“Call Ed — tell him that we have our guy.”
“Really? He looks ok to me.”
“Call him,” she said firmly.
“You sure?”
Linda thumped him on the thigh.
“Think about it Eric — normal people don’t come out of a cemetery carrying a bunch of flowers!”
“Oh!” Stone said as he grappled for the phone.
FOURTEEN
As the man walked passed their car, he was looking directly ahead, apparently unaware that he was being watched. Had he glanced through the car window, he would probably have thought they were a couple trying to get directions to their destination. Stone was looking to the right and talking on the phone to Carter, and Linda had her nose buried in a map that she had grabbed from the glove compartment. When the suspect was fifty yards away and showing no sign of suddenly turning back, Eric and Linda climbed out of the car. Seconds later Carter jogged over and then walked by, gesturing for them to follow. As they caught up Carter breathlessly outlined his plan.
“We need to keep this distance, or more, as we follow this guy. So he doesn’t get suspicious, we’ll keep rotating the person who walks at the front. For now I’ll take point, Eric you hang back about fifty yards behind me, and Linda, I want you to follow Eric, but on the opposite side of the road. Every ten minutes we change places by rotating our positions clockwise. Ok?”
They both nodded their understanding, and the group spread out. In the end, their subterfuge was unnecessary. The man was either so confident, or so incompetent, that they could have followed him with a brass band accompaniment, and remained unobserved.
Walking briskly, and without any outward sign of suspicion or caution, the man took a direct route to a small semi-detached house, in a quiet cul-de-sac, about a mile from the cemetery. About fifteen minutes into the chase, Eric was just beginning to question if they had made a mistake when he saw the man slip something in his pocket and toss the flowers into a bin. Stone looked over his shoulder as he passed the bin, and saw that Carter was already on his way to retrieve the flowers.
When the man entered the house, they hung back, huddling together in the lee of a bus shelter. It was almost dark and beginning to rain. Carter quickly examined the flowers and discovered that they were just that, a bunch of flowers purchased form the superstore where he had parked his car. There was nothing of note, except for the remains of a small envelope taped to the base, evidence of where the data stick had been hidden. Eric pointed at the ripped envelope.
“I saw him put something in his pocket.”
Carter nodded and quickly rattled out some new instructions.
“We need to watch the house. Linda, can you stay here, please? I’ll pass by the house and wait on the opposite side of the road. Eric, do you think you can get into his back yard and have a look through his windows?”
“I’m on it — there’s an alleyway over there, it should lead towards the rear.”
Under the cover of the early evening gloom, Stone slipped over the fence at the rear of the property and dropped undetected into the back yard. It was small, but well-tended, with a central area of neat grass surrounded by a decorative herbaceous border. Keeping close to the fence and using the bushes for cover, Stone belly-crawled slowly for ninety feet until he reached the rear of the house. From there he was able to stand to the side of each window and peer cautiously inside.
There were three windows at the rear of the house. One dark and two brightly lit. The unlit window was obscured with opaque glass, and was obviously a downstairs bathroom. The second window was a small and uninteresting kitchen, but the third was an office. As he crawled through the bushes, Eric had caught glimpses of the man sitting at some sort of desk — his attention fixed on a laptop screen.
The lights from the office cast a long shadow on the lawn, as the man stood and walked towards the corridor. Stone carefully inched his eye around the window frame and caught sight of him walking out of the office. A few moments later, the sounds of running water and banging pots indicated that some cooking was taking place in the kitchen.
From his viewpoint, Stone could see that there was a data stick plugged into a port, on the side of the laptop. On the screen, a green bar marched steadily across a grey box, indicating the progress of some function. Stone risked leaning across the window to have a better look at the laptop. He hoped that he could gleam some useful information, but there was nothing to see, and the desk was clear of papers. Just then, there was an audible chime, indicating that the download was complete. A moving shadow from the doorway, warned that the man was returning to the office. Stone dropped to the ground, and with nothing more to be seen, he retraced his route out of the yard.
Back at the bus shelter, he was joined by Carter and Linda. She brushed the dirt from his clothes as he reported what little he had seen. At least Carter had some good news to report.
“I texted Megan with the address of this house, she just sent back the details of the registered occupant.”
He balanced his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted at the small screen.
“His name is Peter White. Aged sixty-one, his driver’s license photo seems to match this guy. There is no record of any criminal convictions.”
He turned towards Stone.
“I was thinking he looks a lot like the guy Darren Jeffers described. And get this; he seems to have worked as an actor in the past. Most of his acting was done in America, but currently he is neither working nor registered as unemployed.”
He took off his glasses and nodded towards the house.
“The rent on that place should be in the region of £1,200 a month — so he’s getting a decent income from somewhere.”
Linda was bursting with excitement at the news.
“Perhaps we should come back tomorrow and try and follow him. He could lead us back to their base.”
“It’s an idea, and if we had a staff of twenty, and unlimited time, I would agree. I’ve done stake-outs like that when I was a cop. We could end up doing weeks of patient observation, and still deliver negative results.”
Linda pulled a little pout.
“So what do we do now?”
“Give Megan a little time to complete her research on Peter White. With any luck she’ll have a positive link to the Wrecking Crew by tomorrow.”
Carter put a calming hand on her shoulder.
“Anyway she may already have something useful. There was a cryptic text from her earlier, just as I was getting out of my car. It said that she’d had a ‘brainwave’ and she wants to see me as soon as possible, to discuss it.”
He smiled and rolled his eyes.
“From my experience, it means that she’s solved one of my cases, but she wants to break it to me face-to-face — it’s more dramatic that way. I’m going over there now. I’ll stop in on my way home.”
“Do you want us to come?” Stone asked.
“Thank you — no. This kind of humiliation is best endured in private. Anyway, you two are ‘off the grid’, and I want you to stay that way. For now you should go back to your hotel and keep safe, we’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Stone lay in bed staring at a crack in their hotel room ceiling, illuminated by the soft light of the full moon shining through a half-gap in the curtains. Half an hour earlier, he had woken from a fitful sleep. His gut was churning with acid, and his skin crawled with a sense of foreboding. He felt like a man skiing wildly towards a cliff edge, certain that he had missed a warning sign, and yet unable to stop. For two days, he had been struggling with the feeling that he had missed something — something obvious, something of vital importance. Somewhere in the depth of his mind, some half-heard words were trying to make an important connection.