Питер Ловси - The Finisher

What was Pinto’s system? Surely more devious than that. Yet he’d need to keep a record somewhere. He’d be an idiot to keep it on his phone.

The only paper items found in the room had been the receipts from the sports shop.

Was anything noted on some surface you wouldn’t expect?

He looked inside the wardrobe and the crockery cupboard. Pulled the folding table from the wall and examined the underside. The edge of a door might have been a smart place, but Pinto hadn’t used that.

What was his secret?

It had to be somewhere here in this basement.

Beattie’s room?

Unless she was a genius at bluffing, Beattie had no active role in the slavery operation and it was unlikely Pinto would have asked her to take care of anything. However, it was not impossible that he’d gone into her room on some pretext and lodged stuff out of sight and out of her reach on top of a cupboard.

He spoke to the guys at the door. “Have all the rooms been searched?”

“All except one.” Jimmy lowered his voice. “We’ll get in there shortly.”

“While she’s at headquarters?”

A nod. He didn’t have to tell them their job. They’d know where to look.

What else, then?

Having checked every conceivable piece of furniture in Pinto’s room, he was left studying the walls.

And now he saw what had been so easy to miss.

“Jimmy, you might like to photograph this.”

The striped wallpaper was topped by the frieze with the nude runners of both sexes chasing each other endlessly around the room. The pink figures were enclosed between narrow bands of a repeating Greek meander pattern in black on a sand-coloured background.

Just above the lower band, in small, neat letters you wouldn’t see unless you got close up, was a long line of words and numbers, several hundred. They went around three walls, so neatly done that they seemed to be part of the pattern.

“Cool,” Jimmy said. “But what the fuck is it?”

“It looks to me like his record of all the accounts under his control. Each guy’s name followed by the bank, account number and pin.”

“I’ve been staring at that fucking wallpaper and all I saw was bollock-naked people.”

“You would,” Diamond said and added tactfully, “Anyone would.”

“I don’t know how you thought of it.”

He didn’t answer. He’d stepped over to the fourth wall, the one with the door. The frieze along here was empty of writing — or almost so. A number had been written just below the light switch in the same minute hand and the same black ink: 50598.

“Any thoughts what this might be?”

“Search me,” the sergeant said. “A pin number?”

“They’re usually four digits.”

“Phone?”

“If it’s a local number, they’re six digits, aren’t they?”

“I’m stumped, then.”

“It seems to be here by the door as a reminder before he steps outside.” He scratched his unshaven chin. He was trying to dredge up a conversation tiptoeing on the edge of his memory and refusing to make itself known, an insight Beattie had unexpectedly provided. Not from today. Must have been when he was here with Ingeborg. He’d been impressed at the time because it had been a snippet of local knowledge he hadn’t heard about in more than twenty years of living in Bath. Suddenly it mattered.

There had been some connection with Duke Street. But how it linked up with the number under the light switch was a mystery known only to Diamond’s unconscious.

“Thanks, anyway.” He left the room and started up the corridor to where Beattie still awaited her taxi.

She was chuntering on about the outrage of the dawn raid. “They won’t let me lock my door,” she told him. “They said they have a search warrant for the whole basement. I don’t want strange men going in my room when I’m not here and opening my underwear drawer. I’m a law-abiding woman. How can I be a suspicious person when I’m stuck in this chair all day?”

“I’ll make sure they respect your belongings,” he said.

“If I find anything gone, I’ll sue you.”

There’s gratitude, he thought. “Did Tony visit your room before he went out to run in the Other Half?”

“What are you suggesting now?” Beattie said. “You lot with your dirty minds take my breath away.”

“That’s not what I meant, Beattie. He could have left some of his valuables in your care, or even his phone. I’m sure he trusted you.”

“Are you calling me a thief now? I’ve got nothing of Tony’s. God knows I’d tell you if I had.”

“But did he visit your room just to let you know what was happening?”

“Will you listen?” she said. “The only time Tony Pinto has ever been across my threshold is when I had an unwelcome visitor.”

“Oh? Who was that?”

“A spider, silly.”

“Ah.” But the “ah” in this case wasn’t downbeat. It was the “ah” of enlightenment, a Eureka moment. That elusive conversation at the back of his brain had come back to him and of course it was the spider invasion. They came from the vaults under the street, she had said. Duke Street was built on a raised platform over vaults that elevated it by five metres above marshy ground once thought to have been uninhabitable.

Thanks to Beattie’s eight-legged visitors he believed he knew why Pinto had written the five-digit number on his wall.

“I’m coming by.” He edged around the back of the wheelchair and left Beattie muttering to herself. Without another word, he passed the armed officer on duty at the basement’s main door and stepped into the walk-out area nobody had bothered to clear of leaves and rubbish. Being so far below pavement level, this shaft was shadowy as well as smelly. Before anything was built, this would have been ground level, the swamp Beattie had spoken about. The grey stone walls were part of the foundations supporting the street above.

The space below the street had to be searched. Years ago, the residents would have stored their coal there and may have stowed a few unwanted pieces of furniture as well.

The stout wooden door was half hidden by the wheelie bins. He dragged them aside and found what he was expecting: the entrance to the vault secured by a strong hasp and staple and a heavy-duty shiny brass padlock.

A five-digit combination padlock.

He rotated the disks to get 50598 and the shackle sprang up. One mystery solved. The door groaned on its hinges.

The vault’s interior was cold, pitch black and smelt rank. He took out his phone and found the torch function. The beam picked out a massive limestone arch over a flagged floor. Beattie had been right about the spiders. Generations of webs like filthy net curtains hung from either side. But the centre looked clear to walk through, suggesting somebody had come this way not long before.

He turned the beam of light in all directions before taking a few shuffling steps, prodding the flagstones with his stick. Ahead, the archway opened up to a stone passage that crossed laterally. He didn’t need to go far. Just behind the base of the first archway his light picked out a plastic storage box and through the transparent lid he could see a laptop, an iPhone and a stack of bank cards held together with a rubber band. Enough data to employ the computer forensics geeks for months.

And two knives.

The vault was Pinto’s office storeroom.

He shone the light across the rest of the space to check for more and was startled by a movement on the far side. A large rat had emerged from under what looked like a folded tarpaulin, its eyes caught in the beam for a second before it raced away and out of sight.

This wasn’t a nice place to be. Diamond had found what he came for and wouldn’t be staying much longer, but out of a sense of duty he crossed the floor for a closer look and uttered an untypically genteel “oh, no” at the feel of a cobweb draping itself around his face. In the act of brushing himself down, he made things worse by dropping the phone. Fortunately, the light stayed on. He had to go on one knee to pick it up.