A Murder of Magpies (26 page)

As we walked down the corridor, I said, “Isn't Wright going to be suspicious when he sees a broken lock? If he's as dishonest as we think, won't that make him check his computer and files?”

Helena looked at me as if I were mad. “Why would the lock be broken?” She opened her bag and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves and a ring of keys. “One of these should fit. I checked the lock the other day. Put the gloves on first.” My mother could not only recognize different makes of lock, but knew where to get skeleton keys to open them. I didn't want to know any more. She handed them to me, and repeated, “One of these will fit.”

I put on the gloves and did as I was told. She was right. The third one opened the door and we went in, Helena locking up behind us, flicking the snib up. “We don't want any nasty surprises.”

I couldn't resist. “Don't you have Wright's schedule for the day?”

She looked at me pityingly. She knew it was an attempt at sarcasm, so she said very gently, “He's supposed to be going to his son's sports day. But plans change.” She didn't wait for a response, and went over to the computer in the inner office. “Try the filing cabinets,” she said. “Look for ones that are locked. Anything in the open is probably not interesting. One of the smaller keys will work. Filing cabinet locks are not very sophisticated.”

None of the cabinets was locked. Everything inside looked like client files, dated, cross-referenced, open and aboveboard, a model of what a solicitor's files should look like. I flicked through the drawer given over to Vernet. There was a lot, but he was their solicitor. There should be a lot. I decided to snoop around first. If I didn't find anything else, I'd go back and photocopy what was there. I sighed at the thought. Nothing in Wright's desk drawers. Nothing on his shelves except law books, and behind one a bottle of whiskey. So he drank. A quick look at his complexion would have told me the same thing without a breaking-and-entering charge.

I went back into the outer office. More files, all innocent looking. I opened a coat cupboard. Big surprise. Coats. There was a briefcase at the bottom that I tried. Locked. I thought for a moment and went and got the keys Helena had given me. All were too big. I put my head around Wright's door. “Mother, do you have a briefcase key on your ring?”

She didn't look up. “In my bag,” she said, in the same tone of voice she used to use when I was at school and couldn't find a clean shirt.

I got her bag and found the keys. At first I thought it wasn't going to work, but I jiggled the lock while I turned it gently, and it gave with a snap. Bingo. In the front flap was an address book, with numbers and initials. In the case itself were three files, all unlabeled. “I'm going to photocopy this,” I said.

“Mmm,” replied Helena. She had lines of code scrolling across the screen, and was intent.

I photocopied the pages, and returned them carefully to the files in the same order. Then I refilled the paper tray of the photocopier from a stash I found behind the machine, so no one would think anything was different from the way it was left on Friday. I was quite proud of thinking of that, which was worrying. Becoming a good burglar hadn't been part of my life plan.

Helena was still engrossed, so I looked around the outer office, idly snooping. She was right, Kenneth Wright appeared to be doing extremely well for himself. All the chairs were leather, upholstered to within an inch of their lives; the two desks were solid mahogany. They were all reproduction, but reproduction didn't mean cheap. New got up to look like old costs just as much as old. I sat in the secretary's typing chair, swinging myself back and forth, opening and shutting her desk drawers. The top one held office supplies. In the next were personal bits and pieces—stray items of makeup, ibuprofen, contact lens fluid—and at the bottom old steno pads, and an engagement diary for 2007, discarded and buried under a spare pair of tights that had come unrolled and were wrapped in close embrace with a chocolate bar that had turned white with age. I closed the drawer. The remaining drawers were what you would expect. Everything labeled, everything in apple-pie order.

Helena pulled a memory stick out of the computer and put it in her bag. She switched off the power and said, “That's everything. Let's go.”

We were halfway down the hall when I said, “Hang on. Wait.” I ran back to Wright's office and rebroke and reentered. I opened Tiffanie Harris's bottom desk drawer and grabbed the diary. Plenty of people keep old diaries, but either you keep them all, or you keep only last year's. Why keep one five-year-old diary? I shoved it in my bag, relocked, pushed the gloves and keys on top of the diary, and was standing on Philip Mount's doormat, all in less than a minute. “Tell you later,” I said. I was out of breath, not with rushing but with excitement, even if I wasn't sure what I was excited about.

An hour later, as Helena and I idly played “Great books you've never read,” Philip Mount arrived, looking much worse for the wear after his late night. He was a tall and pale, still boyish-looking, with excessive care paid to his floppy mouse-brown hair. He wore studiedly “dress-down” weekend clothes, but the ironed crease down the front of his corduroys indicated his soul wasn't really into casual. Twenty minutes later we all left together, me with my booty, and with a new libel lawyer. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get that one past Selden's.

*   *   *

We took the copied files back to Helena's. She suggested that we didn't want Jake arriving unexpectedly at my flat, and having to explain how we'd got hold of the files.

“I don't think he'd arrive without ringing first,” I said. “It's not like that.”

“That's a shame. You could do a lot worse.” She thought about it. “You have done a lot worse.”

“Thanks, Mother. Your vote of confidence is always welcome.”

“It's not a vote of confidence you need, it's a long, hard look at your life. You've cocooned yourself in your little publishing enclave: you see the same half-dozen people endlessly, you never step outside into the real world. The worst is, you're happy that way.”

She had blindsided me again. I hadn't seen this coming. “What is this—Pick on Sam Week?”

Helena was unruffled. “You're fine now, but how are you going to be in twenty years? I'm not, as you know, someone who thinks any man is better than no man, but you've just shut down the emotional side of your life, and it's not healthy.”

“And you're such an expert,” I retaliated feebly.

“Yes, I am. I'm an expert in living with an emotional life, and in living without one, and I know which is better.”

I turned to stare at her. We'd never discussed her break with my father, and we'd definitely never discussed her private life after the divorce. I wasn't sure that I wanted to now. In fact, I was absolutely certain I didn't. She sensed my withdrawal and put her hand briefly on mine. “Don't worry. I'm not going to ‘share'—I haven't taken to watching
Oprah
in secret. It's just that you should think about where you're going.

“Now.” Her voice returned to its usual briskness. “What I'd like to do is set up the computer, so that everything Wright does gets backed up. On the first run through of the files it would be useful to separate out everything mentioning Vernet; everything mentioning property transactions; and then anything that doesn't indicate clearly what it is: files that have no client names, documents without subject lines or reference numbers. Will you do that?”

I nodded dumbly. I thought I could probably be trusted to shuffle papers. Everything else in my life was open to question.

Helena left me with the paperwork spread out at the kitchen table while she went to set up whatever illegal surveillance operations she had learned God knows where. I switched on the radio. The coffee was dripping slowly through on the hob and the smell filled the warm room. The rain beat against the windowpanes. If only I were reading the newspaper, instead of criminally acquired legal documents, it might even have been a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning.

We sat at the table for the next six hours, slowly going through everything. Helena was the legal mind, but my editorial training was helpful, too. Papers that were not obviously linked I could see, by style, by approach, by the way they were worded, actually belonged together. Gradually we put things in order, and the story was easy to read. This was where the money laundering on all the UK property deals—deals that were processing up to £100 million a year—was coming from. Kenneth Wright was the source.

I got up and stretched. Helena looked as fresh as when we'd started. “The computer will be useful, but it's really not necessary. I'm going to summarize all of this, and write a précis, and then we can hand it all over.”

“To whom?”

“To the police. NCIS, I imagine. But we'll go through Jake. He might as well get the credit, and anyway, he can organize a warrant and the documents can be reacquired legally. What we have here is information, but it's not evidence because it's not admissible.”

“What about Conway?”

“I'd thought of that. I think you should ring him. I don't want to trigger any warning bells around Wright—he can't be allowed to slip through the net—but at the same time, it would be no bad thing for Conway to know that Cooper's aren't the only solicitors in the City.”

I squinted at her in disbelief. “You robbed an office—”

“Burgled, dear. There was no removal of property. It wasn't robbery.”

I shrugged irritably. “You
burgled
an office, then—you burgled an office to entice a new client?”

She looked genuinely shocked. “Of course not. I did it to help you; to see if we could find information that would lead to a murderer; because I don't like Kenneth Wright; and—” her mouth narrowed—“and because if dishonest solicitors are allowed to operate, they weaken the rest of us and, pompous as it may sound, they destroy the fabric of society.” Then she gave a small, catlike smile. “If, in the course of acting on those reasons, I bring in an extremely important new client, well, I won't turn him away.”

I wouldn't have believed most people who made a speech like that, but I think any of Helena's friends would. She is amusing, she is tough, but she is also a person who believes in things like “the fabric of society.” In a way, so do I, although I am less confident than she that it has not already been destroyed.

She went back to work and I made sandwiches. It was only five, but we'd skipped breakfast for burglary, and lunch had slid past without us noticing. Helena took a sandwich in her left hand, and went on making notes with her right, while I tried to be useful, tidying the documents back into their original order. Underneath them all was the diary. I flicked through it idly. Whatever foggy idea had made me go back to grab it had dissipated, ending up merely as a question:
Why would anyone keep a single engagement book?
It was odd, but was “odd” enough? On the spur of the moment I'd thought so. Now I wasn't so sure. Still, given that I'd stolen it, ignoring it seemed even sillier than my initial excitement.

So as Helena continued to write without a pause, I flicked through the diary. It was a diary. It had appointments. Not exactly a hot news flash. Why had Wright kept it? I made lists of dates, lists of initials, lists of names. Then I swapped them about, like some kind of jigsaw puzzle. But it was a jigsaw where all the pieces were the same color. I pushed them about again. And the colors clarified. I said, “Do you still have a copy of the manuscript?”

Helena looked up out of a fog of concentration. “Manuscript?”

“Kit's.”

“On the third shelf above my desk, in a blue folder.” She was already back at work, the words unreeling themselves under her pen.

I trotted up to her study and came back with the manuscript. I'd read it when Kit delivered it, but I hadn't begun to edit it, and I had only an imperfect recall of the details he laid out. After ten minutes I reached for a pen, too, and Helena and I sat in the gathering gloom, both writing as if lives depended on it.

It was near midnight when I sat back, easing my cramped back. Helena kept writing. “Mother,” I said.

“Mmm. Just a minute.”

“Mother.”

She caught my tone and stopped writing. She looked at me and paid attention properly. “What? What is it?”

“Wright killed Alemán.”

She looked vaguely toward the files, small frown lines appearing between her brows.

“No, it's here. I took Wright's diary for 2007. It's all here.” I pulled my notes toward me again. “Look.” I went through the diary, showing how the entries matched up with the files we had taken that showed the extent of the property deals, and, more importantly, with the manuscript. “It's here. Wright has a series of appointments that are only indicated by a time. All the other appointments in the book are indicated either by name, or by initials. The ones that are indicated only by a time are always together in a bunch: two in one day, or three in two days, but never spread through a week. They are interspersed with other appointments, though, and those ones always have initials or abbreviations. The initials are sometimes straightforward, and I've matched up a few with the files.” I nodded toward the copies of Wright's documents. “In the ones I can't match are two that recur: ‘FStH' and ‘Br.' They only come when he has the appointments that are indicated by time.” Helena looked encouraging, so I went on. “The appointments link by date with the files. They are before each of the four big property deals that took place in Britain for Vernet that year.”

“I don't understand, though,” she said. “What's that got to do with murder? We know already from the files that he has been laundering money through the UK property.”