Second, keeping hold of the microcoder and the money might give me some leverage, provided I kept alive long enough to use it.
I picked up my father’s mobile telephone and tried again to turn it on but without success. It had NOKIA written on the front. My mobile was a Samsung. I tried my charger, but the connection was wrong, naturally. I took the SIM card out of my father’s phone and put it in mine, but I seemed unable to get any details of his numbers. If there was anything there, he had stored it in the phone’s memory, not on the SIM.
I dug around in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I always put spare or old chargers, but nothing would fit.
I picked up the Alan Charles Grady passport and examined it. It had been issued nine months previously and appeared to me to be genuine, but I had no real idea of what an Australian passport should look like. I turned the pages and found a stamp from an immigration officer at Heathrow showing that he had not entered the United Kingdom until the day before he came to see me at Ascot. It was the only UK stamp in his passport, but there was also one from Dublin Airport dated the previous week. So he had flown straight out again from Heathrow after his arrival from Australia, just as John Smith had thought, and using the name Grady.
I wondered what he had been up to in Ireland for six days, and I decided it was time to find out. I couldn’t just sit and wait for Shifty-eyes to turn up demanding his money with a knife at my throat for encouragement. Or, worse still, at Sophie’s throat.
The following morning, Friday, I was waiting outside the local mobile telephone shop for it to open at nine o’clock sharp.
I’d not slept well, mostly due to imagining that I could hear creaks on the stairs. I had firmly wedged Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the bedroom door handle when I had retired, and, of course, it had still been safely there in the morning.
At ten past nine, the door was unlocked by a female shop assistant who looked about twelve years old. “Yes, sir,” she said in a bored tone. “Can I help you?”
“I need a charger for this phone,” I said, holding out my father’s Nokia and refrained from asking if her mother was in.
“No problem,” she said with a little more interest. “Mains or in-car?”
“Mains,” I said.
She went over to a display and took one of the chargers.
“This should be the one,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Could you just check that it’s the right one?” I said.
“It will be,” she reiterated.
“Could you just open it to make sure?” I said. “Please.”
She obviously thought I was mad, but she took a large pair of scissors from a drawer beneath the desk and cut through the plastic around the charger. She plugged it into a socket and took the phone from me.
“There,” she said, “it’s charging. You can see from the little lines moving on the side.”
I looked, and indeed the display was no longer completely blank as before.
“Thank you,” I said. “Can you turn it on?”
She pushed a button on the top. The screen lit up, and then the phone played a five-note tune. She handed it back to me with it still connected by the cord to the charger.
The phone had the message PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE displayed on the screen.
“It’s a long time since I used this phone,” I said to her, “and I can’t remember the security code. Can you bypass it for me?”
“No chance,” she said, sounding horrified at the suggestion. “I’m not allowed to do that. How do I know it’s your phone anyway?”
“So, theoretically, you could bypass the security code,” I said, “if you really wanted to?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But I expect Carl could.”
“Who’s Carl?”
“He works out the back,” she said. “He mends mobiles. He’s very clever.”
She disappeared and returned with a young man who didn’t strike me as the very clever type. He was wearing faded, torn and frayed blue jeans, a plain off-white T-shirt and a knitted brown hat that reminded me of a tea cosy. Tufts of fair hair stuck out from under the hat in all directions, and there was a further supply of wispy blond fluff sprouting on his chin.
“Can you unlock this phone?” I asked him.
He didn’t say anything but took the phone from my hand and looked at it.
“What’s the four-digit security code?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said patiently. “That’s why I need it unlocked.”
“What’s the phone’s IMEI number?” he said.
“IMEI?”
“International Mobile Equipment Identity,” he said slowly as if for a child.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“It’s normally written inside the phone,” he said, taking off the back and removing the battery. “Hello. This one’s been removed. There should be a sticker just here.” He pointed. “That’s what people do with stolen phones,” he said, looking warily at me.
“How else can I get this IMEI?” I asked, ignoring his suspicions.
“You could input *#06# on the keypad once it’s unlocked,” he said unhelpfully. “Or it would have been printed on a sticker on the box when you bought it.”
I decided against telling him I hadn’t bought the phone. It would only further his opinion that the phone was stolen, which, if past form was anything to go by, it probably was.
He put the battery back into the phone and turned it on. PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE appeared again on the display.
“Can’t you do it without the IMEI number?” I asked.
“No, mate,” he said, handing back the phone. “Can’t help you without the IMEI or the security code. Not without wiping clean the whole phone memory. Do you want me to do that?”
“No,” I said quickly. It was the phone’s memory I wanted most.
I paid the girl for the charger and took it and the phone back to my home in Station Road and sat again at my kitchen table, thinking about what to do next.
I wondered what the security code might be.
I punched in 3105. My father’s real birthday had been the thirty-first of May.
The display momentarily read INCORRECT SECURITY CODE before returning to PLEASE ENTER YOUR SECURITY CODE.
I tried 0531, the American way of writing dates, but with the same result.
I inserted the year of his birth. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
Next I tried 1234. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
I looked at the copy of his driver’s license. I typed in 0312, his house number. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
The license showed Alan Grady’s birthday as 15 March 1948. I tried 1503. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE. I typed in 1948. INCORRECT SECURITY CODE.
It could be anything. I wondered how many wrong chances I’d have before the whole phone locked up forever. If it was based on his phone number, I reckoned I had no chance.
I worked out there were ten thousand different combinations of four numbers. If I input one combination every ten seconds, it could take me one hundred thousand seconds, assuming I made no mistakes. One hundred thousand seconds was-I sat there trying to do the mental arithmetic-one thousand six hundred and sixty-six and two-thirds minutes, which was… nearly twenty-eight hours. With no sleep or breaks. And that assumed the phone didn’t lock up completely because I’d keyed in too many wrong attempts. There had to be a better way.
I took the phone and the charger with me and decided to go back to see Carl to see if he had any other ideas.
But I never got there.
I sat in the car outside the shop and stared at the phone in my hand. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was unlocked. I had entered my birthday, 2504, just for a laugh, and suddenly there it was: CORRECT SECURITY CODE.
So he hadn’t forgotten. There may, of course, have been other events in his life that happened on the twenty-fifth of April, but I would assume it was my birthday he had remembered.