'That one looks like a phone jack, except not,' he said.
'Hmm. Did you come up with anything else?' I'd asked him to have a think while he drove down here. The usual no-matter-how-trivial stuff you see in cop shows.
'I talked to somebody who saw one of the trucks that took the stuff away.'
'Any haulier's name?'
'No, they were just plain. They didn't have any markings, but the person I was talking to thought they looked like Pikefrith trucks, though he wasn't sure why. Means nothing to me, I'm afraid.'
Pikefrith was a wholly owned subsidiary of ours, one of the few European companies that specialised in shifting delicate scientific instruments and sensitive computer gear. Come to think of it, their trucks did appear slightly different from your average lorry, if you looked carefully enough or were into the subtleties of truck design. Air suspension. I just nodded.
'Oh, yes, and the Essex kids have all disappeared. They all seemed glad to see the back of them up there.' (He pronounced it 'oop there', which was really rather cute.)
'Who the hell are the Essex kids?'
'It's what the Silex people called this lot that have just left. They mostly worked in the room and they kept themselves to themselves. Bit brash, though, so they say. Had a big party on the Friday and then never showed up on the Monday. All transferred.'
I felt confused. 'Were they really from Essex?'
'I think they were from down south. Don't know about Essex.'
'And Freddy said you saw Adrian Poudenhaut there, at the factory?'
'Yes, just last week.'
I felt my eyes narrow as I looked at him. 'You're absolutely certain it was him?'
David Rennell nodded. 'Positive. I've met him a few times; helped him get some of Mr Ferrindonald's cars started, reloaded for him when he was shooting.'
'Did he see you?'
'No. But it was him, definitely.'
Things that make you go, Hmm.
We went our separate ways. I drove back a different route to Blysecrag, still favouring the picturesque B-roads, even when the sun went and night descended. I had many more miles to think stuff over.
The Lancia really was a hoot to drive.
Uncle Freddy's funeral was in three days. I had plenty of time to visit London.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Suzrin House stands in Whitehall in London, the only non-governmental building left on that stretch of the Embankment. It looks out over the river towards the sixties concrete brutalism of the National Theatre complex like an ancient, grizzled gunslinger regarding an upstart cowboy just arrived in town. It is spectacularly ugly in a brooding, noxious sort of way.
Its main, dark brown rectangular tower-block slopes inward slightly and is set back from the Thames, separated from it by a huge glassed-in section several storeys tall whose roof rises from the Embankment side towards the main block. Enormous ornamental windows stare from the very top of the main tower. I used to wonder why the whole thing looked so familiar from a distance until I realised it was shaped like a giant old-fashioned cash register.
The place is part office, part apartment block. It was where Adrian George worked. I took the train from York to London the morning after Freddy died, calling AG en route and arranging lunch.
'I was sorry to hear about old Freddy Ferrindonald.'
'Yeah, it was a shame.'
'Do you have anything in particular in mind for lunchtime?'
'I thought Italian.'
'I meant agenda-wise.'
'Not particularly,' I lied.
We met in a fairly swish French place Adrian George favoured in Covent Garden. He wasn't big on Italian food. He wasn't big on drinking either, citing a heavy workload that afternoon. AG was shortish but trim and dark and handsome. I could remember him when his eyebrows met in the middle, but maybe he'd lost out on too many girls whose mothers had warned them about men with hirsute foreheads, because it looked as if now he shaved that centre line. We conversed pleasantly enough; company gossip, mostly. He was one of those people I got on best with through e-mail, just as Luce was somebody I found it better to talk to on the phone.
I only mentioned his reported sighting of Colin Walker, Hazleton's security chief, in London a month earlier, right at the end of our meal. He tried not to react, laughing it off as mistaken identity. He insisted on picking up the bill.
I said I'd go back to Suzrin House with him. The weather was cool, windy and dry and I thought we might walk along the Strand or the Embankment, but he wanted to take a taxi. He chattered. I already knew all I needed to.
Once we'd gone through Security in the lobby, we went our separate ways, he up to the exec floors, me to the basement to see an old friend.
'That one's a Bell-K connector.'
Allan Fleming was, as usual, a mess. He'd been in a wheelchair for twenty years since a climbing accident in his teens, and despite having a very nice wife called Monica, who was totally devoted to him and turned him out neatly every day, it usually only took him minutes after he arrived at work to look as if he'd spent the last month sleeping rough. Sometimes he accomplished this between the garage — where he parked his converted Mini — and his workshop.
Allan was Suzrin House's resident computer nerd. His workshop — somewhere deep under the main building and way below the surface of the Thames even at low water — was like a museum of computing, filled to its high ceilings with bewildering amounts of electronic hardware ancient and modern, but mostly ancient (which in computer terms, for the truly, seriously, antediluvian stuff, of course meant about the same age as him or me). We'd known each other since post-grad days, when we'd both been in that year's Security intake, before I'd come to my senses and left to be a proper exec, specialising in hi-tech.
Allan was in charge of computer and IT security, specifically here in Suzrin and the other outlying London offices, but in effect — along with a few other similarly gifted geek-wizards in the States — also anywhere the Business had modems and computers. He was our insurance against hackers: if he couldn't worm his way into your system, probably nobody else could either. I'd shown him the plugs and other bits and pieces that David Rennell had brought me from Silex.
'What's a Bell-K connector?' I asked, staring at his cardigan and wondering how he'd managed to get so many buttons done up through the wrong holes. I bet he hadn't left the house like that.
'It's a specialist phone-line connector,' he said, pulling absently at some of his curly brown hair and twisting it so that it stood out from his head like a tiny horizontal pigtail. 'A dedicated land line, probably; very high capacity, especially for the time. Better than ISDN. Made by Bell Laboratories, as you might expect, in the States. Still copper technology, however; your next step up would be your optical.'
'What was its "time"?'
'Oh, just a few years ago.'
'Sort of thing you might find in a chip-manufacturing plant?'
'Hmm.' Allan turned the little connector over in his hands, then took off his unfashionably large-framed glasses and blew on each lens in turn, holding them up to the light and blinking. 'Not particularly. You wouldn't want it for telephony purposes, I'd have thought, and your standard Parallel, Serial and SCSI ports would handle most non-specialist applications.'
'I thought this was specialist.'
'Yes, as I said. But this is for specialist telephonic applications.'
'Such as?'
Allan replaced his glasses, asquint, on his nose. He rocked back in the chair and looked thoughtful. 'Actually, the place you'd most likely see something like this would be in the stock exchange, or a futures market, somewhere like that. They use high capacity dedicated land lines. So I understand.'