‘Why? That’s the alpha and the omega here, the key to whether anybody should believe you. Why would someone do this? Who else has a motive? Who would go to these extraordinary lengths to frame you? And why would they plant tiny quantities of evidence? Why not plant your husband’s body somewhere in the grounds of your house for the police to find, with your Liston knife still sticking in his back?’
She stared back across the table, a blank expression of defiance quickly betraying itself as a façade. She looked lost and scared, but trying not to show it. Or perhaps that was what she wanted him to see.
‘I don’t know. But it has to be related to the project. Peter was under enormous pressure to the extent that he was stealing my money to buy himself time. He was so secretive about the whole thing that I’ve come to assume it can’t have been all legal and above board. I think he was in business with some dangerous people, and I think they killed him and set me up to take the blame.’
She leaned forward again, her voice lower, as if she was concerned about being overheard.
‘Peter kept his laptop on a permanent lockdown, as I’ve told you, but he spent all his days at Sunflight House. I need someone to go and have a look around inside the MTE office, because I’m sure there must be something in that place that will tell us what’s been going on.’
‘So why don’t you put your lawyer on it, or your boyfriend? Give them the keys and let them crack the case. Why ask the reporter whose story helped put you in here?’
‘Because I have no keys, and from what Austin told me, you’re no ordinary reporter.’
Parlabane rocked back in his chair.
‘Wait. You’re asking me to break into a building – to commit a crime – on the off chance that it uncovers some evidence that supports this improbable cover story of yours. Why would I do that unless I already believed you?’
‘Because if I’m lying, what would it cost you? Just a wasted trip, and you still got this interview out of it. But if I’m telling the truth, Mr Parlabane, that’s one hell of a story.’
LOCKDOWN
Sunflight House was a two-storey office building on an industrial estate close to the dual carriageway that ran from the A9 to the centre of Inverness. According to Jager, it had been built as a single premises for a travel firm but was then converted into smaller units by a developer after the original owner went belly-up. She also said that it looked so dull and nondescript that its principal security measure was the fact that nobody would expect to find anything inside worth stealing.
Parlabane wasn’t so sure about that. He noted that the welcome sign at the entrance to the estate, upon which all of the major resident companies were listed, also bore the logo for Cautela Security, warning that their personnel monitored and patrolled twenty-four seven. Whether this applied to all premises, including the care-worn office building, seemed unclear. Parlabane assumed it depended upon whether Peter’s landlord had opted into a contract. Jager’s scorn concerning how cheap the rent was suggested not, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted.
He parked his car across the road in the lot outside a courier depot, hiding his vehicle from direct view of the Sunflight building behind an articulated lorry. If anything went wrong here, he didn’t want his to be the only car in conspicuous vicinity at this time of night.
He still wasn’t sure he was going through with this. He would just go and check it out, he had told himself as he drove north. Case the joint, then make a final judgement on the risk-benefit ratio.
He wished there was someone else he could talk to about this, though he took it as a sign of progress that this wasn’t merely a symptom of missing Sarah. There would have been no need to talk to her regarding this kind of quandary, as her answer was always the same: don’t. Mairi had been more of a willing confederate when it came to his more dangerous methods, but his welfare hadn’t been her highest priority at the time. She might see it differently now.
The woman he most wanted to talk to was the last person he could tell. In fact, the potential impact upon Lucy was one of the things keeping him wary of Jager’s motives. She was a woman who had in the past gone to extraordinary lengths to avenge herself upon those she felt had wronged her, and there had been no love lost between her and her sister-in-law. She had let Evan Okonjo sweat the possibility of HIV infection after stabbing him with a potentially contaminated hypodermic, and that was just for hacking her password. If she knew she was going down, then it was possible that she was striking back at the people who had brought her low in the only ways that were still available to her, such as giving Lucy the impression her beloved brother had been a criminal.
How she might be planning to punish Parlabane remained unclear, as sending him on a wild goose chase wasn’t the most wrathful vengeance he could imagine. He kept thinking of those carefully quoted words: You alone will discover the secret of what happened to my husband. Something about how precisely that had been phrased made him uneasy.
There were plenty of reasons to distrust her, plenty of reasons to stick instead of twist. In that respect she had been wrong about the stakes: he had the interview whether he followed it up or not. But there were also a few reasons to gamble on the bigger jackpot.
The first was that there was something in Jager’s account that could be independently verified. He had researched Liz Miller and quickly found that her story checked out. She had been jailed for stabbing her partner in a case sufficiently controversial as to have received widespread media coverage and consequently featuring high up the list of search results against her name. He wasn’t sure what light it shed upon Elphinstone’s dodgy business dealings, but there was definitely something odd about the haste with which he had proposed to two different women.
Secondly there was the involvement of Sam Finnegan as an unlikely major investor in a computer software project. According to Catherine McLeod, Finnegan was as greedy and resourceful as he was ruthless and sly. He was a man who went to brutal lengths to ensure his effete reputation didn’t make anyone think they could ever get away with screwing him over, and it seemed Peter Elphinstone was struggling to deliver whatever he had promised.
It would be, as Jager suggested, a hell of a story, which was where the biggest reason kicked in: this was what Parlabane lived for.
He walked across the road and through the Sunflight House car park at a leisurely pace, not wishing to appear hurried or furtive to any CCTV cameras that might be trained on the site. The main entrance had a glass double door, further panes flanking either side. There was more glass above, through which he could see a return staircase leading to the first floor. Sunflight must have blown the architectural budget on this central vestibule, as the rest of the place was drab and dowdy, a grim testament to eighties capitalist functionalism.
Everyone was long gone for the night, only darkness visible beyond the glass. Nonetheless, the sodium glow from the streetlamps was sufficient for Parlabane to decide that he wouldn’t be going in the main entrance. There was a keypad entry system, which Jager had neglected to mention, and he didn’t have the code. There was also a conventional lock to override the automated system should the electronics fail, but picking it in full view of the street was not a risk he felt like taking tonight. Sometimes he could pop these things in twenty seconds, other times it might take five minutes, but he could never be sure until he started working.
He walked around the building and found another door at the rear, most probably an emergency exit. From the absence of cigarette butts he deduced that it didn’t see a lot of action, which was borne out by the extended time it took him to open it. It was stiff from lack of use: metal parts expanding and contracting together over decades until the mechanism inside would be hard to turn even with the key. It took patience and a couple of sprays from the miniature can of WD40 in his kit, but he could feel it gradually loosen up, and eventually the tumblers clicked and the bolt slid back.
The door opened with a grudging creak, into a narrow stairwell tha
t was almost pitch black. Parlabane twisted on a penlight and made his way up to the first floor as directed by Jager. At the top landing was a fire door with a mesh-reinforced window at head height. He shone his penlight through it and watched the beam play along a corridor that ran the length of the building, from the emergency exit at the rear to the glass-walled vestibule at the front.
The hallway was a hazard of office furniture. There were filing cabinets, bookcases and old desks pushed against the walls, suggesting somebody was in the process of moving in or moving out.
He could see the name MTE on a door to his right. That was good, because it meant Elphinstone’s office windows were on the side away from the main road, should he need to turn on a light.
He pushed the fire door open gently, stepping through it on tender feet even though he knew the place was empty.
That was when the alarm went off.
Parlabane played the torch along the top of the wall, looking for the source and hoping not to find a camera. His beam only picked out the infra-red sensor he had tripped, positioned to detect movement if anyone came through the fire door. A Cautela logo was legible on the base of the unit, which reminded him he had also seen it printed on the keypad outside the main entrance.
Shit. How could he have been so fucking gullible?
Keying in the entry code automatically deactivated the security. Jager hadn’t told him about the keypad and she certainly hadn’t told him about the alarm.
In a matter of seconds, the allure of a bigger story had vanished like a mirage and he could suddenly see that he’d been played. Sure, he had found reference to Liz Miller’s story online, but it struck him too late that he hadn’t bothered to verify the rest of it, such as whether she had ever been in a relationship with Peter Elphinstone or even heard of Diana Jager. Jager could have simply remembered the case and thrown in Miller’s name because it helped embellish her bullshit story.
He had tried phoning Miller earlier that evening, but when he got no reply he hadn’t made establishing contact a priority. His reasoning was that Jager wouldn’t have got her lawyer to supply Miller’s number if she wasn’t telling the truth, because one call would have blown it all apart. But how did he even know it was Miller’s number? According to the cops, Jager had already used a disposable mobile as part of her previous deception.
He caught his breath, reined in his flight instinct, told himself not to panic. His first thought was to get out of the building and run for his car, but that might be the worst thing he could do. The sign at the estate entrance mentioned patrolling. That meant that the Cautela guards might be mobile, in which case they could be outside this place in two minutes: less if they happened to be around the corner when they got the call.
He ran to the front of the building and looked through the windows. The car park was still empty and there was no traffic on the road.
Okay.
He ran back to the fire door and made his way swiftly but carefully down the stairs. Pushing down on the bar to open the emergency exit door, he thought ruefully of how difficult it had been from the other side.
He had just walked through it when he heard the sound of an engine and glimpsed a vehicle pull into the car park, two figures inside.
Parlabane flattened himself against the wall, out of sight. He knew the first thing these guys would do was split up and perform a perimeter check. There was no way to sneak past them.
He was fucked.
He looked back towards the emergency exit, where the door was inches from swinging closed again. Parlabane lunged for the gap and jammed his lock-picking kit between the door and the frame before it could click shut. Wedging it open as much as he dared lest it squeak, he slipped inside again and pulled it closed. With any luck the guards would complete their circuit, see that the place was secure and then call HQ to get the alarm turned off remotely.
He climbed the stairs and made his way towards the front, crouching near to the floor. With the lights off it was easier to see out than to see in, so he would be able to watch for them making their exit. He only had to hold his position, keep his nerve and stay patient.
Then a pulse of fright shook him as he heard a sudden rumble from outside. He looked up in aghast disbelief to see the lorry he had parked behind switch on its headlights and then begin to slowly roll out of the courier depot parking lot, leaving his car guiltily isolated in view of Sunflight House.
As the lorry turned on to the dual carriageway he saw the two Cautela guards meet in front of the main entrance, and heard the squelch of a two-way radio.
All clear, he willed them to say, but he knew it wasn’t going to be that kind of night.
‘Control says the alarm was tripped inside the building,’ one of them relayed to his partner. ‘Need to do a full sweep.’
‘You got the code?’
‘Oh, aye, right enough. Control, you got the entry code? Five nine eight seven? Okay, cheers.’
Fuck.
Parlabane heard the buzz from directly below him as the entry system unlocked the door. The alarm ceased sounding, making his breathing and movement seem all the more audible.
Fool, he told himself. Vainglorious, incorrigible, weak, desperate fool.
This was what he lived for, he had just admitted that to himself, and Diana Jager knew it.
If I’m lying, what would it cost you?
She said Austin had warned her about him, and she must have done her research once she suspected that Parlabane was a threat. She must have known what had happened to him, where his career had once taken him, and how low he had fallen since. His exclusive on Diana Jager had got him back in the game at long last, but her revenge would be to make it the shortest journalistic comeback of all time. He would be back on the scrapheap, back in jail and professionally fucked for ever if he got busted for burglary again.
ILLUMINATION
Parlabane looked into the gloom of the corridor, probing the darkness with his penlight for somewhere he could hide. He saw four locked doors along either wall, noting with growing despair that they all boasted sturdy-looking strike plates indicative of five-lever mortise locks.
‘Right, a quick once-over,’ he heard one of the guards say from below, the clarity of his voice a warning about how close they were and how easily the sound would carry. ‘We’ll check everything’s secure down here first, then up the emergency stairs and back along. Probably an electrical fault, but we’ll stick together in case some bastard comes flying out from nowhere.’
Parlabane wouldn’t have time to pick even the flimsiest of locks, and as an art rather than a science it wasn’t something that was ever easy to do under pressure. As always when he was in trouble like this, trained instinct told him to look up, to think in three dimensions. This time, however, there was no window to climb out of, no outside wall to scale: only a low ceiling of crappy polystyrene tiles.
A low, suspended ceiling, he would bet, and it was the only bet he could make.
In a second he was on top of one of the filing cabinets that were littering the corridor, wincing at the hollow sound it made due to being empty. He gave one of the tiles a gentle push. It wouldn’t lift. He pushed a little harder. Still nothing, and he noticed the frame move with it. It might be glued. It would be easy enough to punch through but he couldn’t afford to leave a hole, or the resultant pile of crumbled polystyrene beneath, advertising his escape route.
He nudged the tiles either side. Neither moved.
He took a breath, cautioned himself not to panic. He gave one of them a harder push, driving the heel of his palm firmly against the corner. It popped up and almost tumbled through his startled grasp as it fell.
He slid it out of the way and hauled himself into the gap, his fingers finding a vertical suspension spar either side, supporting a lattice of aluminium. It took his weight, though there was a worrying creak as his midriff cleared the gap and his balance shifted forward.
He was sure he heard a door close below: most likely the
fire door on the ground-floor access to the emergency stairs. They would be in this corridor in seconds.
He executed a limb-wrenching turn in the cramped and awkward space, manoeuvring himself one hundred and eighty degrees among the pipes and spars in order to be able to achieve a position from which he could replace the ceiling tile.
He slotted it into place just as the top fire door opened and a click of a switch later he found himself bathed in light.
He held his position, sinews straining, aware that the tiniest adjustment and resulting shift of balance might cause a tell-tale groan from the metal structure. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t see him anyway, a human shape silhouetted against the white tiles. The light was from beneath him, though, projecting downwards.
‘All looks clear,’ one of the guards said, in such a bored tone as to suggest he had long since passed the night when he last expected anything interesting to happen on his shift.
‘Aye, probably an electrical fault right enough,’ his partner agreed.
‘Or maybe a moth. They can set off the sensors. Actually, I mind there was a bird one night over at Plumbcentre. Set off every sensor in the place fluttering aboot.’
‘Must have been the first overnight excitement involving a bird you ever had anyway.’
‘Fuck you.’
Despite his protesting limbs, Parlabane held his position until he was sure they had gone down the main stairs. As he waited, he looked around. This moth that had tripped the sensors was right up among the lights, and his position was giving him a very different perspective on the building’s integrity.
Despite all those heavy-duty locks on the doors, the security was only two-dimensional. The developer had done a cheap and superficial conversion job in subdividing the units, the gypsum partition walls only going as high as the suspended ceiling. From where Parlabane hung, up above the tiles, he had a clear path to drop down into any office on this floor.
Black Widow Page 36
