Richter nudged open the door on the opposite side of the lounge. He took one look inside and immediately stepped back.
‘Michael.’ The SIS officer swung round to look at him. ‘Time to call this one in,’ Richter said. ‘Somebody’s popped your star witness.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘Any problems?’ Wilson asked quietly, as Petrucci stepped into the hotel room and began pulling off his Arab garments. Music was playing from the bedside radio to confuse any microphones.
‘Nobody followed me, and no one seemed to take the slightest notice of me at the apartment building.’
‘And Holden?’
‘James Holden,’ Petrucci replied, with a wolfish smile, ‘is now a sleeping partner — sleeping peacefully, and permanently.’
‘Good. What’s in the bag?’
‘A bunch of disks and stuff from his study. I don’t think he made copies of anything we sent him, but if he did they’ll be amongst this lot.’ Petrucci lifted up the plastic carrier bag. ‘I wiped the hard drive on his PC, so that’s now been sanitized. I don’t think we need worry any more about James Holden or his predictions.’
It didn’t take Inspector Hussein long to respond to the call, because he was sitting with Dawson and O’Hagan in a nearby café.
As he reached the apartment door, Michael Watkinson stepped out to meet him.
‘OK, Michael,’ Hussein began. ‘Tell me what happened here.’
‘My colleague and I came to interview Holden. I checked that he was at home: one of my men is watching the building. The apartment door was ajar, but there was no reply, so we entered to investigate.’
Hussein looked at Watkinson. ‘What time was this?’ he asked.
‘About twenty minutes ago.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Hussein with a slight smile, ‘because I was in this area on a very similar errand. These two gentlemen’ — he gestured towards Dawson and O’Hagan — ‘are Grant Hutchings and Roger Middle-ton from the CIA and this’ — he changed hands — ‘is Michael Watkinson of the British Secret Intelligence Service. We also wanted to talk to Holden, but when we were here about half an hour ago, the door was locked.’
The Arab eyed Watkinson appraisingly, just as Richter appeared behind him. ‘Are you absolutely certain the door was open when you arrived?’
Watkinson glanced at Richter before replying. ‘Let’s just say the door was closed but, when we applied pressure, it opened.’
‘Quite,’ Hussein said, putting a wealth of meaning into the word. ‘Don’t give me any more details of the “pressure” you applied. And this would be your colleague?’
Richter stepped forward and held out his hand. ‘Paul Richter. I was sent out from London to investigate this man Holden. But I guess I’m a little late for that now.’
‘I have a forensic team on the way over,’ the inspector said. ‘Stay here, please, while I check the place myself.’
He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and was back in under a minute. ‘Have you disturbed anything in there?’
Richter shook his head. ‘No. We realized it was a crime scene the moment we went in. Once we found the body we knew we were dealing with a murder, so we waited in the hallway for the police to get here. We didn’t touch or move anything.’ He glanced at the two Americans. ‘I gather you’re from Langley?’
‘Yup.’ Dawson nodded. ‘I’m Grant Hutchings, the senior agent, and this is Roger Middleton. I got your name, but who do you work for — exactly?’
‘An outfit that’s attached to the British SIS. We act in what you might term a supporting role.’
Dawson didn’t look entirely happy with this reply. ‘You carrying some kind of ID?’
‘Only a passport. Why?’
‘I like to know who I’m dealing with,’ Dawson snapped.
‘So do I,’ Richter replied, ‘and if we were on your home turf in the States, I’d be happy to provide whatever you needed. Out here, we’re all guests of the government of Dubai, and you’ve no authority to check my credentials, any more than I can check yours. So unless you want to get involved in a serious pissing contest, I suggest you just accept what I’ve told you and leave it at that.’
Dawson glared at Richter, but O’Hagan shook his head. ‘Leave it, Grant. He’s right — we’re all here under sufferance.’
Watkinson and Hussein watched this exchange with bemused expressions.
Dawson still looked less than happy, but then shrugged. ‘OK, so you’ve been inside. What the hell happened in there?’
‘We don’t know for sure,’ Richter said, ‘but I think Holden was strangled. Whoever did it was searching for something. Every drawer and cupboard has been emptied.’
‘Could it have been a burglary?’ Dawson suggested.
‘I don’t think so, because there are several attractive items still inside. Thieves usually grab whatever’s going. This has all the hallmarks of a professional search operation. What I don’t know is exactly what they were looking for.’
‘Can we go inside?’ Dawson asked Hussein.
The inspector shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. This is now a murder scene, so nobody — apart from the pathologist — can enter until the forensic people have finished their work.’
‘OK,’ Dawson said, ‘so there’s nothing else we can do here until tomorrow, I suppose.’
Hussein nodded. ‘I should have the preliminary report by lunchtime. But there’s nothing you can achieve here, so I suggest you take a taxi back to your hotel.’
‘I’ll need to tell Langley about this,’ Dawson said. ‘Can I use the communications at the Old Fort again to talk to the consulate?’
‘Of course. Tell the taxi driver to take you there, and then get a police car to return you to the hotel.’
Dawson and O’Hagan nodded briefly to the other men, then walked back to the lift.
‘I think the same applies to us, Saeed,’ Watkinson said. ‘Paul and I will let you have our statements tomorrow.’
Once outside the building, Watkinson turned to Richter. ‘I’ve two questions for you. First, what the hell was that spat with the Americans about?’
‘Some CIA officers have the knack of rubbing me up the wrong way,’ Richter replied, ‘and that Hutchings character had it in spades. They stomp in as if they own the place and expect everyone to jump just because they’ve come all the way from Langley waving the star-spangled banner. And usually they’re only on a seagull mission anyway.’
‘Seagull mission?’ Watkinson asked.
‘They fly in, shit all over everyone, and fly out again.’
‘Oh, right.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll remember that. The second question’s more serious. I was waiting there in the hallway of the apartment, just as I told Hussein, but you weren’t. What were you doing?’
‘Nothing contentious, but I knew that once the plods arrived we’d be booted out, and have to wait days to be told what they managed to find. I don’t think we’ve got days to spare, so I was trying to work out what the guy who killed Holden was looking for.’
‘And did you?’
‘I think so, though trying to see something that isn’t there can be a difficult trick. The only room where anything struck me as unusual was the study. There were no computer disks anywhere. These days you don’t often need CDs or floppies, but you always keep the master installation disks, just in case the whole thing crashes, and anyone with any sense makes regular backups. There were no disks anywhere in that room.’
‘So you think Holden’s killer took them?’
‘Yes, and something else pretty much confirmed it.’
‘What?’
‘While you were waiting for the Thin Blue Line to arrive, I tried to boot up Holden’s computer. Someone had pulled the plug out of the socket, which is unusual unless you’re paranoid about power surges. When I finally switched on the PC it wouldn’t start, and the error message reported no operating system could be found. That means the hard disk is faulty, missing, or it had been wiped. The disk was still in the machine, because I could hear it running, and hard drives are very reliable, so the most likely explanation is that somebody ran a wipe utility on it.’