Authors: Maynard Sims
“The password was no problem then?”
“I told you. Five minutes,” Tucker said, and then, “Fuck it!” as the screen went black.
“What happened?” Carter said.
Tucker shook his head. “Don’t know. Could be the battery.”
“Can you get it working again?”
“Probably.” He rolled himself across the room on the chair, coming up against a pine chest of drawers. He pulled open the third drawer down and produced a cable attached to a transformer. “This one might do it.”
He rolled back to the table and plugged the cable into the computer. The screen remained black and lifeless. “Well, it’s not the battery.”
“What now?”
Tucker turned around in his chair to stare at him. “Now the magic begins.” He closed the lid and flipped the computer over onto its front. From the clutter on the table he produced a thin-bladed screwdriver and set about taking the laptop apart.
“Will it take long?”
“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Tucker said.
Carter found an empty spot on a scruffy vinyl couch and settled down to wait.
Lacey stepped from Holly’s narrow boat to the canal bank. Sparks followed him seconds later. “Not very helpful,” he said.
“Drop me off at the station and then go and check out her alibi. What was her name, that friend of hers?”
Sparks consulted his notebook. “Sarah Bennett.”
Lacey nodded. “That’s it. Check her out.”
They walked the towpath in silence on their way back to the car. Finally Lacey said, “Come on, Sergeant. Out with it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Sparks said.
“Bollocks! You’re pissed off with me because I let Carter have the computer.”
“Am I?”
Lacey looked at him sharply. “You know full well you are.”
Sparks stopped walking. “Well, you’ve got to admit, it was a bloody unorthodox thing to do. You don’t know the man from Adam and you let him swan off with what could be a vital piece of evidence. God knows what Superintendent Knox is going to say.”
“I wasn’t planning on telling him. Were you?”
“You’ll have to put it in your report.”
“I’ll have the computer back by the time I come to write it up. Knox doesn’t need to know anything about it.”
They veered off the towpath into the lane where they’d left the car.
“I still don’t understand your reasons for letting Carter take it.”
“Because, Matt, I have a gut feeling about this case. This wasn’t an ordinary assault. At the hospital I asked that Indian doctor…Jhadav…to show me the bites Norton sustained. They were like nothing I’ve ever seen before. And I can’t imagine any animal that could inflict them.”
“So what’s your conclusion?”
They reached the car. Lacey took the keys from his pocket and let them in. As he settled himself in the driver’s seat he said, “My conclusion is that we need help on this one, and I’m willing to let Carter and his Department 18 cronies supply that help.”
Sparks muttered something under his breath as Lacey started the car.
“I didn’t catch that,” Lacey said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it does matter. I want to know we’re both singing from the same song sheet.”
Sparks sighed. “Have you had dealings with this Department 18 before? I find it odd that I’ve never heard of them.”
“Nature of the beast, Matt. They don’t exactly advertise their presence. And, to answer your question, yes, I’ve dealt with them in the past. Only once, but that was enough to convince me that they know what they’re doing when it comes to cases like this.” He eased away from the curb and headed down to the main road.
“Do you feel like sharing?”
“It was about fifteen years ago,” Lacey said. “I was a sergeant working out of Leeds. My inspector at the time was a man called Charlie Fulford, a good copper, but liked the bottle too much. Charlie had been assigned a case, a triple murder, but was getting nowhere with it. No leads, no witnesses, nothing. Three young men found dead in a house in Beeston. There was nothing to show how they died but all of them had been exsanguinated. Not a teaspoon full of blood between them. The investigation carried on for weeks and Charlie, bless him, was getting more and more disturbed by the case. He started drinking heavier than usual and in the end he came to the conclusion that the only explanation was a supernatural one.”
“What was your take on it?”
“I thought that Charlie had taken one drink too many and the booze had rattled his marbles, but I could understand that. The case had received a fair bit of media attention and he was getting a lot of pressure from the assistant commissioner to wrap it up. In desperation he got in touch with a chap called Harry Bailey who, at that time, was one of Department 18’s chief investigators.”
“And Bailey solved the case for him?”
“No, he didn’t. Well, at least, not directly. Bailey was aware of the killings and they tied in with an investigation the department was running.”
“So what happened?”
“Charlie Fulford had the case taken away from him and was forced into early retirement. From what I can gather Department 18 took it over completely and within a month had brought it to a conclusion.”
“Which was?”
“I’ve no idea. I was effectively as much out of the loop as Charlie.”
Sparks looked at him sharply. “Are you winding me up, sir?”
Lacey smiled. “No. I’m trying to make a point. Department 18, like all the other government departments, MI5, MI6 and so on, have an awful lot of clout. They have influence…enough to whip an investigation out from under the noses of a highly respected police force, and enough to suppress media coverage. The story of the three strange deaths in Beeston never again made it into the press. The whole thing was buried.”
“Yet you’re willing to co-operate with them. Why?”
“Because this isn’t the only case I’d like them to look at. I have copies of open files dating back to the late nineties. Cases that have never been resolved by normal police methods. They’ve niggled away at me for years, and I’ve always thought that they needed specialist attention. The type of attention that Department 18 can provide.
“You see, Charlie pissed off his superiors. By going over their heads and contacting Department 18 himself, he left himself vulnerable. The fact that he was a heavy drinker certainly didn’t help, because it gave them a lever to ease him out. But the moment he contacted Harry Bailey and asked for the department’s help, Charlie’s days were numbered.
“For me, meeting Robert Carter is a godsend. It gives me a way in without upsetting anyone. If I can build up a working relationship with him I may get some of these cases solved without ending up like Charlie Fulford. I like my job, Matt. I don’t want to lose it.”
Carter peered over Tucker’s shoulder. “Any joy?”
“We’re about to find out.” He tightened the last screw on the laptop’s case and switched it on.
The screen was blank for a moment, but then the hard drive began to whir and the screen burst into life. Tucker turned and grinned at him. “It’s all yours, man,” he said and hauled himself out of his seat.
“Ollie, you’re a genius,” he said, sliding into Tucker’s warm chair.
“I know,” Tucker said. “More coffee?”
Carter shook his head. “Not for me. I’m going once I’ve backed this lot up.” He took Holly’s memory stick, fitted it into the USB slot at the side of the computer and started backing up the files.
While the files were transferring he opened a directory. The screen was filled with yellow folder icons. He scrolled through them, checking the folder names. He stopped at one called
Gillespie
and opened it.
There were several documents in the folder, the first giving an account of Sophie Gillespie’s death. The story seemed more horrific when set down in black and white. At the end of the document was a footnote—
See Elinor Yardley, 14th October 1608
.
He returned to the directory list, found a folder entitled
Yardley
and clicked it. For a moment nothing happened and then the folder opened and the screen was filled with forty or fifty files. Before he had a chance to open any of them the icons started to vanish, as if an unseen finger was pressing the Delete button and holding it down.
“Ollie! Quick!”
Ollie Tucker lumbered out of the kitchen, took one look at the screen, slammed down the lid of the computer and yanked out the power cable. “What the hell did you do to it?”
“Nothing. I was just checking the files and it started to wipe everything off.”
Tucker shook his head. He pulled the memory stick from the slot. “How much had you downloaded?”
“I don’t know. The transfer had barely started.”
Tucker took the stick across to his main computer, inserted it, clicked the mouse several times and then swore. “It’s fried. Sorry, man. There’s nothing on it. Let me check the laptop again.” He plugged in the cable again, hit the On button and waited, drumming his pudgy fingers on the tabletop. Finally he shook his head. “Hear that?”
“I can’t hear anything,” Carter said.
“Exactly. There’s no sound. The hard drive is fucked. Sorry, Rob. I think we’ve lost it. It’s dead.”
Carter sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “So there’s nothing you can do?”
“If you leave it with me for a couple of days I might be able to retrieve some of the information from the hard drive, but there’s no quick fix, not this time.”
“Do what you can, Ollie.”
“You got it,” Ollie Tucker said.
Chapter Ten
“Sarah Bennett?” Sparks said to the young woman who opened the door to him. She was small and bird-like with shoulder-length, mousey hair pulled back from a nondescript face. She peered at him blearily through a pair of rimless glasses and with her hand swept a few stray tendrils of hair away from her face.
“I might be,” she said, blinking rapidly as if trying to get him into focus. “I’m not too sure at the moment. Who are you?”
Sparks introduced himself.
“ID?”
Sparks produced his warrant card and let her study it for a few moments.
“You’d better come in,” she said. “Excuse the mess. I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
She had thrown on a toweling robe but Sparks could still see the brightly patterned pajamas beneath it. She flopped down on a shiny, brown leatherette couch and closed her eyes with a sigh. “Sorry,” she said. “Not feeling quite human today. Too much to drink last night.”
“Last night is why I’ve come to see you,” Sparks said, looking about the room. One wall was taken up with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, with hardbacks and paperbacks crammed into every conceivable space. Where the books didn’t quite reach the edge of the shelves, various ornaments and knick-knacks filled the spaces.
“Has that old bitch downstairs been complaining about the noise again? Because she complains even when I sneeze loudly.”
Sparks smiled. “No, this has nothing to do with your neighbor. I wanted to ask you a few questions about Holly Ireland.” He sat down in a red, velvet-covered armchair opposite her and took out his notebook.
“What about Holly?” Sarah said. “What’s happened to her?”
“Don’t be alarmed. Ms. Ireland’s fine. Nothing’s happened to her. When did you last see her?”
“About four o’clock this morning when we went to bed. She’d left before I got up.”
“So you spent the evening with her?”
Sarah shook her head. “No. She didn’t turn up here until gone eleven.”
“Is it usual for her to come calling so late?”
“No, but then Holly’s impetuous. She’d been to a dinner party, got pissed off with the company and left early. She dropped in for a nightcap.”
“Do you remember the exact time she arrived?”
Sarah thought for a moment. “I know it was after eleven because I’d been watching a film on TV. It had just finished and I was making a cup of chamomile tea to take to bed with me. So it was 11:10, 11:15. Around about then.”
“And she was here from then until you went to bed at four? Is that right? She didn’t pop out at any time, to stretch her legs perhaps?”
Sarah smoothed her hair back again. “No, she didn’t. Look, what’s this about? Is Holly in some kind of trouble?”
Sparks sidestepped the question. “What do you know about her relationship with Henry Norton?”
“If I’m in for an interrogation I’m going to need coffee.” She got up from the couch and padded out to the kitchen. “You want one?”
“Black. No sugar. Thanks.”
Sparks stood and wandered across to the bookcase. His eyes scanned the piles of books but his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking back to Holly Ireland’s narrow boat and Ian Lacey’s decision to let Carter take the computer. It was true he had never heard of Department 18 and had no idea how they operated, but it bothered Sparks that his inspector had given ground so easily. In the five years they had been paired up he’d found Lacey to be a bulldog of a man, pugnacious, stubborn, even dogmatic, and yet he’d rolled over when confronted with an official from a little-known government department. The story Lacey had told him in the car about Charlie Fulford went some way to explain his actions, but not far enough to account for Lacey’s sudden personality switch. And what were the files he wanted to run past Carter? Sparks wasn’t aware that they had any unresolved cases on their books.