had been taken out, upended and then broken into pieces: Northcote’s antique study desk had been crowbarred apart into something close to matchwood and the heavy, button-backed desk chair disembowelled. Every book on the shelves had been taken down and its leaves torn out and strewn across the floor. The doors of the cupboards below had been wrenched off their hinges. The safe gaped open, empty. The drapes hung in shreds. Carver was glad he’d salvaged Northcote’s family photographs: every one that remained had been smashed. The devastation, through which protectively white-overalled forensic specialists were working, was repeated throughout the ground floor. It was only when they reached the sprawling, split-level drawing room that Carver realized through the mess that no antique ornament or any of the silver that Northcote had collected remained. Nor did any of the paintings, prints or original nineteenth-century photographs of early American settlers and native American tribes, a collection in itself unique if not antique.
The kitchen and staff accommodation had been overturned, in some instances literally. Three huge, free- standing fridge freezers had been thrown forward off their feet but only after the doors had been opened, for their contents to smash and now seep over the floor. The same destruction had been carried out on two separate, smaller refrigerators. Every single thing in every storage cupboard had been heaped, smashed, on the floor, to mix with the seepage from the freezers. What wine and spirits had not been taken from the cellar were smashed and soaked the floor.
Every room in the staff wing was demolished, apart from the shell itself, even to every article of clothing being slashed beyond repair and every personal item – photographs, ornaments, momentoes – smashed.
Because there was so much soft furnishing and bedding the havoc appeared worse upstairs because every piece – bed coverings, duvets, pillows, mattresses, couches and easy chairs – had been eviscerated. The carpet had even been lifted in Northcote’s bedroom and adjoining dressing room, where all his suits hung in tatters from their rails and in the middle of which were piled slashed shirts and sweaters.
Hibbert said: ‘It’s the same in the outhouses. Everything – cars, equipment – totally wrecked.’
Carver saw that Jennings was standing with a handkerchief to his face, silently crying. Jane was gazing around, face unmoving, quite emotionless. His voice muffled, the butler said: ‘Everything’s gone… there’s nothing left.’
‘This wasn’t local,’ insisted Hibbert, defensively. ‘I know the people around here, particularly the bad ones. They burglarize, sure. But not much. And when they do they don’t do this. Here’s how I see it. There’s a lot of publicity, in the city. It’s a professional gang. And got to be a heavy gang of four, five, maybe more, guys to do all this. Overturn things like the freezers downstairs and tear off doors as they did. They decide on a big hit. They drive up – it would need a truck, obviously – and see the staff go: it’s in the papers that everyone’s going to Manhattan for the funeral. With the staff gone, they’ve got the whole place to themselves, to do with what they want.’
Would they have found what he hadn’t? wondered Carver, impatiently uninterested in the country sheriffs failed theorizing. It would have been impossible for anything anywhere here to have remained undiscovered. Stirring himself, if only for another token protest, he said: ‘Why trash it? Why not do what you think your locals would have done, simply steal what’s valuable?’
‘Looking for something that wasn’t so obviously sitting around to be snatched,’ said Hibbert, with unwitting perceptiveness.
‘What about the burglar alarm?’ demanded Jane, speaking at last.
‘Proof that they’re professionals, like their being able to open the safe,’ said the sheriff, at once. ‘Place as remote from any utilities as this has to be an individual electricity supply, a pole-mounted cable coming off the main supply, way down in the lane by the lake. And then carried here through two other pole mountings, with transformer boosting. Forensics have already found the gizmo. A bypass clamp between the input cable and the transformer on the last pole. The cable’s cut in between, immobilizing the system, but the alarm that should go off precisely when the cable is cut doesn’t operate because it’s still got a local battery supply.’
‘A system like that has to be at least thirty years old!’ exclaimed Jane. ‘Maybe more.’
‘At least,’ agreed Hibbert, shaking his head. ‘Litchfield’s a peaceful place, most times. Folks around here don’t think much of updating their equipment, once it’s in.’
Northcote hadn’t bothered to hide the still unstudied BHYF and NOXT documents that had been in the night- stand, remembered Carver. Carelessness, like not bothering about an out-of-date alarm system? Or complacency, Northcote’s belief after so many unthreatened, unendangered years that he had mob protection far more effective than anything electrical. Carver said: ‘Perhaps now they will.’
‘Forensics are going through the place as minutely as the burglars did,’ promised the sheriff. ‘They couldn’t have done all this without leaving something behind. We’ll find it.’
‘That kitchen floor’s a mess,’ reminded Carver. ‘Difficult not to have left a footprint, I would have thought?’ Why was he bothering, he asked himself again.
‘Now maybe,’ agreed Hibbert. ‘It would have taken time for it all to leak out like it has. By then they would have moved on. I already thought about it.’
He deserved that put-down for attempting to play Sherlock Holmes, Carver accepted. ‘If there was no burglar alarm, how come you discovered the break-in?’
The big-bellied man nodded towards Jane. ‘Mrs Carver’s call, yesterday. Telling me that the staff were all going early into the city. Told one of my car patrols to drive by every so often. When one did, first time this morning, the front door was wide open. He didn’t need to go in and see the state of the place to work out what had happened.’
There’s nothing left to steal,’ declared Jane, decisively. ‘We’ll go back to New York, do what we have to do there. I’ll tell the insurance people and perhaps you’ll come back directly after the funeral, to be here, Jack…?’ She paused, looking around the destroyed bedroom. ‘When you come back you’ll need to bring a sleeping bag.’
‘You got any idea what might be missing, Mrs Carver?’ asked Hibbert. ‘It’s important for the crime report.’
‘Absolutely none at all,’ said Jane, uncaringly. ‘It could be listed on the insurance details. I’ll get the underwriters to contact you.’
‘I’d appreciate it.’
In the helicopter on the way back yet again to the city, Carver said: ‘Hibbert was right. We didn’t need that.’ So much was crowding in on him that Carver found it difficult to get his thoughts in sequence: in any order at all. He needed space, an uninterrupted hour, to think.
‘It’s a decision reached for us,’ announced Jane, conclusively. ‘The house would have been sold anyway: I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to keep it, after what happened. Now we just throw everything out for garbage and call in the realtor.’
‘If that’s what you want,’ said Carver.
Jane said: ‘I wonder what they were looking for?’
As he unlocked the door the cybercafe manager said: ‘Here again, bright and early,’ and Alice remembered that during her interview with George Northcote he’d told her his work adage had always been that the early bird caught the fattest worms and hoped he was right in her case. She said: ‘I told you yesterday I’ve got a lot to do.’
She set out to work alphabetically, state by state, through her American subsidiary company listings for Mulder Inc., Encomp and Innsflow International, which started her in Alabama, where Mulder Supplies Inc. was headquartered in Birmingham, with ten outlets throughout the state. She spent a firewall-blocked hour password- probing, which by hacking standards was hardly any time at all, but which Alice calculated against the number of sites she wanted to penetrate would take her two months, working eight hours a day, seven days a week and then only if she allowed herself two hours successfully to get into each one. It was far easier – taking just ten minutes – getting into Alabama’s state tax records. There were filed-ahead-of-time returns for Mulder Supplies Inc. for the past five years, each showing a rising, after-tax profit. The first had been $250,000, the last $1,800,000. It took Alice less time – just five minutes – to find the password into the local Companies Register to confirm the trading designation for Mulder Supplies Inc. was as a blank video tape provider to Mulder’s entertainment division, the history of which was in the so far impenetrable Grand Cayman parent company files. She tried again – and failed – to get into Mulder Supplies headquarters before, strictly according to her alphabetical schedule, moving as far north as it was possible to get, to Anchorage, Alaska. She gave herself another hour to get undetected into Mulder Marine and was again defeated, but got into the state tax files just as easily as she had in Alabama, and they were again immaculate. Once more – although this time for only three of the last trading years – they showed an ever-
