Authors: JOHN YORVIK
Going down in the golden lift, Dani said, “That didn’t go as well as expected.”
“I know. Now I need a drink. Let’s find a place to eat round here.”
We found a reasonably priced Italian restaurant in time for the last lunchtime sitting. We both ordered spaghetti and I ordered a bottle of house red. Dani was on bottled water. Just as two piled up plates of spaghetti arrived my phone rang. I answered it and struggled to hear a woman’s voice above the noise of the restaurant.
“Can you talk?” said the voice.
“One moment,” I replied, and walked into the corridor next to the toilets clutching the phone to my ear.
“Yes, what is it?”
“You don’t know me. I work with the Commission. I knew Natasha Rokitzky. And Marty Stewart.”
“The Commission for Looted Art? Have you spoken to Agent Greenfield?”
“Greenfield can’t be trusted. The Commission has been infiltrated. There’s a leak. I’m working in deep cover. The investigation has been suspended since Natasha’s death. These people are just too dangerous. And they’re everywhere.”
“Which people?”
“They don’t have a name. They’re an organisation... Don’t underestimate...”
“Sorry? You’re breaking up.”
“Can you hear me now?”
“Yes, how did you find out about me? How did you get this number?”
“Agent Greenfield was talking about you in the lift. He logged your interview and wrote your number in the file. I accessed it.”
“Can we meet?”
“It’s too dangerous. Did Marty tell you about April 16
th
?”
“That’s tomorrow.”
“What did he tell you about April 16
th
?” she insisted.
“How can I know you’re for real? How do I know I can trust you?”
“There is no-one else who you can trust. I’m going to give you a number. Only call it if you have the location, then we can act.”
“What will happen if we confirm the location?”
“Just take down the number...”
I grabbed a pen from my jacket pocket and wrote down the number on the back of the card Agent Greenfield had given me. After I’d read the number back to her the line went dead. I studied the number on the card for a minute to see if it had any special significance, then I shoved it back in the pocket of my jeans and returned to finish my meal.
* * *
“Best if he doesn’t see me,” I said to Dani, who was in the armchair with a lap full of photographic equipment. Dani put down the camera she was cleaning and fetched an envelope containing 200 pounds from the table top and answered the door. I heard them whispering to each other. The raptor handed Dani a bag with something heavy in it. And then Dani handed over the envelope. I heard the raptor say “sweet” and then Dani closed the door.
As I came out of hiding, Dani was pulling a fairly large Sony laptop out of the plastic bag.
“They said they snatched it when he was at the bar in a Soho pub. He was drunk. The password is ‘underworld’.”
“So,” I said, “should we find out exactly who Mr Rilke’s friends are?”
I walked over to the sofa and sat down next to Dani so I could see what she was doing. Dani took the rag that she’d been using to clean the cameras and gave the laptop a wipe down before switching it on. The laptop took ages to boot up. I imagined Rilke’s computer was badly set up. He was from that generation who had largely missed out on a digital education. This would make it much easier to find something useful. Dani typed in the password and clicked enter.
When the laptop had finally loaded up all the icons onto the desktop, Dani tried to open Outlook Express.
“Great,” she said, “he’s configured Outlook. We have 3,000 emails to go through.”
“Okay, keyword search, AmizFire.”
“Okay... No. Nothing’s come up.”
“Try April 16.”
“Only emails sent or received on the date. No keywords written in the message.”
“Okay. Let’s try Tommy Burns.”
“Nothing.”
“Jim Scott?”
“Nothing. How about we try Lishman?”
Dani typed Lishman into the Outlook search engine and clicked enter.
Three entries came up with the subject matter ‘Lishman’. Dani clicked on the first one. It was from Rilke to an email address made up of a string of symbols: %$·”!!++*@________.web
“Try remembering that one,” I said, “@ seven underscores dot web.”
The message itself read:
Approach from Lishman (Free Press) at book signing. I made sure he was laughed out of the store. He may one day be right, but may he never know when he’s right. That is key.
“It’s bizarrely laconic for a writer like Rilke,” I said. “There must have been more mails or a wider context. Maybe a phone call or a meeting. And... was Rilke expecting me?”
“The Chessington Club connection. Sam McCormick lives in the same building. He must have given Rilke the heads-up,” said Dani. “Matthew Rilke is definitely in the loop.”
“Which loop? The loop of this organisation?” I asked.
I thought back to the strange phone call I’d received yesterday at the Italian restaurant. The mystery caller had used that word ‘organisation’. She said they were an organisation without a name. She’d also told me not to underestimate them. Surely if they were such a powerful organisation, they wouldn’t allow Marty, Dani and myself to be a thorn in their side for much longer. Of course, the death of Natasha Rok was testament to that. I was also intrigued as to why they would allow people like Rilke to associate with them and report what they do.
“Why would they want someone like Rilke in the loop?” I asked.
“In his book
Those Underground
Rilke says that these cult-like organisations that run the UK live by a moral code: they have to tell the public what they are doing. He says they will always find an ambiguous way of doing so. Maybe they’ll use a discredited journalist or a writer of fiction. The main thing is that whoever breaks the news can be dismissed as a crackpot.”
“And you think that’s Rilke...?” I said.
“I think that Rilke is the official biographer of this group with no name... that used to be the Chessington Club.”
“There’s a double irony in Rilke being the one to tell us what he’s basically a part of. What is the logic behind announcing to the world what they do?”
“This is what’s strange,” said Dani. “They are crime organisations that live by superstitions, which have evolved into codes.”
“We’re getting into weird territory now, Dani.”
“And there’s no going back.”
I nodded my agreement. “Okay, so what did the mystery messenger reply?”
Dani clicked on the next email in the chain with the address %$·”!!++*@________.web, but there was no visible text.
“Maybe it was written in invisible ink,” said Dani.
“Or self-destructed after 10 seconds,” I said.
We clicked on the third email. It was from Rilke again to the mystery email:
Unlike his friend, he requires no serious medical attention IMHO, but if expedience demands... if problem disappears amidst Scotch mist and Hackney gun smoke. Bye bye problem.
Neither of us spoke. Dani searched Rilke’s Outlook for ‘Hackney’. Nothing came up. She closed Outlook Express and searched his other documents. There was nothing personal. Only manuscripts of his books. After ten minutes of searching in silence, the words ‘Hackney gun smoke’ still hanging in the air, Dani slammed Rilke’s laptop closed.
We turned to face each other and said, almost in unison, “Let’s get out of here!”
We rushed about packing things up. Dani ran upstairs to warn Pippa and Erika to beware of visitors. I boxed all of the photos and papers and searched for a loose floorboard under which to hide them.
Ten minutes later, we were hurrying down the street both carrying medium-sized backpacks. When we got near Hackney station, I pointed Dani in the direction of the park.
“Where are we going?” said Dani.
“Costa Coffee, we need to get this laptop re-stolen.”
We walked into Costa and found a table. I got out the laptop and turned it on. After a few minutes I keyed in the password. Dani took out a handkerchief and began to clean it down to get rid of any of our fingerprints. When she was finished, I went to the counter carrying our backpacks to order some coffees and food. Dani went off to the toilets to hide for a while. I lifted her backpack off the floor and weighed it against my own. It was easily twice as heavy.
When I got back to the table with the coffees, the laptop was gone. Dani arrived back soon after.
“I didn’t see anyone that might steal something in here,” said Dani.
“If you’re a Costa thief, you dress to blend in with the clientele. It was probably that guy who was sitting opposite with the black turtleneck. Where’s he gone now?”
We drank our coffees and then left Costa to look for the nearest access point for Regent’s Canal.
* * *
We’d also stopped at a hardware store in Islington to buy a crowbar. We wouldn’t be safe staying at a hotel. We had to find a building to squat. Pippa and Erika had trained Dani on how to break in to an empty building without damaging the property and giving the police a reason to charge you.
We wanted to be as close to AmizFire as possible. Studying an Ordinance Survey map, Dani circled the row of four-storey Victorian houses on Shakespeare Street that backed onto Primrose Hill. We cased Shakespeare Street from the front trying not to draw attention to ourselves, but, wearing military attire and backpacks, it was luck rather than skill that helped us evade suspicion. Half-way down the street, Dani spotted one of the houses was for sale and looked empty. It had a long driveway and secluded garden at the front and would fit the bill as far as scoping out AmizFire was concerned.
Having chosen our target, we walked up Primrose Hill and took a right into the park annex, which was flat and divided up into football pitches. There was the usual collection of tired dog walkers carrying small freezer bags in their pockets or hands, but they began to dwindle in numbers as dinnertime approached.
When we thought no-one was looking we made a dash for the trees that lined the perimeter fence. When we got to the back wall of the target house, I gave Dani a leg up and then scrambled over myself. Walking up the garden path to the backdoor, I could hear the low growling of the next door neighbour’s dog. Dani opened her bag and fished out a pack of dog snacks. She took out a handful of pellets and cast them over the fence.
The back of the house had a large kitchen window on the left-hand side and a back door and a utility room on the right. The backdoor was made of stout wood, but had a cat flap built into the lower panel. The window to the right of the backdoor was divided into a large lower section of clean glass and a narrow oblong window opening at the top. This was the weakest point at the back of the house. Dani would definitely be able to fit through it, so I got out the crowbar and prepared to get to work jemmying the window. It was going to be noisy so the quicker I did it, the better. I was hoping the neighbours would be comatose on Shiraz and pasta by now and would actively avoid hearing anything that would necessitate leaving the comfort of their sofas. I worked the crowbar into the small gap between the window frame and the window. Holding the crowbar in the gap with my left hand, I gave the end a whack with the palm of my right hand. But it slipped out of my grasp and clattered against the lower windowpane. It was loud. The window vibrated, the dog in the neighbour’s garden started barking and Dani let out a screamed whisper of admonishment: “Lishman!!”
“What?” I whispered back. “It’s the only way.”
“No, it’s not. The first rule of housebreaking: always check for a key.”
And she handed me the key she’d fished out from under a plant pot housing a dried up spider plant.
“Dani, you’re a genius.”
I slid the key into the backdoor, turned it clockwise against the stiff mechanism of the lock and managed to open the door.
“Okay, Dani. Quick tour of the house to make sure nobody’s here and then up to the attic. Torches only pointed to the ground.”
“Wow, look at this place. We could squat it.”
“Dani!”
We crept around the ground floor checking each room. There were cups and glasses and a few items of furniture, but most of it was ripped or damaged in some way. It was clear that no-one had lived there for at least a year.
Satisfied that we were alone, we climbed slowly up three flights of stairs into the attic. Inside there was a floor-to-ceiling dormer window. I found some discarded cushions in one of the cupboards and lay them down on the floor in front of the window. Throwing my coat over the cushions, I lay down on my belly and checked the view out of the window. There was AmizFire in the red brick splendour of the converted match factory, lit by floodlights marking the four corners of its grounds. Alternating spot lights made its stainless steel obelisk appear like a beacon of shimmering mercury in amidst the drab Camden night.