‘You said you know where Joshu is,’ Vivian said. ‘I have to tell you, it sounds like he’s the person with the strongest interest in taking Jimmy away from you. Are you so sure he’s where you think he is, and not here in the US?’
Stephanie looked amused. ‘He’s definitely not in the US. He—’
‘Maybe not. But does he have the resources to hire people to kidnap Jimmy and bring the boy to him.’
‘No. If you’d just let me finish what I was about to say . . . Unless I’ve been burgled since we left for the airport, Joshu is exactly where I last saw him. Sitting in an urn on my mantelpiece. Joshu’s dead, Agent McKuras. His and Scarlett’s ashes sit in my living room like bookends above the fireplace. Jimmy says good morning and good night to them every day.’
Vivian felt ambushed. The blood rose in her cheeks and she drummed her fingers on the desk. She wanted to yell at Stephanie, but that wasn’t an option while the woman still might be the repository of information about the kidnap. ‘What happened to him?’
‘Like everything else connected to Scarlett and Jimmy, it’s a long story.’
This time, Vivian was not about to be seduced by narrative. Stephanie Harker was a terrific raconteur, so good that Vivian risked losing sight of the importance of time in tracking down a missing child. And maybe – just maybe – there was a deliberate point to Stephanie’s meandering stories. After all, who knew better than she that she’d be stopped by security? Who was better placed to set this up? She’d been left in charge of a rich woman’s brat with no money to pay for it. Maybe she’d decided to extort some cash from the charitable foundation she’d mentioned earlier. ‘These long stories aren’t taking me any nearer a valid suspect,’ she said, her voice cold. ‘Tell me, Stephanie. If you got a ransom demand for Jimmy, who would pay?’
Stephanie looked startled. ‘I . . . I don’t know. I never even thought about it.’ She spread her hands in a gesture of openness. ‘I don’t have that kind of money.’
‘What kind of money?’
She looked puzzled. ‘Well, when you hear about ransoms, it’s usually seven figures and upwards. I’m not a rich woman. I make a decent living, but I’m not a millionaire. I’d do my best to raise the money, but I don’t have much.’
‘Couldn’t you approach his mother’s charitable foundation?’
‘No chance,’ Stephanie said. ‘It was set up to benefit an orphanage in a remote part of Romania. Scarlett went there in 2007 as part of
‘What about his father’s estate?’
Stephanie snorted her ridicule. ‘What estate? Joshu spent money like water. Faster than he could earn it, latterly. He was too fond of drugs and fast cars and stupid women. The only thing he left Jimmy was his music, which is all boxed up in a storage unit. It might make a few grand if I sold it off on eBay, but not enough to pay a ransom. No, if somebody’s taken Jimmy for money, they’ve made a serious error of judgement.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘But at least they’ve got a vested interest in keeping him alive. Which is better than the alternative.’
‘Which means we’re back to square one.’ Vivian couldn’t help showing her impatience. ‘If you can’t take me closer to a viable suspect, who can?’
Stephanie gave her a nervous glance. Not for the first time, Vivian felt there was something lurking between them. Something Stephanie didn’t want to give up. Something she didn’t even want to contemplate. She looked down, studying her neatly manicured nails. ‘There is someone it might be helpful for you to talk to. He’s a detective with Scotland Yard. Detective Sergeant Nick Nicolaides.’
Vivian was taken aback. Out of nowhere, two hours into this interview, Stephanie Harker was introducing a cop who had something to bring to the party. ‘Who the hell is Sergeant Nick Nicolaides? And what does he have to do with this?’
‘When Joshu died he was the officer who did all the interviews. He was really sympathetic but he seemed to be thorough too. Anyway, when I had some problems of my own this past year, I rang him because he was the only cop I knew. So he knows Jimmy and he knows the background too.’ She raised her eyes and met Vivian’s incredulous stare.
‘And I’m only hearing about him now?’
‘I’m sorry.’ The talkative Stephanie seemed to have run out of steam. She rubbed her eyes, her face a grimace of pain. ‘None of this is easy, you know. I’ll give you his number, shall I?’ She recited it from memory and Vivian keyed it into her phone.
‘Wait here,’ she said grimly. ‘I need to see what this Nicolaides guy has to say.’
16
With every passing day the soundproofed room seemed to grow more oppressive. Detective Sergeant Nick Nicolaides knew the personal scents of the other five occupants so well he could have picked them out of an identity parade blindfolded. He knew their physical tics; the tapping of a pen against teeth, the soft percussion of fingertips on desktop, the sucking of air through the front teeth, the scratching of fingernails on designer stubble, the endless fiddling with the bridge of the reading glasses. He knew who would crack which kind of joke over the contents of the emails they were working through. He knew who was tweeting his mistress instead of working, who was texting his bookie and who was ordering groceries online from Tesco. And of course, he knew more about the professional and personal lives of News International journalists than any adult human should have to.
When he’d been seconded to the team investigating the allegations of News International’s phone hacking and corrupting of public officials, Nick had been excited. It was a headline-grabbing case, and its potential repercussions for the media and the Met were thrilling. Though not in a good way.
But the glitz had worn thin pretty quickly. News International had handed over three hundred million emails. Three hundred million. Nick suspected they’d dumped everything they could find on to the inquiry in the hope that the trees would get lost in the wood. It wasn’t humanly possible to read every one. He remembered reading about a project to classify every galaxy in the universe according to shape. The astronomers involved had asked members of the public to log on to their website and take part in the process. It was the only way to get enough bodies on the case. Even then, it would take years. But that wasn’t an option here because it was a criminal investigation.
So what they had was a computer program that was gradually working its way through all of the three hundred million, primed with key words and phrases that should, in theory, mean that all the dodgy emails would be spat out into the inboxes of the people grafting away in rooms like this all over the old Wapping printworks. Every team was a mix of the company’s own watchdogs and police officers. Embedded, that was what they called what he was doing. And embedded was what it bloody felt like. Embedded up to the neck in other people’s shit.
Now, instead of actually working real cases and catching real criminals, Nick was locked in a bunker looking for evidence which, even if he found it, probably would never see the light of courtroom day. A few months ago, his career had seemed to be on an upward trajectory. But this was the backwater to end all backwaters.
He clicked on the next email in his queue. It had been flagged up because it contained the word ‘credit’. One of the ways journalists paid backhanders to sources was to list their associates in the credits book. If you wanted to pay DCI XXX for giving you an exclusive tip, you put a payment through to his girlfriend or his mum or his best mate. So every time a journalist or an executive mentioned, ‘taking the credit’, or ‘credit where it’s due’, Nick would have to read the innocuous message. Just in case.
This time, it was from an editorial executive complaining that his company credit card had been refused at the petrol station that morning. Nick sighed and sent it to the ‘checked’ folder and clicked on the next one. The ringing of his phone felt like a stay of execution. A glance at the screen revealed an unfamiliar number. But it was
