Robert Young - Gatecrasher

Keane placed a crisp ten pound note on the table and then found a five in his wallet and placed that on top.

‘I’ve got these,’ he said, his voice noticeably deeper than its usual pitch.

‘Cheers,’ said Slater. Warren only grunted his thanks. ‘What’s the time?’ asked Slater and belched quietly into his hand.

The polite gesture seemed out of place from a man whom the others knew to be a very dangerous individual in the right — or wrong — circumstances. The man was full of contradictions.

‘Too fucking early,’ growled Keane.

Slater regarded him coldly. He had made no secret of his contempt for the way Keane had handled the situation on Saturday night and had made it clear to him that was the way he felt.

‘It’s half seven,’ Warren said as he tugged his sleeve back over his wrist. ‘Guess we should get cracking on round two.’

‘George knows we’ve already looked doesn’t he?’ asked Keane, determined not to let Slater intimidate him.

Warren had long thought that the younger man had a cruel and ambitious streak that made him so competitive that he might create a problem for them. That one day, in his haste to impress the rest of them, Gresham especially, he would slip up. And so he had.

The defiant look on Keane’s face now told him that he wasn’t about to admit to it though. Perhaps they’d miscalculated this, misjudged Keane.

Warren was nodding his head. ‘Yeah. But Slater spoke to him after me, once he’d calmed down,’ he said and nodded toward the big man. ‘Decided that it would’ve looked too dodgy to keep snooping around on a Sunday, especially once the rain started like that. We aren’t going to find him today, but we need to find out where he got to.’

‘I s’pose. So where do we kick off then?’ said Keane.

He already knew what they would be doing but he was probably trying to sound breezy, as if he wasn’t bothered by Slater’s sneering, as if he wasn’t going to blame himself for the situation even if the others did. He ignored another look from Slater although Warren could see his irritation rising already. ‘Back to where we left him,’ Slater said before Warren could answer. ‘Back to square one.’

An hour later they stood in a small alleyway staring at a section of the wall. Blood streaked across the top of the wall and splashed around the floor at their feet had caught their attention. Kane insisted that there had been much more, that the downpour the day before must have washed it away.

They all stood peering over the wall into the garden beyond.

‘He went in there. Must have,’ said Slater trying to see between the small gap in the curtains of the nearest window.

‘Yeah but to get help? Call the Bill? Hide?’ said Warren.

‘Not the Bill or we’d have heard by now. Maybe to get help but that would probably have meant Old Bill again so probably to hide. In which case we may never hear from him again,’ reasoned Slater. ‘In which case, we’d better get moving. Make sure whoever lives here is at work or whatever and check the place out.’

‘What if they aren’t at work?’ asked Warren.

Slater turned back and stared over the wall but he didn’t say anything and Warren didn’t press him.

Monday. 9.30am.

The offices of Griffin Holdings Ltd stood gleaming in glass and steel alongside The Great West Road in Hammersmith. Ten stories high it stood not much taller than the small church next door but still made the older building look quaint and out of place in the changing environment.

Griffin Holdings Ltd occupied the top three floors of the building and had done so for almost four years. In that time, its Chief Executive, Andrew Griffin, had carefully rebuilt the company from the floundering mess he had found it in, back into a formidable reflection of its former glory. It traded now on the slogan that reflected its reputation: “anything, anytime, anywhere”.

When he had assumed control of the operation it had just lost its two founding partners and figureheads, and with it its name and thus its identity. Griffin had been forced to take a robust approach to restructuring the company — with the departure of the previous owners contracts had been lost and as a result income was a dwindling commodity. Parts of the operation had become redundant and were starting to make losses rather than profit.

He had made difficult, unpleasant decisions that put men out of jobs; men who had been loyal to the company for many years and who left behind them close friends with whom Griffin knew he would still have to work and would have much to do to win over.

Property had been sold to raise cash but this had proved the easiest part of the rebuilding process as the property market remained high and they were able to realise some excellent returns on holdings that had been bought near the bottom of the market. Griffin had been lauded for this move which had at once streamlined an operation that was beginning to look decidedly flabby and inefficient and placed the balance sheet firmly back in the black.

That had been a simple way to finish his first year at the helm with the accounts looking deceptively favourable but the second year had been the struggle. The long hours and hard slog to win contracts against the fiercest of competition in a tightening marketplace, watching some of that effort come to nothing when they were awarded elsewhere. Trying hard to motivate an increasingly demoralised workforce with little cause for optimism. Griffin had had to take a very public pay cut in order to force through a salary freeze that year.

But now, after several years, Griffin Holdings Ltd was a name to be respected in the import and export industry. Which made the latest incident all the more frustrating for the CEO who stood now in his office, pacing the carpet and chewing his fingernails anxiously. No matter how often he turned to look at the telephone on his desk it staunchly refused to ring.

He was waiting for a phone call to report on exactly what it was that had happened that weekend. At three o’clock on the previous Saturday morning he had been roused from his bed by a telephone call telling him that there had been a break in at the company headquarters. From the soft warmth of his bed and his wife there in his Berkshire home the decision to stay put and deal with it later had appeared perfectly sensible. Burglars and stolen computers were an irritation, particularly in the middle of the night, but little more and in any case, they were insured.

He had made a cursory visit during the daylight hours the following day but he made it obvious that there was little that he could do and he contented himself with growling at the security people to make sure they locked up properly tonight.

Whether that decision would have changed anything there was no way of knowing. But it was becoming clear now that nothing so simple as a broken window and a few snatched PCs had gone on that weekend. There was precious little damage done and more ominously, nothing seemed to have been taken. Nothing tangible at least, nothing physical.

He had ordered that a quick inventory be done to see what had been taken — was it computers they were after? Or had they come for the more valuable servers perhaps? Something else? So far, his staff told him, it seemed like nothing had been taken. Many of his subordinates, now frantically checking through the offices and delegating his instructions down the line were optimistically chirping that perhaps they had been scared away somehow, by the alarm or the security people, before they could take anything.

Griffin had nodded his agreement with cheery positivity but was sure that wasn’t true and the knot of tension twisting in his stomach was getting worse every minute that he waited and his phone remained silent.