by Tim Weaver
‘At all?’
‘Or, at least, that’s what she thinks, anyway.’
‘So he did come back for her?’
‘No. Not exactly.’
‘I don’t get it, then. What happened?’
‘She’s shit-scared, making her way back down the side of this mountain, with no torch, no food and no idea where she’s going – and then she realizes something.’
‘What?’
‘Adrian is watching her.’
Jo heard the door of the minivan open and close, and a male voice – softly spoken, gentle – say, ‘Hey, Ma. Sorry I’m a little late.’ Footsteps followed, first out on the driveway, then on the porch, where he filled the frame of the front door. He was just like his photograph: handsome, broad, muscular.
His eyes searched the living room for Jo.
‘Oh, hello,’ he said, smiling, his tone warm. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’
‘This is my boy.’ Valeria beamed from behind him. ‘My Adrian.’
‘So Adrian remained out there in the woods with Martina?’
‘He was just watching her. Like, following her, out of sight.’
‘She couldn’t see him?’
‘No. No, she couldn’t see a thing.’
‘Did she say anything to him?’
‘Yeah, she kept calling his name.’
‘But he didn’t respond?’
‘No. Not once, even when she tripped and fell, and busted up her ankle real good. I mean, she said it blew up like a balloon and she could barely put one foot in front of the other. She could hardly even walk, she was scared out of her fucking mind, screaming his name into the darkness, begging for him to help her out.’
‘But he still didn’t help her out?’
‘No. It was like …’
Jo got to her feet.
‘Hello, Adrian,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘I’m Detective Kader.’
‘It was like what?’
‘She said it was like Adrian was hunting her.’
Part Five
* * *
THE ROOM
38
Twenty-four hours later, York was a ghost town.
It was 2 a.m., the vast Gothic spires of the cathedral climbing so far into the night they appeared to almost dissolve. Rain drummed against doorways and windowsills, water rushed and gurgled in gutters, and the skies were perfectly black, except for the occasional flash of lightning. In those moments, the narrow streets and bowed, crooked buildings would come alive – blinking like a strobe – before retreating into darkness again.
As I approached the Shambles, I double-checked my pockets for the key and the piece of paper with the alarm code on it, and then slowed my pace, looking behind me. Healy and I had spent the day since Mills left us at the cottage talking this through, arguing the risks, batting everything back and forth, and he’d never wavered once: he believed the whole thing to be an ambush, a juicy piece of bait that would either destroy me or kill me, and do the same to him. Why would Mills put on a performance like the one at the cottage? Why help me? Why would he go against the person or people he worked for? It was certainly simpler to dismiss it as an ambush – but Healy hadn’t seen Mills with the mother and her kids, and he hadn’t seen the expression on his face at the cottage.
I kept moving, the rain unable to breach this part of the city as effectively, the cramped Elizabethan buildings on either side barely feet from one another. The empty streets and silent rooms put me in mind of Black Gale, another ghost town, and then a little way along – as signs whipped and wheezed in the wind – I found a small entrance between a sweet shop and a café: a void filled only with darkness. There was no signage on the main thoroughfare, no indication that this led to a law firm, but as I took a few steps in, under an archway, I found myself in a courtyard, beneath an overhanging second floor, and spotted the sign out front.
Pale green with gold lettering.
Seiger and Sten.
Despite the archaic building, the door was modern: heavy oak, a silver lock and letterbox. Yet, new as the door was, straight away I realized something was off. I paused there for a long moment – the plastic of the key pinched between my thumb and forefinger – and tried to convince myself everything was fine.
But it wasn’t.
The key was wrong. It wasn’t even vaguely compatible with the lock. I tried to slide it in but got nowhere. It was too thin, the cuts on the blade weren’t right, and the lock was a traditional tumbler: there was no electronic reader on it, or inside it, so there was nothing to read the strip on the key.
Instantly, I thought of Healy, of how I’d overruled him and his concerns about coming here. So had he been right all along?
Was this a trap?
But why would Mills place the key inside Seiger and Sten notepaper if it wasn’t for Seiger and Sten? And if the key didn’t open the office, what did it open?
I tried to look through the front window, but all I could see was the vague shape of a long desk, and the curve of a sofa on the left. As I stepped back, I felt my wallet shift against my leg and knew that, inside one of the zip pockets, were my picks. I looked again at the door: it was big, heavy, and would be hard, maybe impossible, to break open with physical force. The lock was different, though. It was just a pin tumbler. I could get past that.
But now I was doubting myself.
The key didn’t fit, so what if the alarm code Mills had given me didn’t work either?
I looked at the door, at the piece of paper in my hands with 459822 written in the middle. I thought about Black Gale, about the nine people who’d called it home.
There was only one way to find out.
I dropped to my haunches at the door and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The wind died, the place becoming quiet again, except for the perpetual lap of water in the drains, and babble of the gutters.
Thirty seconds later, something clicked and the door had come away from its frame.
Straight away, the security system started to chirp.
As quickly as possible, I moved inside the building – leaving the door open in case I needed a rapid escape – and searched for the alarm box. About five feet from me, on a wall adjacent to the front desk, its fascia was blinking with blue lights. It was near black inside the office but the lights produced an intermittent wash, enough for me to see that the alarm box had a small, flip-down section housing the number pad. I pulled it open and punched in the code. For a split second, nothing happened: the LEDs were still winking, the sound hadn’t stopped.
I turned to the door, ready to run.
But then everything snapped to silence.
39
I clicked the main door shut, and everything retreated into darkness. I could just about make out the reception desk, a curved piece of pale wood – built on to a slight platform – and a sofa and a couple of tub chairs.
As I switched on my penlight, shadows shifted, forming in the corners of the room and around a doorway to the right of the reception desk. It was pulled most of the way shut. On the walls were photographs of a man who I assumed was Jacob Pierce. He was different from how I’d imagined: in his late sixties; a full, thick head of grey hair swept back from his forehead; bright blue eyes, smooth skin, clean-shaven. I’d expected him to look older, maybe less polished, as if his desire not to publicize himself on the company website, or anywhere else, was down to something physical – his age, or an impairment, or some odd tic. But he had none of those things. In most of the pictures he was at social events, the names of charities on banners, Pierce shaking hands with people and presenting them with oversized cheques. In one, he was standing next to Kate Middleton.
I made a beeline for the corridor leading off the reception area and, as I crossed the room, noticed for the first time how low the ceilings were, how the lines of the interior were all slightly off, and how there were three further doors.
The first was on my left and led to a small room with two desks facing each other and
a wall stacked entirely with ring binders. I moved inside, sweeping the light across the shelves. The ring binders were arranged alphabetically, the surname of the client on the spine. I searched for Perry, Davey, Gibbs, Solomon or Wilson, but none of the nine villagers were up on the shelves.
The desks each had a PC on them, three-tiered in-trays and a desk diary. There were four photos on one of them, the same woman in all the shots, with the same kids; and on the other desk was a small cactus, with Post-its stuck to the monitor, reminders scrawled all over them. I booted up both computers, taking a closer look at the photographs of the woman: she was in her forties, with two daughters about fourteen and twelve. The other desk belonged to a man: in the top drawer, I found some hair gel as well as a can of Lynx. I couldn’t completely dismiss either person as irrelevant, but somehow I doubted they were a part of whatever might be going on here, and I became more convinced as I started going through their PCs. Neither was password-protected, the inboxes were full of bland work emails, and there was nothing in either Internet history that was even vaguely connected to Black Gale.
I returned to the corridor.
Through the second door, opposite the office I’d just been into, was a small, closet-style toilet. In front of me, at the far end of the corridor, I could see a solid, bricked wall. Between that and where I stood was the third door I’d spotted earlier. It had a nameplate on it.
JACOB PIERCE.
As I pushed open his door, I found myself in a bigger, much nicer office, divided almost in two. One half was set on a raised platform, where Pierce had placed an eight-seater table, and a sideboard with a TV screen above it and video-conferencing facilities. In the other half was his desk, shelves full of more binders, and a line of five filing cabinets behind his chair.
I went through the binders in the same way as I had in the other office – and this time I actually found something: a file for Randolph Solomon.
It was a history of the work Seiger and Sten had undertaken on his behalf, all the way back to when they’d dealt with the estate of his late father. I could see Jacob Pierce’s name throughout, his signature at the bottom of forms and letters, some so old they’d begun to yellow, and then at the back was the paperwork associated with the move that Randolph and Emiline had made to Black Gale. I began to leaf through the pages more carefully, but couldn’t spot a single letter, form or agreement that might in any way be tethered to my case. There were none of the photos that Mills had taken on his phone when we’d seen him at the village – photos that Pierce must have asked him to take in order to ensure that nothing at Black Gale had changed, that no one was on to them – and there was no indication that the property had been bugged.
Frustrated, I switched to the cabinets behind his desk. Inside each of the files, I found an increasingly predictable mix of probate, house moves, divorce paperwork, employment law and business disputes. Nothing even remotely connected to the village.
I looked around the office, confused.
Why would Mills give me the alarm code if there was nothing here?
Maybe for the same reason he gave me a key that doesn’t open anything.
I glanced at Pierce’s desk, at his computer, and switched it on. As it chimed into life, I went through the drawers of the sideboard at the other end of the room and then fired up the video-conferencing equipment. It made a soft ping as a large, fifty-inch monitor blinked on, and then I reached for the camera underneath and turned it away from me just to be safe.
Picking up the remote control, I began cycling through some menus on the left of the TV. At the bottom was an option for Recent Calls. Most were the names of local businesses I recognized from the binders that I’d already been through, but a couple of them had red dots next to their names. Pretty soon, I realized why: they were recordings.
I pressed Play and got my first look at Jacob Pierce in action.
In a square box at the bottom left of the screen he was talking to two men and a woman from an insurance company in Selby about a redundancy process they were about to embark upon. He was smartly dressed in a shirt, grey waistcoat and mauve tie, and spoke in a soft northern accent. He was urbane, stylish, engaging, even about subjects that were tedious, and had the appearance of a figurehead, of someone who could gain business based on nothing more than his good looks and personality. So why was his presence online so subdued?
‘Any other questions you have,’ he said to the trio, writing something down, ‘just send them over.’ I watched him, his ease with them, his humour. ‘I’ve recorded this session because I know you guys like to have a copy of all our correspondence, and because the legalities of employment law are obviously a very exciting subject, so you’ll definitely want to watch this again.’ They laughed, and then again as Pierce looked into the camera and straightened his tie, insinuating that – if they ever did watch it back – he’d be looking his best. ‘I’ll be back in touch very soon.’
They said their goodbyes and the screen went blank.
I stood staring at the television, still asking myself why a man like this was so determined to spend so much of his life below the radar. When I played the second recording, I discovered it was the same three people from the same insurance company, Pierce as smart and gregarious as before. After watching it through, I switched the whole system off, reset the camera and returned to his PC, sliding in at the desk and firing up his email.
Unlike his employees, Pierce had password-protected his inbox. It didn’t necessarily mean anything – most people did the same; it was rarer to find an email client open – but while there was little of interest among the documents on his hard drive, when I switched to the Internet, I instantly saw something was off.
He was using two different browsers.
In Explorer, his history was littered with uninteresting stop-offs, all related to work he’d been hired for or was advising on. There were brief detours to other websites, unrelated to his profession, but they weren’t exciting either. Online newspapers. Shopping. Sport.
Chrome was different.
Before I’d even got to his history, I could see he’d added an extension. Its icon was in the corner of the browser window and, when I clicked on it, I realized he’d downloaded a proxy and VPN service.
It was software that let him mask his IP address.
A menu was showing his location as somewhere in Sweden.
For a second, a buzz of excitement charged through me, but then I went to his history, expecting a waterfall of websites, confirmation of why I was here, of why Mills had handed me the alarm code, and found nothing.
There was no Internet history at all.
I sat there for a second, staring at the screen, frustrated, panicked. Did Pierce erase his activity every time he used it? Or had he done it because he knew I was coming?
And then I happened to look down.
The carpet was the only part of the room I hadn’t paid attention to, but now, as I used the penlight, I saw that there was a small rug, laid at one end of the row of filing cabinets stationed behind Pierce’s desk. It looked weirdly out of place.
I got up and kicked at it with the toe of my boot, pushing it away from the cabinets, and – as soon as I did – I realized there was something underneath: two metal plates, snaking out from under the last of the five cabinets. They were thick and ridged. I crouched down, trying to get a better angle with the torch.
Runners.
Standing again, I went to the first of the filing cabinets and pressed two hands flat to its flank, pushing at it. It jolted, almost bucked against me, but then the whole thing – all five of the cabinets – began to slowly move along the tracks embedded in the floor, squealing softly as they did. I’d got the cabinets about three and a half feet when I finally hit a buffer.
Behind the cabinets was an entranceway.
It opened on to a set of ten steps, akin to a cellar staircase, that dropped down to a metal door. I moved inside, having to duck as I did, the ceiling low, the walls
so thick around me that it instantly seemed to deaden all sound. When I got to the bottom, I looked at the lock.
The keyhole was minuscule – maybe only a couple of millimetres wide – and around the circumference of the lock plate, equally spaced in an upside-down triangle, were three LEDs. I reached into my pocket, fished out the key that Mills had left for me, and tried inserting it into the lock. It went all the way in.
The second I turned it, something buzzed.
The LEDs all lit up.
And then, with a click, the door opened.
40
I moved past the door, into the room beyond.
It was small, cramped, about ten feet across, even less from left to right, and like everywhere else in the building, its ceiling was low. Brown watermarks crawled above me like vertebrae, and – all along the walls – the plaster was punctured and broken. There was no window, just a tiny square of thick, opaque glass in the roof. I swept the torch from left to right, looking for a light switch, but there was no electricity either. There was no heating system. There was no other way into this place except through the coded door.
In front of me were two shelving units.
On one was a series of long, rectangular metal boxes with flip-up lids. On the other were two very large cardboard ones. All of them were covered in dust and had clearly been here a while.
I flipped the lid on the nearest metal box and used the penlight to illuminate the interior.
It was full of money.
Notes, wrapped in plastic bundles.
I removed one, turning it in my hand. It was difficult to tell for sure but each bundle looked like it had about £5,000 in it, and there were twenty-five of them stacked side by side.
