Severed (17 page)

'Let's start at the beginning,' Lucas says when we're in his study and he's got his laptop booted up.

We're both drinking coffee, sitting in matching and very comfortable black leather chairs at
opposite ends of his enormous glass desk. It's now twenty to five, and I feel a lot better. I've showered and am dressed in a pair of Lucas's Armani jeans and a short-sleeved cotton Hugo Boss shirt. I wanted a pair of his shoes as well but he said his friendship only went so far, so I'm still in my tatty smoke-stained Timberlands.

'Do you still not remember anything at all about last night?' he asks.

'I can't really remember anything about yesterday. I vaguely recall driving to the showroom yesterday morning, but even that I'm not a hundred per cent sure about. I have no recollection of calling you.'

'It's a pity we can't do something to unlock your memory. Obviously, the people who set you up have gone to great trouble to conceal the location where you spent last night. Which means they think your memory might come back, or . . .'

'Or what?'

'Or it's a place that's familiar to you.'

I shake my head. 'I've never been in that bedroom before.'

'No, but you might have been to the house.'

'I don't think so,' I say. 'The place where I
woke up this morning is somewhere north of London. Hertfordshire, maybe the edge of Essex. I don't know anyone who lives there.'

'OK,' he concedes. 'Now I need to take a look at this DVD. See what it shows up.'

He takes the case from his pocket and removes the disc.

'It's really not pleasant,' I warn him.

He lights a cigarette and views me through the smoke. 'I know, and you don't have to stay in here. In fact, it might be better if you didn't. There's no point putting yourself through it all again.'

Lucas is right, and as he inserts the DVD into his laptop I get up and leave the room. I want to remember Leah as she was when we first met: a mischievous, smiling young woman with beautiful doe eyes and a cute upturned nose, not the cold, lifeless corpse she became, nor the bleak, bloody way she met her end.

I take a seat in Lucas's lounge and stare at the blank screen of the giant plasma TV that hangs on an even blanker-looking wall. Lucas's place is a typical bachelor's pad, minimally furnished with most of the money going on the electrical goods. There are no pictures on any of the
walls, and the sofa and matching chairs are carefully and immaculately arranged, giving it a showroom feel. It's all undeniably flashy - which makes me conclude that the PI trade pays a lot better than I ever thought - but bland and utterly devoid of character.

While I wait, I force the thoughts of Leah out of my mind and instead go back through the events of the day, trying to come up with some answers. I've been targeted by a gang of violent criminals with whom I have no previous connection. A former soldier, Iain Ferrie, whom I served alongside but hardly knew, had something in a briefcase that these people wanted desperately, but instead of sending one of their own associates to collect it, they decided to use me, going to elaborate lengths, including setting me up for murder, to make sure that I followed their instructions. Ferrie refused to tell me what was in the case but suggested that it was something 'very bad', and his demeanour - extremely tense and agitated - makes me think that he was telling the truth.

What's also true is that the men to whom I delivered the briefcase are determined to hang on to it, and will not hesitate to kill anyone who,
like Snowy, gets in their way. They've taken some losses at the brothel, but I suspect there are more of them, and they still have the case. They also believe, it seems, that Ferrie was holding something back from them.

Iain Ferrie. Whichever way I look at it, he is the key to all this, the starting point.

I get up from the sofa just as Lucas opens the door of his study and steps into the lounge. I'm about to tell him that we need to learn more about Ferrie when I stop. The expression on Lucas's face is one of shock and confusion.

'It's bad, isn't it?' I say.

'It's horrible,' he answers, shaking his head slowly. 'Awful.'

'I know,' I say. But of course I don't. I couldn't bring myself to watch it all earlier, so I can only imagine the savagery and terror on that DVD.

'But there's something else,' he continues, with a sigh. 'Something I've got to show you.'

'I don't want to see any part of that film ever again,' I tell him.

'It's not something on the film.'

Puzzled, I follow him into the study and stand next to him in front of the laptop, which is displaying the 'My Computer' screen where the
documents and various internal and external drives are listed. As I watch, Lucas leans down and right-clicks on the DVD drive icon. A menu of options appears, and he double-clicks on the 'Properties' icon. A table with a pie chart in the middle appears, stating that the disk has 83 per cent available space. Beneath the pie chart there's a single untitled file listed.

'Look at the date on the file,' Lucas says, touching the screen lightly with a forefinger.

The text to the right of the title 'Unknown File' reads 'Date last modified', and that's the moment when it finally clicks. I turn and stare at him, and I'm guessing my expression is as confused as his was when he first came out of the study.

'This is the DVD they gave me, right? The one with the murder on?'

He nods. 'That's right. The one that was supposedly filmed last night featuring you and Leah. But you can see, can't you? It wasn't. This file, the film of the murder, was made at 11.47 p.m. on Wednesday.' He taps the time and date on the screen. 'In other words, two days ago. Someone's really fucking you about, Tyler.'

I step back from the machine, suddenly
feeling flushed. 'What the hell does this mean? That it was all an act? But Leah was dead, Lucas. I saw her. And she sure as hell hadn't been dead for that long.'

He sighs. 'The film looks real enough. If it's a fake, it's a damn good one.'

I slam my hand down on the desk so hard the coffee cups rattle and Lucas flinches. Frustration hits me like an icy slap, and I'm reminded once again how impotent my memory loss is making me.

'What the hell does this all mean?' I repeat, my voice rising.

'It means', says Lucas calmly, 'that Leah may well be dead, but it wasn't her you woke up next to this morning.'

'How well did you really know her, Tyler?' asks Lucas quietly.

I can hear something vaguely accusatory in his tone, and I don't like it.

'Well enough,' I tell him. 'She's not involved in this, Lucas. She's . . .' I pause. 'She
was
a really good person.'

'I know, I know, but--'

'But what? Leah's dead, for Christ's sake. She was murdered. How can she have been involved?'

He sighs. 'Listen, Tyler. How long have I known you?'

'A long time,' I admit reluctantly.

'Exactly. You're my friend. I respect your
judgement. I know you really cared for Leah, but I've got to be honest with you . . .' He stops and fixes me with an intense stare. 'There's something wrong.'

I open my mouth to argue, but something stops me. Instead, I sit back in the seat and listen. I think back to the night we met, how much I felt for her even then, and I feel a knot forming in my stomach.

'You came to me yesterday asking for information about Leah,' Lucas continues, 'which means you weren't entirely sure about her yourself. Also, the DVD shows quite categorically that she wasn't murdered last night or early this morning. She was killed late on Wednesday.'

I wipe a hand across my brow, not sure what to think. The three weeks we spent together were some of the happiest of my life. For once, everything felt absolutely right. I can't bring myself, even now, to believe that it was all an act on her part.

'So, what is it you're saying, Lucas?'

'That it's possible she was working for who-ever's set you up. That maybe she was used to lure you in, but was more expendable than she
thought. She was used, then killed, to seal your co-operation.'

'But if I didn't see her yesterday, who was it who lured me to that house? And who did I wake up next to this morning?'

'I have no idea,' he admits, with a weary shrug. 'Neither, unfortunately, do you. Remember the anagram. Leah Torness. She's not real.'

I still think there must be some mistake on the timing shown on the DVD, because I know who I saw this morning, and I'm absolutely positive it was Leah. The body shape, the jewellery, the tattoo. They were all hers. But I don't press the argument. There's no point.

Lucas sighs. 'All right,' he says, 'we're going to have to look at things from another angle.'

'How about starting with Ferrie?' I suggest, forcing myself to start thinking properly again.

'Good idea.'

He pauses for a moment, mulling things over. I let him get on with it. He's the detective, after all. As he thinks, he doodles on a giant desktop notepad. Finally, he lights a cigarette, blows a line of smoke towards the ceiling, and looks my way.

'When you went to exchange the briefcases this morning, you told me that you were sent to one address but were immediately taken to another one?'

'That's right. A house just up the road.'

'How far up the road?'

'I don't know. Fifty yards?'

'Not far, then. Ferrie would probably have had to give them the location to send you to a while before you turned up.'

'He did. The guy blackmailing me told me where to go an hour and a half before I got there.'

Lucas jots something down on the notepad, the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

'Did the place where you finally met Ferrie look lived-in to you?' he asks.

I shake my head, recalling its sparseness. 'No, it didn't.'

He nods slowly. 'That's what I thought. I can't see a guy as nervous as you say Ferrie was swapping the cases at his home, or anywhere near it, so I reckon it's safe to assume he lived somewhere else. We need to find out where.'

'He was acting really paranoid this morning. It's not going to be easy.'

'Let me worry about that,' he says sharply. 'Now, when you were given the address, you weren't told the name of the person you were going to see. Is that right?'

I nod. 'They don't know his real name. It's one of the things they wanted me to tell them.'

'Which gives us an advantage, because we do know it. Even if he's covered his tracks, we'll find him.' He sends another pall of smoke skywards. 'Trust me, I'm a detective.'

So I sit there drinking my coffee and trying without much success to relax for the first time today, while he continues to detect. And it soon becomes clear that Ferrie had indeed covered his tracks. When he hired Lucas, he paid for his services upfront and in cash, declining to give an address where he could be reached. But we're lucky with the name. It's comparatively unusual, and there are only four Iain Ferries on the electoral roll in Greater London. A combination of surfing the net and telephoning strategically placed contacts confirms to us that none of them has ever served in the military. A dead end? Lucas is undeterred.

'You can find anybody if you want to,' he tells me between phone calls. 'As long as you know
where to look. There's all this shit with the Data Protection Act and how you've got to protect a person's personal details, but the thing is, they're held on so many different databases it's impossible. And the security on those databases is worthless half the time. If you know a decent hacker, he'll get inside and they'll never have a clue he's been there.'

And Lucas does know a decent hacker. He's got the business card of someone with the bizarre name of Dorriel Graham who advertises himself as an IT security consultant. 'This guy's the best,' he tells me, calling the number on the card.

While he's not looking, I write down the number myself. You never know when skills like that may come in useful.

And come in useful they quickly do. Lucas gets him to hack into the Ministry of Defence computer systems. Now, given that the MOD are supposedly in charge of defending the realm, I would have thought this would be near enough impossible, but it seems some of their systems are more secure than others, and the database that contains the details of serving and recently demobbed soldiers is eminently
hackable. Ferrie may have left the army some time ago, but the MOD still have a record of him, and within fifteen minutes of Lucas's call a two-page document with photograph is coming through on his printer.

'This'll help us,' he says, reading through it. 'Ferrie might not be on the electoral roll or the Land Registry, but people close to him will be. See, it says here he was married in 1999 and that his spouse is a Charlotte Melanie Priem. There'll be a record of her somewhere.'

His next port of call is the Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths, a database that any member of the public is allowed to access. Armed with the date of the marriage and the names of the couple, he quickly finds that it ended in divorce in December 2003, on the grounds of Mr Ferrie's unreasonable behaviour. No further details of what he did are given, but we don't care about that. What we care about is the fact that the petitioner, Miss Priem, gives a flat in Enfield as her permanent residence. A check on the Land Registry shows that she still owns the flat, and a quick call to his contact at BT gets Lucas its landline number. It's all very easy if, as he says, you know where you're looking.