Chapter 9
The next morning, Jonny’s cooking as I get downstairs.
He doesn’t have Elle’s knack of making it seem easy; the kitchen looks like a polecat was left uncaged in it overnight.
He has emptied every single cupboard. On the plus side, he’s produced a stack of pancakes the size of my head.
The flatscreen TV on the other side of the room by the sofas – told you it was a big kitchen – is blaring away with the morning news.
Apparently the government is preparing to hold its nose and sign a huge new deal with the dubious foreign trading giant of Qumar, despite significant doubts and internal protests. I know just how the government feels.
‘Morning,’ he says. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Oh, like a log. Totally uninterrupted rest, no weird encounters or threats at all.’
‘That’s good. I’m hacking my sleep at the moment.
’ I would ask for details, but he’s distracted – half his attention is on the TV, which is currently reporting on sewage in rivers, while the rest of him is stirring the remaining batter with a rolling pin, then scraping it off the pin with a Sabatier knife.
‘Morning, all!’ Elle and Em clatter in and start piling into the pancakes. I take a plate, look in the cutlery drawer – Jonny has managed to use up most of the implements, so I’ll be eating mine with an oyster fork – and sit.
‘Three have been on the floor,’ Jonny says. ‘But there’s only a fourteen per cent chance you’ll pick one of those, assuming you eat two. If you eat more, it rises to—’
‘Thanks, Jonny.’
I meet Em’s gaze. She smiles as sweetly as if four hours ago she didn’t just blackmail me into the worst idea of my life so far. I can feel the notebook still in my top pocket where she tucked it. Elle gives me an equally sweet smile, and I realise I have no idea at all whether she knows too.
Em might have my prints, but at least I’ve kept Rule 1 intact so far. At least she didn’t get my name out of me.
‘Anyway,’ she says, getting out her laptop. ‘Task one is to find out who our murder victim was.’
‘Land Registry,’ I say. ‘Simple.’
‘Jonny, can you hide our tracks effectively if Al’s looking up something here?’
Jonny smears his hands with a tea towel and leans over Em’s shoulder. His fingers blur briefly, and when Em swivels the screen, I can see he’s opened a browser I’ve never heard of before with the Land Registry site open.
‘Al?’
I log in using my interloping account – nothing like my real name – pay my ￡3, and put in the address of the house.
‘Right. Larksfoot, Bridling. Here we go …’
And that’s when I get my next surprise.
‘It’s not here.’
‘You said everything was on there.’
‘It is, but … Well, not everything. A house goes on the Registry when it’s sold.’
‘When did they start doing that?’
‘Long time ago. More than a century, I think.’
‘So this house hasn’t changed hands since then?’
‘Apparently not. Not on the open market, anyway.’ This is weird. It’s the first place I’ve ever come across that isn’t on the register.
‘So it was his ancestral home or something? Does that mean he was posh?’
‘It’s possible.’ I think of Sausage Fingers’ spiky grey hair and cross red face. ‘But … I don’t know. He didn’t seem posh to me.’
‘We’ll think of something to track him.’
‘How?’
I don’t actually have any ideas; the Land Registry was all I had. If we’d only looked at some post, or had time to hunt around the house a bit more …
‘We could contact Claudia,’ says Elle.
‘Absolutely not,’ Em replies.
‘But—’
‘No. Sorry. Not doing it. Just shut that down.’
‘I know you don’t like her, Em, but she’s still our—’
‘No,’ Em interrupts. ‘We’re not talking to that woman. Move on.’
‘Er, guys?’ That’s Jonny, but I’m so tangled in a new thread of searching Land Registry property not there and unregistered properties and secret homes UK that I don’t pay attention.
Em and Elle are glaring at each other in a stand-off I don’t understand, so they don’t notice either.
Eventually Jonny has to say it again: ‘Guys.’
We follow his gaze to the screen, where a local news reporter is standing outside Larksfoot, in front of some police tape, and fielding questions from the studio about the Cotswolds gang murder that has shocked this once-peaceful village to its core.
Five minutes later – no thanks to any of us – we know the dead man’s name, age and occupation.
David Harcourt was, and now will ever remain, fifty-seven years old.
He was a ‘beloved part of village life’ – fundraiser, church volunteer, a stout pillar of civil society.
A series of photos running backwards in time show him gradually becoming less red and portly, until eventually he’s quite a handsome young businessman in the late eighties.
More unsettling, he was in my line of work.
Davy – I would call him by his surname ordinarily, but being threatened with a gun puts you on first-name terms in my book, no matter where your relationship goes from there – had been an estate agent at a Mayfair firm.
The newsreader, practically salivating at the ratings-winning combo of murder and high-end property, announced that the company he had worked at was one of the UK’s most exclusive estate agencies, established in 1987 by a then-buccaneering Davy and his co-founder.
A camera crew had been sent to the firm’s office – dubious taste, I thought – and a junior reporter was breathlessly relating from the scene that there wasn’t anyone there yet, due to it only being 7.
34 a.m., and that the police had announced the death was being treated as murder. Nothing gets past those guys.
Eventually, after the ritual declaration that anyone who knows anything at all should blah blah, the anchor lets go of the juicy murder and moves on to the busting of an Iranian spy ring operating on the south coast, and we switch off.
‘Who would want to kill a luxury estate agent?’
We all sit and ponder Elle’s question for a bit.
‘All right, who would not want to kill a luxury estate agent?’
Em stands. ‘Well, the first thing we have to do is get into his firm somehow. Find out what was going on there. Maybe a rival agent shot him.’
‘What, over a five-bed semi in Walthamstow? Be real, Em.’
She shrugs. ‘Doesn’t matter. Worth checking anyway. Al, have you heard of this firm before, Harcourt and Wallace?’
‘Never. They must be tiny.’
‘Office in Mayfair,’ says Jonny. ‘Somewhere called Kennel Row. They can’t be unsuccessful. In fact’ – more tap-dancing fingers – ‘oh, yeah, they’re doing all right for themselves. Look at these figures.’
‘Can you summarise?’ I’ve never been much good with balance sheets.
‘Pretty decent profits at the end of the last two years. Big increases in pay to the directors. Yeah, they’re doing great.’
‘I hope for their sake it’s above board,’ says Em. ‘Although if one of their senior people has just turned up dead, I suspect it won’t be. We’d better find out.’
‘How?’
‘One of us will have to go along and make a few enquiries.’ She’s looking at the ceiling, speaking as if to herself.
‘If only we had someone who knew anything about estate agents, or would know the right questions to ask. And someone who was brilliant at coming up with cover stories.’ Her gaze lands on me.
‘You’re joking.’
She grins. ‘You wish.’