A Foreign Country

54

‘Who was it?’ Barbara asked when Kell came back into the house.

‘Amelia’s husband,’ he replied, taking a bottle of Heineken from the fridge and popping the cap. ‘He’s gone back to London. Any change over there?’

Kell nodded in the direction of Amelia’s house and a chastened Harold immediately set about making amends for his earlier mistake.

‘CUCKOO’s gone upstairs,’ he said. ‘Unpacking in his room. Amelia suggested he take a shower before dinner but so far all he’s done is admire himself in the mirror and smelled the sheets to see if they’re clean.’

‘Have we still got decent visuals?’ Kell asked, moving behind Elsa, in her habitual seat at the table. He looked up at the three screens feeding video surveillance of CUCKOO’s bedroom and bathroom. In the lower right-hand corner, Amelia was taking a roast chicken out of the Aga.

‘You want sound?’ Harold asked.

‘Only if he talks. Has he got a radio on in there? Any music?’

‘Nothing.’

In a silent row, Kell, Elsa and Harold watched CUCKOO, near-hypnotized as he took pairs of folded underpants and balled-up socks from his suitcase, placing them in a wardrobe at the edge of the screen. He hung three shirts on hangers and draped a pair of linen trousers against the back of a chair. A book came out, a framed photograph. Kell took a sip of his drink.

‘Where’s Kevin?’ he asked. ‘Did you get him on the radio?’

Harold’s voice was tight with apology. ‘Yes. Sorry, guv. Amateur hour. He’s parked now in the lay-by but didn’t get there in time to see Giles’s car. Anybody else appears, he’ll flag them down and radio in straight away. I’m sorry it was switched off. I was busy with the live feeds, let it slip …’

Kell put him out of his misery. ‘Forget it.’

Again they turned their attention to the footage from the house, three faces lit up by the flickering feed. Amelia was setting a table for two in the kitchen. CUCKOO had made his way into the bathroom.

‘This is where he gets his kit off,’ Harold said, but the joke fell flat. Kell wondered if he had been drinking to calm his nerves.

‘What’s he carrying?’ he asked.

In his right hand, CUCKOO was holding an open laptop, which he rested on a stool beside the bath. He then locked the door, sat on the closed toilet seat and proceeded to tap in a sequence of letters.

‘Can we see that, can we see what he’s typing?’ Kell asked.

‘It’s being taped,’ Harold replied. He had put a camera in the ceiling light precisely for this purpose. ‘I can go back and look at it later.’

‘Do that,’ Kell replied, though there was an edge of doubt in his voice. Had Harold picked the best angle? It looked as though the lid was obscuring the keyboard. ‘Elsa, can you read the wi-fi?’

‘Bringing it up now,’ she said, and he looked down to see a screen of code on her primary laptop, an analysis of the Internet activity in Amelia’s house. ‘Must be something he wants to hide,’ she said. ‘Why else would he lock himself away?’

CUCKOO spent five further minutes checking email on Wanadoo; Elsa could not be certain what he was reading or writing.

‘It’s encrypted,’ she said. ‘I need the laptop. I need to get into the guts.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Barbara told her, her soft, mellow voice a welcome corrective to the tension in the room.

Kell turned and smiled. He was grateful that Barbara was on the team; she had a dignity and strength of character that obliged people around her to behave as they would in the presence of a grandmother or distinguished matriarch. In a lower screen, Amelia was removing the cork from a bottle of wine.

‘Hang on.’

Harold had seen something. CUCKOO had placed the laptop on the floor and was standing up. From his back pocket he took out a mobile phone and opened the casing. He then reached into the ticket pocket at the front of his jeans and removed what appeared to be a SIM card.

‘Good luck with that,’ Harold muttered as CUCKOO put the SIM into the phone, closed the casing and powered it up. ‘More chance of getting a signal at the bottom of a swimming pool.’

The team looked on as Vincent stared at the phone, waiting for a signal from what Kell assumed was a French network. After two minutes, he switched it off and replaced the SIM in his jeans.

Everybody was thinking the same thing. Kell turned to Barbara.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you need to get your hands on that.’

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘All part of the service.’