I drove home at a law-abiding speed for once. It was the traffic that was my downfall. I had to pass the Corn Exchange on my way home, and as I drove up Cateaton Street, everything ground to a complete halt. The lights at the bottom of Shude Hill had died, and the resulting rush-hour chaos brought the city centre to a standstill. It seemed like a sign from the gods, so I pulled off the main drag on to Hanging Ditch and parked the van.
Five minutes later, I was inside Martin Cheetham's office.
18
Kate Brannigan's Burglary Tip No. 3: Always burgle offices in daylight hours. People notice lights in offices at night. And people who notice lights in offices that shouldn't be lit up have a nasty habit of being security staff. However, rules are made to be broken, and besides, I wasn't the first unauthorized visitor to Martin Cheetham's office.
That much was obvious from the safe. The reproduction of Monet's Water Lilies that had covered it on my previous visit lay on the floor, while the door of the safe stood ajar. With a frustrated sigh, I took a look inside. I found exactly what I expected. Nothing.
I looked round the room in something approaching despair. There was enough paper in here to keep the least popular detective constable on the force busy for a month. Besides, I wasn't convinced that I would find anything enlightening. I was still pinning my hopes on Cheetham's computer files, particularly since he had the kind of scanner that would have allowed him to import a copy of any document straight into his computer. A quick check of the desk revealed the same absence of discs that I'd noted back at the house. But there was one difference here. The PC sitting on the desk had a hard disc. In other words, the chances were that the master copy of the material on the discs that had been stolen was permanently stored in the machine in front of me.
It was last resort time, so I did the obvious. I switched on the machine. It automatically loaded the system files. Then a prompt appeared, demanding input. I asked the machine to show me the headings under which it was storing stuff. In the following list, I spotted a couple of familiar software names -a word-processing package, a spreadsheet and an accounts program. The rest of the list were probably data files. First, I loaded the word processing package which would allow me to read the data files, then I tried a directory called WORK.C. It seemed to be all the correspondence plus details of deeds on the properties currently being handled. The files were subdivided according to whether Cheetham was acting for vendor or buyer, and what stage he was up to. It was incredibly boring.
The next directory I tried was called WORK.L. When I attempted to access it, nothing happened. I tried again and nothing happened. I tried one or two other ways of getting into the directory, but there was clearly some kind of access block on it. Desperately, I searched Cheetham's drawers again, looking for a single word scribbled somewhere that might be a password for the directory, but without success. I knew that, given time, Bill or I could hack our way into the hidden files of the locked directory, but time was the one thing I wasn't sure I had.
What the hell? I'd taken so many chances already, what was one more? Closing the door on the latch behind me, I left Cheetham's office and returned to the van. I unlocked the security box welded to the floor and took out our office laptop PC. It's a portable machine, more compatible with its desktop equivalents than any married couple I know. It can store the equivalent of sixty novels. I walked back into the Corn Exchange with the fat briefcase, trying hard to look nonchalant, and returned undetected to Cheetham's office by some miracle.
Amongst the resident software on our portable's hard disc was a program that could have been designed for situations like this. It's a special file transfer kit that is used to move data at high speed between portables and desktop machines. I uncoiled the lead that would form the physical link between the two machines and plugged it in at both ends. I switched on my machine and booted up the software.
The program sends over a highly sophisticated communications program, which is then used to 'steal' the files from the target machine. The big advantage of using these kits is that you leave no trace on the machine you've raided. The very process itself also often bypasses any security package that the target PC's operator has installed. The final advantage is that it's extremely fast. Ten minutes after returning to Cheetham's office, I was ready to walk out of the door with the contents of WORK.C and WORK.L firmly ensconced on my own hard disc.
There were just a couple of things I had to do first. I picked up the phone and dialled my favourite Chinese restaurant for a takeaway. Then I called Greater Manchester Police's switchboard. I calmly told the operator who answered that there was a dead body at 27 Tamarind Grove, and hung up.
The traffic had begun to clear, and I picked up my Chinese fifteen minutes later. I'd just parked the van on the drive of my bungalow when I remembered I hadn't checked the tapes from the surveillance. I had two choices. Either I could go indoors and eat my Chinese, preferably with Richard, then, once I'd got all comfy and relaxed, I could schlep all the way over to Stockport and do the business. Or I could go now, and hope that there was nothing that would require my presence there all night. Being what Richard would describe as a boring old fart, I decided to finish the day's work before I settled down. Besides, my bruises were aching, and I knew that if I sank into the comfort of my own sofa, I might never get up again unless it was to crawl into a hot bath.
The drive to Stockport was the Chinese aroma torture. There's nothing worse than the smell of hot and sour soup and salt and pepper ribs when nothing's stayed in your stomach since breakfast and you can't have them. What made it even more frustrating was that there was no one home in my nice little staked-out semi. And, according to my bug, no one had been home either. The phone had rung another couple of times, and that was the sum total of my illegal surveillance.
When I finally got home, the offer of a share in my Chinese distracted Richard from a pirate radio bhangra station he'd been listening to in the course of duty. Sometimes I think his job's even worse than mine. I brought him up to date with my adventures, which added a spice to dinner that even the Chinese had never thought of.
'So he topped himself, then? Or was it one of those sleazy deaths by sexual misadventure?' he asked, doing his impersonation of a tabloid journo as he poked through the char siu pork to get at the bean sprouts below.
'It looks like it. But I don't think he did,” I said.
'Why's that, Supersleuth?'
'A collection of little things that individually are insignificant, but taken together make me feel very uneasy,' I replied.
'Want to run it past me? See if it's just your imagination?' Richard offered. I knew he really meant: because you're too well brought up to talk with your mouth full, that means there will be more for me. I gave in gracefully, because he was quite right, I did want to check that my suspicions had some genuine foundation.
'OK,' I said. 'Point one. I take Nell to be Martin Cheetham's girlfriend, judging by the body language on the two occasions I saw them together. She was in the house for about twenty minutes, thirty max, before Lomax arrived. Now if she and Cheetham were getting it on together, that might explain why he was in his drag. But if they were busy having a little loving, what was going down with Lomax and the files?'