Christopher Brookmyre (12 page)

Willis pulled a set of keys from his greatcoat pocket, delicately undoing the lock before turning the handle with a grimace, as though he was opening a wound.

'Where did you get the keys?' Bett asked.

Willis stepped aside from the door.

'Oh, from our property manager. It's a new lock. He put it in to replace the other one, which was ruined.'

Bett had a look at the doorframe. 'It wasn't forced,' he observed.

'No, drilled, he said. Drilled through.'

'And you told me on the phone that nobody in the building heard anything?'

'Property manager believes it was a . . . ' Willis mimed turning a crank. 'You know?'

'Yes. Stealthier, but slow. You own the building?'

'We own the apartment. We have a few dotted around. If you want to headhunt gifted staff, you have to be able to accommodate them immediately. Some stay just until they find a place themselves, but others . . . '

'How long was Fleming here, then?'

'Two years. Shall we . . . ?' Willis invited, with visible reluctance and distaste. They stepped into the small hallway, which was little more than a conduit between three rooms, the largest of which was an open-plan kitchen and living area.

'Have you been in here before?' Bett asked. 'I mean, since . . . '

'Yes. We tried not to disturb anything. I don't find it particularly comfortable, to be frank, being in someone else's home without his say-so, but the buck stops here, as they say.'

Lex could sympathise. It was not a comfortable place to be. The feng shui was all off. The sofa, for instance, was at a psychologically jarring angle (upright was more calming), and, in her judgement, pot plants worked best when they weren't lying sideways across the floor.

'Alexis, the camera,' Bett reminded her. She pulled it from a pouch on her laptop satchel and began taking shots of the scene, snapping as she picked her footsteps carefully amid the mess. The only clutter-free areas were the shelves and bookcases, because all of their contents had been scattered about the floor. CDs lay fanned-out like fallen dominoes, next to books, DVDs and magazines. Pictures had been pulled from the walls and left on the floor, though Lex noted that the glass was intact on each of them. The only wallhung decorations remaining were glossy pin-ups in two clusters: one in the kitchen and one next to the computer. Soccer players, tour posters, some movie stills.

A flat-screen monitor sat on a desk by the farther of two broad windows, the PC itself nestling underneath, surrounded by piles of blank and used printer paper, stacked like kindling. A pale green light indicated activity. The kitchen area was a real treat. Rice, pasta, flour, salt, breakfast cereals, washing powder and dishwasher tablets had been emptied out on to the floor and their containers discarded on top. Pots and pans had been pulled from cupboards and now lolled like grounded ships upon the banks of powder and grain. Supermarket ready meals lay around the foot of the fridge-freezer, contents spilling out where the plastic film had broken, their cardboard sleeves dotted randomly about the floor. Four bottles lay undisturbed on a wine rack atop the work surface next to the sink, and Lex noticed also that no crockery had been broken.

In the compact little bathroom, the contents of a mirrored cabinet had been dumped into the basin directly below, bottles of shampoo and shower gel tipped into the bath. Again, the shelves and surfaces were clear, including the cistern lid, which was slightly askew.

The bedroom was the same deal. The place had been tossed, not trashed.

'How did you find out he was missing?' Bett asked.

'Didn't you ask me this before?'

'For the benefit of Miss Richardson here, and to refresh my memory.'

'Rather undramatic, initially. He failed to turn up for work, although that was fairly remarkable for him, I suppose. He'd seldom lost a day before that. When the road has looked like being closed in the winter, he's often slept at the lab because he'd rather be stranded that end. When he didn't call in by midday, somebody phoned here, to no reply. Couldn't get him on his mobile phone, either. Then the property manager got a call from one of the neighbours who'd noticed the door was ajar and the lock damaged. She'd rung the bell, then stuck her head inside when there was no answer. When she saw what she saw . . . '

'And you came here yourself? Right away?'

'I realised that Mr Fleming could have been incommunicado because he was with the police, reporting a burglary, but if that wasn't the case, I knew there was no time to lose. I had to see for myself.'

'Who spoke to the neighbours? You said nobody heard anything.'

'I did. I mean, I didn't go round the whole building, just, you know, next door, above and below. Nothing.'

'What did you tell the woman who noticed the door? She'll be wondering why she hasn't seen any police, to say nothing of not seeing her neighbour.'

'I think she thought I
was
the police, to be honest.'

'You didn't tell her you were,' Bett said, with a note of caution.

'Oh, no. I see where you're going. No. I just didn't tell her I wasn't, if you know what I mean.'

'Sure.'

Bett knelt down and picked about among the mess. He opened a couple of CD cases, revealing the silver discs to be in place within. Then he lifted up one of the pictures, a photo collage.

'This is Fleming, right?'

'Yes. That's him with the little girl.'

'Not his, I assume.'

'No. Family.'

'Can I take this?'

'Yes, certainly. I mean . . . I don't like giving . . . '

'I understand. But so will Mr Fleming.'

'Indeed. I've also got some personnel file photos of him in the car.'

'Alexis, can you have a look at the computer?' he ordered.

'Yes, sir,' she assented, her gratitude at having a recognised purpose only marginally diminished by having no idea what she should be looking for. Functionality would be a start, she decided, so she gave the mouse a wiggle to see whether the system would wake up or required a full boot. It proved to be the latter; the absence of fan noise had suggested this, but you could never assume. Not every machine was cursed to sound like a Spitfire readying for takeoff, just every machine she'd owned. She paused over the switch, considering whether there might be a logic-bomb in the start-up folder, primed to trash the hard disk whenever the machine was turned on; in fact merely booting the thing up normally would obscure a few of the previous user's tracks. Instead, she undertook a little hardware surgery, connecting her laptop to lift an unadulterated image of the hard disk.

That done, in the absence of any specific request from the boss, Lex went about some basics. 'First thing to remark is that the machine is intact,' she told Bett, hoping he'd respond with some form of cue. 'They didn't smash it and they didn't steal it.'

Bett said nothing, simply went about his recce; stepping slowly and precisely around the room, stopping to examine certain items, sometimes just staring. It looked like detection by osmosis.

Lex scoped the system. She checked the boot log first to see when the machine had last been up and for how long, then began looking deeper. The first thing to stick out was the directory access records, denoting which folders had been opened during the last session. The answer was most of them, right down almost every branch of the hierarchy, even into the murkiest depths of application sub-directory temp folders. This was not indicative of normal usage. If it was your own machine and you couldn't remember where a file was, you'd use a search facility to locate it; someone would only go through the folders manually if they weren't sure what it was they were specifically looking
for
. This was the electronic equivalent of all the open drawers and cleared shelves elsewhere in the apartment.

'It's been sifted,' she announced. 'Systematically, from top to bottom.'

'Care to hazard a guess at what they were looking for?' Bett asked Willis.

'If you mean do I think it's to do with Marledoq, then no. He wouldn't have material relating to his work here.'

'Wouldn't or shouldn't?'

'Both. I mean, yes, theoretically there's no reason why he might not have some files relating to work, but, well, the thing with Ross is that he's seldom out of the place. If he wants to work on something, night times or weekends, he stays on-site. He was there the night you hit the place, remember?'

'I understand. But that doesn't mean that what they were looking for wasn't related to Marledoq. Someone interested in Ross's work wouldn't necessarily know whether he had material at home.'

'My take is that he didn't,' Lex offered, warding off thoughts of a more successful theft from Marledoq of work-related data. 'And I'd say that whatever they were looking for, they struck out. This thing's just a media toaster.'

'Would you translate, please,' Bett insisted, 'for those of us with a less neological vocabulary.'

'Fleming uses this thing for comms and entertainment, nothing else. And he doesn't do a lot of that either. This machine must be two years old if it's a day and yet the hard drive's only about a quarter full. Mostly vanilla apps--'

'Alexis,' Bett warned.

'Standard retail applications. The bulk of the used disk space is JPEGs, MP3s and AV . . . sorry, that's picture, music and video file formats, sir. Going by what's on the floor, the music's mostly ripped from these CDs, so the PC's just a conduit for a portable player. The majority of the video files are archived webcam captures; after that it's downloaded clips, mainly soccer, going by the tags, and they're all in the temporary cache, nothing older than thirty days.'

'Why?'

'Files in the temp cache are automatically wiped after a while so you don't end up with twenty gigs of last year's web content clogging up your HD. De-fault setting is thirty days. It tells me this guy doesn't tinker much with this thing, just uses it to keep in touch. He's got a mike here and a webcam above the monitor, see? Archived webcam captures are all labelled the same: "mich"

then a date.'

'His sister's name is Michelle,' Willis informed them.

'Let's see one,' said Bett, eyeing the photo collage he'd lifted. Lex opened the most recent file. It was small spec but decent frame-rate, though no sound. It showed a young woman sitting with a toddler in her lap, a slightly older child standing beside her. She urged the older kid to wave, which she did. Junior waved too, though he was looking at his sister instead of the camera.

'Moving postcards from home: sis, niece and nephew. It's the same kids in most of his picture files, too.'

'And you've transferred
all
these files to that laptop?' Bett asked.

'Yes, sir. They took up less than a quarter of his HD space. I'll remove the hard drive itself too. That way I can check for residual data from files that might have been erased.'

'You can do that?' Willis asked.

'Sure,' she told him. 'But I wouldn't hold out for any big secrets. Like I said, it's a media toaster. This thing's on light duties. He doesn't even have any games apart from vendor pre-installs.'

'You'll have to forgive Alexis,' Bett said. 'English isn't her first language. Go ahead, remove the hard drive. I'll have a look on the laptop during the flight back. Mr Willis, anything else you have by way of background would be useful. The more we know about him, the better chance we have of working out where he might have gone.'

'That's assuming where he's gone is his own choice,' Willis suggested.

'Everything I've seen so far points to flight rather than capture,' Bett replied.

'Despite the mess, there's little to suggest any of it was the result of a struggle. No blood, no breakages. If there'd been a fight in here, one of the neighbours would have heard something, to say nothing of taking an unwilling subject down three flights of stairs.'

'There wouldn't be a fight if they took him at gunpoint.'

'And yet if they took him at gunpoint, they wouldn't have needed to rifle through the place looking for whatever they were after. They could simply have threatened to shoot him unless he told them where it was.'

'How do we know it's "they"?' Lex asked. 'Or is that just a figure of speech?'

'It's they,' Bett answered. 'Two different sets of footprints spreading that mess from the kitchen floor. Well, four sets, actually, but I'm eliminating the ones Mr Willis's shoes left on a previous visit and the ones you made when you were taking pictures. There were two of them, and Fleming wasn't here when they searched this place. Abduction, whether at gunpoint or not, is about getting in and getting out as quickly and quietly as possible. Whoever was in here took their time. They were careful, they were quiet and they were thorough. They looked behind paintings, inside CD cases, they even searched rice and flour hoppers. Someone spent how long looking through his computer?'

'Last session was forty-eight minutes.'

'Time they knew they had, because they weren't expecting Mr Fleming to walk in and disturb them. They knew he was gone. They may well have been coming to abduct him, and most plausibly at gunpoint, but when they arrived, they discovered he'd been one step ahead. He knew they were coming for him. It could have been mere moments' notice - maybe something fortuitous he saw or heard - or it could have been hours; but the main thing is, he knew they weren't there to sell the
Watchtower
. Ross Fleming ran, and not to the police. We need to work out where, but equally important, we need to work out from whom.'

Bett looked down at the photo collage, then around the diligently strewn chaos of the room, before zeroing in on Willis again.

'If I were to ask you,' he said, 'just off the top of your head, worst-case scenario or merely the first thing that leaps to mind: what would you guess this is about?'

Willis paused, sighing with discomfiture. 'I . . . I'm sorry, I hate this kind of speculation. It seems so disrespectful, like we're working for the tabloids, digging up dirt.'

Lex caught a concealed glance from Bett, a brief roll of the eyes conveying a weary but arch frustration at this squeamishness. Here was a man whose company made instruments of violence and destruction, recoiling from a task because it seemed impolite. Yes, Willis and her grandmother would definitely have got along.