Private London (Private 4)

She’d inherited a fortune when her father, an oil and steel billionaire, had died. So she certainly didn’t want for money. Which was what baffled me most about the whole thing. Until Jack Morgan told me what Harlan Shapiro had been working on before he was taken.

I leaned on the doorbell again. No response.

I hadn’t expected any.

I stood with Del Rio at the professor’s door and looked at Hannah Shapiro who was sitting with Sam Riddel in the back of my car. She was gazing at me through the window with an expression on her face that I couldn’t read.

Somewhere in there was the girl I knew. Somewhere was the woman she had become.

I thought of the consequences of these sequences of events. I thought of my lovely god-daughter Chloe. I remembered the tubes attached to her. I remembered the bandaging around her head. I remembered the beeping noises the monitors made as they checked her vital signs. I remembered her closed eyelids, the eyes flicking behind them as though she were trying to find her way home from the darkness.

I remembered the promise to her dad that I had made as he lay dying in my arms in a dust-blown wreck of a town in Iraq.

Then I picked up the police-issue battering ram and smashed Professor Annabelle Weston’s front door in.

Chapter 96

DEL RIO WENT in first.

He held his gun in a two-handed grip, sweeping the room for hostile targets.

I dropped the ‘enforcer’, as it was known, to one side. It landed with a heavy thud on the polished wooden floor, taking large chips out of it. I didn’t feel guilty.

Luckily, no alarm bells had gone off. Score one for the good guys.

Expensive rugs were positioned around the room. A small TV in the corner. Matching burgundy leather sofas with tartan fabric trimming, and assorted throw cushions. The kitchen beyond was neat, pristine. Polished chrome and pale white wood.

An open door to the side led upstairs, and another ground-floor door was closed. I was about to open it when Del Rio shook his head and raised his pistol once more.

He kicked the door open. A downstairs bathroom. Empty.

Upstairs, Annabelle Weston had converted one of the two bedrooms into a small office. The venetian blind covering the window and the plain wall looked all too familiar. She had filmed Hannah’s pieces to camera for us there.

Thirty minutes later and we had finished searching. Nothing. Hannah couldn’t tell us where the professor had gone, either. She didn’t know.

I’m not a psychiatrist but I could see how easily Hannah could have been manipulated. She must have had a very poor view of men.

A father whom she had considered had abandoned her and who then took advantage of her in the most abusive of ways. She had watched men rape and kill her mother. She had been robbed of her mother’s love and had grown up in a house where she had come to hate her father. Not hard for a vibrant, charismatic and beautiful woman like Annabelle Weston to channel those feelings in other directions.

Not hard for her to turn the young woman’s need for love into something more physical.

Annabelle Weston had left behind a laptop in her office. She must have been so sure that Hannah wouldn’t betray her, and that we wouldn’t be smart enough to put two and two together. Maybe she figured we were onto her before we were. She knew we’d found a witness and had gone to ground.

Del Rio and I hadn’t been able to break the security on the laptop and access her secure files, so Adrian Tuttle had had his second evening of the weekend spoiled. Fifteen minutes after I called him from the professor’s flat he turned up with his dinner date. Five minutes later he told us he couldn’t crack it either.

His dinner date, a painfully shy Australian woman in her mid-twenties, told him to stand aside. In less than sixty seconds she had cracked wide open the security systems that were in place on the professor’s computer.

A blush brightened her cheeks. I could see what Adrian Tuttle saw in her. She had a nice smile, too. Adrian himself was watching her like the cat who’s got the cream.

‘Told you she was good,’ he said.

‘And you were right.’ I smiled at her as she moved aside. ‘Adrian tells me you’ve just finished a doctorate in this kind of stuff.’

‘Yeah,’ she said blushing again.

‘How would you feel about working for the private sector? So happens we have a vacancy in our computer-forensics division.’

‘Fair dinkum?’ she asked.