‘The ticket was issued on the fifth of last month.’
Rik lifted an eyebrow. ‘She must have come back.’
‘Or he’s using her old car. Or, she never left. Either way-’
‘Either way, why is the receipt in Param’s desk?’ Rik grinned. ‘Somebody’s been a naughty boy. Do we have an address?’
‘Yes, we do.’ Harry checked his watch. It was mid-afternoon and they hadn’t eaten. Much more of this and they’d be operating on reduced batteries. He hoped the Michaels address would lead somewhere and not dump them flat. ‘We’ll do it another time. We’ve pushed our luck with this one. I need you to do some work on this new job for me.’
Rik jumped up and cracked his knuckles. ‘Suits me. After all this paper, I’m getting withdrawal symptoms. What’s the brief?’
‘There isn’t much.’ He reeled off from memory what little information he’d been given by Jennings.
Rik looked doubtful. ‘Christ, you weren’t kidding, were you? I need more than that if I’m to get anything on the net.’
‘We’ve got a name. We’ll have to make do with that. Anyway, I thought you IT nerds liked a challenge.’
‘We do. But what happens if we can’t find anything? He might have disappeared completely.’
Harry smiled. He knew Rik well enough to realize that he would wear his keyboard down to the wires before admitting defeat. ‘There’s no such thing as disappearing completely. You in or not?’
‘I’m in.’
ELEVEN
They drove to Rik’s flat near Paddington to ponder on the meagre scraps representing Professor Samuel Silverman’s recent life. With so little to go on, the usual audit was out. With none of the usual paperwork, they were missing their customary points of reference. A process which might normally take a couple of days, interspersed with numerous calls to check any detail that failed to match, now looked a non-starter. And with no family members or friends to speak to, usually a valuable source of information, gossip and speculation, they had no anecdotal hints to fall back on and broaden the search.
Rik opened his laptop and began feeding Silverman’s name into various search engines. There were several Samuel Silvermans, some dead, some living, but none matching even remotely the kind of background to the missing professor. There were lawyers, financial experts, psychiatrists, scientists — even academics. Yet none that came close to the man they were looking for. Going on Jennings’ mention that Silverman had connections with the Israeli government, he also began tentative probing of certain restricted websites, and put out feelers to contacts in the hacking community.
While Rik was Googling, Harry went out for sandwiches, coffee and cake to spur on their thinking. After being cooped up in Param’s place, the car and now here, he was glad to get out into the open, and took his time. He had a feeling there would be a lot more of being cooped up to come.
On his return, he handed Rik his brain food and prowled the room deep in thought. The furnishings were minimal and mixed, evidence of impulse buying by Rik following his recent move from home, where he’d lived with his mother. There was an L-shaped sofa, a glass-topped table with four matching chairs, a space-age steel-and-glass coffee table, a flat-screen television and music centre, but little else. The floor was woodblock and polished to a high gleam. Discreet wall lights completed the modernistic, almost clinical effect.
‘God bless IKEA,’ Harry commented.
‘It’s a place to chill, not a character statement,’ retorted Rik, who had clearly been waiting for some form of comment. ‘Anyway, I’ve had no complaints.’ He smirked and fluttered his eyebrows.
Harry walked over to the window. His own place in Islington was like a second-hand shop in comparison, the furniture gathered at various times without much thought given to style or fashion, the result of a life on the move with little time spent at home. Anything matching was by chance, whereas he guessed Rik had chosen his furnishings with an instinctive leaning towards how they might look to a third party.
He peered down three floors to a twin row of shops. The area was busy, cars jostling with delivery vans to find space at the kerb, while pedestrians crossed wherever and whenever the spirit took them, instinctive survivors of a busy thoroughfare. The aftermath of an earlier fruit and vegetable market lay in the gutter like battle scars, blood-red segments of pulp and skin mixed with traces of paper bags and splinters of wooden boxes.
‘How is it,’ said Rik, sprawling on the sofa, waiting for the machine to do something, ‘that Silverman’s “people” didn’t supply any financials? No bank statements, no credit card slips, no receipts, no work stuff, like letters, academic notes, agendas or jottings. There’s usually too much crap, not too little. This bloke has nothing.’ He balanced the disposable mug on the arm of the sofa and ripped the ends off paper tubes of sugar, stirring in the contents and glumly considering the lack of data they had to work with. Rik’s IT-trained mind preferred to see something tangible to fasten on to, not a dribble of detail that led nowhere. ‘Makes you wonder how hard they looked.’
Harry was only half listening. He was studying a nondescript saloon at the kerb a hundred yards up the street. It was parked behind a battered delivery van and contained a solitary figure — a man — but he couldn’t see any other detail. A tired shopper, maybe. Or a patient husband, killing time while his wife did the weekly market run. It could be either, but after years of undercover work, he had built up a security man’s instinctive suspicion of lone figures in parked cars.
‘Unless he destroyed everything before walking away,’ he said vaguely. Some runners did that. Binned or burned everything. It was as much a psychological severing of all ties with their past life as it was an attempt to conceal any clues pointing to their new one.
‘He couldn’t destroy bank or tax records,’ Rik countered. ‘Not possible.’
Harry waited for a sign of movement. He’d noticed the car earlier, when he’d gone for coffee. Something about it had snagged at the edge of his attention without quite gelling. Yet there was nothing he could put his finger on. Maybe it was an aura he’d become attuned to over the years, a marker only those with the right instincts might pick up on. Yet why should it concern him? He didn’t even live here. He put his coffee down. Sometimes you had to follow your instincts. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
He ran downstairs, slowing to a stroll as he hit the street. He stopped at a fruit stall that was still packing up and bought some grapes, then continued along the street, eyeing the windows and pausing occasionally to peer at a display. As he drew level with the delivery van, he turned and faced the nearest shop window and chewed some grapes, studying a rack of audio equipment on special offer. He bent as if taking in the specifications. The angle gave him an ideal background against which he could see the driver in the saloon behind the van.
It was a man. Medium build, jowly, with dark hair and heavy eyebrows over a pasty face. He was staring down the street, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in front of him.
It was a look Harry had seen too many times to be mistaken: the driver was watching someone. He turned and followed the line of the man’s focus, but there was too much clutter to be able to pick out any one object. Or person.
He continued his stroll, pausing to catch the car’s reflection in another window, but without drawing any firm conclusion. A local cop, then. A drugs squad officer on a dealer’s tail, perhaps. Or more mundane than that: a market inspector.
He crossed the street and returned to the flat by a roundabout route, wondering if paranoia got worse as you got older.
‘Everyone’s life overlaps in some way, right?’ Rik was still teasing at the lack of paperwork in Silverman’s file, as if Harry hadn’t left. ‘There’s always home stuff in their desks and work stuff at home. Until now.’ He blinked, just noticing a change in the atmosphere. ‘You’ve been out.’