The Locker

by Adrian Magson

  A thought flickered into her head about the CIA man following George Paperas, but she dismissed it. Paperas might have trodden on some toes in the past, or with his field work and UN contacts, he might have information the CIA considered useful in the war on terror. Unless it was proven otherwise, that was his business and no part of what they were here to discuss.

  twenty-two

  After Aston signed off, Ruth checked her email and found the link from him with the CCTV footage from Fitness Plus. She clicked on it and waited while it downloaded.

  The picture was grainy with a blue-ish tinge, but clear enough to make out details of faces and furnishings. It showed the main corridor leading from the corner near reception past the bank of lockers and vending machines. No doubt another camera showed the opposite end of the corridor leading to the pool, but that wasn’t necessary right now.

  A timer in the bottom right-hand corner showed a date, and the time at 09.05. About ten minutes before Nancy arrived, if the kidnap note was accurate. It was cutting it fine but she guessed Aston had vetted the footage first and sent her what was relevant.

  Two women in gym gear walked by and went through the door into the fitness studio. The silence was slightly unnerving, Ruth thought, after the pounding beat of the music she knew was being played throughout the building. They were shortly followed by the young hunk Ruth had seen chatting to the receptionist. But instead of entering the studio he walked to the end of the corridor, checked a fire door then came back, bending to check out the slots in the vending machines before moving on to the lockers, where he ran his hand along the doors, pushing them shut. He seemed in no hurry to be busy.

  When he stopped alongside the first bank of lockers and flicked a hand at the key in the middle, Ruth tensed.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Gina.

  “That’s the locker Nancy uses, where the note was left. It’s got a large safety pin instead of an orange key fob.”

  The hunk opened the door and appeared to be checking the coin mechanism box on the inside. Then he closed it again and walked away, flexing his arms.

  “Did you see anything?” Ruth murmured, and looked at the other two. “I didn’t.”

  Vaslik shook his head. “If he dropped the card, he should be in Vegas—they’d pay top dollar for that kind of skill.”

  Two more customers came in separately; one an elderly man with a stick, the other a young woman wearing a hoodie and carrying a sports bag. She stopped halfway along the bank of lockers and opened one, then changed her mind and moved back towards the first row.

  She opened the door to the middle one and pushed her bag inside using both hands. As she did so, they saw one hand was holding a flash of something white against the dark fabric.

  Gina leaned in to look closer. “What’s that?”

  “Bingo,” Ruth muttered. “It’s the card. Now, who the hell are you, lady?”

  The woman didn’t lock the door, but turned as if to go into the studio, then appeared to change her mind before going back to the locker and pulling out her bag, this time one-handed. As she turned to leave, her hoodie fell back slightly, revealing one side of her face.

  It was the woman Ruth knew as Clarisse.

  As she walked out of shot towards the reception area, the three investigators looked at each other.

  “She gets around,” said Vaslik. “Can you freeze and copy a frame of that?”

  Ruth was already reaching for the laptop’s mouse pad. “I’m on it.” She did so, then allowed the footage to run.

  What was left was dynamite.

  They saw Nancy enter the frame and go to the locker. She opened the door and stopped; went very still for a moment before reaching inside. When she withdrew her hand, she was holding the square of white card.

  The shock was plain to see in the stiffness of her body and face.

  Seconds later, she was running out of the frame, her sports bag forgotten on the floor. Moments after, the mystery woman appeared and looked inside the locker, then flicked the door closed and looked down at Nancy’s bag for a second before looking along the corridor without moving.

  She was smiling.

  “What’s she doing? Gina asked. “Why is she standing there?”

  “She’s waiting,” said Vaslik, “to see if this fish took the bait.”

  Five minutes later they joined Nancy in the living room, where she was watching the BBC News Channel. A reporter in a hard hat and body armour was standing in front of a burning building in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. In the background people were clawing at piles of rubble while emergency crews struggled to get victims into vehicles and away from the scene. Evidence of a bomb outrage, the reporter was saying, by a little-known extremist group that had, until now, been mostly vocal with attempting only limited attempts at disrupting everyday life in the capital.

  Ruth turned off the television and showed Nancy the freeze-frame of the woman as she turned away from the locker.

  “Do you know her?” she asked gently, hardly daring to breathe. She didn’t want to pre-empt Nancy’s answer in any way. This was the first break they’d had, and if it led anywhere they’d struck very lucky indeed. Sometimes that was all it needed: one moment of carelessness. Maybe this was such a case and would be the undoing of all the care Clarisse had taken not to be seen.

  Nancy studied it, eyes flooding with recognition.

  “Yes, I do—at least, to say hello to. Her name’s Karen, or Helen—I forget which. Helen, I think. Sorry, but I’m terrible with some names. Why have you got this photo? What’s going on?”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “A week, ten days … maybe a bit longer. She joined recently. We’ve hardly talked, really. She was there just after I found the card. She must have thought I was so rude—I ran off without stopping to talk.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Ruth commented. “I think she’ll understand better than most. What do you think, Slik?”

  When Vaslik nodded with a grim smile, Nancy looked at them both and asked, “What do you mean? Do you know her?”

  “Not as well as we’d like to. We acquired footage of the CCTV taken just before you arrived at Fitness Plus yesterday morning. This is a freeze-frame taken just after she’d placed the card in your locker.”

  “What? But that’s—” Nancy looked horrified. “She put it there?” Her voice was tiny, like a child’s, and a pulse was beating at the side of her head.

  “Yes. Your gym buddy, Helen. She also calls herself Clarisse and claims to live at No. 38. She doesn’t, of course, but she—or somebody else—has definitely been there.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Watching this house. Watching you. Sometimes from the ground floor window, sometimes upstairs.”

  “What?”

  They waited while Nancy went through the stages of feeling angry, violated, resentful and frightened, offering reassurance. The last emotion was likely to be the most immediately worrying, but that was Gina’s problem. Hand-holding was what she was trained for. The rest would, in time, diminish.

  “It’s OK,” said Ruth. “She’s gone now. We’ll try and find her, don’t worry.” Find her, she thought, and lean on her with a big stick.

  twenty-three

  George Paperas called towards midday. Ruth took the call in the study, in case the conversation included something Nancy didn’t need to know.

  “Interesting person, your Michael Hardman,” he began.

  “You’ve found him?” She couldn’t help it, she felt a tingle of electricity pass through her. But it didn’t last.

  “No. Nothing like that. In fact, that’s the odd thing: he’s actually proving very difficult to pin down. I rang a dozen names on that list of agencies you gave me. Fortunately, most of them were people I know. It seemed the quickest way to get some feel for him.”

  “
What did you find?”

  “In a way, more than I expected … and a lot less. Hardman’s got something of a name for himself; he’s a bit of a butterfly, is the general view. He first popped up as a field volunteer with Oxfam about four years ago, in Pakistan. He showed up one day at a transit camp near Peshawar and offered to pitch in. They were under pressure and grateful for any extra hands they could get. He quickly became a valued member of the team and even drove supply trucks close to the border when the local contract drivers got scared off by threats from the Taliban. Then a couple of weeks later, he disappeared, saying he had family stuff to resolve.”

  “Could be true,” Ruth murmured. “His daughter’s very young.”

  “Well, he never said anything about that. It was the same with five other agencies I spoke to. They’re mostly small and don’t have the resources to turn away offers of help, so when he turned up they took him on with open arms. But it was one-sided.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He’d be there as promised, work for a few days, maybe a week or two, then fade into the background. Not all the names ticked on the list had heard of him—and I know at least three of them who have excellent record keeping. For a committed aid worker, he doesn’t seem to have left much of a footprint.”

  “Did anybody know anything about him?”

  “That’s the problem: nothing. He never volunteered information about his background or family, even in down-time, which is rare. Work in tough circumstances like field aid, and you talk about anything to take your mind off what you’ve seen, if only for a few hours. He didn’t do that; didn’t indulge in gossip and appeared to have no political leanings. Most aid workers are pretty open about where they’re from; it’s camp-fire stuff. Engaging with others is part of the job description if you’re serious about it. But your Mr. Hardman doesn’t appear to have been the type.”

  “Was he paid by them?”

  “No. That was the thing they liked. He didn’t ask for anything, so most of them figured he had private money and a conscience. He wouldn’t be the first.”

  “What did they think of him?”

  “Pleasant enough, organised and hard-working for the time they knew him … but not somebody they’d welcome back. Each time he left, he created a gap in the workforce that often couldn’t be filled quickly enough. It happens, of course, when workers fall ill or suffer an injury of some kind; then they have to be evacuated out if it’s serious enough and a replacement found. But this was different. He simply left with little or no notice.”

  Ruth felt a pulse beating in her throat. “And no ideas about where he’d gone?” She wasn’t sure why that was important, but it was something she felt she had to ask.

  “None. He simply left and disappeared.”

  She thanked him for his help and cut the connection, then went in search of Slik.

  “He said he had something to do,” said Gina, who was leaning against the kitchen sink working her way through a bacon sandwich. She pushed a plateful towards Ruth. “Here, get one of these down you. You look like you’re thinking too much.”

  “Thanks.” Ruth was hungry and took a bite, wondering where Slik had gone and why she had a bad feeling about Michael Hardman.

  twenty-four

  Andy Vaslik stepped inside the rear of No. 38 and closed the French doors behind him. He stood quite still, listening for the slightest sound, the smallest shuffle of movement in the atmosphere that would signal the presence of another. He’d checked the outside of the building first, and only when he felt fairly sure nobody was in, he’d made his way down the side path and gained access the same way as before.

  He waited, tuning in. This time he wanted to get a feel for the place. Last time had been quick and dirty, snatching a clutch of fleeting observations before anyone came back and found them. Now he was certain the place had been abandoned as an observation post, he wanted to take a closer look.

  He started upstairs, going through every room, sniffing the air, absorbing the sense of the building, looking behind doors. Then he checked every inch of the carpets and fixtures. He was looking for any minute traces that might show who had been here, and what they had done. Every visitor leaves something, unless clothed in a forensics suit, and he was guessing the woman calling herself Clarisse would have been no different. She would have kept movement in the house to a minimum to avoid alerting the neighbours, but she would have been unable to remain totally still for hours at a time.

  And when people move, they sometimes leave things behind.

  He didn’t want to jump the gun and call in Cruxys’s own experts; instead he had confidence in his own abilities to tell him what he needed to know.

  The two rear bedrooms gave him nothing. If Clarisse had been in here, she’d been careful to leave no obvious trace. Facing away from the focus of her attention—the Hardman House—would have been pointless and time-wasting, and he had a feeling Clarisse was too professional for that.

  He checked the front rooms, giving a clear view each way along the road. This was where he figured Clarisse or her colleagues—and he was fairly sure there would have been others—would have spent most of their time. It gave a commanding view of their target, while avoiding the likelihood of anybody looking up from the road. People don’t always look up at houses, but centre their attention on the ground floor where they expect to see movement. From here, the watchers could observe the Hardman’s house in relative safety, while keeping an eye on the comings and goings of neighbours and alert to the possibility of random callers to this house itself.

  He scoured the carpets, eyeing the flattened area he’d seen before, but finding nothing. He wasn’t surprised; the empty room would have shown at a glance if they had left anything behind.

  What he did see was three rounded indentations in the carpet. They had used a stool of some kind. He was willing to bet it was a folding camp stool, easy to conceal and carry, and putting the watcher at a comfortable level to see through the window with minimum exposure.

  It pointed to expertise and planning; amateurs wouldn’t think of comfort, and they would have left more in the way of traces.

  He checked the bathroom again, noting the unflushed bowl, and stooped to look behind the seat, peering into the corners. Nothing.

  The rest of the house was the same, devoid of debris, the way professionals leave a place because they know what the risks can be if they get careless.

  He let himself out the back and walked down the side of the house, pausing to check the wheelie bins. You just never knew. But they were empty. As he passed through the side gate, he saw the neighbour’s bin on the other side of the low fence, less than a foot away. On impulse, he made sure he wasn’t being watched, then leaned over and took a look.

  And smiled.

  It was full with pre-filled white bin liners, knotted in the kind of neat, eco-friendly, responsible way people liked to live. But down the side was something that didn’t match: it was a small paper carrier bag with a garish logo, the twin handles tied roughly together—the way people did after a picnic with their food waste and wrappers, when they were going to flip it into a garbage can on their way home.

  He plucked it out and walked away, keen to see if his trash raid had been worthwhile.

  Ruth was waiting for him by the back gate. She had a good idea where he’d been and eyed the bag in his hand. “Is that loot or did you stop for lunch on the way?”

  He explained where he’d been and held up the bag he’d liberated, but refused to say anything until they were back in the kitchen. He spread an old newspaper on the working surface, then carefully tipped out the bag’s contents and used a fork from the drawer to sort through the scraps.

  It yielded the remnants of a working meal for one to go: a litter of orange peel, a paper coffee mug with a smear of dried foam around the rim, a plastic spoon, a scrunched-up paper napkin and an empty y
ogurt pot. A healthy eater, evidently.

  They stood and stared at the evidence for what it was, each running the possibilities through their mind. This was either the neighbour’s last lunch wrappings, casually tossed in the wheelie bin as they got home, or something else entirely.

  “What do you think?” said Ruth.

  Vaslik shook his head. “I don’t think anything. It’s nothing, is what it is.” He excused himself and went to the bathroom, squeezing by in front of her. When she looked back at the debris on the work surface, something about it was different.

  The paper napkin was gone.

  She wondered why Vaslik had removed it, and was about to follow him to ask, when a shout echoed from upstairs. It was Gina.

  “Ruth! Andy! Get an ambulance!”

  twenty-five

  The ambulance was at the house within eight minutes and the paramedics were wheeling Nancy out five minutes later, face covered in an oxygen mask. She looked sickly white, her hair plastered wetly against her skin from where Gina had dragged her out of the bath and deposited her on the bathroom floor to administer resuscitation.

  “I heard a bump from the bathroom,” Gina explained. “I went to check on her and she was under the water, staring up at the ceiling.”

  “You think she slipped?” asked Ruth. They were walking towards her car, ready to follow the ambulance as it pulled away from the kerb, lights flashing.

  “Probably. I mean, it’s the only explanation, isn’t it?”

  “Why do we all need to go?” Vaslik spoke from the back seat as they buckled up and Ruth took off after the emergency vehicle, referring to her insistence that they all follow close behind.

  “She’s going to an A&E unit. I didn’t have time to get a private clinic sorted. We can do that once she’s been assessed and treated. Until then we watch her closely.”