family as her illness had allowed. I, meanwhile, had no one other than my demented old grandmother, who sometimes didn’t recognize me anymore.
Except that I now knew I did have family after all. I had two half sisters in Australia. The only problem was that I didn’t know their names or where they lived, and they, in turn, would have absolutely no idea that I existed. I couldn’t imagine my father had told his new family that he already had a son, the offspring of a wife that he had strangled in England before fleeing by ship to the Antipodes.
I went downstairs again and back into the sitting room.
Once more I sifted through the sad piles of shirts, underwear and handkerchiefs as if I would now find something I had previously missed. But there was nothing.
I looked at the black-and-red canvas rucksack. An airline baggage label with LHR printed across it in large, bold capital letters was fastened around one of the straps with the name GRADY printed smaller on it alongside a bar code, but there was no actual indication of where the label had been attached to the strap. Once again I stared into the rucksack as if I might have somehow overlooked something. As before, it appeared to be completely empty, but, nevertheless, I tipped the whole thing upside down and gave it a good shake. It was more out of frustration than in any expectation of finding anything.
As I turned it over, back and forth, I could feel something move.
I placed it down on the floor and peered inside once more.
The rucksack had a waterproof liner sewn into the canvas with a drawstring at the top. There was a gap at the back, and I slid my hand down between the liner and the canvas. A space about two inches deep across the whole bottom of the rucksack existed between the liner and the base, and here I found the treasure that the man in the parking lot must have sought.
I pulled out three blue-plastic-wrap-covered packages and carefully used a pair of kitchen scissors to open them at one end. Each contained sizable wads of large-denomination banknotes, two in British pounds and the other in Australian dollars. I counted each pack in turn and did some rough mental arithmetic.
My father had taken lodgings in a cheap seedy one-star hotel in Sussex Gardens with about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of cash in his luggage.
And he had died for it.
6
There were five other items hidden in the space, in addition to the money.
One was a South African passport in the name of Willem Van Buren.
Another was a small polythene bag containing what appeared at first to be ten grains of rice, but, on closer examination, were clearly man-made. They looked like frosted glass.
Two others were photocopied booklets about six by eight inches with DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION printed along the top of the front cover.
And the fifth was a flat black object about six inches long and two inches wide with some buttons on it. At first I thought it was a television remote control, but it didn’t appear to have VOLUME and CHANNEL buttons, just 0 to 9 plus an ENTER button. I pushed them all. Nothing happened. I turned it over. There was a battery compartment on the back that, I discovered, was empty, so I took the device through to the kitchen and scavenged the battery from the kitchen clock.
I pushed the buttons again and, this time, was rewarded by a small red light that appeared in the top right- hand corner for a moment before going out. Nothing else happened. I pointed the thing at the television and pushed again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened other than the flash of the little red light.
I didn’t know much about electronics in general, or TV remotes in particular, but I did know that they had to be programmed correctly.
I would show the thing to Luca, I thought. He was not only my whiz kid at using the computer, he also understood what went on under its cover-Luca had even worked as an electronics maintenance man briefly before he transferred to the racetrack. My own technical ability ran simply to giving something a sharp clout with my hand if it failed to perform as expected.
I put the battery back in the kitchen clock, which I reset to the right time of twenty to one. I had to be back on the road by nine o’clock in the morning.
I suddenly felt very hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d had a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast for breakfast sixteen hours earlier. I hadn’t had the time.
I looked in the fridge. There wasn’t much there. I usually went to the supermarket once a week on a Sunday to get the essentials like milk, bread and those ready-cooked meals I could simply stuff in the microwave. But this last weekend I had somehow forgotten to go. I shook the plastic milk bottle. There was only enough left for a small bowl of cereal and maybe a cup of coffee in the morning. The loaf of bread was down to the last few slices, and they looked to have passed their best with green mold spots appearing around the edges.
I found a tin of baked beans in a cupboard and made myself beans on toast, carefully removing a few moldy bits from the bread before placing it in the toaster.
I spread the bounty from the rucksack’s secret compartment out on the kitchen table in front of me and looked at it as I ate.
I picked up the two booklets with the heading DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION. I hadn’t seen one close-up before, but I knew what they were. “Horse passports,” I believed they were called, and every racehorse had to have one in order to race. They were a detailed record of a horse’s marking and hair whorls. A horse presented at a racetrack for a race had to match the one described in its passport to ensure that another horse wasn’t running in its place. In the olden days, unscrupulous trainers might have presented a “ringer” that would run as if it were another horse. The ringer was usually much better than the horse that should have been running and hence it would start at much more favorable odds than if its true identity had been known. Many such deceptions had raked in the cash before the introduction of detailed horse passports had put a stop to it.
But the two in front of me were photocopies, not the originals, and could never have been passed off as the real thing. I scanned through them but could see nothing out of the ordinary.
Next I picked up the human passport, that of Willem Van Buren from South Africa, and looked at the photograph. It wasn’t the same man I had seen in Sussex Gardens, I was sure of that, because the face that looked out at me from the image on the passport was that of my father. Van Buren must have been the name he had used to check into the Royal Sovereign Hotel.
Did I have yet more sisters, or perhaps some brothers, in Cape Town or Johannesburg?
I was also intrigued by the little bag of rice-type grains. I took one of them out of the bag and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. It was, in fact, slightly larger than a grain of rice, being about a centimeter long and about a third of that in diameter. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see through as it was opaque. I shook it by my ear, but it made no noise.
Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to hide a few chips of frosted glass? There had to be more to them than the eye, or the ear, could tell.
I took my tomato-sauce-covered knife and recklessly crushed the grain against the table. It actually broke surprisingly easily. I could now see that the grain was not made of solid glass but was a cylinder with what appeared to be a minute electronic circuit housed inside.
I looked carefully at the nine still left in the bag. There were definitely no external connections, no terminals to connect to. Again, I would ask Luca. If anyone knew what they were, he would. I scooped the broken bits back into the bag and placed it on the table.
And then, of course, there was the money.
What should I do with it all?
Well, I told myself, I should go and give it to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn. But how could I? He certainly wouldn’t take it very kindly that I hadn’t told him about my father’s luggage earlier. He might accuse me again of being somehow involved in his murder.
I began to wish I had told him straightaway about the seedy hotel in Sussex Gardens. It would have made things much easier, and also I wouldn’t have suffered the fright of my life. I still came out in a cold sweat just
