‘Yes, because they’re going to leave the admin tower unlocked, aren’t they? After all, it’s only full of all their top-secret files, why would they bother locking that?’
‘Humour me.’
‘Fine.’ She pulled on the handle: it clicked, then the door swung open without so much as a creak.
The Bloodsmith pulled his chin in. ‘Does that worry you as much as it worries me?’
Lucy gathered up her backpack again. ‘Want to call it quits and go home?’
‘What, and wait for the next pair of thugs to come knocking?’
‘Yeah, me neither.’ She slipped into the reception area and eased the door shut behind her.
No sign of any traitorous little red lights, winking in the darkness, and she hadn’t seen any motion detectors or security cameras the last two times she was in here, but that didn’t mean anything: these days you could buy a spy-cam off the internet that was smaller than a thimble. Still, too late to worry about that now.
She gave her glasses a quick dry-and-polish with a clean hankie, then pulled on the headtorch and clicked it to the lowest setting, tiptoeing up the stairs, past photo after photo of the great and the good, to the second floor. ‘RECORDS R — Z ~ STAFF ONLY’. She tried the handle, but the door was definitely locked this time. It was a more modern lock, too.
If this was a film, she could’ve poked about inside it with a kirby grip for thirty seconds and it’d pop open, but down here in the real world...
She dug the cordless drill out again and fitted a 6-mm metal bit into the chuck, then placed the point an inch below the keyhole and started her up nice and slow. Put a bit more speed into it when the drill had made a decent dent in the metal plate. Keeping her head back, out of range of the tiny flying curls of metal. The glasses would protect her eyes, but no point getting them scratched.
‘Look on the bright side, Kiddo, at least we know it’s not a trap. If it was, they’d have left this one unlocked as well.’
The drill was well into its stride now, squealing its way through the lock’s cartridge, juddering every time it hit a spring, before jerking forward into the next one.
Then there was no resistance at all — must have drilled through and out the other side. She put the drill back in the rucksack and pulled out Dad’s ancient flathead screwdriver. Turned it around the wrong way and chapped the wooden hilt on the lock’s face, four or five times, till a collection of little metal pins tumbled out of the drilled hole to click and ping against the marble floor.
‘Here we go.’ She turned the screwdriver the right way around and slid the flat head into the keyhole and turned. Clunk.
This time, when she tried the handle, the door swung open. The whole procedure had taken about seventy seconds.
Lucy stepped into the dark canyon between the opposing walls of filing cabinets, headtorch sweeping the polished wood like a searchlight.
Now for the tricky part: figuring out where the hell Benedict Strachan’s file was hidden in the school’s byzantine non-alphabetical filing system...
‘This is taking far too long.’
Lucy scowled down from the top of her ladder. ‘You’re not helping.’
The Bloodsmith shrugged in his pale spotlight, making a show of checking his watch. ‘It’s after midnight and we’re still no nearer finding Benedict Strachan’s file, Kiddo. At this rate they’ll be doing morning assembly and we’ll still be in here.’
She read her way across the next three drawers.
‘WAITIMU, NKASIOGI’, ‘WALKINSHAW, PETER’, ‘VOIGT, BARDUWULF’.
Moved down two rungs.
‘TULLOCH, GORDON’, ‘RUKHMABAI, BHAVNA’, ‘SYMINGTON-BROWN, MARTIN’.
He was right: this was going to take forever.
‘YUNG, TALIA’, ‘YOO, CHIN-SUN’, ‘WESTWATER, COLLIN’.
But what other choice did she have? There was no sodding logic to the system, at least none that she could see. It was all random.
‘ZAKHAROV, PAVEL’, ‘RHYNIE, PAUL’, ‘TILFORD-SMITH, ROBERTA’. And she was still at least twelve foot off the ground.
‘WRIGHTSON, BORRIS’, ‘VELÁZQUEZ Y GALDÁMEZ, CATALINA’, ‘YEADON, SAMUEL’.
Hold on.
She climbed up a couple of rungs again.
‘RHYNIE, PAUL’, as in Paul Rhynie, the Business Secretary?
Might as well, as she was already up here.
It was a bit of a balancing act, getting the drill out of the backpack without falling off the ladder, but at least the 6-mm bit was still attached, and the drawer locks were much less robust than the door’s had been. Thirty seconds and she was in.
The drawer was a good two-and-a-half feet deep and full of hanging files, each with its own named divider.
She pulled one out and laid it on top of the others.
The Bloodsmith gave a big, exaggerated sigh. ‘Do we really have time for that?’
‘Still not helping.’
It was full of newspaper clippings about Paul Rhynie’s rise to power: mostly bits from the Financial Times featuring contracts he’d awarded, many of which had a gold star stuck to them. No idea what that was supposed to signify. The next file contained handwritten notes, detailing a whole raft of deals that looked about as legal as a pallet-load of cocaine. And speaking of cocaine — the one after that held about half a dozen grainy hidden-camera photographs of the Business Secretary and a leggy blonde in a hotel room somewhere, snorting up before getting down to some pretty hard-core sexual activities. ‘Wow.’
Tucked in right at the back was a hanging file with an old manila folder in it, ‘ENTRANCE EXAM’ written on the front in a child’s careful printing. Inside were Rhynie’s IQ and aptitude tests, along with the obligatory rambling essay entitled, ‘WHAT I DID OVER THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS, BY PAUL LYNDON RHYNIE (AGED 11½)’. The IQ score was 116, so slightly better than average, but not exactly setting the world on fire. According to the assessment, what young Paul did have was a very rich and well-connected family, so the examiners had approved his application to join St Nicholas College.
The Dunk would’ve had something to say about that.
The last thing in the folder was a lumpy white C4 envelope with a black border around it.
Lucy tipped the contents out.
‘Bloody hell...’
Four glossy eight-by-ten photographs, taken with a telephoto lens; a single sheet of A4, covered in the same handwriting as the essay; and what looked like a grubby striped tie in a ziplock plastic pouch.
My name is Paul Lyndon Rhynie and I hereby confess to the murder of Melissa Allenson, by strangulation. I acted alone and am solely responsible for my actions...
‘Holy shit!’
It was all there: dates, times; how he’d found her soliciting down by the docks in Logansferry and convinced her he was lost and there’d be a reward if she helped him find his way home; how he’d assaulted her in the car park of a disused cash-and-carry; strangled her with one of his father’s regimental ties; doused the body in lighter fluid and set fire to it...
The first photo showed two boys talking to a woman, beneath a streetlight, in front of a blank brick wall — ‘PIERSON ROAD’ visible on a sign above her head. The boys were dressed in hoodies and anoraks; she was in a grubby duffel coat, high-heeled boots, and a painfully short skirt. There was something... artistic about the image, as if it was destined for a gallery or a coffee-table book.
The next picture wasn’t. It caught the moment in the disused car park when both boys tackled their victim to the ground. They were garrotting her in the third photo. And in the last one, they stood over her body as blue and yellow flames licked along her back.