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I don’t, I thought desperately. I do not, in any possible sense, have this. And if I do have it, I don’t want it—I don’t want all of this on my shoulders, being left up to me.
But I had no choice. And I knew that if it had been me lying there, my blood all over the living room floor, there was no way Gabe would have curled up in the dent I had left in our bed and given up. No way at all. He would not have rested for a single moment until he had tracked down whoever did this and destroyed them.
Gabe would never have given up. So neither could I.
I stood up.
His bookshelf was beside his bed, the water glass from three nights ago still sitting on it, the mark of his lips on the rim, but I toughened my heart, pushed the glass aside, and began looking through the books, my head to one side as I read the titles on the spines. A Confederacy of Dunces, nope. Fermat’s Last Theorem, nope. The Cement Garden. Empire of Pain. The Music of the Primes. Nope, nope, and nope.
I scanned the shelves, growing frustrated now, looking at the familiar, Gabe-ish mix of literary novels and sciencey nonfiction. Our tastes had never converged that much—I leaned more towards Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin Hobb—your basic sci-fi/fantasy nerd. Which made it all the harder to recall the title that Gabe had mentioned. Still, it was none of the ones here, I was ready to swear to that.
And then I saw it. Not upright on the shelf but lying crossways, wedged into the gap between the books and the shelf above. Old and battered, the schlocky 1960s jacket peeling and a little torn.
The Glass Key, by Dashiell Hammett.
I heard Gabe’s deep, amused voice rumble in my ears. A key for a key, get it?
I pulled it out, carefully, because the paper was old and brittle and I could feel the glue on the spine was ready to crack, and opened it up.
Inside the front cover were three long codes, carefully written out in pencil, each over twenty characters long, and a mix of numerals and letters.
One of those entries—and I had no idea which one—represented somewhere north of twenty thousand pounds, although the amount fluctuated so much that it was impossible to know on any given day how much was in there. And all I needed to access it were these numbers.
There was no time to write out the full strings, and I certainly couldn’t memorize them, so I picked up the book and stuffed it in the top of the rucksack. As I did so, a noise from outside made my pulse jump.
It was a noise I knew well, one I’d made myself just a few nights ago, in fact. It was someone kicking over the milk bottles on the front step.
“Balls,” I heard from the front garden. “Sorry, just tripped over the milk bottles.”
There was the crackle of a radio, inaudible words blaring out under a blast of static, and when I peered cautiously through the bedroom curtains, I saw a police officer standing in front of my door, holding a mobile phone.
I hadn’t thought it would be possible for my heart to beat any faster, but now it sped up.
“Yeah,” I heard. “Yeah, gotcha. Heading in now, but I’m pretty sure she won’t be here. I’ve not seen anyone except the postman. Hang on. Key’s a bit stiff.”
Shit. Shit. I had to get out of here.
Shouldering the bag, I ran as swiftly and quietly as I could down the corridor, but I had barely made it halfway to the top of the stairs when I heard the second key turn in the front door. For a moment I froze, looking longingly at the bathroom door—but it was in sight of the front door, which was about to open at any second. Instead I turned around and bolted back into our bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me.
Inside I stood with my eyes shut and my ear pressed to the door, the better to hear what was going on downstairs. There was a metallic bang as the front door flung open and the latch banged against the hallway wall (my paintwork!) and then the heavy tread of a police officer stepping inside my house.
I held my breath, listening, wondering what I should do.
“I’m inside,” I heard, faintly, from downstairs. “Can’t see anything amiss. Let me just have a recce.”
There was an answering crackle from the radio, and I heard the officer’s feet on the hallway floor, and the screech of the squeaky board as he stepped into the living room.
Thanking God for old Victorian houses, I carefully turned the handle of the bedroom door and put one foot out onto the landing—only to bolt back inside as I heard the crackle of the radio and the officer’s footsteps in the hall again.
“Nothing down here. I’ll just take a look upstairs.”
Shit. Now I was really trapped. There was no way I could leave with him coming up the stairs, and no way he wouldn’t come into the bedroom. Would he search the wardrobes? Under the bed?
For a moment I stood frozen in indecision, and then, at the sound of a creaking tread on the bottom-most stair, I shook myself out of it. What I had told myself back at Arden Alliance was just as true now as it had been then: In this job, doing nothing was a risk in itself. Sometimes you just had to go on your gut.
I ran across the bedroom, avoiding the loose floorboard under the window, wrenched open the wardrobe door, and leapt inside, yanking the door shut behind me.
Just in time.
