Adrian Magson - Tracers

Rik scowled, cheated of the opportunity to use his specialist skills. He selected a drawer and dumped the contents on a spare piece of carpet and began sifting through.

Two hours later, they adjourned to the kitchen for coffee and a conference. So far they had come up empty.

If there was anything in the desk, they hadn’t found it. Every invoice, receipt or statement cross-referenced perfectly to a household or work expense, and those that didn’t, they had cross-checked with Saskia Param. It had taken several phone calls to elicit the details, along with repeated queries from her about why they needed to go through her private papers in this way.

After the first three calls, Harry had given up explaining.

‘If you want to find out what happened to your husband,’ he’d said bluntly during the last call, ‘and get your house back, this is the only way.’ It had shut her up, although he guessed only for a while. He sensed she had already lined up a divorce lawyer ready for the fray, and was impatient for them to be out so that she could move in and begin the next phase of her life.

‘He’s clean,’ Harry said, staring into his coffee, adding in a way that made it sound an almost unhealthy trait in a grown man, ‘Too bloody clean, in fact.’

‘As in?’ Rik had come to rely on Harry’s judgement in these things. As straightforward as Harry liked to pretend to be, he had the ability to peer deep into the minds of his quarries and understand what they were thinking.

‘Param’s wealthy, married, no kids, great job. OK, his missus is as cold as custard, but nobody’s life is perfect, right? Then he goes walkabout with a ton of money. Also not uncommon. . for a fraudster. But this was no spur of the moment thing. Too much planning went into it.’ He gestured around the spotless kitchen, a mocking reflection of what they had found everywhere else. ‘It’s like he sanitized the whole place before he bunked off. And that lot in there,’ he nodded towards the study, now littered with piles of papers, none of which had offered a single lead, ‘is uncanny. Nobody could work on a scam, then do a bunk and not leave something behind.’

Rik shrugged easily. ‘Like you said, he planned it.’ He glanced at Harry, took a tour round the kitchen, then said casually, ‘Is this what you thought you’d be doing after Five, looking for runners who didn’t want to be found?’

Harry had often asked himself the same question. Forced, like Rik, to leave the security service after surviving a posting to an office called Red Station in Georgia, where his name had been placed on a hit list by two renegade security services bosses, he had been in limbo. Since staying on at Thames House was a non-starter — there were too many embarrassed faces who didn’t wish to be reminded of the organization’s shortcomings — it had meant an end to the structure and order of his life. Even working undercover requires strict attention to habit and detail. In its place had come freedom and free choice, neither of which he had experienced much of before. Life since then had been a mix of security-related jobs and contracts, including two brief assignments in Iraq — a place he’d sworn never to go back to, but circumstances had demanded it — where Rik had learned some hard lessons in survival not normally experienced by security service IT personnel.

Yet for Harry, the link with his old employers had never been irrevocably broken. For him, there was still some unfinished business to be resolved: namely, finding his former boss, Henry Paulton. The man had conspired with a senior MI6 officer, Sir Anthony Bellingham, to have Harry and the others in the station terminated by a team called the Hit. Saved by ironic circumstance as the Russians had moved across the border into South Ossetia in a so-called protective and supportive action, Harry, Rik and an MI6 officer named Clare Jardine had abandoned the station and headed home. Recognizing that his time was up, Paulton had slipped away. Bellingham was not so lucky; he had died by Clare Jardine’s hand on London’s Embankment before she, too, had vanished.

Harry had no interest in Jardine. She had done what she thought was right for her. But Paulton was another matter. And that still rankled like toothache. It was something he’d never discussed with Rik, although he knew the day would come. But right now wasn’t the time.

‘Let’s do it again. Top to bottom.’ He rinsed his cup and left it on the side. It was down to sheer doggedness now, revisiting every nook and cranny, rechecking every item of furniture in the house, in case they’d missed something. If that didn’t work, they were stumped.

After two more hours of effort, including a dusty trawl through the attic, Harry walked back into the study. He did a tour of the room, ticking off obvious places of interest. But it was a cosmetic exercise; there was nowhere left to look which hadn’t already been searched thoroughly. And he was now certain that Param would not have hidden anything in the walls, ceiling or floor without his eagle-eyed wife being aware of it. He left the room and picked up a set of car keys with a BMW fob from a table in the hallway.

The garage was a double, brick-built affair with a concrete floor finished in a polished dark-green skim. It held one car — a blue 5 series BMW — and a few items of gardening equipment. Apart from that, it was immaculate and barren. Harry searched the car from front to boot, but found nothing. It looked as if it might have just been delivered from the showroom, with none of the usual accumulated car trash found in most vehicles.

He returned to the study and dropped the keys on the desk, then rang Mrs Param and asked her for the registration numbers of the family cars. She gave him the details with customary reluctance and he rang off before she could bitch further about the invasion of her property.

‘Now there’s a thing,’ he said quietly, and felt the first buzz of something being not quite right. He went back to a drawer he had been working on earlier, checking and rechecking everything. Only this time he knew what he was looking for.

‘What have you got?’ Rik was showing signs of acute boredom, his spiked hair now limp. On Harry’s instructions he had already gone through the kitchen again with a fresh pair of eyes, emptying drawers and cupboards, even poring over a pegboard of notes and postcards. So far it had produced nothing useful. Unlike Matuq, Raymond Param had shown no history of visiting isolated cottages in the depths of Norfolk or anywhere else.

‘The Params own two cars — a BMW for him and a Mazda for her,’ Harry explained, sitting back. ‘She’s got the Mazda with her and the Beemer’s in the garage — and it’s new-pin clean.’

Rik pulled a face. ‘Why leave a car like that?’

‘Because driving it would be a dead giveaway. Like a sign round his neck saying, Here I am. ’ Harry picked up a piece of paper from the drawer. ‘There’s a parking fine receipt here for a late-model Mini Cooper S, issued in Golden Square, London.’ He shrugged. ‘I saw it earlier but dismissed it. Now I’m wondering.’

He picked up the phone and dialled a number, read out the registration number of the Mini and waited. Eventually, he stirred and made a scribbled note on the parking receipt. He cut the connection and scowled at the ceiling.

‘Well?’ Rik looked as if he was contemplating taking a pickaxe to the furniture out of sheer spite.

‘A second.’ Harry went back to the drawers he had been working on and rummaged through the papers before pulling out a sheet with a triumphant smile. ‘What do we know of Param’s office colleagues?’

‘Not much. They’ve all been looked at by the police and the company’s own security people. Mostly long-time employees, no queries or big spending habits, no changes to daily routine.’ He frowned, realizing that Harry had found something. ‘The smug old git look really doesn’t suit you, by the way.’