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.
'Let's hope she's in,' I say.
He shrugs. 'It doesn't matter if she's not. Chances are she'll have a mobile registered to that address – I'll just get hold of that. More importantly, does she know where he is?'
He lights another cigarette and calls the number.
Ten seconds later, Lucas embarks on some time-honoured patter. 'Hello, Mrs Ferrie? Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Priem. I apologize for bothering you but I've been trying to locate your ex-husband.' He tells her he's a former soldier who served with Iain, and wants to invite him to a regiment reunion. Something about his manner – all chirpy, cheeky charm – clearly works for the ladies because within seconds they're chatting like old friends. From the way he's speaking, it sounds like she's firing off a lot of not very flattering comments about her husband, which comes as no surprise. 'Oh, that'd be great if you could do that, Charlotte. You're very kind.' He winks at me as he speaks and gives the thumbs up. 'Thanks, that's really helpful… No, to be honest, I didn't get on with him that well, but I'd feel bad if he didn't get an invite, and there are a couple of people who do really want to see him.'
There's a short pause, then Lucas scribbles something down on the notepad. It looks promising.
'I agree,' he says into the phone, 'if he was like that, then it's inexcusable… No, you should never do that… That's right, you couldn't have known…' He rolls his eyes at me. 'Don't I know it? We always find these things out too late… What do I do now? I'm a forest ranger… Yes, I've always loved the outdoor life. Now, if you'll excuse me, I really have to go… Yes, thanks… thanks… Definitely, if I get the time… OK… Bye.' He slams the phone into the cradle. 'Jesus, I'd be behaving pretty fucking unreasonably if I had to live with her. She wouldn't shut up.'
'But we've got what we wanted?'
He nods, ripping the paper containing the address from the notepad and stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray. 'Yeah, she saw him three months ago. He was living in a flat in Southgate. She thinks he's still there. A place called Frobisher House.'
I could do with a longer sit down, but it's already gone five, about two hours since Snowy was murdered in broad daylight, and pretty soon the police are going to be phoning Lucas about it.
I think he's thinking the same thing because we get to our feet simultaneously and three minutes later we're in his BMW and heading north on the Holloway Road.
23
Frobisher House is the second of a row of five low-rise blocks of cheaply designed 1970s flats that share an award-winning blandness, and which take up one side of the street, looking like unwelcome invaders when compared to the pretty terrace of Edwardian cottages opposite. A group of kids are playing football in the car park that runs along the front of the flats as Lucas and I pull up half an hour after setting out. If anything, the day is getting hotter as it moves inexorably towards evening.
We get out of the car and walk up to the front entrance of Frobisher House.
'I'll tell you something,' says Lucas as we open the scratched and ancient Perspex doors, 'if I lived in a dump like this, I reckon I'd resort to blackmail.'
I know what he means. There's fresh, illegible graffiti on the adjoining wall, and as we step inside we're assailed by a stale smell of feet and sweat which reminds me of a schoolboys' changing room.
'I heard he was a gambler,' I say. 'I guess he just wasn't a very good one.'
Ferrie's place is on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smells vaguely of bleach, which is a far more tolerable odour than the one lingering at ground level. I can hear a woman shouting at her kids in one of the flats and a baby is crying irritably in another, but the corridor itself is empty. The front door to his flat is made of plywood, in keeping with the general cheapness of the rest of the building, and there are two locks on it, a Yale and a Chubb, the latter having been added recently.
'You know,' says Lucas, pulling a set of skeleton keys from his pocket, 'if I had something valuable, worth all that money to someone else, there's no way I'd hide it in here. It's not exactly secure.' Wanting to prove his point, he gets to work on the locks, telling me to act natural. 'If anyone asks what we're doing, we're cops, OK? I've got some ID I can show them if they get too nosy.'
Lucas, it seems, has some fairly eye-opening working practices, and if ever the private detective work dries up, he's definitely got a career alternative as a burglar. It takes him about a minute to pick the Chubb and half that time to do the Yale. I have to admit I'm impressed as the door opens and I follow him inside.
It leads directly into a poky little box-like living room that's most definitely been lived in. It's at the opposite end of the bachelor pad spectrum from Lucas's. A threadbare sofa and a couple of armchairs that don't match it are arranged in a very tight semicircle around a portable TV, which sits on a cornflakes box. There's an overflowing pub ashtray on the sofa's arm and another one on the floor, as well as various bits of used crockery that haven't quite made it back to the kitchen. Bookshelves, groaning under the weight of piles of paperbacks, line two of the walls, and a framed poster showing an exotic beach scene, complete with turquoise sea and hanging coconut palms, takes up most of one of the others. It's entitled 'Paradise', which I'm guessing is where Iain Ferrie was planning on heading if he hadn't been so rudely interrupted. As if to prove the point, there's a battered Samsonite suitcase next to the front door with a passport and an airline ticket balanced on top.
So Ferrie had been telling me the truth about getting out of the country fast, and given the trouble he was getting himself in, who could blame him?
Lucas puts on some plastic evidence gloves and hands a pair to me. He picks up the passport and opens it at the photo. 'It's him, all right,' he says. 'So at least we're in the right place. Let's see where he was going.' He inspects the airline ticket. 'Caracas, one way. Very nice. The sort of place I'd head to if I was a fugitive.'