Scott Mariani - House of War

She hesitated, obviously finding the question weird. The information would help Ben piece together Romy’s movements that morning, which might come in useful as he learned more. But Jeanne wasn’t taking the bait. ‘I’m sorry, but who exactly are you?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Apologies for having called at this difficult time.’

Ben ended the call before she could say more. So much for winning them over with charm.

He went back to examining Romy’s phone. Address book, call records, texts, emails; he was running out of options and didn’t have much to show for it so far. All that remained for him to check out was the folder containing image files.

Lots of folks went about snapping anything that moved, subscribed heavily to the selfie craze and had thousands of photos crammed into their phones, but Romy wasn’t one of those people. She had only five files stored in the images folder. They were arranged in chronological order. Ben opened the oldest one first, dating back to January.

The image was a self-taken shot of Romy and a young guy about the same age as her, slightly built, who looked like he might be Moroccan or Algerian. Ben wondered if this was Michel, the boyfriend. They were hugging each other and grinning cheesy grins for the camera on a cloudy beach somewhere, maybe the north coast up near Calais. They were dressed for winter, hats and coats and woolly scarves, and the sea breeze was blowing her hair across her face. She looked happy. The young guy, too. It was a sad picture, in retrospect.

The next photo had been taken three months ago, inside what appeared to be a bar. Ben could see tables covered with glassware and bottles, and red vinyl bench seating and other people in the background. Another image taken not long afterwards the same day showed the two of them posing outside the bar, pulling silly faces. Ben could see the faded lettering painted on the bar window that spelled out backwards the words LE GERONIMO.

Ben laid down Romy’s phone for a moment and tried Michel’s number again on his burner. Still no reply.

He returned to her phone. The fourth photo was a blurry shot of an older couple, taken in the dining room in a middle-class family home a couple of months ago. It looked like someone’s birthday, though the older couple didn’t seem to be having a great time. They both bore a faint resemblance to Romy: her parents, he assumed. Her father had the pasty complexion of a chronic cardiac sufferer and her mother looked like an uptight sort. They were centred at the end of a table bearing a cake festooned with candles, the smiling, goofy faces of some other people peering in at the edges of the frame. Romy wasn’t among them, so Ben assumed she’d been behind the camera. Photography hadn’t been her greatest talent in life, that was for sure.

When he tried to open the fifth and most recent picture file, just three days old, he discovered two things about it. First, that it wasn’t a picture file at all but a much larger video clip. Second, that it was encrypted.

A window popped up requesting a PIN number. Beneath that was a prompt asking him ‘Forget your passcode?’ When he tapped it, the phone asked him for a security question. Which could be anything in the world, and after a couple of failed attempts the whole phone might lock itself up. He didn’t even bother trying.

Now why would Romy have encrypted the video file when she hadn’t made any attempt to protect the rest of her phone data? That fact alone singled it out as an item of particular interest, and Ben’s curiosity was piqued. It could be all kinds of things. Something private, obviously. Possibly something very personal that Romy didn’t want anyone to see.

Which left open the possibility that the clip could be something more pertinent to the questions Ben was trying to answer. He needed to get into that video file.

He was no expert on how to access inaccessible digital data. But he knew someone who was.

Thierry Chevrolet wasn’t named after a famous American automobile marque. His surname was derived from an old French word meaning a goat farmer. But goat farming wasn’t how Thierry made his living, either.

Back when Ben had operated as a freelance kidnap and hostage rescue specialist, his work had taken him to many different countries and necessitated a number of false identities. Passports, driving licences, ID cards and other official papers all had to be perfect to avoid unnecessary entanglements with the authorities and allow him to slip about under the radar. He’d gone to a couple of dodgy characters in the forgery trade, one in London, one in Amsterdam, before he’d found the then twenty-nine-year-old Thierry working out of a tiny apartment in Paris. He was a nervous, skinny guy with a bush of Afro hair and a reedy moustache, and talked in a whispery voice owing to the fact that he only had one lung. Hardly the archetype of the master criminal. But after seeing a sample of his work Ben had hired him on the spot to produce a variety of false papers. He’d been more than pleased with the results.

Now and then things would get hot and one of Ben’s fake identities would have to be ditched and replaced, so he had been able to offer Thierry a steady stream of work. The pair had got to know each other well. Ben had discovered that in addition to being an excellent forger, Thierry was also a wizard with anything techno-orientated. On a few occasions he’d employed him to hack emails, raid computer files and unlock phones ‘confiscated’ from associates of kidnappers. If Thierry couldn’t hack and crack his way into it, you might as well toss it in the bin.

And now Ben had a new assignment for him.

Last time they’d had dealings was years ago, before Ben had retired from freelance work, moved to France full-time and joined up with Jeff Dekker to set up the tactical training centre at Le Val. He had no idea whether the guy was still active.

Ben levered up the loose floorboard in the safehouse’s bedroom, dug around in the cavity below and pulled out a padded envelope sealed with tape. Inside were a couple of examples of Thierry’s artistry, a British passport in the name Paul Harris, and a French one for the fictitious Vincent Fournier. Each had served him well on a few occasions.

Wrapped up with the fake passports was a dog-eared old notebook in which Ben had kept lists of contacts in those days. Thierry’s number was marked just by the letter T. He dialled it, but there was no answer. Maybe it was a long shot. Thierry could have changed his phone, or emigrated, or gone straight and got a job, or died, or been caught and sent to jail. Any of which possibilities would leave Ben in a tricky situation. The issue wasn’t finding someone else who could unlock the encrypted video file. It was finding someone who wouldn’t ask questions about what Ben was doing with a phone belonging to the victim of an unsolved murder. Petty crooks often greased the wheels of their good fortune by acting as police informants on the side. Thierry, by contrast, was far too honourable a criminal to ever rat on a client.