With her early shift in the morning, Jen hadn’t been keen on helping Connor. But he had persisted, the vague guilt he felt at laying on the charm and promising her whatever she wanted in return for helping him only slightly ameliorated by the realization that he meant to honour his promise.
She arrived twenty minutes later, Simon letting her into the flat. She had changed out of the tight-fitting jeans and T-shirt she had been wearing in the pub earlier, opting for a pair of joggers and a sweat shirt. Connor couldn’t help but notice she looked all the better for it.
‘Jen, thanks for coming,’ he said, as he led her into the living room of Donna’s flat. ‘This is Donna Blake, who I told you about on the phone.’
Jen extended a hand, Donna taking it. They were about the same height, but it was like looking at a flipped image. Where Jen was fair, Donna was dark. Jen’s skin seemed to glow with health, her eyes bright and clear, while Donna’s complexion was pale, her skin taut, eyes surrounded by dark shadows of exhaustion and glittering with a keen awareness fuelled by a mixture of adrenalin and fear.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Donna said, cracking what was almost a genuine smile, warmth guttering through the façade. ‘Thanks for this.’
‘No problem,’ Jen said. ‘Just means this one will owe me. Again.’
Connor squirmed as both women turned to him. ‘Right, as I said, Jen’s going to keep you and you son company while we’re away. You’ll be perfectly safe, but if there are any problems, just call my mobile.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Donna said, her eyes telling Connor she wasn’t convinced.
‘Right,’ Connor said, nodding to Simon as he bounced the keys Donna had given him. ‘Let’s go. You remember that alarm code?’
Simon sighed. ‘Seven four three five nine four,’ he said. ‘You happy now? C’mon, let’s get going.’
Out in the cool night, the smell of rain in the air, Connor glanced around, saw what he was looking for and threw the car keys to Simon. ‘Go on, I’ll be there in a second.’
He watched as Simon walked to the car and plipped the alarm, then took a straight path to the Mercedes parked at the end of the street, doing nothing to mask his approach.
He wanted to be seen.
The driver’s-side door opened as he closed in on the car, the interior light bouncing off Paulie’s shaven head. Connor held up his hands as Paulie unfolded himself from the car, careful to keep his bandaged hand against his chest. Connor thought about that. Why would MacKenzie trust his daughter’s safety to an injured man – a man who had failed once already? Smiled. Obvious, really.
‘What the fuck you playing at, Fraser, dragging her all the way across town just to see you?’
‘Not here to fight, Paulie,’ Connor said. ‘Look, I know I already owe you, but I need a favour. I have to run an errand, and I need you to keep an eye on that flat,’ he turned and gestured to Donna Blake’s window, ‘while I’m gone. Jen’s in there with someone, and I need you to make sure they’re safe until I get back.’
Paulie pulled back his lips in a snarl, revealing teeth that weren’t over-familiar with a brush. ‘What the fuck? You think I’m babysitting for you? Fuck off. All I care about is Jennifer.’
‘I know that,’ Connor said, holding Paulie’s gaze. ‘And why shouldn’t you? She told me you’ve been around since she was a kid. It’s obvious you care about her – why else would you be here on your own time?’
‘What the . . .?’
‘Come on, Paulie, I don’t have time for bullshit. You’re hurt. You’ve let your boss down once already, yet here you are, driving around with a busted hand, still keeping an eye on Jen. Must hurt like a bastard, even with an automatic like that. You wouldn’t be doing that unless you cared for her. So I’m asking you, please, do this for me. Keep her safe until I get back.’
Connor saw the hatred in Paulie’s eyes flicker. It was only for a second but, in that moment, he knew the man would do what he asked. Not for him. For Jen.
‘And why the fuck should I do anything for you?’ he said.
Connor stepped closer, moving to Paulie’s left, making sure he was out of Simon’s eyeline as he reached behind his back.
‘Because I’m trusting you,’ he said. ‘And because I’m giving you this to make sure you get the job done.’
Paulie looked down, eyes widening as he saw the holstered Glock Connor was holding tight to his chest. ‘What the fuck are you . . .’
‘Just take it. I don’t think anything’s going to kick off here, but if it does, this’ll even the playing field with your hand being fucked. It’s chambered. Just flick the safety, point and shoot. Okay?’
‘Who the fuck are you, Fraser?’ Paulie asked, even as he reached for the gun.
Connor kept his gaze level, hoping none of the panic he felt at handing over the weapon had bled into his eyes. ‘Someone like you,’ he said. ‘Someone who wants to keep Jen safe.’ He reached into his other pocket, produced a business card. ‘If everything goes to plan, I’ll be back in less than an hour. But if anything happens, or you see something you don’t like, call me.’
Paulie took the card, his eyes moving between it, the gun and Connor, as though they were parts of an equation he couldn’t figure out. ‘Okay,’ he said finally.
Connor nodded and turned away, keeping himself between Paulie and the Audi, not wanting Simon to know he had just given away his gun. He kept his pace slow and casual, fought the almost irresistible urge to run, duck, get out of the line of sight of Paulie and the gun. He thought he could feel it trained on him, the barrel poking into his back as he walked.
‘The fuck was that all about?’ Simon asked, as Connor slipped into the driver’s seat of the Audi.
‘Insurance policy,’ Connor said as he fired the engine. Settling into the seat, he felt his T-shirt plaster itself to his back, the cold sweat that covered him acting like icy glue.
The studio was only a ten-minute drive from Donna Blake’s flat, on streets that were quiet. Connor kept to the speed limit, not wanting to attract undue attention. He needn’t have worried: turning off the main road into the industrial estate where the radio station was based was like falling off the world. He had expected a police car or an officer stationed at the entrance, but there was nothing. He remembered Ford’s words – We’ve only so many bodies on hand – and realized that whoever had been stationed there had been reassigned. Made sense. The main crime scene was a car park, and that would have been picked clean by the forensics team by now, Donna Blake’s car taken away for further testing. Which left the office. Not a primary crime scene, just adjacent to one, which meant that the police could seal it up and return to it when they had the time and the manpower.
Which gave Connor an opportunity.
He drove past it, a squat, ugly building with a gaudy Valley FM sign stuck in the grass and peeling red paint on the awning above shuttered glass double doors. He looked around for CCTV cameras or anything that would indicate a police presence, saw nothing but the yellow and black ‘Police: Do Not Cross’ tape that surrounded the building and fluttered listlessly in the breeze. He pulled around the corner, tucking the Audi into a pool of darkness under a tree. Killed the engine, looked at Simon.
‘You sure about this? We’re going to break a police cordon and search a potential crime scene. That’s bad enough for me, but you’ve still got a career to think about, Simon.’
Simon grinned in the gloom, teeth glinting in the light from the Audi’s dash. ‘Catch yerself on, Connor. I’m not letting you go in there to have all the fun. Besides, we both know you want me right beside you so you can keep an eye on me.’
Connor shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. Simon was right, but the notion sounded absurd. He got out of the car without another word, Simon following him. They ducked under the cordon and walked quickly up the path to the double doors, Simon riffling through the keys as he moved, dropping to the ground for the shutter lock in one fluid movement.
Connor heard the lock click, winced as the shutters squealed and rattled up their tracks. Simon stopped them halfway, leaving just enough space for them to access the front door. He ducked under and saw the police tape pulled across the middle of the two doors. There was a soft snicking sound, and a blade suddenly winked in Simon’s hand.
‘Where the fuck did you get that?’ Connor asked.
‘Says the man carrying a cannon,’ Simon said, as he sliced the police tape and unlocked the door. ‘I’m going to slip in and disarm the alarm. You follow and pull the shutters down behind you.’
Connor watched as Simon stepped into the blackness. Heard the beep of an alarm as the motion sensor tripped, felt his pulse raise as he heard Simon punching keys. What if Donna had given them the wrong code? What if Simon had remembered it wrongly or keyed it in wrong? What if—
The beeping ended abruptly. ‘Clear,’ Simon called.
Connor took a deep, steadying breath, pulled the shutter down behind him and stepped inside, pulling out his pencil torch.
It was just as Donna had described it, a large, open-plan space, untidy desks dotted around it. The back of the room was taken up by a booth that was separated into two sections – a production unit and the main recording studio. Through the glass window, Connor could see a mic hanging on a boom arm. He wondered how many times Donna Blake had sat in front of it.
‘Here,’ Simon called, snapping Connor from his thoughts. Connor swung the torch in an arc, saw Simon standing next to a desk that was neater and less cluttered than the others. Just as Donna had said, a Saltire hung from an Anglepoise lamp at the corner of the desk, one end twisted into a loose knot and looped around the neck of a small teddy bear with a Union flag cape draped down its back. Donna had told him that no one in the office could decide if it was Evans’s idea of a joke or a deliberate attempt to bait people into confronting him. But, with what he now knew, Connor suspected it had another meaning. Something deeper. An in-joke between Evans and one other person.
Connor stepped forward, swung the torch over the desk. Nothing there of interest. A notepad sat beside a laptop, which was patched into a desktop monitor. Donna had told them all the laptops were password-protected but, still, it was worth a look.
‘You check that,’ Connor said. ‘I’ll look in the drawers.’
Simon cracked the laptop and hit the power key, its tinny bong as it powered up loud in the gloomy silence. Connor watched him for a moment, then turned his attention to the three drawers on the right of the desk.
He opened the first, again the question of what he was looking for occurring to him. Something that provided the missing link between Evans and Griffin, something that made sense of all this.
He heard the soft chatter of keys. ‘Password,’ Simon muttered. ‘What the fuck could that be?’
‘Try Billy,’ Connor said, speaking before he thought about it.
More chattering from the keyboard, followed by the chirp to tell them the password was wrong. ‘No go,’ he said, ‘and if this is a normal log-in system, we’ve only got two more tries before it locks us out.’
Connor bit his lip. Think. Think. He kept his own passwords random, but knew other people were less contentious, opting for something simple and memorable, something with meaning to them. The name of a pet or a loved one. But how did he figure that out with a perfect stranger? ‘Gimme a minute,’ he said, turning his attention back to the drawers.
The first was a disappointment, holding only pens, a stapler and a stack of Post-it notes. The second and third were slightly more promising, with old notepads and a flash drive. Connor lifted them out, pocketed the flash drive, then riffled through the notepads. Nothing interesting, mostly notes on stories, ideas for interview subjects and topics, along with a few newspaper cuttings, headlines highlighted, notes scrawled in the margins.
‘Any other ideas?’ Simon asked, impatience edging his voice. ‘Would he make it as easy as his own name? Fuck it, why not try?’ He typed. Got the bing of rejection. ‘Ah, fuck it. Let’s take it with us, man, work it out later.’
Connor nodded agreement, looked at the notepads in front of him. Couldn’t see any reason to take them. Besides, leaving the drawers totally empty, along with the disappearance of the laptop and the slicing of the police tape, would be like leaving a huge ‘We only searched this desk’ sign for the police.
He dropped the notepads back into the drawers, pushed them shut. ‘Aye. Come on, then. We’ve got those notepads and the laptop, maybe we can . . .’
The bottom drawer had stuck.
Connor looked down, thinking he had overfilled it, one of the notepads catching on the runner. But, no, it was only half full, the notepads sitting well below the lip of the drawer.
He tried it again. It refused to slide home.
He dropped to his knees, pulled the drawer all the way out. As he’d suspected, it had caught at the end of the runner, and he angled it up to pull it clear. Set the drawer aside, reached into void space and felt around.
A pulse of excitement as his hand touched something cool and smooth. He ran his fingers over it, finding its edges, then pulled it out and reached back in to make sure he hadn’t missed anything else. He hadn’t.
‘What’s that?’ Simon said, leaning over.
‘No idea,’ Connor said, opening the laminated envelope file. It might be nothing, just a folder that had slipped down the back of the drawers and been forgotten. He slipped out a sheaf of papers and trained the torch on them. His breath caught as he processed what he was seeing, the pressure rising behind his eyes as though he was straining against a heavy weight in the gym rather than holding a few pieces of paper.
Simon’s voice seemed to come from very far away. ‘Connor? What is it? What?’
Connor stood up abruptly, felt the world sway. Looked across the desk, at the small display there. ‘Try teddy bear,’ he whispered, his tongue and lips numb.
‘What? Oh . . .’ Simon typed, the screen flaring to life as the laptop kept booting. ‘How the fuck did you figure that out?’ he asked. ‘Connor, what?’
Connor bent down, slid the drawer back into place. It fitted perfectly now. A lot of things did. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Grab the laptop and let’s get out of here.’
Simon wasted a second on a confused look, then got moving. They retraced their steps, both careful to touch only what they absolutely had to, even though they were wearing gloves. Connor stepped out into the night, grabbed the shutters as Simon reset the alarm, then pulled it down behind them. The police would find that the cordon tape was cut, but it was a neat slice, so at first glance it would look all right.
Not that it was a real concern. Not now.
They hurried back down the path and to the car, the file seeming to pulse with heat under Connor’s arm. Back in the Audi, he had the engine fired and the car in gear before Simon had had a chance to speak. He was just clearing the industrial estate when a chirp from the stereo told him he had a call. He thumbed the answer button on the steering wheel. ‘Connor Fraser.’
A low whisper down the line. ‘Fraser, it’s Paulie. You’d better get back here. Looks like we’ve got company.’
Connor floored the accelerator, the car roaring to life, the sound echoing in his chest, seeming to resonate somewhere deep within.
‘Connor, what the fuck’s going on, man?’ Simon asked, raising his voice over the sound of the engine.
‘I know why they died,’ Connor said. ‘Donna was right. She is in danger. And – fuck! – I put Jen right in harm’s way too.’
Simon stared at him for a moment, then turned to face front. ‘Drive,’ he said. ‘Forget the guilt. Just fucking get us there. You can fill me in on the way.’