A Murder of Magpies (9 page)

“It's fine by me. That's not what I'm here for.”

I let a beat pass, so he could hear me thinking,
You could have fooled me
. Then, “What did you find—or not find—last night?”

“What we'd expected. A thorough search. Do you remember if your computer was switched on when you went out?”

“Yes, I was doing a backup.”

“There was no sign of that, so they've been through it. My guess is they cloned your hard drive. Also, there were no memory sticks anywhere, and you must have had some?” He waited, and I nodded. “I thought so. Then they took those away and copied everything else. They probably didn't know what they were looking for. It's much more likely they were just sent in to look for manuscripts, and see what was on the computer. We heard back from the typist this morning. She had sent the manuscript from that mail shop.”

“Really? Then why—” I waved my hand at the mess all around us.

“It's not just the manuscript. Our IT people think that they will have installed a keystroke recorder to keep an eye on what you've got, how much you know. Don's a nice man. Do you want me to ask if he'll sweep your system for you?”

I was amazed. I didn't really expect the police to perform personal computing services, but then I didn't really expect them to talk to me as if I were human, and Inspector Field—Jake—was treating me as a colleague rather than a member of the public crossing a police barrier.

I rescued some clean clothes from the mess on the floor, and returned to Mr. Rudiger's to try and disguise the worst of the bruising with makeup before I went out—if Bim saw me on the stairs, he'd have nightmares. It wasn't too difficult—concealer covers a multitude of sins, and all I needed to do was buy some fairly flamboyant green eye shadow for the unbruised eye, and it would look like I had a bad case of the 1960s, but nothing worse.

*   *   *

At my mother's office the meeting took on the aura of a case conference. The only way you could tell that Jake was the policeman and we were the civilians was that he had automatically taken charge. Then again, have you ever seen a meeting with two women and a man where that doesn't happen? Really, I suppose, the only way you could tell that Jake was a policeman was that my mother
let
him take charge.

“What have we got?” he said, leaving it up to us to decide who “we” were, and what we might have.

My mother was quite sure of both answers. “Given that Sam can't describe the man who hit her?” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I mutely shook my head. The landing was dark, and I had sensed the man, rather than seen him. “And there were no fingerprints?” She raised her eyebrows at Jake, treating him exactly as she did me.

“Nothing. Nothing, that is, that we can match at the moment—we've eliminated Sam's, and what appears to be her cleaner's, but there are stray prints that we can't source. None of them match anything we've got on file, so we're either talking about Sam's friends—most likely—or people who've never entered the system—much less likely, because they weren't very clever about it. And villains who aren't very clever we usually meet before too long. The final possibility is that they were from outside the country.” He tapped off the possibilities on his palm: “There's the bank, Intinvest, and their friends; Alemán's family; Vernet; or someone we don't know about yet.”

“Or the French police,” I added thoughtlessly.

He acted like I hadn't spoken, with only a flattening of his look indicating that I'd gone a step too far. I moved back on to safer ground. “Is there some way of checking the prints in Europe?”

“In theory. In practice, we expect the Spanish and the French to respond in about twenty-four hours; Lithuania is anybody's guess; and the Italians may take twenty-four months. It depends on how busy they are—and if they can match the prints.”

“If they can, when do you expect to hear?”

My mother looked impatiently at me. “No, dear. If they can, it's twenty-four months. It's if they can't, we'll hear back quickly.”

It was lucky my mother had decided to be one of the good guys, because she'd have made a sensational baddie. But while all this was important, I couldn't really give it my full attention. I was more worried about Kit. “Surely that's more urgent? Have you heard anything?”

Jake looked gently at me. “Nothing. We've spoken to his sister, who hasn't heard from him for a few weeks, although she says that's normal. We found his ex. They'd seen each other a few months ago—he claims they're friendly.” He looked over at me, to see if I knew differently, but I just shrugged. “He says he hasn't seen him since, and he was in New York when Kit missed his meeting with you.” He still didn't say “disappeared,” I noticed. “His passport confirms that.” At least he was taking it seriously enough to check, I thought sourly. Jake continued, “His solicitor says that the papers Kit left with him have been in his safe, and there's no indication they've been disturbed. I spoke last night to the rector at the London School of Design to see if he'd heard anything.”

“But Kit hasn't lectured there since—” I stopped short.

“Since he was accused of harassment by one of his students last year. It's all right, we know all about it, although you might have mentioned it to me when we spoke yesterday. It would have saved time.” He saw me looking stubborn, and plowed on. “The rector didn't think that there was anything in the accusation, and an internal investigation showed that the student,” he checked his notes, “Davies, was a bit of a fantasist, with a history of instability. He left the LSD soon after—” He broke off. “Can it really be called that?”

“Yes, it can. Don't bother with the jokes, they've all been made already.” I refused to be distracted. “Look, Kit said Davies was really weird. And he said that before he was accused. He sort of stalked Kit. He was at all his public lectures, he followed him around the country. He must have spent a huge amount of time and money on it.”

Jake wasn't interested in a dropout with a yen for fashionistas. But I was. It wasn't unusual for a student to make trouble, even if this kind of trouble was extreme, but it was very unusual for a student to put a lot of cash into something with such an unproductive end result. I thought it was worth following up. I decided I'd call the rector, who'd published a few books on design and whom I knew slightly. Nicholas Meredith was always plugged in to what was happening. If there was any gossip about Kit, he might not want to pass it on to the police, but maybe he would talk to me.

Meanwhile my mother was lining up our tasks. “I'll start to ask some questions about Intinvest and its subsidiaries. I don't think I'll get much from the East European side, but I'll see what's being said.” She turned to me. “Will you get me a copy of the manuscript, please? There might be some place where I might have leverage.”

I looked from her to Jake, like a puppy who isn't quite sure who it should be obeying. Jake shrugged. “Nell knows far more about corporate malfeasance than I do. The Fraud Squad is looking at the manuscript, and the papers Kit left with his solicitor, but they're more interested in the money laundering than they are in who might have arranged for his disappearance. They'll give me whatever they think is relevant, but more is always better at the beginning of an investigation.”

I was momentarily sidetracked. Nell? When had Jake and Helena become so friendly? And anyway, no one ever abbreviated Helena's name. Then I heard what he'd just said. “When did you get a manuscript? And from whom?”

He looked noncommittal. “We took it off your office computer while we were looking at the hacker's attempted entry. Your IT man was very helpful.”

Was he? I didn't think I liked IT going into my computer, even with the police who, presumably, had a warrant. But it probably wasn't the best time to bring that up. Jake seemed to think he was on thin ice, too, and moved on quickly. “I'll take on Diego Alemán, Alemán's brother. He's here, studying at Birkbeck, and I think it's time to talk to him.”

This changed things. In some ways, everything had been comfortably distant: French police, Italian or Lithuanian thugs laundering money. But Birkbeck College wasn't distant. Most of the staff were on a different planet, it's true, but it was my kind of different—the have-no-television, “What is
The X Factor
?” kind of different.

“What is he doing at Birkbeck? Is he studying there? I might know his tutors.”

Jake was playing this one close to his chest. “Let's compare notes later.” “Later” was going to be sometime soon, I could see. Possibly the next millennium. I let it ride.

Jake stood. “Well, if that's all for the moment?” My mother nodded impatiently—she wanted to hit the phones and start picking up scuttlebutt. Suddenly I felt exhausted. What I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. But I had the weekend in front of me to begin to repair the damage to my flat, and to my body. If I didn't reach Nicholas at the LSD, I wasn't going to be able to speak to him until Monday, and that was too long to put Kit's disappearance on hold. I decided to go to the office. With luck, I could skulk in while everyone was at lunch, make some calls, and leave without seeing too many people—or being seen by them.

*   *   *

I stopped at the chemist for some cheap eye makeup before I went into the office. The woman behind the counter tried to steer me toward neutral tones, but once I took off my sunglasses she agreed 1960s hippie green was the way to go. She even helped me match the bruises, and as she said cheerfully, “Well, honey, you look like you're really bad at makeup, but you don't look like you got beat up anymore.”

Miranda didn't agree when I slunk past her desk. I'd timed my entry carefully—not that hitting lunch hour on a Friday is difficult in a publishing office. It goes on for so long, after all. Miranda was the only one there, bent over Breda's book, looking a little beat up herself. She was terrific. She didn't ask questions, didn't comment at all. She only flinched slightly, and said, “Coffee?” Even if she hadn't been able to read, I'd have kept her forever just for that.

I nodded my thanks and quickly shut myself into my office. Lunchtime was good in that no one was around to question me, but equally, there was no one around for me to question. I left messages for Nicholas Meredith, and Chris Stanley, a friend of Peter's who taught political theory at Birkbeck. I contemplated trying to get in touch with Kit's editor on the
Sunday News,
to see if he had any ideas. I'd met him once, briefly, when Kit and I had bumped into him at the cinema. That he was terrifying was an understatement. He was a huge alpha male who was only happy when making other people cry. And if that was the read I got on him at a Rita Hayworth retrospective, imagine what he'd be like at work. I sat up straighter.
I'm not a coward,
I told myself severely. But even if I wasn't, and the statement was open to discussion, I also couldn't see how to approach him.
Hello, you won't remember me, but I'm looking for your missing journo even though I have no official reason to?
That needed work.

Instead I e-mailed Robert Marks at Selden's, and David. Then all the people in the building who had copies of the manuscript, asking them to delete them off their computers, as well as returning any printed copies to me for shredding. I worded it to imply that we had a libel problem, and therefore we couldn't afford to have stray copies lying about, but I didn't think that would hold after I'd spoken to David. I sent a list of all these people to IT, too, so they could scrub their hard drives, or whatever it was they needed to do to delete the manuscript permanently. All in all, I was a whirlwind of activity, even if none of it seemed to get me any further forward.

Miranda came in with the coffee, and stood hovering. I couldn't really blame her for wanting to know what was going on. So did I. I took a deep breath and said, “Close the door.” I'd decided that, if David agreed, we'd tell the rest of the world that I'd been hurt when I came home during a burglary, and that Kit's manuscript had serious libel problems, and present them as two separate issues. But I thought it was important to tell Miranda the truth—she was in the line of fire if anyone identified her as my assistant, and anyway, I just couldn't deal with it on my own.

She tried to look professional, but she was goggling at me like a five-year-old on a school trip to the fire station. But she pulled herself together, and halfway through she began to make notes. By the time I'd finished she was acting as though I was telling her how to brief a designer for a book jacket, the most exciting thing I'd let her do so far.

“Right,” she said briskly. “What story do you want me to give as your cover story, and what story should I pass as deep gossip—you know, ‘I'm telling you this, but don't tell another soul'? That's the only way you'll keep a lid on this, even for a while.”

It was a good plan. I couldn't stop the talk, but I could tailor it. If my colleagues thought something was being withheld from them, they'd move heaven and earth to get at the truth. If, on the other hand, they thought they had the facts, they'd be happy for days ringing each other up to say “Did you
hear
…?”

I had an inspiration. “Are you still in touch with Kathleen Strong?” Kath was her ex-boss, a literary agent and a gossip to rival Kit. If you wanted a particularly vicious rumor spread, she was your girl.

Miranda grinned. “I am a bit, but not enough to call her out of the blue. She'd suspect. Can I go to the launch of that new book tonight? Kath represents the author, and she's sure to be there. I can easily drop it then.”

“Yes, that's a very good idea. It's a drinks party, and no one will care how many people show up. What's our story?”