smith. ‘Stay here. Preserve the scene at all costs. No one gets in here. No one, understand?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re perfectly clear on that? If the Pope comes here and wants to examine his deposit box, what happens?’

  ‘He doesn’t get in, Bear.’

  ‘Bloody right he doesn’t. Now, I want you to go through this stuff. Catalogue it, label it. And if you find anything I need to be informed about, call me right away.’

  He spun on his heel. ‘Okay,’ he said to Hunter. ‘Let’s go and nail the bastard.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  FOR his moment of triumph, Joseph Valenti
a chose to wear his favourite suit, a single-breasted masterpiece in bottle-green, created especially for him by master tailor Alfredo Magnoli of Milan. The effect was enhanced by his hand-painted silk tie, Brooks Brothers shirt and Chanel cufflinks.

  Sitting at the top table between his solicitor and his barrister, he allowed himself the luxury of tipping his chair backwards at a slight angle to display his total confidence and ease. The body language was clear for all to see: this was a man who would soon be totally vindicated by a grovelling apology from Simon Addison and a cheque for two million for charity.

  The plush McGregor Room, the top function room in Dublin’s most expensive hotel, was abuzz with frantic activity. Camera crews from RTÉ, TV3 and BBC were covering the event live. A dense thicket of radio microphones sprouted in front of each of the two top tables. More than a hundred chairs, each one occupied by an invited guest or a member of the press, filled the room, and a substantial spillover crowd jammed the basement, where the dramatic events of the evening were to be broadcast on closed-circuit video.

  Valentia’s eyes roved the room with obvious satisfaction. He’d hired the top PR agent in town and had been reassured that every single press medium would be represented at the conference. Simon Addison’s humiliation would be as public as it would be abject and complete.

  At last, Valentia permitted himself the briefest glance across at the other top table, where an ashen-faced Simon Addison sat like a condemned prisoner awaiting the death sentence. On one side of him was Thomas Hinch, his solicitor; on the other side, his barrister, Samuel Zeicker. Each was leafing through thick files, but Valentia knew that this was all just for show. There was only one relevant bit of paperwork, and it sat in front of Addison in a plain white envelope.

  The bank draft for two million.

  Just after nine o’clock, Valentia rose to his feet and tapped his water-glass with a gold pen. ‘I believe we’re all present, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I think we should proceed.’