The fifth door was locked. I left it for a moment and tried the sixth. Another guest bedroom. That told me that either Turner was behind the locked door, or something significant was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my set of picklocks with me. I don’t carry them routinely, and when I’d set off on my pursuit of Turner, I hadn’t expected to be doing any burglaries. I could of course simply smash the lock with one of the dozens of marble statuettes that hung around in niches all over the place. But I didn’t want the villa’s owner to know the extent to which he’d been turned over unless I could possibly help it.

I looked up at the door lintel. Gianni’s boss was not much bigger than me, so the chances were that the key wasn’t sitting up there. I went back to the master bedroom and began a proper search. I got lucky in the bathroom. I’d taken the contents of the bathroom cupboard off the shelves one by one, just to make sure there was nothing behind them. There were two aerosol cans of Polo shaving foam, and one was a lot lighter than the other. I looked more closely at the heavier of the two. Gripping it tightly, I twisted the bottom of the can. It unscrewed smoothly, revealing a compartment lined with bubble wrap. Inside was what looked like a handkerchief. I pulled it out and a bunch of keys tumbled to the floor. “Gotcha!” I murmured.

The longest of the keys opened the locked door. Bingo! Inside was a starkly functional office, a sharp contrast to the luxurious appointments of the rest of the villa. I switched the light on, closed the shutters and took a good look round. A basic desk stood against one wall with a computer, a modem and a fax machine on it. To one side there was a photocopier and a laser printer. Automatically, I switched them on. I noticed a shredder under the desk as I sat down and hit the computer’s power button. The machine booted up and I called up the directories. Ten minutes later, my jubilation had given way to depression. Every single data file I’d tried to access was password protected. I couldn’t get in to read them. All it would let me do was print out a list of all files, which I duly did.

Muttering dark imprecations, I returned to the main directory. Time for some lateral thinking. In the years since I first started working at Mortensen and Brannigan and discovered the wonderful world of electronic mail, the Internet had grown from the home of academics and a handful of computer loonies like me to the world’s bulletin board. The communications software that was running on this machine was a standard business package that I’d used dozens of times before. Even if the files were password protected, I reckoned that the communications program would still be able to transmit them intact to somewhere I could retrieve them later and pass them on to someone who could crack the passwording. All I needed was a local number for the Internet. If I was lucky, there would be one already loaded in the comms program. I started it running and called up the telephone directory screen.

It was my lucky night. Right at the top of the list was the number for the local Internet node-the E-mail equivalent of a postal sorting office. The way the Net works is simple. It’s analogous to sending a letter rather than making a phone call. The network is connected by phone lines, and works on what they call a parcel switching system. What happens is you dial a local number and send your data to it. The computer there reads the address and shunts your data down the network, section by section, till it arrives at its destination. But unlike a letter, which takes days if you’re lucky, this takes less time than it takes to describe the process.

I used the edit mode to discover Gianni’s boss’s login and password, then I instructed the computer to connect me to the Internet. Less than a minute later, we were in. I typed in the electronic mail address of the office, then I started sending the files one by one. An hour and a mug of coffee later, I’d sent a copy of every data file in the machine back to Manchester.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I switched off the machine. Now it was time for the desk drawers. I unlocked each drawer with the remaining keys on the bunch. The first drawer held stationery. The second held junk-rubber bands, spare computer disks, a couple of computer cables, a half-eaten chocolate bar and a box of Post-it notes. The bottom drawer looked more promising, with its collection of suspension files. No such luck. All the files held was the paperwork for the house: utility bills, receipts for furniture, building work, landscaping, pool maintenance. The only interesting thing was that everything was in the name of a company-Gruppo Leopardi. There was no clue as to who was behind Gruppo Leopardi. And I didn’t have the time for the kind of thorough search that might reveal that. I’d already been there too long, and I was getting too tired to concentrate. It was time to make tracks.

I went back over to the window, to open the shutters again. I wanted to leave everything exactly as I’d found it. As I turned back, clumsy with exhaustion, I caught the Thermos jug with my elbow. It sailed off the desk and bounced off the paneled wall under the window. It landed on its side on the floor, apparently undamaged. Not so the wall. The wood paneling where the jug had hit had slowly swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Eat your heart out, Enid Blyton. If preposterous coincidence is good enough for the Secret Seven, it’s good enough for me.

19

if the brannigans were posh enough to have a family motto, it would go something like, “What do you mean, I can’t*!” Just because I’ve never learned how to crack a safe didn’t mean I was going to close the panel and walk away. I sat on the floor opposite the safe and studied it. There was a six-digit electronic display above a keypad with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero to nine. Beside the keypad were buttons that I translated as “enter code,” “open,” “random reset,” “master.” That didn’t take me a whole lot further forward.

I checked my watch. Ten o’clock. Not too late to make a call. I took the mobile out of my bag and rang Dennis. It would have been cheaper to use the fax phone, but I’d already noticed that Gruppo Leopardi had itemized billing on their phone account and I didn’t want to leave a trail straight back to Dennis, especially given that he already had connections with these people via Turner. Dennis answered his phone on the second ring. “Hi, Dennis,” I said. “I’m looking at the outside of a safe and I want to be looking at the inside. Any ideas?”

“Kate, you’re more of a villain than I am. You know I haven’t touched a safe since Billy the Whip dropped one on my foot in 1983.”

“This isn’t the time for reminiscing. This call’s costing me a week’s wages.”

He chuckled. “Then somebody else must be paying for it. What does this safe look like?”

I described it to him. “You’re wasting your time, Kate. Beast like that, you’ve got no chance unless you know the combo,” he said sorrowfully.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. He might be a sloppy git though, this guy you’re having over. He might have gone for something really stupid like the last six digits of the phone number. Or the first six. Or his date of birth. Or his girlfriend’s name. Or some set of letters and numbers he sees in his office every day.”

I groaned. “Enough, already. You sure there’s no other way?”

“That’s why they call them safes,” Dennis said. “Where are you, anyway?”

“You don’t want to know. Believe me, you don’t want to know. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your help.”

I went back to the domestic files and tried various combinations of the phone number and any other number I could find, including the vehicle registrations. No joy. I sat in the boss’s chair and looked round me. What would he see from here that would be a constant aide-memoire? I got up and tried the model numbers of the fax machine, the modem and the photocopier. Nothing. I didn’t know the boss’s birthday, but I had a feeling that a man as security conscious as him wouldn’t have gone for anything that obvious.