Shepherd sat back on his heels and picked up a blue woollen cardigan with cream buttons. After Sue had died, he couldn’t bring himself to take her clothes out of the wardrobe for four months. Then he had put them into black bags and left them in the spare bedroom at their house in Ealing. It wasn’t until Katra had arrived that he had thrown them out. He knew exactly how the old man had felt. He put the cardigan back into the box and closed it.
A brick wall divided his half of the attic from Elaine’s, with a plastic water tank at one end. He walked carefully across the beams to the dividing wall and banged it with the flat of his hand. He had hoped it would be plaster board that he could cut through it, but it was bricks.
He returned to the trapdoor, went down the aluminium ladder, folded it up and closed the hatch. He took the pole downstairs and went to the sitting room. Elaine’s driveway was still empty. He took out his mobile and called her. ‘Hey, where are you?’ he asked.
‘Bangor,’ she said. ‘I’ve a few calls to make here. Why, what’s up?’
‘I saw a guy in your back garden,’ said Shepherd. ‘Teenager, I think, prowling around. He was heading for the shed but when he saw me he bolted. I had a quick look around and there were no windows broken or anything so he was probably just trying his luck.’
‘The burglar alarm’s usually enough of a deterrent,’ said Elaine. ‘They see the box and go off in search of a house that’s less trouble.’
‘Like mine?’ said Shepherd.
Elaine laughed. ‘I’m afraid so,’ she said. ‘You should get an alarm, too. Thanks for keeping an eye on things for me, Jamie.’
‘It’s the neighbourly thing to do,’ he said.
Salih walked out of Maida Vale Tube station and crossed Elgin Avenue. Viktor Merkulov was sitting outside a Starbucks cafe, sipping a latte. He was wearing a cashmere overcoat and a fur hat, and a pair of black leather gloves lay on the table in front of him. Salih smiled. The man dressed like a Russian cliche.
Merkulov waved as he walked over. ‘Come, my friend, sit down, what would you like to drink?’
‘Why are you sitting outside?’ asked Salih. ‘It’s freezing.’ He already knew that the Russian had chosen Maida Vale for their meeting because it was a short walk from St John’s Wood where he owned a three-bedroom penthouse apartment with views over Lord’s cricket ground.
‘This?’ laughed Merkulov. ‘This is nothing. I can tell you have never been to Siberia.’
Salih sat down. ‘No coffee for me,’ he said.
‘Tea, then,’ said Merkulov, standing up.
‘Tea,’ agreed Salih. ‘No milk. No sugar.’
The Russian went inside to fetch it. Salih shivered and folded his arms. He was wearing a reefer jacket over an Aran sweater but the wind chilled him. An elderly woman walked past with a Jack Russell on a tartan lead. She looked at him suspiciously and he smiled amiably. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘Lovely dog.’
The woman’s jaw dropped, then her face creased into a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and hurried off. Salih’s smile tightened as he watched her go. All Muslims were regarded with suspicion in London, following the bombings on the Tube system. It didn’t matter that the terrorist attacks were the work of a very small minority of Islamic fundamentalists, every brown face was treated as a potential threat.
Merkulov returned with a mug of tea and two chocolate muffins. He put the tea in front of Salih, then sat down heavily and held out the plate.
‘I always worry about eating with former KGB people,’ Salih said. ‘I feel I should be checking everything with a Geiger counter.’
Merkulov scowled. ‘Just because a Russian dissident gets radiation poisoning, everyone blames us,’ he said. He took a bite from a muffin and continued to speak with his mouth full. ‘Do you really think that if Putin wanted someone dead, he couldn’t arrange to have it look like an accident? There are experts who can make any death look like an accident. Look at what happened to Princess Diana.’ Muffin crumbs splattered across the table and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Salih grinned. ‘You’re not taking credit for what happened to Diana, are you?’
‘Of course it wasn’t the KGB, we had no reason to harm her. But the British Establishment, now that’s a different matter.’
Salih slid a folded piece of paper across the table. ‘I need someone to track this mobile phone for me. Can you do that?’
‘It belongs to the American or to the woman?’
‘The woman,’ said Salih. ‘She might be in Northern Ireland.’
‘Do you know which phone company she’s with? Vodaphone, T-Mobile? Orange?’
‘All I have is the number,’ said Salih. ‘I need to know where she is.’
‘That’s easy,’ said the Russian. ‘Do you know what make of phone she has?’ Salih shook his head.
‘Some of the new models have GPS capability, which means we can pin her down to a few metres in real time. If not, we’ll know which transmitter she’s near. In the city that could be a hundred feet or so.’
‘And would you be able to get a list of calls, incoming and outgoing?’
The Russian pulled a face. ‘All things are possible, my friend. For a price.’
‘And get me the locations of the numbers?’
‘The landlines, of course. It is harder to get the locations of mobiles.’
Salih took a brown envelope from inside his jacket and slid it across the table. ‘Ten thousand pounds on account,’ he said.
Merkulov picked up the envelope. ‘It will take me a day or two at most.’
‘I want to know by tonight,’ said Salih. ‘I will pay whatever it takes.’
‘This is why I’d never feed you a radioactive soda,’ said Merkulov, tapping the envelope on Salih’s shoulder. ‘You are too valuable a customer.’
Shepherd checked that no one was on the pavement, then used his keys to open Elaine’s front door. He was carrying the pole he’d found in his garden shed. He closed the door behind him and tapped the four-digit code into the keypad on the burglar-alarm console.
On his last surreptitious visit to Elaine’s house he’d searched the ground floor. He still had to do the bedrooms but he decided that the attic was a better bet. He used the pole to open the hatch and pull down the folding stairs, then went up and switched on the light. The layout was a mirror image of his own attic, with the water tank in the far corner, next to the dividing wall with his own property. Half a dozen cardboard boxes had been stacked against the tank, and there was a wooden cabin trunk with a combination lock. Shepherd had a quick look through the boxes but they contained junk – old lamps, toys, ornaments, several children’s annuals and some schoolbooks, scuffed handbags and winter coats.
Shepherd reclosed the cardboard boxes and knelt beside the trunk and examined the combination lock. A three-digit number would open it, which meant there were a thousand possible combinations. Assuming it would take two seconds to try each number, he could do all thousand in two thousand seconds, which was just over half an hour. He had time but . . . He closed his eyes and went to the file Button had shown him, mentally flicking through the numbers that meant something to Elaine. He tried her birthdate, month and day, then day and month. No joy. He tried her husband’s birthday. Her wedding anniversary wouldn’t work because it fell on 3 May, which meant two digits. Would she have used the date her husband had been killed – 28 August? He tried eight-two-eight and two-eight-eight but neither worked. Her son, maybe. Little Timmy. He tried his birthday, month followed by year, then year followed by month. The lock clicked open.
Inside the trunk he found three photograph albums, two with a green fake leather binding, the third bound in white leather. He took out the first and flicked through it. There were photographs of Elaine as a baby, as a child and as a young woman. She had been a pretty toddler with long, curly red hair.
The second album contained pictures of her with her husband, mostly holiday snaps. Several had been taken on beaches, and in every image they were holding each other. They had clearly been a close couple. Half-way through the album she was pregnant, then she and her husband were holding a baby. Shepherd felt dirty as he rooted through Elaine’s memories. He had no right to be handling her possessions, prying into her personal life.