Written in Dead Wax (16 page)

It wasn’t hard to find the address.

The whole street was full of police vehicles.

I met Nevada at the café ten minutes later. She looked up as I came in and said, “You’re right. The coffee at this place is really good.” Then she saw my face. “What is it?”

I sat down opposite her. “I went around to her flat before I got here,” I said. “The place was crawling with police. The whole road was sealed off. I asked a neighbour what was going on. They said a woman had been killed.”

She looked at me. “It wasn’t…”

I nodded. “It was. It seems there was a break-in last night and Mrs Aisling Helmer interrupted the burglar.” I shook my head. “She was beaten to death.”

She stared at me.

I said, “Sound familiar?”

The room they’d given Tinkler was a private one in a pleasant location, high up in a corner of the hospital. There was a nice view from the window, over rooftops, and even a glimpse of a distant patch of green. I imagine Maggie had somehow exerted influence, or maybe they were just treating her brother really well out of professional courtesy.

Or maybe it was an index of the seriousness of his condition.

There were grapes in a bowl beside his bed, which I thought was a particularly cruel touch. His face was naked and beaten and vulnerable. Somewhere under that unhappy slackness was my friend. I felt bad staring at him. If I’d been in his place I wouldn’t want to be seen like that. I’d be ashamed of anyone seeing me in that state of helpless absence.

I felt a sweet burst of flavour in my mouth and realised with some degree of embarrassment that while I was staring glumly at my savagely wounded friend, I was also absentmindedly stealing, and eating, his grapes.

Nevada was staring at me. “Those are his. You are eating his grapes.”

“I was hoping he’d wake up and fight me for them.”

But she was genuinely angry. She seized the bowl from me and put it back down with a loud clank on the bedside table. “You can’t behave like that,” she said. “So callous. It’s despicable.”

“It’s just the shock,” I said. “Seeing him like this.”

“I know,” she said, the anger draining out of her. She sat down and I sat down. The only sound was Tinkler’s laboured breathing.

“Well, we’d better get to it,” I said.

As we walked down the corridor, away from Tinkler’s room, I got my bearings and I realised the distant patch of green that could be seen from his window was Fulham Palace Cemetery.

* * *

Clean Head pulled out of the hospital parking lot onto the main road and turned left. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought we were going to Goldhawk Road.”

Nevada shook her head. “We’re not looking for records just at the moment.” We drove south past Parsons Green, down Broomhouse Lane to cross the river at Wandsworth Bridge. Ten minutes later we were skirting the traffic at Clapham Junction to chug up Lavender Hill and finally stop outside a discreet and ultra modern-looking shop front with the words
SPOOK STORE
in sober white letters above it.

The street address was evidently 7, but this was ostentatiously rendered on the shop’s door as “007”.

I looked at Nevada and said, “What fresh madness is this?”

“You just come along now and don’t interfere.” She led the way into the store that turned out to be an odd cross between an upmarket jeweller’s, with its carpeting, quiet and tasteful display cases, and your average techno nerd emporium. All the gear on display was electronics of various kinds, mostly in boring grey boxes. A young man appeared through a door at the back of the shop.

He was slim and tanned, wearing an expensive-looking well-cut light brown suit which I imagined rang Nevada’s bells. His hair had been cropped down to a dark stubble and so had his beard, in a kind of permanent five o’clock shadow. This matching minimal hair and beard had been carefully shaved into a series of curves. The effect was that his face and head seemed covered with a kind of swirling symmetrical pattern, which at first glance looked like a Maori tattoo. It came across as both trendy and creepy. I suspected any points he’d gained from Nevada for the suit he had promptly lost with this aberration.

“Good morning,” he said. He had a Birmingham accent, which sounded so incongruously workaday that he promptly ceased to be creepy.

“I phoned,” said Nevada, “earlier.”

“Ah yes. You were interested in…”

“Counter surveillance.”

He nodded and said, “Please come to the counter surveillance counter.”

As we followed him over to a display case I restrained myself from asking who’s on first. He said, “I got your call and have selected a range of bug busters for you to look at.”

“Bug busters?” I said in what I thought was an entirely neutral and innocent tone of voice, but Nevada gave me a you-stay-out-of-this look. The man removed two handheld devices from the display case and set them on the counter for us to look at. One was twice as big as the other, but either of them would sit comfortably in your palm. The larger one looked like a walkie-talkie and the smaller like one of those battery packs people wear when they’re fitted with a radio mike. The man lifted the smaller one and smiled his best salesman’s smile.

“This is the Stone Circle 48 digital radio frequency monitor. It provides high quality bug detection at an affordable price.” He patted it. “This model costs just over five hundred pounds including VAT.”

“What does it do?” said Nevada with what I thought was admirable bluntness.

“What
doesn’t
it do?” He smiled his false salesman’s smile again and I sensed stale patter. “In fact it will detect any device emitting a radio signal between one megahertz and four point eight gigahertz. That includes telephone, video, small battery and mains powered transmitters and—”

“Tracking devices?” said Nevada.

“Oh yes, certainly, tracking devices too. Very much so.”

“Okay, what about the other one?”

He smiled again, but this time it looked sincere. He put the small device down and picked up the larger one, handling it with reverence. “This is the Stone Circle 10. It retails for fifteen hundred pounds.”

I said, “Fifteen hundred pounds!”

Nevada nudged me to shut up. “What’s the difference,” she said, “between that one and the other one?”

Our guide waxed lyrical. “This model covers a truly staggering frequency range, from zero to ten gigahertz.” I repressed the urge to ask him if it went to eleven. “Which covers all bugs which have recently become commercially available,” he concluded.

Nevada nodded. She’d got it. “So that one goes to four point eight and this one goes to ten.”

“That’s correct.” He looked lovingly at the device in his hand. I thought he was going to tickle its tummy. “Yes. All the way to ten gigahertz. It also has an optional beep tone.”

Nevada nodded decisively. “We’ll take that one.”

“Which one?” His Brummie accent spiked excitedly, as if he could hardly believe his luck.

“The more expensive one with the truly staggering frequency range.” Nevada nodded at it. “That will be fifteen hundred pounds, I believe you said?”

“Eighteen hundred, including VAT.”

“What!” I said.

Nevada stepped on my foot and handed the man her credit card. “That will be fine.” I had thought the guy would be reluctant to put down his beloved Stone Circle 10 but he discarded it like a hot potato and grabbed Nevada’s card quick before she changed her mind. He completed the transaction and wrapped our purchase for us. At that price I expected it to be sealed in an origami swan fashioned from handmade linen paper, but he just stuck it in a plastic bag with a dismayingly chunky instruction manual. The bag had the Spook Store logo on it, which turned out to be a cheesy angular double S motif that I probably wasn’t alone in thinking was tastelessly close to a certain well-known Nazi insignia.

As we walked out of the store I said, “Was it the optional beep tone that sold you?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.” As we got into the taxi she handed it to me and said, “You take charge of this.”

“What?”

“You’re the technical one.”

I reluctantly took the thing out of the bag and began trying to make head or tail of its instruction manual. We drove west down St John’s Hill, then Clean Head switched to the back roads, following some abstruse formula that only she knew, until miraculously we came back out onto the A3 by Huguenot Place.

By now I had worked out that, luckily, the manual featured instructions printed in a number of languages, which reduced the relevant English section to a more manageable size.

We turned left into Garratt Lane opposite the shopping centre and drove down it until we came to Sainsbury’s. Clean Head signalled for a left turn and pulled into the supermarket parking lot.

She ignored any number of available spaces and drove to a distant, lonely corner of the lot where only a few other vehicles were parked. She cut off the engine as we approached the painted rectangle of the parking space she’d chosen, and let the taxi drift the last few metres on momentum, coming to a stop exactly in the middle of the rectangle.

“She’s such a show-off,” said Nevada. Then, looking at me expectantly, “Well?”

“What?”

“Have you assimilated the manual?”

I had, as it happened. “I suppose so, sort of, yes.”

“Then let’s get started.”

I looked at her. “Do you really think this taxi is bugged? That they’re listening to our every word?” Whoever “they” might be.

“It’s a tracking device I’m concerned about. And let’s just say I want to exclude the possibility.”

“You think someone stuck a tracking device on us?”

“As I said, let’s exclude that possibility.”

I switched the device on. To my relief the little black and green screen came to life right away. “Looks like batteries were included. All that for just eighteen hundred pounds.” The front door of the cab opened and Clean Head got out. She opened the back door and climbed in with us. She sat down and smiled.

“This is a little bit humiliating,” she said.

“Why?” said Nevada.

“Because it’s my cab.” She shrugged. She did seem a bit embarrassed. “It’s like going to the STD clinic to be checked out.”

“Not that you’d know,” said Nevada.

Clean Head grinned. “Not that I’d know.”

The instruction booklet had actually been written in an imaginative variant of English, just similar enough to lure the casual reader into a false sense of security. But I had managed to glean the basic facts, and we scanned the inside of the rear of the cab. Then we got out and Clean Head let me into the driver’s compartment. I was a little surprised that she hadn’t insisted on checking this private space herself, and felt a bit privileged. I noticed that she drank San Pellegrino mineral water and had a Françoise Sagan paperback on the go.

No bugs anywhere, though.

We stood outside the taxi and I ran the device all over its surface. Nothing. We stood and looked at each other. “That’s it, then.”

Nevada shook her head. “No. Now we have to check underneath.”

“By we, we mean me?” I said. Both the women looked at me.

“You’re doing so well,” said Nevada. She didn’t quite bat her eyelashes, but she might as well have done. “I wouldn’t want to interfere.”

“Well, that’s a first.”

Clean Head plucked the lapel of her jacket, by way of explanation. “And this is new.”

“Well, you’re just lucky I’m not wearing my Paul Smith,” I said, and got down on my hands and knees on the grubby tarmac and set to work with ill grace. The idea was to do it from several angles so as to make sure everything got scanned. I started at the front of the cab. After a few seconds I had to roll over and change hands. “I’m getting a cramp in my shoulder.”

“Poor darling,” said Nevada. “We’ll give you a massage afterwards.”

“We’ll get some baby oil from Sainsbury’s,” added Clean Head and they both cackled. It was a big vehicle and to make sure I covered every centimetre I had to get down on the ground at six separate points—once at each corner of the vehicle and once on each side in the middle.

A family of shoppers were walking past and they paused to gaze at us curiously as I pawed under the car. Nevada called to them, “He’s such a cheapskate. It’s only a pound coin.”

“Two-pound coin,” I snarled. But the light on the monitor screen stayed green, the RF readout didn’t flicker and the optional beep tone didn’t beep. I got stiffly to my feet. “Nothing.”

Nevada looked at Clean Head. “The STD clinic has given you a clean bill of health.”

We got some coffees from the Starbucks around the corner and all sat in the back of the cab. It smelled wonderful with the three cups of coffee in there. “All right, we’ve ruled out a tracking device,” said Nevada. She was at her most businesslike and I was a little surprised she wasn’t asking us to take notes. “But is it still possible we’re being followed.”

“If we were,” said Clean Head, “we wouldn’t know it.”

“Why not?”

“If they were any good at their job, they’d be almost impossible to spot.”

“Well, they’re not that good. We managed to spot them once.” Nevada looked at me. “You remember? Coming back from Brompton, across Putney Bridge. But we managed to shake them off.”

“That doesn’t mean they stayed shook off,” said Clean Head. “And perhaps they’ve got more careful since then.” She sipped her coffee. “I know how
I’d
do it.”

“How?”

“I’d have one in front and one behind. Not too close. That way if one lost you, the other could keep you in sight. It wouldn’t be hard.”

“What kind of vehicles would they use?” said Nevada.

She shook her head. “Impossible to say. But definitely silver.”

I said, “Why silver?”

“Look around you.” Nevada and I looked around the car park. At least every second car was an almost identical shade of silver grey. I’d never noticed it before, but she was right.

“But now I know what to look for,” said Clean Head. “And I know what to do about it.” She was buzzing, and not just with the coffee. This was clearly more fun than
Bonjour Tristesse
. We pulled out of the car park, turned right and headed for Armoury Way. We were bound for Goldhawk Road, our search for the record resumed.