found?’
Harry had often asked himself the same question. Forced, like Rik, to leave the security service after surviving a posting to an office called Red Station in Georgia, where his name had been placed on a hit list by two renegade security services bosses, he had been in limbo. Since staying on at Thames House was a non-starter — there were too many embarrassed faces who didn’t wish to be reminded of the organization’s shortcomings — it had meant an end to the structure and order of his life. Even working undercover requires strict attention to habit and detail. In its place had come freedom and free choice, neither of which he had experienced much of before. Life since then had been a mix of security-related jobs and contracts, including two brief assignments in Iraq — a place he’d sworn never to go back to, but circumstances had demanded it — where Rik had learned some hard lessons in survival not normally experienced by security service IT personnel.
Yet for Harry, the link with his old employers had never been irrevocably broken. For him, there was still some unfinished business to be resolved: namely, finding his former boss, Henry Paulton. The man had conspired with a senior MI6 officer, Sir Anthony Bellingham, to have Harry and the others in the station terminated by a team called the Hit. Saved by ironic circumstance as the Russians had moved across the border into South Ossetia in a so-called protective and supportive action, Harry, Rik and an MI6 officer named Clare Jardine had abandoned the station and headed home. Recognizing that his time was up, Paulton had slipped away. Bellingham was not so lucky; he had died by Clare Jardine’s hand on London’s Embankment before she, too, had vanished.
Harry had no interest in Jardine. She had done what she thought was right for her. But Paulton was another matter. And that still rankled like toothache. It was something he’d never discussed with Rik, although he knew the day would come. But right now wasn’t the time.
‘Let’s do it again. Top to bottom.’ He rinsed his cup and left it on the side. It was down to sheer doggedness now, revisiting every nook and cranny, rechecking every item of furniture in the house, in case they’d missed something. If that didn’t work, they were stumped.
After two more hours of effort, including a dusty trawl through the attic, Harry walked back into the study. He did a tour of the room, ticking off obvious places of interest. But it was a cosmetic exercise; there was nowhere left to look which hadn’t already been searched thoroughly. And he was now certain that Param would not have hidden anything in the walls, ceiling or floor without his eagle-eyed wife being aware of it. He left the room and picked up a set of car keys with a BMW fob from a table in the hallway.
The garage was a double, brick-built affair with a concrete floor finished in a polished dark-green skim. It held one car — a blue 5 series BMW — and a few items of gardening equipment. Apart from that, it was immaculate and barren. Harry searched the car from front to boot, but found nothing. It looked as if it might have just been delivered from the showroom, with none of the usual accumulated car trash found in most vehicles.
He returned to the study and dropped the keys on the desk, then rang Mrs Param and asked her for the registration numbers of the family cars. She gave him the details with customary reluctance and he rang off before she could bitch further about the invasion of her property.
‘Now there’s a thing,’ he said quietly, and felt the first buzz of something being not quite right. He went back to a drawer he had been working on earlier, checking and rechecking everything. Only this time he knew what he was looking for.
‘What have you got?’ Rik was showing signs of acute boredom, his spiked hair now limp. On Harry’s instructions he had already gone through the kitchen again with a fresh pair of eyes, emptying drawers and cupboards, even poring over a pegboard of notes and postcards. So far it had produced nothing useful. Unlike Matuq, Raymond Param had shown no history of visiting isolated cottages in the depths of Norfolk or anywhere else.
‘The Params own two cars — a BMW for him and a Mazda for her,’ Harry explained, sitting back. ‘She’s got the Mazda with her and the Beemer’s in the garage — and it’s new-pin clean.’
Rik pulled a face. ‘Why leave a car like that?’
‘Because driving it would be a dead giveaway. Like a sign round his neck saying,
He picked up the phone and dialled a number, read out the registration number of the Mini and waited. Eventually, he stirred and made a scribbled note on the parking receipt. He cut the connection and scowled at the ceiling.
‘Well?’ Rik looked as if he was contemplating taking a pickaxe to the furniture out of sheer spite.
‘A second.’ Harry went back to the drawers he had been working on and rummaged through the papers before pulling out a sheet with a triumphant smile. ‘What do we know of Param’s office colleagues?’
‘Not much. They’ve all been looked at by the police and the company’s own security people. Mostly long-time employees, no queries or big spending habits, no changes to daily routine.’ He frowned, realizing that Harry had found something. ‘The smug old git look really doesn’t suit you, by the way.’
Harry ignored the jibe and flicked at the piece of paper he was holding. It was a dusty, creased sheet he’d discovered at the bottom of a drawer, caught up among other work-related clutter of seemingly little relevance.
‘This is an extract from minutes of a board meeting a couple of years back. Apologies for absence, dates of next meeting and so on. One of the notes refers to a vote of thanks to a Miss Yvonne Michaels, who served as a PA for Param and a couple of other directors. According to this, she was leaving London to go back to Cape Town, where her family lives. Sounds like they were sorry to see her go, good and faithful employee, loyal and so forth.’
‘South Africans come and go all the time. There’s a whole community of them here.’
Harry nodded. As Australians and Kiwis had done for years before them, now it was kids from Johannesburg and Cape Town who piled in and out of London looking for opportunity and adventure, filling in by staffing pubs up and down the country.
‘The registration of the Mini Cooper S,’ he explained, teasing out his thoughts along with the facts, ‘booked for an overstay in Golden Square, London W1, is in the name of a Y. Michaels.’
‘Param paid the fine for her. Good bosses do that.’
‘The ticket was issued on the fifth of last month.’
Rik lifted an eyebrow. ‘She must have come back.’
‘Or he’s using her old car. Or, she never left. Either way-’
‘Either way, why is the receipt in Param’s desk?’ Rik grinned. ‘Somebody’s been a naughty boy. Do we have an address?’
‘Yes, we do.’ Harry checked his watch. It was mid-afternoon and they hadn’t eaten. Much more of this and they’d be operating on reduced batteries. He hoped the Michaels address would lead somewhere and not dump them flat. ‘We’ll do it another time. We’ve pushed our luck with this one. I need you to do some work on this new job for me.’
Rik jumped up and cracked his knuckles. ‘Suits me. After all this paper, I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. What’s the brief?’
‘There isn’t much.’ He reeled off from memory what little information he’d been given by Jennings.
Rik looked doubtful. ‘Christ, you weren’t kidding, were you? I need more than that if I’m to get anything on the net.’
‘We’ve got a name. We’ll have to make do with that. Anyway, I thought you IT nerds liked a challenge.’
‘We do. But what happens if we can’t find anything? He might have disappeared completely.’
Harry smiled. He knew Rik well enough to realize that he would wear his keyboard down to the wires before admitting defeat. ‘There’s no such thing as disappearing completely. You in or not?’
‘I’m in.’
ELEVEN
They drove to Rik’s flat near Paddington to ponder on the meagre scraps representing Professor Samuel
