No Sleep for the Dead

Chapter 17

From the inside of Riley’s Golf next morning, parked in the same spot Palmer had used on his first survey of the office block, they sat and watched as a procession of police and forensics personnel buzzed around the area. Whatever commercial activity normally went on inside the building appeared to have been suspended, as there was little sign of the usual ebb and flow of corporate visitors or staff, and one or two arrivals were clearly put off by seeing a uniform at the door.

They watched Nobby do a brief tour of the outside, carefully avoiding a taped-off area to one side of the building where the police activity seemed to be focussed. From the concentration and position of the forensics team, Gillivray had fallen from a side window, landing close to the building in dead ground just outside their view.

‘Odd place to jump from,’ said Riley.

Palmer nodded and studied the building through a small pair of binoculars. ‘Especially since the windows don’t look that big. No way you’d fall out of there by accident.’

‘So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘Somebody helped him out.’ Palmer chewed his lip and put the binoculars away.

A police constable left the car park and strolled along the street towards them, inspecting vehicles. He spoke occasionally into his radio, no doubt passing on registration details for vehicle checks. Riley sank down in her seat.

‘If he comes close, I’m not going to snog you, Palmer,’ she warned.

‘Thank God for that,’ Palmer murmured.

Just as they thought they were going to be spotted, the constable stopped barely thirty yards away and listened to his radio, then turned and hurried back to the building.

Riley looked at Palmer. ‘Go on — you’re relieved, aren’t you?’ she accused him. Then she sat up as the rear door of the building opened and the familiar figures of Radnor and Michael appeared. They were carrying briefcases and coats, and headed towards a cab which had pulled into the rear car park.

‘Stroke of luck,’ said Palmer. ‘While the cats are away…’

‘You’re not saying we go in there now?’ Riley checked to see if he was serious. ‘The police are all over the place.’

‘It’s the best time.’ He opened his door. ‘The world doesn’t stop just because one of its low-lifes has taken a one-way ticket to the Great Beyond.’ He picked up a leather dossier case on the way out of the car, and Riley scrambled after him, holding a plain, black briefcase she had been given as a present several years ago but rarely used.

They were stopped at the front entrance by a uniformed officer. ‘Can I ask what your business is, please?’ he queried.

Riley showed him her business card and told him they had an appointment with Azimtec on the first floor. Hopefully, he was unaware that its two main members had just left by the rear door. He studied them both for a moment, then nodded and stood aside.

They approached the desk where Nobby sat waiting, barely managing to control a faintly bewildered expression at their arrival. Across the foyer stood two men in suits, talking quietly. They bore the distinct air of police officers, but didn’t look at the newcomers.

‘Sir. Miss,’ said Nobby, standing up and assuming a non-committal expression. ‘Sign the book, please?’ He pushed the visitor’s book towards them, followed by two badges. This time Riley filled in the spaces using their own names, as the chances of being stopped and asked for ID were too strong. This time they had decided to go in under cover of Riley doing a speculative piece about art imports from the former Soviet Bloc, with Palmer stringing along as an advisor. It might not fool anyone for long, but since it involved half-truths and would be impossible to disprove, it was as good a story as any.

‘You know where to go,’ said Nobby, for the benefit of the police, before sitting back down and picking up his paper. Clearly, said his body language, nothing unusual was going on here. As if to reflect that, the two men turned and walked towards the rear of the building, one of them holding a set of building plans.

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.

‘Damn,’ said Palmer, with a faint look of surprise. He’d been concentrating so hard on the layout of the drawer and not leaving clues, he’d missed the obvious. ‘Well, now we know who killed Gillivray.’

Riley stared at him. ‘Radnor?’

Palmer nodded. ‘Or Michael. He looks more the type.’

‘But why? I wouldn’t have thought they even knew each other.’

‘They probably didn’t. You said yourself that Michael was asking questions about us. The visitor’s book would have shown who we were calling on — even if the security guy downstairs hadn’t told them. It’s a short step from there to wondering what we were doing here, and following the trail up to the sixth floor. Radnor must have got worried and set Michael on to them, to find out what they were up to. Knowing Gillivray, he probably told him to shove off. After that, it was a link they couldn’t leave, in case he blabbed.’

‘But killing him? That’s a bit extreme.’

Palmer wasn’t so sure. It went with the background of people like Radnor. ‘It’s what they do, covering their tracks.’

Suddenly the phone rang. They stared at it, both rooted to the spot. Palmer let it ring four times before reaching forward and picking up the receiver with his fingertips.

‘Incoming!’ The voice was Nobby’s, speaking from the front desk. ‘Twenty seconds — half a minute, tops.’