Clean Break

by Val McDermid

  “Wait till you taste it,” I called back. I chose a couple of tall glasses and scraped the Valium powder into one. I topped it up with about two thirds of the cocktail mixture and stirred it vigorously with a glass rod. I poured the rest into the other glass and topped it up with grapefruit juice and a dash of grenadine syrup to make the colors match. I swallowed hard, picked up both glasses and walked through to the kitchen. Gianni was chopping red onions with a wide-bladed chef’s knife. “A very Italian cocktail,” I announced, handing the drugged glass to him.

  He took it from me and swigged a generous mouthful. He savored it, swilling it round his mouth before swallowing it. “You’re right. Bitter and sweet. Like love, huh?” The leer was back.

  “Not too bitter, I hope,” I giggled, moving behind him and hugging him from behind.

  “Not with me, baby. With me, it’ll be sweeter than sugar,” he said arrogantly.

  “I can hardly wait,” I murmured. I wasn’t exactly lying. I moved away and perched on a high stool, watching him cook. The onions went into a deep pan with olive oil and garlic. Next, he chopped a fennel bulb into thin slices and added them to the stewing onions. He took a punnet of wild mushrooms from the fridge, washed them under running water, patted them dry lovingly with paper towels and chopped them coarsely. Into the pan they went along with a torn handful of coriander leaves.

  “It smells wonderful,” I said.

  “Wait till you taste it,” he said. “There’s only one thing tastes better.” Time for another leer. The temperature was rising in more ways than one. The only good thing about that was the speed at which he was drinking his cocktail.

  “No contest,” I said, watching him measure out round grains of risotto rice. He tipped the rice into the pan, stirred it into the mixture for a couple of minutes, then took a carton out of the freezer.

  “Chicken stock,” he said, tossing the solid lump into the pan amidst much hissing and clouds of steam. He kept stirring till the stock had defrosted and the pan was bubbling gently. Then he put a lid on, set the timer for twelve minutes and drained his glass.

  “How about a salad to go with it?” I asked hastily as he started to move towards me. “And I’ll mix you another drink, OK?”

  His eyes seemed to lose focus momentarily and he shook his head like a bull bothered by flies. He rubbed his hands over his face and mumbled, “OK.” I’d reckoned about twenty minutes for the drugs to take effect, but maybe the amount he’d had to drink on an empty stomach was accelerating things.

  I’d barely got the cap off the gin bottle when there was a sound like a tree falling in the kitchen. I tiptoed back to the doorway to see Gianni spread-eagled on the marble floor. For one terrible moment, I thought I’d killed him. Then he started to snore like a sawmill on overtime. I ran across to the butcher’s block and picked up the knife. It took seconds to saw off the electric cable from a couple of the kitchen appliances. Tying him up took quite a bit

  I found the cellar door on the second try. A wide flight of stairs led down into the depths. One thing about marble floors is that they make shifting heavy loads a lot easier. I got down on my knees behind Gianni and shoved with all my strength. Foot by foot, we slid across the gleaming tiles to the doorway. One last push sent him skidding over the first step, feet first. He bounced down the stairs like a sack of potatoes, still snoring. I staggered to my feet. For the first time, I was grateful that Gianni’s boss was security conscious. The cellar door had bolts top and bottom as well as a lock on the door. I slid the bolts home and leaned against the door to get my breath back.

  When the timer went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Automatically, I turned off the gas under the pan. Now the adrenaline surge was slipping away, I realized that I was in fact ravenous. I shrugged. The food was there, I might as well eat. I didn’t think Gianni was going to be knocking at the door demanding his share in a hurry.

  He might have been the world’s worst lecher, but he was a fabulous cook. I shoveled the risotto down, savoring every delicious mouthful. Now I needed coffee. It was going to be a long night. I wished I hadn’t chopped the lead off the Gaggia. A search of the cupboards eventually turned up a jar of instant and a Thermos jug. I brewed up and, armed with jug, mug and shoulder bag, I set off to explore.

  Whatever Gianni’s boss was, he wasn’t short of a bob. The public rooms on the ground floor were all marble floored, with expensive Oriental rugs scattered around. The furniture was upmarket repro, all polished to a mirror finish. There was nothing in the dining room, drawing room, morning room or the TV lounge to indicate that this was anything other than the home of a successful businessman. Even the videos lined up in the cabinet by the oversized TV were completely innocuous.

  Cautiously, I made my way up the stairs. It was always possible that Turner was a prisoner somewhere inside the villa rather than en suite bathrooms. If Gianni’s boss ever set up in competition with Casa Nico, the pensione down the valley would go out of business within hours. The third door opened on what was clearly the master bedroom. The wardrobes were filled with designer suits and shirts, the drawers with silk underwear and the kind of leisure wear that has the labels on the outside. No trace of a woman in residence. No trace of any papers, either.

  The fourth door opened on to a library. It was obviously a reader’s library rather than one where the books had been bought by the yard. Modern hardbacks lined the shelves. I noticed a sizeable chunk of crime fiction, but most of the books were by authors I’d never heard of. There was also a whole section of legal textbooks, mostly covering commercial and international law. But again, there were no papers anywhere, unless some of the books were dummies. If they were, they’d be hanging on to their secrets. There was no way I had time to go through that lot book by book.

  The fifth door was locked. I left it for a moment and tried the sixth. Another guest bedroom. That told me that either Turner was behind the locked door, or something significant was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my set of picklocks with me. I don’t carry them routinely, and when I’d set off on my pursuit of Turner, I hadn’t expected to be doing any burglaries. I could of course simply smash the lock with one of the dozens of marble statuettes that hung around in niches all over the place. But I didn’t want the villa’s owner to know the extent to which he’d been turned over unless I could possibly help it.

  I looked up at the door lintel. Gianni’s boss was not much bigger than me, so the chances were that the key wasn’t sitting up there. I went back to the master bedroom and began a proper search. I got lucky in the bathroom. I’d taken the contents of the bathroom cupboard off the shelves one by one, just to make sure there was nothing behind them. There were two aerosol cans of Polo shaving foam, and one was a lot lighter than the other. I looked more closely at the heavier of the two. Gripping it tightly, I twisted the bottom of the can. It unscrewed smoothly, revealing a

  The longest of the keys opened the locked door. Inside was a starkly functional office, a sharp contrast to the luxurious appointments of the rest of the villa. I switched the light on, closed the shutters and took a good look around. A basic desk stood against one wall with a computer, a modem, and a fax machine on it. To one side there was a photocopier and a laser printer. Automatically, I switched them on. I noticed a shredder under the desk as I sat down and hit the computer’s power button. The machine booted up and I called up the directories. Ten minutes later, my jubilation had given way to depression. Every single data file I’d tried to access was password protected. I couldn’t get in to read them. All it would let me do was print out a list of all files, which I duly did.

  Muttering dark imprecations, I returned to the main directory. Time for some lateral thinking. In the years since I first started working at Mortensen and Brannigan and discovered the wonderful world of electronic mail, the Internet had grown from the home of academics and a handful of computer loonies like me to the world’s bulletin board. The communications software that was running on this machine was a sta
ndard business package that I’d used dozens of times before. Even if the files were password protected, I reckoned that the communications program would still be able to transmit them intact to somewhere I could retrieve them later and pass them on to someone who could crack the passwording. All I needed was a local number for the Internet. If I was lucky, there would be one already loaded in the comms program. I started it running and called up the telephone directory screen.

  It was my lucky night. Right at the top of the list was the number for the local Internet node—the E-mail equivalent of a postal sorting office. The way the Net works is simple. It’s analogous to sending a letter rather than making a phone call. The network is connected by phone lines, and works on what they call a parcel switching system. What happens is you dial a local number and send your data to it. The computer there reads the address and

  I used the edit mode to discover Gianni’s boss’s login and password, then I instructed the computer to connect me to the Internet. Less than a minute later, we were in. I typed in the electronic mail address of the office, then I started sending the files one by one. An hour and a mug of coffee later, I’d sent a copy of every data file in the machine back to Manchester.

  Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I switched off the machine. Now it was time for the desk drawers. I unlocked each drawer with the remaining keys on the bunch. The first drawer held stationery. The second held junk—rubber bands, spare computer disks, a couple of computer cables, a half-eaten chocolate bar and a box of Post-it notes. The bottom drawer looked more promising, with its collection of suspension files. No such luck. All the files held was the paperwork for the house: utility bills, receipts for furniture, building work, landscaping, pool maintenance. The only interesting thing was that everything was in the name of a company—Gruppo Leopardi. There was no clue as to who was behind Gruppo Leopardi. And I didn’t have the time for the kind of thorough search that might reveal that. I’d already been there too long, and I was getting too tired to concentrate. It was time to make tracks.

  I went back over to the window, to open the shutters again. I wanted to leave everything exactly as I’d found it. As I turned back, clumsy with exhaustion, I caught the Thermos jug with my elbow. It sailed off the desk and bounced off the paneled wall under the window. It landed on its side on the floor, apparently undamaged. Not so the wall. The wood paneling where the jug had hit had slowly swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Eat your heart out, Enid Blyton. If preposterous coincidence is good enough for the Secret Seven, it’s good enough for me.

  Chapter 19

  If the Brannigans were posh enough to have a family motto, it would go something like, “What do you mean, I can’t?” Just because I’ve never learned how to crack a safe didn’t mean I was going to close the panel and walk away. I sat on the floor opposite the safe and studied it. There was a six-digit electronic display above a keypad with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero to nine. Beside the keypad were buttons that I translated as “enter code,” “open,” “random reset,” “master.” That didn’t take me a whole lot further forward.

  I checked my watch. Ten o’clock. Not too late to make a call. I took the mobile out of my bag and rang Dennis. It would have been cheaper to use the fax phone, but I’d already noticed that Gruppo Leopardi had itemized billing on their phone account and I didn’t want to leave a trail straight back to Dennis, especially given that he already had connections with these people via Turner. Dennis answered his phone on the second ring. “Hi, Dennis,” I said. “I’m looking at the outside of a safe and I want to be looking at the inside. Any ideas?”

  “Kate, you’re more of a villain than I am. You know I haven’t touched a safe since Billy the Whip dropped one on my foot in 1983.”

  “This isn’t the time for reminiscing. This call’s costing me a week’s wages.”

  He chuckled. “Then somebody else must be paying for it. What does this safe look like?”

  I described it to him. “You’re wasting your time, Kate. Beast like that, you’ve got no chance unless you know the combo,” he said sorrowfully.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. He might be a sloppy git though, this guy you’re having over. He might have gone for something really stupid like the last six digits of the phone number. Or the first six. Or his date of birth. Or his girlfriend’s name. Or some set of letters and numbers he sees in his office every day.”

  I groaned. “Enough, already. You sure there’s no other way?”

  “That’s why they call them safes,” Dennis said. “Where are you, anyway?”

  “You don’t want to know. Believe me, you don’t want to know. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your help.”

  I went back to the domestic files and tried various combinations of the phone number and any other number I could find, including the vehicle registrations. No joy. I sat in the boss’s chair and looked around me. What would he see from here that would be a constant aide-mémoire? I got up and tried the model numbers of the fax machine, the modem and the photocopier. Nothing. I didn’t know the boss’s birthday, but I had a feeling that a man as security conscious as him wouldn’t have gone for anything that obvious.

  It was last resort time. What would I do if I wanted a code that was random enough for no one to guess, but accessible to me whenever I forgot it? Acting on pure instinct, I hit the power button on the computer again and watched the screen, looking for any six digit combinations that came up during the boot process. I ended up with two, MB 4D33 was part of the operating system ident. And the CD-ROM drive’s device model number was CR-563-X. The first string did nothing. But when I entered the second set of digits, the display changed from red to green. I couldn’t believe it.

  Holding my breath, I hit the “open” button. There was a soft click and the door catch released. “There is a God, and she likes me,” I said softly. I opened the safe and stared in at the contents. There was a stack of papers about half an inch thick. On top of them sat a loose-leaf folder, slightly bigger than a Filofax. I took everything out of the safe and moved back to the desk. I started with the folder. First there was a list of names, with dates and figures next to it. Following that were half a dozen pages listing

  I opened the clasps of the folder and put the pages through the photocopier. While they were feeding through, I looked at the other papers. Some of them were legal contracts, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Others were handwritten notes which seemed to refer to meetings, but although I understood most of the words, I couldn’t get a lot of sense out of them. There were a few business letters, mostly of the “thank you for your letter of the fifteenth, we can confirm the safe arrival of your consignment” type. The final bundle of papers were draft accounts of Gruppo Leopardi. I copied the lot.

  Once I’d finished, I replaced everything in the safe, exactly as I’d found it. I had the papers, but I wanted a little bit of insurance, just in case anything happened on the way home to deprive me of my photocopies. The fax machine was the best source of that insurance, but I didn’t want to send the stuff to my office number for the same reason I’d used the mobile to phone Dennis. It needed to go somewhere secure, but somewhere large enough for it not to be obvious who specifically it had gone to. Ideally, it also had to go somewhere that even the Mafia would think twice about storming mob-handed.

  There was only one place and one person I could think of that fitted the bill. Detective Chief Inspector Della Prentice, top dog on the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. This wasn’t her bailiwick, but Della’s still the only copper I’d trust with anything that might put me at risk. I’d worked with Della a couple of times

  I took a sheet of paper out of the stationery drawer and scribbled a cover sheet. “Fax for the urgent and confidential attention of DCI Prentice, Regional Crime Squad. Dear Della, Vital evidence. Please keep safe until I can fill you in on the deep background. I’ll call you as soon as I get back. Thanks. KB.” That should do it, I though
t, dialling her departmental fax machine. God knows what the duty CID would make of a hundred-page fax from Italy in the middle of the night.

  By the time I’d finished, it was after two. I bundled up my photocopies, stuffed them in an envelope and tucked the lot into my bulging bag. Time to get the hell out of here, as far away as possible. I had a horrible feeling that I knew what had happened to Nicholas Turner, probably because of my bug, and I didn’t want to end up the same way. There wasn’t a trace of the guy in any of the spare bedrooms, which put paid to any comforting ideas about him having nipped into Sestri in a taxi for dinner.

  I switched everything off and locked the desk drawers again. Satisfied that it all looked just as it had when I’d walked into the office, I got out, locking the door behind me. I replaced the keys in the dummy can, hoping that my memory of how the contents of the cabinet had been arranged was accurate. I trotted down the stairs and back to the kitchen. I put my ear to the cellar door. Silence. I had a momentary pang of conscience, wondering what would happen to the big man when he came round and found himself tied up in the dark for an indefinite period of time. Then I reminded myself that he was probably directly responsible for whatever had happened to Turner, and I stopped feeling guilty. Besides, judging by the pristine condition of the villa, I reckoned there must be a maid who came in every day to polish the floors,

  I let myself out of the French windows and stood on the patio, weighing up what to do next. I had the black box that would open the gates for me, but I didn’t know where the security system was controlled from, and the cameras would still be rolling. I wasn’t keen on finding myself the star of the Mafia equivalent of Crimewatch, so I decided to help myself to one of the vehicles, just to keep myself hidden from the all-seeing eyes by the gate. You can only do so much with computer enhancement, and I reckoned the combination of the darkness and the obscurity of being inside a car would make sure I couldn’t be identified.