Adrian Magson - No Sleep for the Dead

Riley suddenly had a thought and leaned across the desk. ‘Can you contact Jimmy and ask him a question for me?’ she said quietly.

‘Sure. What is it?’

‘Ask him if he ever saw a tall black man with dreadlocks going up to the first floor, or if he ever knew of Azimtec employing a driver who was black?’

Nobby nodded and reached for the phone, adding, ‘The police have been through the building interviewing everyone. They did Azimtec half an hour ago.’

Riley smiled her thanks and followed Palmer, who was on his way past the lifts and up the stairs, fingering the badge clipped to his lapel. He flashed the back of it to Riley. Behind the badge was taped a key. Once they were out of sight of the security cameras by the lifts, he ripped it off and headed for the solid wooden door of Azimtec Trading.

Seconds later they were inside, listening to the silence of an empty office and, from outside, the hum of traffic in the street and the muted sound of voices from the forensic team. Palmer locked the door.

According to Jimmy Gough, who had phoned earlier, they had just over an hour before the accountant arrived for his stint. Nobby had told him that a taxi had been ordered to take Radnor and Michael to the airport, and that he believed the two men were on their way to Glasgow for the day, having overheard them discussing flight details.

Palmer stood still as if absorbing the atmosphere around him, then slipped the key into his pocket and pulled on some thin rubber gloves.

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Riley.

‘Not sure yet. Don’t touch anything. Just use your eyes. If you see anything interesting, let me move it and you remember its position.’

They were standing in an area approximately twenty feet by twenty feet square. Although it was in the same position as the one they had seen on the sixth floor, it held no reception counter and no chairs. Thinly carpeted, it contained only a plain desk against one wall, and a side table holding a single telephone. There were no pictures on the walls, no signs leading to other offices and no indication that it ever served to welcome visitors.

‘Friendly atmosphere,’ muttered Palmer. He nodded towards a door to their right. ‘This way.’ It opened onto a bare, uncarpeted corridor. The first door on the left was to an office containing a desk, wastebasket and a small cupboard. It smelled unused, with a thin layer of dust over everything. It was the same with the next room and the next, each roughly ten by ten and intended for single use.

They retraced their steps to a door on the opposite side of the foyer. This opened into a well-appointed office, with decent carpeting, pleasant décor and comfortable furniture. A large desk in the centre of the room was blank save for a telephone, a wire correspondence tray, a small clock and a blotting pad. A bookcase stood against one wall, the shelves lined with a selection of volumes interspersed with statuettes and some glassware. A small fridge stood in one corner next to a table holding some glasses and a bottle of mineral water.

Palmer tried the desk drawers. They were unlocked and full of office desk clutter from notepads and paper to paperclips, spare pens and personal detritus. He was about to flick through them when he noticed the way in which the contents were so evenly scattered. Everything looked just a little too casual, too neat, as if it had been set up to look like a million other desk drawers. Yet it wasn’t.

He carefully closed the drawers and moved over to the bookcase, where Riley was using a pen to shuffle aside each book, checking for items in between. They were standard office tomes on company law, administration and accounting, all too old to be of current use and plainly bought by the yard. But one looked out of place, with a glossy cover and cantered at an angle to fit into the shelf space. Palmer took it down. It was a hardback edition of ‘A Guide to Russian Imperial Art’, and looked well thumbed, with yellow Post-it notes protruding from the edges of the pages.

He flicked through it. The notes highlighted an array of icons, portraits, glassware, gold and silver, all elaborately decorated and set against a backdrop of display cases lined with plush material to highlight the rich colours. One or two pages had neat notations in the margins, although they were in Russian and Palmer couldn’t read them.

Close to the back, he found two slips of paper. One could have been a shopping list, containing references to page numbers in the book. The other was smaller and heavy in texture, with a glossy feel. It had jagged edges, as if torn from another, larger piece. He slipped this into his pocket, and replaced the book exactly as he had found it.

In the fridge, they found two bottles of lager, a bottle of vodka and one of whisky, with six small tins of tonic and soda. A plastic tray of ice cubes. No peanuts, no chocolates, no little nibbles. Whatever Messrs Radnor and Michael were into, they didn’t lean towards the wild side when it came to alcohol.

‘This isn’t where they do their main business,’ said Riley. ‘Is it?’ She was staring round with a grim expression. ‘It’s too blank.’

‘Right,’ Palmer agreed with her. ‘It’s a place to hang, that’s all. A cover. No working office is this bare — not when there are two of them and they come in here every day. They haven’t even got a computer. When was the last time you saw an office without one?’

‘Laptops,’ Riley guessed, nodding towards a coiled power cable on one of the shelves. ‘Safer than leaving a PC lying around. With the right hardware, they can make a connection to anywhere they like.’ Even the phone had a thin covering of dust. ‘But what about the stuff Jimmy said they bring in from time to time? And the packing stuff in the skips?’

‘More cover. My guess is, they move a bit of stuff through here, just to keep it real. If so, it’s probably genuine and clean. I’d like to know where the other place is.’

‘Could be they’ve flown.’ Riley thought back to when they had seen Radnor and Michael leaving the building earlier. They had been carrying briefcases and coats, but hadn’t seemed to be in a hurry. But then, if Radnor was who Palmer thought, he would have been trained not to give anything away, and to act normally, especially if he thought he was being watched.

Palmer walked over to the window. Standing to one side, he peered down to where a couple of forensics officers investigating Gillivray’s death were studying the ground in minute detail, while a young woman took shots with a digital camera.

He wandered back to the desk. Something about the contents had rung a small alarm bell. It wasn’t simply the layout, which he thought too contrived to be normal, but something else. He slid the top drawer open again, careful not to disturb anything, and studied the interior.

‘What is it?’ Riley knew Palmer’s body language fairly well and realised he had noticed something.

‘Without touching anything,’ he said, ‘tell me what you see.’ He turned away and stared out of the window.

Riley glanced at her watch. She was concerned about the accountant arriving early. With only one way in, they’d be caught red-handed if he decided to be overly conscientious today.

‘We’ve got time, don’t worry.’

Riley turned to the drawer and studied the contents. ‘Okay. There’s a stapler, paperclips, elastic bands, pens, pencils, ink cartridges, a book of stamps, scissors, sticky tape, some string, a gold something — could be a tie clip — some Euros, a retractable craft knife, earphones, a pen-torch-’

‘Go back.’ Palmer turned and joined her at the desk. He looked down. ‘Where’s the gold tie clip?’

‘There.’ Riley pointed to where a small bar of gold with a clip attached to one side was sitting in one corner of the drawer, partly concealed beneath a stapler. The clip was bent back away from the main bar.