Stephen Leather - Once bitten

He shook his head emphatically. "Not without a court order. We have to abide by client confidentiality, I'm afraid, much as I'd like to help."

"A court order is certainly a possibility, but it'll involve us both in quite a bit of time and trouble, and to be honest I don't think Ms Ferriman's case actually merits it," I said. "Look, if you could give me a ballpark figure of her assets, nothing too specific, then hopefully I'll be able to eliminate her from our enquiries. You needn't tell me how many accounts, or how much is in each one, or even exact numbers. Just a ballpark figure which I won't even write down."

He looked over at his computer terminal and back at me and I smiled ingratiatingly and nodded.

"Well…" he said.

"Just a ballpark figure," I pressed. I put the notebook away and sat back in the chair.

He nodded as if he'd made up his mind. "Very well," he said, "but I'll deny that you ever got the information from this office. If you want a figure you can use, you'll have to come back with a court order. Understood?"

"Understood," I said.

"If you went on a figure of sixty you wouldn't be too far out," he said quietly as if he was a Russian agent giving me details of the Kremlin's nuclear capability.

"Sixty thousand dollars?" I said.

He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head, sighing mournfully as if dismayed at my stupidity. "Come, come, Mr Beaverbrook, we are not some down-at-heel savings and loan, you know. Sixty million dollars. Or thereabouts."

The Basement One of the perks of being a police psychologist is that you get to meet a wide range of people.

Sure, a fair number of them are murders, rapists and perverts, but every now and again I'd come across a pearl among the swine. Dave Burwash was a case in point. You might even say that he was one my successes, seeing as how he wasn't doing life in a State penitentiary and he hadn't gone out and raped and killed a group of underage cheerleaders. Dave was one of the first criminals, make that alleged criminals because he got off on a technicality, that I came across. He'd been pulled in on a charge of breaking into a broker's office while wearing a Mickey Mouse mask and I ran him through the Beaverbrook program to see if the mask was a symptom of an underlying mental problem. He was fine. He was better than fine, he had an IQ of 156 which put him in the top half of one percent of the population, and I ran him through a few other tests that showed he had a particular aptitude for numbers. Yes, he'd told me, he'd always been good at adding up figures in his head, he'd worked in a bar for a while and no matter how busy it had got he'd beat the electronic cash register hands down every time and at school he'd amused his friends by multiplying numbers, big numbers, in his head. The sort of school he went to was the sort where the teachers were just glad if they got through the day without a shooting in the corridor, so they weren't exactly on the lookout for hidden talents of the type that Dave possessed. His father had run off soon after he was born and his mother was often ill so Dave took a succession of jobs but then she got worse and he turned to crime. He had a particular knack for lock-picking, I guess because of the mathematical side of it, the combinations and the tumblers, it was physical but required a keen mind, and he was, he told me proudly, having no problems getting to grips with electronic alarm systems. He was a criminal, there was no doubt about it, but there was a problem with missing evidence – the Mickey Mouse mask, believe it or not – when the case came to court, and Dave walked.

I took an immediate liking to the guy, he was five years or so younger than me and had a sarcastic approach to life, the sort of slant that Archie Hemmings would have called "English humour". I helped get him onto a computer programming course and within a year he was running his own consultancy and earning five times what I was paid by the good old LAPD. He was a natural, better even than suggested by the Beaverbrook program. I wasn't sure how he'd react to being asked to resume his old habits for one night, but he jumped at the chance.

He arrived at my house in shiny new two-seater Mercedes but I made him leave it outside my house and I drove him to North Alta-Vista in the Alpine. We parked some distance away and I carried the brown leather wallet containing the tools of his former trade and insisted that he walked a dozen or so paces behind me just in case, God forbid, we should attract the attention of an overzealous member of the local constabulary. Dave thought it was all great fun, but there was no way I was going to risk his future. We walked down an alley at the side of Terry's building and when we were sure that we were alone in the darkness I tiptoes towards him and whispered in his ear.

"This is it. Can you see a way in?"

"There's always a way in," he whispered back.

"As soon as you've got me in, get the hell out of here," I said. "I don't want you anywhere near the building if anything goes wrong. Walk up to the Boulevard and catch a taxi from there. And leave the picks with me. And wear gloves. And…"

"Jamie," he said, interrupting, "you're making me nervous."

"Right," I said, handing over the soft leather wallet. "Right. OK. I'll keep quiet. Are you sure you…"

He held up his hand to silence me and took the wallet. "Watch," he said. "And learn."

In the distance we heard a siren wail and somewhere in the dark a bottle smashed.

"Relax," he whispered. "It's probably just a cat."

The windows were protected by metal grilles which appeared to have been locked from the inside and after Dave had checked them out he shrugged disappointedly. Steps led down to a door and he ran his hands over it and tapped it cautiously. "Metal," he whispered.

"Can you do it?" I asked.

There were three locks, evenly spaced down the left hand side of the door, and he examined each one. "I can, but it'll take time," he said. "Let's see if there's an easier way." We walked further down the alley and took a right turn, walking by a pile of fetid cardboard boxes and a cat which was chewing on something unsavoury. It mewed as we went by, warning us not to tamper with whatever it was it had between its sharp teeth.

By now our eyes were used to the gloom. The moon was still out but there were tall walls either side of the alley and the moonlight couldn't penetrate down to where we were. Just starlight. It was enough. The windows there were also shuttered and covered with grilles. At the end of the alley was the yellow glow of street lights and I hung back to let him go out first. He turned to the right and then stopped to examine the door of the double garage door there before walking on and back to the main road. I caught up with him about fifty yards from the building. "Let's go get a drink," he said. I took the wallet back from him and put it into my jacket pocket.

He waited until we were in a bar on Sunset Boulevard with a couple of bottles of lager in front of us before leaning over conspiratorially. "It's just like the old days, this, Jamie," he said, and winked. In his dark sweatshirt and blue jeans he looked a lot more like the burglar of old than the successful and highly-paid computer programmer which he'd become.

"Don't get to like it, Dave," I warned. I knew all too well the adrenaline kick that comes with breaking the law, I'd seen it many times in the interrogation rooms in precinct houses all over Los Angeles. I didn't want to turn Dave back to his old ways, and not for the first time I regretted asking him along. I had no right to jeopordise his new life, even if I had been the catalyst who caused it. It was as if I was playing God, and the way he was reveling in it and treating it like an adventure just made me feel worse.

He raised his bottle in salute and drank from it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand, realising as he did that he was still wearing his black leather gloves. He slid them off and put them into his back pocket.