of cash on which to exist until the fuss died down.
‘I found him. He’s dead.’ Harry described briefly what had happened.
‘Jeez, that’s tough. Remind me never to steal anything from Colonel Gaddafi.’
The house looked no less imposing the following morning at nine thirty. The local school run was over, always a time when nobody had time to notice anything, in Harry’s experience, as he led the way through the front door and across a broad hallway to a small green box on one wall.
‘You have twenty seconds to key in the number,’ a tearless and artfully ‘traumatized’ Mrs Param had told him half an hour earlier. It was all the time they had, she had warned, sitting regally in her sister’s front room, before the private security company she had insisted her husband use came to investigate.
She had given grudging permission for them to look around, but only after the intervention of her husband’s former employers.
‘How long do I have to put up with this?’ she had demanded coldly. She was attractive in a glossy, brittle way and, if she had shed any tears at her husband’s disappearance, there was little evidence in her manner or the precision of her make-up. Harry thought she needed a swift kick up the pants, but kept his thoughts to himself. Somehow, given the acerbic comments voiced by her sister about her absent brother-in-law being nothing but a gambler and wastrel, he doubted it would be long before Mrs Param returned to clear the place out for a quick and vengeful sale.
‘A few hours,’ Harry had told her. ‘A day at most.’ He hadn’t mentioned that if they had to enter the fabric of the house to see if her husband had hidden files or documents inside the walls or beneath the flooring, it could take a lot longer. That sort of decision was down to Jennings and his client.
After keying in the security code, he stood and breathed in the atmosphere for a moment before walking through the house. Rik hung back, humming quietly. This was Harry’s area of expertise, a time to acclimatize himself to the feel of the place and soak up the colour and tone of Raymond Param’s former life.
The house was richly furnished and comfortable, with gold-embroidered chairs and sofas set with precision around a large living room overlooking a neat rear garden and patio. The carpet was pale and expensive throughout. Apart from a huge kitchen, a utility room, dining room, study and a downstairs bathroom completed the ground floor layout, like the pages of a property catalogue. It was the domain of a childless couple: no clutter, no toys, no signs of disarray from careless teenagers or rampaging tots.
But there were signs that the police had been through the house, evidenced by the minute shift of certain items, the slightly opened drawers and small depressions in the carpet where furniture had been moved and put back a fraction out of place.
There were a few photos, carefully positioned for maximum effect, like exhibits in a gallery. Other than people who were probably unnamed members of the extended Param family on both sides, they were mostly of Param and his wife, Saskia, arms artfully entwined and heads close but never quite touching. None of the shots displayed any obvious warmth between them. It was as if they had been concentrating more on the professional than the personal touch, like mannequins in a photo shoot. Raymond Param was athletic, well dressed and groomed, from the brushed hair and crisp shirts, to the display of a large Rolex and the chunky cufflinks at his wrists. His wife wore her clothes and make-up with the ease of a professional model, smiling carefully at the camera but not once at her husband.
‘Nothing blindingly obvious,’ said Harry. There had been little in the way of clues or suggestions from Saskia Param as to where her husband might have gone, and he’d dismissed further questioning of her as a waste of time. It was down to sifting through whatever they could find in the hopes of uncovering a lead. The one thing he was sure of was that this house had ceased to be a centre of marital bliss a long time ago.
‘I’ll start on the study.’ Rik was looking through the doorway at a grey PC sitting on a desk.
Harry nodded. ‘Go to it. I’ll do the rest.’ He made his way upstairs and began working methodically through the rooms, beginning with the master bedroom. He wasn’t hopeful of finding anything because Mrs Param had made it clear that her husband’s domain was the study, and she knew for certain that he never left anything in his suits because she always checked. This had been said without a blink of embarrassment. He looked anyway, because as he knew from experience, even the most watchful of wives missed things. And an apparently innocuous scrap of paper was all he needed to give him a trail to follow.
Twenty minutes later he closed the door to the main bedroom. The wardrobe held only clothes and the drawers contained smaller items and accessories. The en suite bathroom proved a similar blank, as did the other rooms and cupboards. If Param had left anything here, it was somewhere inside the furniture or concealed behind the walls, where nothing short of wholesale demolition would find it.
He returned to the study where Rik was staring at the PC with a concentrated look of disgust.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ said Rik. ‘It’s a useless pile of crap. He cleaned it.’
‘How?’
‘He must have downloaded a wipe utility to sanitize the hard drive.’ He tapped the keyboard in frustration. ‘Kills all the data stone dead.’ He gestured at a laptop on the sideboard. ‘Same with that. No links to follow, either.’
‘Well, although I only understood half of what you just said,’ Harry murmured, ‘it means he wasn’t fooling. He was covering his tracks.’ It also meant that it killed any chances of Param having been coerced by a third party to defraud the funds. ‘We’ll have to do it the hard way.’ He began pulling drawers out of the large, ornate desk, and emptying them one by one, placing each item to one side after examination. There was also a sideboard, a drinks cupboard and a filing cabinet, all of which were places Param might have left something they could use. If they were lucky.
Rik scowled, cheated of the opportunity to use his specialist skills. He selected a drawer and dumped the contents on a spare piece of carpet and began sifting through.
TEN
Two hours later, they adjourned to the kitchen for coffee and a conference. So far they had come up empty.
If there was anything in the desk, they hadn’t found it. Every invoice, receipt or statement cross-referenced perfectly to a household or work expense, and those that didn’t, they had cross-checked with Saskia Param. It had taken several phone calls to elicit the details, along with repeated queries from her about why they needed to go through her private papers in this way.
After the first three calls, Harry had given up explaining.
‘If you want to find out what happened to your husband,’ he’d said bluntly during the last call, ‘and get your house back, this is the only way.’ It had shut her up, although he guessed only for a while. He sensed she had already lined up a divorce lawyer ready for the fray, and was impatient for them to be out so that she could move in and begin the next phase of her life.
‘He’s clean,’ Harry said, staring into his coffee, adding in a way that made it sound an almost unhealthy trait in a grown man, ‘Too bloody clean, in fact.’
‘As in?’ Rik had come to rely on Harry’s judgement in these things. As straightforward as Harry liked to pretend to be, he had the ability to peer deep into the minds of his quarries and understand what they were thinking.
‘Param’s wealthy, married, no kids, great job. OK, his missus is as cold as custard, but nobody’s life is perfect, right? Then he goes walkabout with a ton of money. Also not uncommon. . for a fraudster. But this was no spur of the moment thing. Too much planning went into it.’ He gestured around the spotless kitchen, a mocking reflection of what they had found everywhere else. ‘It’s like he sanitized the whole place before he bunked off. And that lot in there,’ he nodded towards the study, now littered with piles of papers, none of which had offered a single lead, ‘is uncanny. Nobody could work on a scam, then do a bunk and not leave
Rik shrugged easily. ‘Like you said, he planned it.’ He glanced at Harry, took a tour round the kitchen, then said casually, ‘Is this what you thought you’d be doing after Five, looking for runners who didn’t want to be
