it. As I turned back, clumsy with exhaustion, I caught the Thermos jug with my elbow. It sailed off the desk and bounced off the paneled wall under the window. It landed on its side on the floor, apparently undamaged. Not so the wall. The wood paneling where the jug had hit had slowly swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Eat your heart out, Enid Blyton. If preposterous coincidence is good enough for the Secret Seven, it’s good enough for me.
19
if the brannigans were posh enough to have a family motto, it would go something like, “What do you mean, I can’t*!” Just because I’ve never learned how to crack a safe didn’t mean I was going to close the panel and walk away. I sat on the floor opposite the safe and studied it. There was a six-digit electronic display above a keypad with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero to nine. Beside the keypad were buttons that I translated as “enter code,” “open,” “random reset,” “master.” That didn’t take me a whole lot further forward.
I checked my watch. Ten o’clock. Not too late to make a call. I took the mobile out of my bag and rang Dennis. It would have been cheaper to use the fax phone, but I’d already noticed that Gruppo Leopardi had itemized billing on their phone account and I didn’t want to leave a trail straight back to Dennis, especially given that he already had connections with these people via Turner. Dennis answered his phone on the second ring. “Hi, Dennis,” I said. “I’m looking at the outside of a safe and I want to be looking at the inside. Any ideas?”
“Kate, you’re more of a villain than I am. You know I haven’t touched a safe since Billy the Whip dropped one on my foot in 1983.”
“This isn’t the time for reminiscing. This call’s costing me a week’s wages.”
He chuckled. “Then somebody else must be paying for it. What does this safe look like?”
I described it to him. “You’re wasting your time, Kate. Beast like that, you’ve got no chance unless you know the combo,” he said sorrowfully.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. He might be a sloppy git though, this guy you’re having over. He might have gone for something really stupid like the last six digits of the phone number. Or the first six. Or his date of birth. Or his girlfriend’s name. Or some set of letters and numbers he sees in his office every day.”
I groaned. “Enough, already. You sure there’s no other way?”
“That’s why they call them safes,” Dennis said. “Where are you, anyway?”
“You don’t want to know. Believe me, you don’t want to know. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your help.”
I went back to the domestic files and tried various combinations of the phone number and any other number I could find, including the vehicle registrations. No joy. I sat in the boss’s chair and looked round me. What would he see from here that would be a constant aide-memoire? I got up and tried the model numbers of the fax machine, the modem and the photocopier. Nothing. I didn’t know the boss’s birthday, but I had a feeling that a man as security conscious as him wouldn’t have gone for anything that obvious.
It was last-resort time. What would / do if I wanted a code that was random enough for no one to guess, but accessible to me whenever I forgot it? Acting on pure instinct, I hit the power button on the computer again and watched the screen, looking for any six-digit combinations that came up during the boot process. I ended up with two. MB-4D33 was part of the operating system ident. And the CD-ROM drive’s device model number was CEr563 -X. The first string did nothing. But when I entered the second set of digits, the display changed from red to green. I couldn’t believe it.
Holding my breath, I hit the open button. There was a soft click and the door catch released. “There is a god, and she likes me,” I said softly. I opened the safe and stared in at the contents. There was a stack of papers about half an inch thick. On top of them sat a loose-leaf folder, slightly bigger than a Filo-fax. I took everything out of the safe and moved back to the desk. I went through the folder first. First there was a list of names, with dates and figures next to it. Following that were half a dozen pages listing numbered locations. Some of them had ticks beside them, and a couple were crossed out. Castle Dumdivie was on the list, with a tick. So were a few other names I recognized. Next came a list of dates and places followed by a number and letter code-20CC, 34H, 50,OOOE, that sort of thing. The fourth column was a number. A little bit of cross-checking, and I realized that the numbers corresponded to ticked locations on the list, and, in the cases I knew about, the dates were all two to four weeks after the burglaries. Finally, there were several pages of names, addresses and phone numbers. Halfway down the third page, I spotted Turner. I wasn’t sure what all of this meant, but I was beginning to have the glimmerings of an idea.
I opened the clasps of the folder and put the pages through the photocopier. While they were feeding through, I looked at the other papers. Some of them were legal contracts, and I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Others were handwritten notes which seemed to refer to meetings, but although I understood most of the words, I couldn’t get a lot of sense out of them. There were a few business letters, mostly of the “thank you for your letter of the fifteenth, we can confirm the safe arrival of your consignment” type. The final bundle of papers were draft accounts of Gruppo Leopardi. I copied the lot. Once I’d finished, I replaced everything in the safe, exactly as I’d found it. I had the papers, but I wanted a little bit of insurance, just in case anything happened on the way home to deprive me of my photocopies. The fax machine was the best source of that insurance, but I didn’t want to send the stuff to my office number for the same reason I’d used the mobile to phone Dennis. It needed to go somewhere secure, but somewhere large enough for it not to be obvious who specifically it had gone to. Ideally, it also had to go somewhere that even the Mafia would think twice about storming mob-handed.
There was only one place and one person I could think of that fit the bill. Detective Chief Inspector Delia Prentice, top dog on the Regional Crime Squad’s fraud task force. This wasn’t her bailiwick, but Delia’s still the only copper I’d trust with anything that might put me at risk. I’d worked with Delia a couple of times now since we’d first been introduced by Josh Gilbert. They’d been at Cambridge together, and although their fascination with finance high and low had taken them in radically different directions, they’d stayed close enough for Josh to recognize that Delia and I are kindred spirits. Since our first encounter, we’d become close friends, and Delia had taken a key position in the network of female friends that helps and sustains me in my work as well as my leisure time. I knew if I faxed this wodge of incomprehensible paperwork to Delia, she’d tuck it away safely in her drawer till I turned up to explain its significance.
I took a sheet of paper out of the stationery drawer and scribbled a cover sheet. “Fax for the urgent and confidential attention of DCI Prentice, Regional Crime Squad. Dear Delia: Vital evidence. Please keep safe until I can fill you in on the deep background. I’ll call you as soon as I get back. Thanks. KB.” That should do it, I thought, dialing her departmental fax machine. God knows what the duty CID would make of a hundred-page fax from Italy in the middle of the night.
By the time I’d finished, it was after two. I bundled up my photocopies, stuffed them in an envelope and tucked the lot into my bulging bag. Time to get the hell out of here, as far away as possible. I had a horrible feeling that I knew what had happened to Nicholas Turner, probably because of my bug, and I didn’t want to end up the same way. There wasn’t a trace of the guy in any of the spare bedrooms, which put paid to any comforting ideas about him having nipped into Sestri in a taxi for dinner.
I switched everything off and locked the desk drawers again. Satisfied that everything looked just as it had when I’d walked into the office, I got out, locking the door behind me. I replaced the keys in the dummy can, hoping that my memory of how the contents of the cabinet had been arranged was accurate. I trotted down the stairs and back to the kitchen. I put my ear to the cellar door. Silence. I had a momentary pang of conscience, wondering what would happen to the big man when he came round and found himself tied up in the dark for an indefinite period of time. Then I reminded myself that he was probably directly responsible for whatever had happened to Turner, and I stopped feeling guilty. Besides, judging by the pristine condition of the villa, I reckoned there must be a maid who came in every day to polish the floors, the furniture and the kitchen equipment. By the time she arrived, Gianni would probably be bellowing like a bull.
I let myself out of the french windows and stood on the patio, weighing up what to do next. I had the black box that would open the gates for me, but I didn’t know where the security system was controlled from, and the cameras would still be rolling. I wasn’t keen on finding myself the star of the Mafia equivalent of Crimewatch, so I decided to help myself to one of the vehicles, just to keep myself hidden from the all-seeing eyes by the gate. You
