Tracers

NINE

Raymond Param’s house stood in leafy seclusion at the end of a short cul-de-sac in London’s Highgate. With a double garage, large garden, eyelash gables and a majestic sweep of roof, it was impressive and solid in the evening sunlight, a fanfare to design, prosperity and the rewards of capitalist enterprise.

It also had a brooding aura hovering over it like a dense cloud, as if the owner’s sudden change of status had infected the area, draining whatever light there may have been out of the atmosphere.

‘Nice gaff,’ said Rik Ferris, studying the facade. He scrubbed at his head of spiky hair which refused to be tamed. A bit, Harry decided, like his unusual taste in T-shirts, although he’d toned them down a bit lately. The current one was dark blue with a vivid splash of orange across the chest. The blue matched the Audi TT they were sitting in. Rik had agreed to meet him outside the house for a briefing on Param’s background. ‘I thought you said Jennings wanted him left alone.’

‘So he did. But I haven’t yet sorted out how to start on the latest job he gave me. A runner named Silverman — I’ll tell you about it later. In the meantime, we might as well do something positive.’ Harry took out the briefing paper on Param and scanned the main points. Raymond Param, investment manager for Boulding Bartram, an investment partnership in London. Aged forty-three, Anglo-Indian, his mother British, he went to the London School of Economics, did some time in the States, then joined Bouldings. Married, no children. Solid performer, reliable, steady, then one day, gone. No notes, no goodbyes, no shoes on the beach. He checked a six-by-four photo which accompanied the briefing notes. It showed a sleek individual in a conservative pinstripe, with receding black hair and an easy smile.

‘Why are they hot to find him?’

‘His employers found a bunch of dummy offshore accounts after he’d skipped. All empty. They think he set them up so he could dump small amounts of money over several months, then cleared them out once he was ready to go.’

‘Small? Is it worth all the trouble, trying to get him back?’

‘The small amounts added up to about three million.’

‘Ouch. Painful. Sounds like their systems slipped up.’

‘Just a bit. No warning, out of character, never done this before, highest integrity, honest as the day is long, blah-di-blah. Now rich and on the lam.’ He passed Rik copies of the briefing documents. ‘We need to check out anything you can find on him; clubs, friends, recent trips, financials — the usual.’

‘No problem.’ Rik folded the sheets and put them in the glove box. Like Harry, he was a former employee of MI5. He had an extensive knowledge of government systems and a widespread hacking community he could use to blur the lines of any illicit searches he needed to conduct. It had been his misuse of IT resources that had led to his own downfall, and his posting to the same remote station where he and Harry had first met.

‘Where do we start the physical stuff?’

‘Right here. The wife’s staying with her sister, so we’ve got full run of the house to do the audit, including, with luck, his computer and financial records.’ The audit was the term Harry used for trawling through a runner’s background, checking every file, document, scrap of paper, phone and email records, financial detail, and even searching their clothing and cars, all in the hope of finding a clue to the runner’s whereabouts. Mostly, it worked. Like it had with Matuq, turning up a colour postcard of a cottage in Blakeney, Norfolk. It hadn’t been the one he’d been staying in, but enough to point Harry in the right direction. The rest had been down to Rik checking phone calls and emails made by the Libyan from his office and home. Harry looked at him. ‘First, though, I’d like to check the wife actually is with the sister and hasn’t snuck off to Las Vegas to join hubby Raymond on the blackjack tables.’

‘Cynic,’ Rik murmured drily. But he knew Harry was right; Param wouldn’t be the first partner or husband to skip with some ill-gotten gains with the connivance of his better half. He yawned. ‘Tomorrow first thing?’

‘Why — you got a hot date?’ Rik had a variety of girlfriends, none of whom seemed to last long. Most were victims of his irregular lifestyle and his obsession with technology. . and possibly, Harry figured, his taste in garish T-shirts and his spiky hair. Their passing didn’t seem to bother him much.

‘I did. She blew me out. Something about visiting her sister in hospital.’

Harry laughed. ‘Christ — they’re not still using that old chestnut, are they?’

‘At least I’m still finding out,’ Rik sneered. ‘When did you last go on a date?’

Harry didn’t rise to the bait. He was beyond dates. Dates were for new beginnings, tentative relationships with a faint whiff of potential failure about them. He was more into a relaxed night in with a decent bottle of wine. And Jean. Fortunately, she concurred wholeheartedly with that. The willowy owner of an upmarket flower business, she had an easy grin and an earthy laugh and actually concurred very nicely. But not tonight. She was out with friends at a hen party in the Cotswolds. ‘You haven’t said anything about the Libyan. . Matuq? How’d it go?’ The electronic sweep Rik had conducted had provided nothing useful, save that his credit cards and bank account had not been used. With no other identifiable source of money, they had concluded that he was using a pre-drawn fund of cash on which to exist until the fuss died down.

‘I found him. He’s dead.’ Harry described briefly what had happened.

‘Jeez, that’s tough. Remind me never to steal anything from Colonel Gaddafi.’

The house looked no less imposing the following morning at nine thirty. The local school run was over, always a time when nobody had time to notice anything, in Harry’s experience, as he led the way through the front door and across a broad hallway to a small green box on one wall.

‘You have twenty seconds to key in the number,’ a tearless and artfully ‘traumatized’ Mrs Param had told him half an hour earlier. It was all the time they had, she had warned, sitting regally in her sister’s front room, before the private security company she had insisted her husband use came to investigate.

She had given grudging permission for them to look around, but only after the intervention of her husband’s former employers.

‘How long do I have to put up with this?’ she had demanded coldly. She was attractive in a glossy, brittle way and, if she had shed any tears at her husband’s disappearance, there was little evidence in her manner or the precision of her make-up. Harry thought she needed a swift kick up the pants, but kept his thoughts to himself. Somehow, given the acerbic comments voiced by her sister about her absent brother-in-law being nothing but a gambler and wastrel, he doubted it would be long before Mrs Param returned to clear the place out for a quick and vengeful sale.

‘A few hours,’ Harry had told her. ‘A day at most.’ He hadn’t mentioned that if they had to enter the fabric of the house to see if her husband had hidden files or documents inside the walls or beneath the flooring, it could take a lot longer. That sort of decision was down to Jennings and his client.

After keying in the security code, he stood and breathed in the atmosphere for a moment before walking through the house. Rik hung back, humming quietly. This was Harry’s area of expertise, a time to acclimatize himself to the feel of the place and soak up the colour and tone of Raymond Param’s former life.

The house was richly furnished and comfortable, with gold-embroidered chairs and sofas set with precision around a large living room overlooking a neat rear garden and patio. The carpet was pale and expensive throughout. Apart from a huge kitchen, a utility room, dining room, study and a downstairs bathroom completed the ground floor layout, like the pages of a property catalogue. It was the domain of a childless couple: no clutter, no toys, no signs of disarray from careless teenagers or rampaging tots.

But there were signs that the police had been through the house, evidenced by the minute shift of certain items, the slightly opened drawers and small depressions in the carpet where furniture had been moved and put back a fraction out of place.

There were a few photos, carefully positioned for maximum effect, like exhibits in a gallery. Other than people who were probably unnamed members of the extended Param family on both sides, they were mostly of Param and his wife, Saskia, arms artfully entwined and heads close but never quite touching. None of the shots displayed any obvious warmth between them. It was as if they had been concentrating more on the professional than the personal touch, like mannequins in a photo shoot. Raymond Param was athletic, well dressed and groomed, from the brushed hair and crisp shirts, to the display of a large Rolex and the chunky cufflinks at his wrists. His wife wore her clothes and make-up with the ease of a professional model, smiling carefully at the camera but not once at her husband.

‘Nothing blindingly obvious,’ said Harry. There had been little in the way of clues or suggestions from Saskia Param as to where her husband might have gone, and he’d dismissed further questioning of her as a waste of time. It was down to sifting through whatever they could find in the hopes of uncovering a lead. The one thing he was sure of was that this house had ceased to be a centre of marital bliss a long time ago.

‘I’ll start on the study.’ Rik was looking through the doorway at a grey PC sitting on a desk.

Harry nodded. ‘Go to it. I’ll do the rest.’ He made his way upstairs and began working methodically through the rooms, beginning with the master bedroom. He wasn’t hopeful of finding anything because Mrs Param had made it clear that her husband’s domain was the study, and she knew for certain that he never left anything in his suits because she always checked. This had been said without a blink of embarrassment. He looked anyway, because as he knew from experience, even the most watchful of wives missed things. And an apparently innocuous scrap of paper was all he needed to give him a trail to follow.

Twenty minutes later he closed the door to the main bedroom. The wardrobe held only clothes and the drawers contained smaller items and accessories. The en suite bathroom proved a similar blank, as did the other rooms and cupboards. If Param had left anything here, it was somewhere inside the furniture or concealed behind the walls, where nothing short of wholesale demolition would find it.

He returned to the study where Rik was staring at the PC with a concentrated look of disgust.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rik. ‘It’s a useless pile of crap. He cleaned it.’

‘How?’

‘He must have downloaded a wipe utility to sanitize the hard drive.’ He tapped the keyboard in frustration. ‘Kills all the data stone dead.’ He gestured at a laptop on the sideboard. ‘Same with that. No links to follow, either.’

‘Well, although I only understood half of what you just said,’ Harry murmured, ‘it means he wasn’t fooling. He was covering his tracks.’ It also meant that it killed any chances of Param having been coerced by a third party to defraud the funds. ‘We’ll have to do it the hard way.’ He began pulling drawers out of the large, ornate desk, and emptying them one by one, placing each item to one side after examination. There was also a sideboard, a drinks cupboard and a filing cabinet, all of which were places Param might have left something they could use. If they were lucky.

Rik scowled, cheated of the opportunity to use his specialist skills. He selected a drawer and dumped the contents on a spare piece of carpet and began sifting through.