The Reckless Engineer (24 page)

‘Who, the Hunts next door?’

‘Yes.’ Jeremy nodded. ‘You mustn’t breathe a word to anybody. It’s a very serious matter, a life and death matter. I shouldn’t have risked compromising my identity like this with you, but one thing led to another and I couldn’t help myself.’ His tone faded back to a soft whimper.

‘This is very exciting. I shan’t breathe a word to anybody, I swear.’

She turned around to face him, looking him straight in his eye. ‘I was on my break and I have to go back to work now, Jeremy.’

She gave him a passionate kiss and got up as she broke away from it.

‘Can I see you again? Dinner tonight, here in my room again?’ he asked, his voice softly pleading.

‘I’d love to. And I shall bring some makeup—foundation and concealer—to cover up those freckles and this birthmark. Those freckles don’t go with your dark makeover, you know. Neither do those glacial blue eyes.’

‘But they go with you.’ He got up and tapped her perfect nose, littered with freckles that spread and faded in both directions over her cheeks, with his forefinger. He reached out and gathered her in for a kiss, unable to keep his hands off her.

Annie finally broke away from the kiss and disappeared out the door.

I have to go out and buy some candles for dinner and create some romance
. He was going put two candles on the dinner table, turn the lights off, and order champagne and room service by candlelight. He knew in his gut that if he made the effort, Annie was going to spend the night with him.

CHAPTER 31

Wednesday, October 27 — Twelve Days Later

Back-to-back
The Good Wife
reruns were still playing on the TV with the sound turned “mute”. Jeremy lay down on the sofa again and, finding it hard to focus on the story lines, drifted back into a light sleep and dreams of Annie.

About fifteen minutes later he realized that the voices and the noises next door had suddenly faded. He heard a door being shut inside—the bedroom door. Jeremy jumped to his feet and drew the living room curtains so that the room was almost dark. He opened the living room door slightly and listened.

Caitlin and Gavin were leaving their apartment.

‘Won’t Jack be wondering where you are?’ Gavin was saying.

‘He was sleeping off a nasty hangover from a late night out in London this morning. He is all excited about this new project with underwater robots, so that is what he will get back to when he gets up. I left a message that I was visiting the mother of one of Gillian’s school friends in case he decides to come by BlackGold. It is nice to see him back in form actually.’ Caitlin laughed.

‘You find him attractive like this,’ Gavin paraphrased after her in a worried and jealous tone as he locked the door behind them.

‘Oh, no! He’s a bore when he gets into his geeky engineering designs,’ Caitlin protested hurriedly.

The lady doth protest too much
, Jeremy thought, as their voices tailed off down the corridor.

Back in his room Jeremy opened the curtains slightly and watched them leave the hotel hand in hand, crossing the road and walking towards the beach. Did he imagine Caitlin withdrawing her hand, he wasn’t sure. They were now engrossed in an animated exchange.

Seems like trouble in paradise
.

He immediately picked up the phone and dialled the reception.

‘Hullo, Mr. Brown’

Annie had seen the caller ID of his room and remembered not to blow his cover.

‘Annie, could you do me a favour? The Hunts left the hotel and walked towards the beach just now. Could you keep an eye out and give me a buzz on my mobile the moment they come back into the hotel?’

‘Of course, Mr. Brown,’ she said in a serious tone.

He read out his number.

‘See ya later tonight, babe,’ he added in a soft voice.

‘Yeah, see ya.’ She laughed softly.

Jeremy hung up. There was work to do. Retrieving the master key card he had borrowed, he dashed out of his room and tried it on Gavin’s door. The key fit into the lock and the LED flashed green. He was in.

Jeremy entered the suite and took the living room in one glance as he slipped on a pair of latex gloves. The first thing of importance that he recognized was Caitlin’s laptop, the same one he had copied before. Jeremy took it back into his room, powered it up and booted it with the Linux DVD he had in his case. He accessed the hard disk without any problem. He connected the backup disk he had to a USB port with a cable from his case and ran the hard disk raw-backup utility program. This disk would take about twenty minutes to back up an image. He would do the rest of his search of the room while it ran.

Jeremy went back to Gavin’s living room and conducted a methodical search of the papers and everything else in the room. Remembering the instructions Harry had given his photographer, he brought his small camcorder in and took a recording of the room with zoom-in shots of areas of interest.

He checked his mobile. No warning from Annie yet.

Inside the bedroom he found another laptop that surely belonged to Gavin. He took this laptop—an Apple MacBook—to his room also. Caitlin’s backup had completed. Jeremy removed it and powered it down. Then he went through the same process with Gavin’s laptop. It had a smaller disk, and hence its raw-backup should complete faster. He wiped down Caitlin’s laptop and returned it to its original position in Gavin’s living room.

Jeremy completed the search and the video recording of the bedroom fast. There was nothing of interest in the bathroom. He returned Gavin’s laptop to its original position after getting its image and closed Gavin’s front door behind him.

Back in his room Jeremy got into his running shorts and dashed downstairs taking two steps at a time. It was time he went out and enjoyed the beautiful day on the beach himself. He felt reckless and on a high from the afternoon’s activities and decided to leave his disguise behind, confident he could avoid Caitlin and Gavin out there. On his way back he would stop by the shops and buy himself six sets of candles for the night ahead.

CHAPTER 32

Thursday, October 28 — Thirteen Days Later

Jeremy was jolted out of his sleep by his mobile screaming into the night. Who turned the volume all the way up? he wondered, blinking at it, still half asleep.

‘Annie, you vixen.’ He swore out loud, smiling.

Not content with screaming at him, his mobile had by now started a dance around the bedside table on the vibrator. Jeremy looked at the alarm clock. It was 10:12 Thursday night.

‘Hullo! Bloody hell, I’m coming, I’m coming.’

‘Jeremy?’

Harry’s voice already sounded to him like an unjust nag.

‘What?’

‘You’re drunk,’ Harry accused.

‘I, er, don’t think so,’ Jeremy protested, drunkenly.

‘Maggie?’ Annie spooned up behind him and possessively whispered in his ears.

They had had dinner by candlelight again. After dinner they had watched an episode of
The Good Wife
on TV, read one of Annie’s short stories together, and proceeded to test her skills at making mixed drinks out of the well-stocked bar in the room, flasks, ice cubes, and halved lime flying around the living room. They had then made love and fallen asleep.

‘No, it’s Harry.’

Jeremy covered the microphone with his hand and put Annie’s mind at rest.

‘And you’ve got a girl in bed, ha, ha!’ Harry laughed out loud. ‘So
that’s
why you’ve fallen off the face of the earth, forgotten my numbers, and haven’t turned up at work. Alan Walters has been calling me wondering where you are.’

‘One minute, Harry,’ Jeremy put the call on hold.

‘Annie, I’ve got to take this call in the living room—client confidential, Harry insists.’

He got out of bed and stumbled in the direction of the living room door and, finally getting to it, closed it behind him.
Gosh, those mixed drinks hit one hard,
especially after the bottle of champagne that they had consumed with the meal. Jeremy shook his head like a dog and blinked hard to really wake up.

‘Harry, it’s only Maggie. Whadup?’

‘Maggie, the consultant wannabe? When did Maggie ever get you pissed senseless, Jeremy? Come on. This is your college buddy you are talking to. Anyway, what’s up with
you
is what I wanted to ask. Or should I forget about it now and call tomorrow when you are back to your senses?’

‘What’s up is I found the letters, Harry.’

‘What letters?’

‘The letters Cossack searched that haunted house for and took with him.’

‘Michelle’s house?’

‘Yeah, it’s got the big devil in it black sickle in hand and lots of little demons floating all around in the air and under the chairs and tables. One of them pulled my leg. Don’t go back in there . . . urrgh . . . don’t go back into Michelle’s house.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Harry knew better than to argue with him when he was
not
drunk. ‘But what about the letters? What’s in them?’

‘The letter was from Caitlin, to Michelle. She finally cracked under pressure from Michelle’s calls and sent it to Michelle, telling her in no uncertain terms
never
to call her house again; or else that she would have the men delivering the letter to her by hand perform an abortion on her foetus in the house. If Michelle were to come anywhere near her home again or try to speak to Gillian, the abortion they perform will be on
her
(Michelle). It says that she was divorcing Jack anyway and had already given Jack the divorce terms and told him to get out of the house. That was the letter signed by Caitlin and hand delivered to Michelle, no doubt by Cossack. I have it safely right here in the secret inner pocket of my jacket.’

Jeremy pulled on the jacket draped over a chair to keep the chill off his otherwise naked body and patted it where the inner pocket was to make sure the letter was there. The spills of alcohol stuck his fingers to the table and the phone; and the stench of it hung heavy in the air in the room and made him want to throw up. He picked up half of a squeezed lime from the carpet, held it to his nose, and took in a deep breath. The smell filled his lungs and temporarily settled his agitated stomach.

‘And then there was the divorce proposal,’ he continued.

‘What proposal?’

‘A divorce proposal from Caitlin to Jack, to get rid of him cheap. Caitlin keeps the McAllen mansion in Guildford and gets all of BlackGold—Jack gets five million in settlement; Marc and Peter’s funds will keep coming, but not Marianne’s. If Jack accepts the terms and walks away then she would sign a quickie divorce agreement. Jack has emailed her back saying okay, whatever, if that’s what she wanted, that he wanted to work on the marriage and not get divorced.’

Jeremy felt parched. He coughed, took a sip of water from the glass on the table, and continued.

‘Michelle had seen this offer and written a letter back to Caitlin that Jack and she had seen a solicitor, and that he would demand all of BlackGold and half of the Guildford estate after a ten-year marriage. This letter had reached Caitlin a week before the murder, according to her emails to Gavin raging about Michelle daring to try to continue to call her asking for face-to-face negotiations. The divorce offer, and the emails, they are all right here in my secret inner pocket, uh huh.’

‘Bloody hell! I can see why Caitlin might want
that
letter out of Michelle’s house.’

‘And after all that now Caitlin is confused.’

‘Confused about what?’

‘About Jack. That’s our gut feeling. The body language, bits of conversation I have overheard . . . She is having second thoughts. She half wants that weak, spineless, stick-in-the-mud womaniser after all Gavin has done killing Michelle for her. There is no justice in this world anymore.’

‘What do you mean? Do you have evidence that Gavin killed Michelle for Caitlin?’

‘No, but I
know
. Gavin is my buddy. He took me out to dinner a week ago and we had lunch today – room service in his room. I know all about how Scorpion and Caitlin’s father screwed up his life. And now Caitlin is doing it to us too.’

‘When are you coming back to the office? Or can you fax the two letters to me?’

‘They’re in your email, scans of them. I keep the originals in my secret pocket right here. They will be safe with me in Scotland. Nobody knows about the secret inner pocket.’

‘Safe with you
where
?’

‘I have a flight out to Aberdeen booked for tomorrow afternoon. I’m gonna help your guy with Scorpion.’

‘You mean Skull. Have you touched base with Darren Skipper?’

‘Well, I say Scorpion, because, my dear Harry, the tattoo of the skull is smaller than the tattoo of the scorpion. Although, if you take his real bald shiny skull, it is big. It is bigger than the tattoo of the scorpion one might say.’

‘No shit, Sherlock!’

Harry knew better than to argue with him when he was
not
drunk.

‘I had better let you sleep off all that alcohol you’ve got in you. I’m going to call Jack and ask him to drive you to Southampton for your flight, because I don’t think you will be in a fit state to drive tomorrow. It is Southampton you are flying from I presume?’

‘Yeah, the 2:22 out of Southampton, although 2 is
not
my lucky number. I might die if the little demons are still following me. I shoulda looked for a 1:11 flight.’

‘Okay, gotcha. And don’t let that girl you’ve got in bed (Annie, did you say?) keep you up all night long. You are getting too old for that.’

Harry laughed.

‘I also have an appointment with Cossack for next Tuesday afternoon. We are gonna send him off to keep an eye on Maggie, although I say it is a waste of time and money because I don’t want her. She’s been messing me about and we don’t want her anymore.’

‘Go back to sleep, Jeremy.’

‘I say, that Maggie, she’s an old prude. She shoulda not dragged me around by the nose string, er, strung me around by the noose; and now it is too late. I don’t want her no more.’

‘Good night, Jeremy.’

‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. I have the pictures.’

‘What pictures?’

‘The pictures, the, the photographs of Gavin’s room, you know. Like the pictures you had your entourage take all around Michelle’s haunted house. Be careful when you develop those pictures, Harry. Look carefully in the background, and under the living room tables and chairs. The devil is in there with a black sickle, and little demons are floating about. Look in the white space.’

‘What’s in the pictures of Gavin’s room, Jeremy?’

‘What? Ah, yes, the pictures. Chocolates. Three boxes of Cavalier chocolates and two empty ones fallen on the carpet behind his bed.’