Authors: Stella Rimington
‘And if the others turn up?’
‘We tell them the same thing. They have to wait till the all-clear is given. I hope none of that happens, but I think it’s a chance we have to take. It doesn’t make any sense that the meet didn’t take place. Ramdani wouldn’t have had much time to change the plans, so it would have to have been a change from the other end. But whatever’s happened, we’re now out of touch with the jihadis – that’s worrying, to say the least. I’m hoping there may be something in the flat that indicates what they’re up to.’
As Carnier digested this, he looked at Seurat, who stayed silent – Isabelle had just decided to do what he’d been hoping she would, but it was certainly risky and he wondered what Liz would have done.
Finally, Carnier shrugged. ‘OK. I’ll set it up.’
Isabelle nodded. ‘We’ll need the locksmith – I don’t want any doors broken down. The idea of this is to keep it as quiet as possible. A discreet entry, a quick search by officers with concealed weapons to make sure he’s not there, then I’ll go in.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Seurat immediately. Carnier looked at him dubiously. Isabelle said quickly, ‘It’s all right, Alex. Martin knows more than anyone else what we’re looking for.’
The sky was pitch-black now, and the corridor was only dimly lit by the few bulbs that were working. Seurat could just make out the two armed officers who were to go in first in case Ramdani was there. They were wearing fluorescent yellow jackets with ‘GAZ’ written on the back. One of them carried a bag, its contents not usual for a gas fitter.
Their instructions were to get inside the flat as quickly and quietly as they could and to avoid, if at all possible, attracting the attention of the other inhabitants in the block. The previous summer had seen three nights of rioting at this estate, which had started when the arrest of a drug dealer had gone wrong and a child had been shot. The last thing Isabelle wanted was anything to happen that might make trouble flare up again, alert Ramdani and the jihadis and send them off on another tack.
As the ‘gas men’ approached the door of Ramdani’s flat, Seurat and Isabelle waited at the end of the corridor. It was dinner time and quiet except for the sound of television coming from the flats. At each end of the corridor two more men in yellow GAZ jackets stood ready to detain anyone who tried to come along the corridor.
The first policeman rang the buzzer and knocked on the door. They all waited tensely in silence, and suddenly a door opened. But it was not the one to Ramdani’s flat. An old lady came out of the next apartment; Isabelle groaned.
‘Who the hell are you?’ the old lady was demanding. She had her stick with her and waved it threateningly at the men standing by Ramdani’s door.
‘It’s perfectly all right, Madame,’ said the senior of the men politely. ‘Just go back inside, if you don’t mind. We’ve had a report of a smell of gas coming from this flat and we need to go inside to investigate. It is probably nothing serious but we need to check. Do you know whether your neighbour is in?’
‘I’ve no idea where he is,’ she said. ‘It’s not my business to keep track of my neighbours. But if he’s not answering the door, I suppose he’s out. What are you going to do – break his door down?’
‘No, Madame, there’ll be no need for that,’ replied the ‘gas man’, soothingly. ‘Now if you’d just like to go inside out of the cold, we’ll check it out. I don’t think there’s any problem but better safe than sorry.’ And he ushered her gently back inside her flat and waited until she closed the door.
There was a sigh of relief from the end of the corridor as Isabelle let out her pent-up breath. ‘He did well,’ said Seurat. ‘That old lady reminds me of my grandmother. Terribly nosy, absolutely fearless, and won’t take any nonsense from anyone.’
The man with the bag started work on the lock. It took him only seconds to have the door open and the two officers went inside. Isabelle and Seurat went up to the front door but they waited outside by the door as the armed officers went through the apartment. After a few minutes they came back to the external corridor. ‘The place is empty.’
‘All right, thank you very much,’ Isabelle said. ‘Stay here please. I don’t think we’ll be very long, and then you can go and tell the old lady that everything’s fine. Hopefully she’ll forget about us.’ In her grey parka and jeans Isabelle cut an unremarkable figure, but she was clearly in charge. ‘All right, Martin? Time to have a look around, eh?’
They started in the living room at the front of the flat. There were thin curtains hanging at the window but they were not drawn. An unshaded bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling was switched on. The room was tidy but minimally furnished with a threadbare sofa, one grubby armchair that had a rip in the fabric on its back, and a low table marked by the rings of mugs and glasses, on which was a two-day-old copy of
Libération
and a newspaper in Arabic.
The centre of the floor was covered by a faded carpet, the floorboards visible round the edges, and there was an electric fan heater in one corner that wasn’t plugged in. There were no cupboards, desks or anything else that might contain papers, and no laptop or other electronic device. A new-looking television set on a stand in one corner of the room was the only thing that looked as if it had cost any significant sum.
Down the corridor, back towards the front door, was a small kitchen. There were cupboards above and below a worktop on one side of the room; the officers had left them open. Seurat peered in at their small collection of tins, cereal boxes, small bags of flour and sugar, a carton of salt, and an old jam jar full of couscous. The fridge was almost empty – wilted stalks of celery, three eggs in a little rack, a half-full milk carton and a chunk of hard cheese that looked as though it had been there for a good long time.
‘If this guy was expecting visitors he hasn’t exactly stocked up to feed them,’ Seurat said.
Isabelle was examining the oven and grill. ‘Thank God it’s gas,’ she said. ‘I suddenly wondered if these flats only had electricity.’
Opposite the kitchen was a small bathroom. There was a bath with a shower over it and a plastic shower curtain. It was bone-dry. No one had taken a shower or a bath for a long time. The sink was streaked with the detritus of Ramdani’s last shave – little black hairs that studded the basin like steel filings. On the porcelain top a razor lay carelessly askew, next to a can of shaving foam, its cap off. Seurat opened the mirrored front of the small bathroom cabinet and saw one stick of roll-on deodorant, a box of plasters, a pair of tweezers and an opened pack of razor blades.
‘Looks as though he doesn’t have a beard,’ was Seurat’s comment.
Behind him Isabelle was pulling at the wooden slats on the side of the bath, but they wouldn’t give. She said, ‘I don’t think he’s hiding under there. Not if he ever planned on coming out.’
Seurat snorted. ‘I have to say, this all seems unnecessarily grim. I don’t have any clear picture of Ramdani, but this flat barely feels lived in.’
‘I know what you mean. After three days here any sane man would jump off the balcony outside. I bet he hasn’t been here long. And wasn’t planning to stay much longer.’
Seurat nodded. ‘But where has he gone? And why isn’t he here now? I don’t get it.’
‘Come on. Don’t let’s hang about. There’s still the bedroom to check.’
The bedroom did nothing to lift their spirits. It held a double bed, and a cheap-looking desk with four drawers, containing a few pens and pencils, some rubber bands, paper clips and a lot of dust but no paper. A metal chair, a small bedside table on which sat a little lamp and nothing else, and a built-in cupboard that contained one empty suitcase completed the furnishings.
‘Honestly,’ said Seurat, gazing at the paltry contents of the room, ‘this could be a doss house. Do we know anything about this guy?’
‘Not much,’ admitted Isabelle. ‘We’re working on it, but for now we’ve only official records. We couldn’t exactly ask around here if we didn’t want him scared off.’
‘So what do we know?’
‘He’s a native Parisian – Yemeni mother, French father. The father is not in evidence, and the mother is dead. Ramdani grew up half a mile from here. He’s twenty-five, and when he left school he went and lived in Yemen for a few years – at least that’s what Immigration say; if he went anywhere else it didn’t get stamped in his passport. He’s on benefits now, but used to work in a little bar down the street – again, we didn’t want to ask questions; I got this from the Office of Employment.’ She added a little defensively, ‘We can find out a lot more than that, of course. But at this stage discretion seemed to be preferable to a lot of inquiries.’
Seurat sighed, looking around the dismal room. ‘I’m just frustrated the jihadis didn’t arrive. And this guy seems to have disappeared and left virtually no sign of himself. Your people are sure he couldn’t have got past them somehow?’
‘Absolutely. We’ve had the camera up for thirty-six hours. No one’s been out of this flat – or in. You’ve seen for yourself there’s no other way out. And if he were hiding in here, we’d have found him by now. There isn’t room to swing a cat in this place. He must have left before we started watching. That’s the only explanation, isn’t it?’ she added, since she wasn’t sure Seurat was paying attention to what she was saying.
He wasn’t. He had gone over to one corner of the room and was looking up at the ceiling, where there was a square metal grating.
‘What is it?’ asked Isabelle, slightly annoyed. Martin was always so inquisitive, she thought, even when it just wasted time.
‘It must be some kind of central heating system. There are no radiators in this place and it’s not freezing cold,’ he said, purposely misunderstanding her.
‘What about it? The officers will have checked that out.’
‘Maybe. But maybe not.’ He picked up the metal chair and put it under the grating. ‘There are no screws in this. How do you think it stays in place?’
‘Heaven knows. It probably rests on a ledge. Can’t you see?’
As he stood on the chair the cover was only inches above his upraised hand. He reached up and gently pushed. One corner of the grating lifted and then dropped back into place. He pushed again with both hands and the entire square cover lifted up and he was able to move it over to rest on the inside of the ceiling. He stared up into the hole above his head. He poked one arm through until it disappeared into the gap, and felt around in the blackness. Then he climbed down.
‘Find anything?’ asked Isabelle sarcastically. She shared Seurat’s frustration, but couldn’t see the point of what he was doing now.
‘Not yet.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a small metal torch. Then he repositioned the chair to place it directly below the opening in the ceiling and climbed back onto it again.
‘You’re not thinking of going up there, are you? Let the officers do it. They’re younger than you.’
‘Don’t worry – if anyone’s going to have to crawl along a shaft it won’t be me. I just want to take a look to see where it goes.’
He hoisted both arms up into the gap, holding his torch in his teeth, and leaned his elbows on the ceiling. Then before Isabelle could protest Seurat pulled himself straight up into the air until his head disappeared into the opening. He’s strong, thought Isabelle admiringly despite herself, for inwardly she thought this was all a waste of time.
‘Come on down, Martin,’ she said, staring at his legs hanging in the air. He must have replied, but his voice was muffled by the surrounding walls of the shaft.
‘What did you say?’ Isabelle half shouted, and just then he dropped back down again, missing the chair and falling onto the floor with a thud.
‘Are you all right?’ Isabelle was standing over him and held out a hand. But he sat up, shook his head and said, ‘I’m fine. My arms suddenly gave way.’
‘I told you it was a job for a younger man,’ she said unsympathetically. ‘What’s up there anyway?’
‘There’s a duct, quite wide. You could crawl along it if you were slim – and young,’ he added with a smile. ‘It must run along the top of all the flats in this corridor. I can’t swear to it, but I thought I heard something moving up there.’
‘It was probably rats. Or the pipes heating up.’
‘Mmm. Perhaps. We need to find out exactly where it goes. There may be an exit he could have used.’
‘Why would he want to go out that way?’
‘He may have spotted the surveillance and put two and two together.’
‘Yes, and he may have invisible powers too,’ she replied caustically.
‘But don’t you see? That would explain why the others didn’t show. He may have warned them.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Isabelle. ‘We’ve been very careful.’
Martin shrugged. ‘Well, whatever. But the duct’s certainly a possible way out – and in as well. Do you think we can get a plan of where it goes?’
‘I’m sure we can from the building management company. But I can’t see much point in doing it now. There’s nothing here to help us learn what the jihadis are planning to do, or where they are. And if you’re right and Ramdani saw the surveillance, he’s probably not coming back. If we stay here much longer we’re going to have the old lady next door coming out to find out what’s going on. I think we ought to leave now and get the “gas men” to tell the old lady that everything’s fine. Then we can get the plans tomorrow and see whether it’s worth sending someone to explore the ducting.’