“… halfway down the motorway when it dawned on me. When I’d asked this supposed security man if he’d called Peter Beckman, he’d said Peter was already on his way in. But Peter’s taken a couple of days off this week to go to some stupid Christmas market in Germany with his wife. So I rang him on his mobile, and he’s only having dinner in some floating restaurant on the bloody Rhine.” I heard the sound of shoes being kicked off.
“Well, I know,” he continued after a short pause. “So I rang studio security and they denied any report of a break-in or any call to me … No, I don’t think so. It’ll be some bloody technicians’ Christmas party, some idiot’s idea of a joke, let’s bugger up Turpin’s evening …” Another pause. “Oh, all right, I’ll check, but the alarm was on … Yes, I’m just going to get changed, and I’ll be right over. You know how I feel about Clitheroe sausages for breakfast,” he added suggestively. I was going to have serious trouble with sausages for a while, I could tell.
I strained my ears and picked up the sound of sliding doors open and close, then faint sounds like someone doing exactly what Turpin had said. I heard the bathroom door open, the sound of a light cord being pulled once, twice, and the door closing. A door moved over carpet pile, a light switch snapped twice. The study. He was checking, just like he’d told Deirdre he would. My throat constricted, my muscles went rigid. Gizmo’s CD-ROM was still in Turpin’s drive. Where had I left the CD I’d taken out of it? Dennis’s
I felt the tension slowly leaking out of my body. We’d got away with it. Turpin was going out again. The terrible irony was that if we’d waited quarter of an hour longer before Dennis had made his hoax call, Deirdre would have saved us the trouble and I’d not have lost five years off my life expectancy. Dennis let go of my hand. I patted his arm in thanks.
Finally, the alarm was reset and the low thrum of Turpin’s car engine dimmed in the distance. “Now what?” I asked.
“He’s gone for the night. You’ve got hours to play with,” Dennis said cheerfully.
“The alarm’s on. As soon as we move out from under the bed, Lostock calls the cavalry. And for all we know, Clitheroe sausages is only a couple of hundred yards away.”
Dennis chuckled. “The trouble with you, Kate, is you worry too much. Now me, I’ve got the advantage of a commando training. Cool under pressure.”
I poked him sharply in the ribs, enjoying the squeal that accompanied the rush of air. “You can’t get the staff these days,” I said sweetly. “I’ll just lie here and meditate while you get it sorted.” It’s called whistling in the dark.
In the dim gleam from the landing, I watched as Dennis rolled on to his stomach and propelled himself across the floor using toes, knees, elbows and fingers for purchase. Keeping belly to the carpet made it a slow crawl, but it was effective. The little red light on the passive infrared detector perched in the corner of the room stayed unlit. He disappeared round the corner of the door and my stomach started eating itself. I badly needed to go to the loo.
Time stretched to impossible lengths. I wondered if Dennis was going downstairs head first or feet first. I wondered whether the keypad itself was covered by an infrared detector. I wondered whether it was possible to install detectors that didn’t show they’d been activated. I even wondered if Turpin was paranoid enough to have installed one of those silent alarms that rang in a remote control center staffed by battle-hungry security guards. I wondered
Suddenly the main alarm klaxon gave a single whoop. Shocked, I cracked my head on the underside of the bed in my manic scramble to get out from under there. “It’s all right,” Dennis shouted. “It’s off.”
He found me sitting on the landing carpet gingerly fingering the egg on my forehead. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” I groaned. “Jesus, Dennis, if I was a cat I’d be on borrowed lives after tonight.”
“Never mind whingeing, let’s get done and get out of here,” he said. “I fancy a night in with the wife.”
“I didn’t realize you’d been banged up that long,” I said tartly, getting to my feet and heading back into Turpin’s study, this time via the loo. I was amazed we’d got away with it; directly in the line of sight from the doorway was a CD gleaming like a beacon on Turpin’s desk.
Ransacking his secrets took less time than I expected. Less time, certainly, than I deserved, given how overdrawn my luck must have been that night. We let ourselves out of the front door just after midnight. I dropped Dennis outside his front door half an hour later and drove home on freshly gritted roads. For once, Richard was home alone, awake and ardent. Unfortunately I felt older than God and about as sexy as a Barbie doll so he made me cocoa and didn’t say a word against me crashing alone in my own bed. It must be love.
I think.
I was constructing the fire wall between me and the evidence when Gizmo stuck his head round my office door next morning. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“I’m trying to make this stuff look like it came through the letterbox,” I said, waving a hand at the pile of material I’d amassed from John Turpin’s office. “It’s all sorted now, except for the computer files. All I can do is enclose a floppy copy with a printed note of where to find the original files on Turpin’s hard disk. But it’s not conclusive.”
Gizmo sidled into the room, looking particularly smart in one of
The top sheet revealed John Turpin’s present shareholding in NPTV as well as details of his future potential share options. I whistled softly. Even a movement in share price of a few pence could make a significant difference to Turpin’s personal wealth. Next came what were clearly commercially sensitive details of NPTV’s current negotiations with a cable TV company. I didn’t even want to know where this stuff had come from. What was clear from the terms of the deal was that if certain levels of viewing figures were reached in the twelve months either side of the deal, senior executives of NPTV — among them John Turpin — were going to be a lot richer than they were now.
The last sheet was the killer. Somehow, Gizmo had got his sticky fingers on the details of a transaction carried out by John Turpin’s stockbroker on his behalf. The order for a tranche of NPTV shares had been placed on the day of Dorothea Dawson’s murder. According to the computerized time code on the order, Turpin had instructed his broker in the short space of time between Gloria and me leaving the camper van and the police arriving in response to my call.
I looked up at Gizmo. “I suppose he thought he’d be too busy later on to get his order in. And then he’d have lost the edge that killing Dorothea had given him.”
“You mean he killed her just to push up the program ratings and make himself richer?” Gizmo said, clearly shocked.
“I think that was just a bonus. He actually killed her because she’d sussed that he was the mole leaking the storylines to the papers. Ironically, she had powerful reasons for keeping quiet about his involvement, but he didn’t believe her. He thought she was going to blackmail him or expose him, and he wasn’t prepared to take that risk. He just bided his time till he found the right opportunity.”
Gizmo shook his head. “It never ceases to amaze me, what people will do for money. People always say shit like it buys you
Philosophy for breakfast now. It had to be better than Clitheroe sausages, I thought with a bitter smile. I hoped Turpin was making the most of it. He’d be a fair few years older before he tasted anything other than prison food. With a sigh, I picked up the phone and managed to persuade the police switchboard to connect me to Linda Shaw. “Hi, Sergeant,” I said. “It’s Kate Brannigan.”