The Courier. Ava McCarthy
a client you couldn’t trust. She studied the woman sitting behind the desk and wondered how on earth she could tell.
‘We don’t have long,’ the woman said, picking at Harry’s business card with her nail. ‘He’ll be back in an hour.’
Harry tried to read her eyes but couldn’t see them behind the oversized sunglasses. ‘Perhaps we should do it another time.’
The woman’s mouth tightened. She dragged a hand through her hair, spiking up her short pixie cut.
Her name was Beth Oliver, or so she’d said. She’d called Harry an hour ago, asking to meet at her home on the seafront to discuss a specialized job. So far, they’d skirted around the details, but Harry could tell there was more.
Beth jerked to her feet and began pacing the room. Her figure was boyish, flat front and back, making it hard to pin down her age. She came to a halt by the large sash window that overlooked Dublin Bay.
‘I can’t wait any longer.’ Her fists were clenched. ‘It has to be today.’
Harry glanced over at the tall, stainless steel construction that occupied one end of the room. ‘You’re sure the laptop’s inside the vault?’
Beth nodded, shoving her hands deep into her pockets. Her outfit was casual, trainers and jeans, the kind Harry favoured when her own scams needed a quick getaway.
Inwardly, she sighed. Six months ago, her internal wiring would’ve sorted through all the signals, but lately her judgement had been off. Maybe it wasn’t surprising after all she’d been through, but surely she should’ve snapped out of it by now?
She snatched up her case and got to her feet. Playing it safe was not in her nature, but her instincts were too unreliable to take a chance right now.
‘Your best option is to call the vault manufacturers,’ she said. ‘They could probably open it for you.’
Beth spun round. ‘But they know my husband, they’ll ring him to check it’s okay.’
‘Any reason they shouldn’t?’
‘I told you, he can’t know about this.’ The pitch of Beth’s voice was ramping up. ‘Besides, I need you to examine the laptop. That’s what you do, isn’t it?’ She pushed Harry’s business card across the desk, the Blackjack Security logo visible in one corner. ‘Recover information from hard drives?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Among other things.’
‘Well, that’s why I’m hiring you.’
‘Look, Beth, I’ll be straight with you here. For all I know, you could be a stranger off the street who’s just broken into this house.’ Harry held up her hand at Beth’s outraged look. ‘And even if you are who you say you are, I have no legal authority to break into your husband’s safe and examine his laptop without his permission. I just can’t do it.’
Beth’s knuckles were white. ‘What if I could prove the safe belongs to me?’
Harry frowned. ‘Does it?’
She snorted. ‘Everything in this bloody house belongs to me. Cars, bills, mortgages, I pay for it all. Garvin’s been bleeding me dry for years.’ She resumed her patrol of the room. ‘He’s always on the point of making it big, but everything he does is a disaster.’
She stopped in front of the steel vault, arms folded, shoulders hunched. Harry moved up beside her, the polished metal reflecting her own approaching image: navy suit, tangled black curls, dark smudges for eyes. Beside Beth’s pipe-cleaner frame, her own modest curves looked buxom.
For the first time, Harry studied the vault up close. It was the size and shape of a triple wardrobe, with a heavy-duty door along its centre panel. Mounted on the handle was a brick-sized entry device complete with small keypad and screen. A red light blinked on and off in one corner.
The back of Harry’s neck tingled. She was close enough to the vault to reach out and touch it, and the challenge to crack it open made her fingertips buzz. She dragged her attention back to Beth.
‘So you can prove you own this?’
She tried to keep the hopeful tone out of her voice. There was a lot here that needed clearing up before she could accept Beth as a client.
Beth marched back to the desk and snatched an envelope from one of the drawers. ‘I’m well used to people not believing what I say.’ She handed the envelope over. ‘Especially where Garvin’s concerned.’
Harry opened the flap. Inside, she found a passport and a bank statement, both in Beth’s name. The passport showed a woman with high cheekbones and a slight upward tilt to her eyes. Harry glanced over at Beth. It could’ve been her, but the bug-eyed shades made it hard to tell.
The bank statement showed a payment to Bull Safehouses Limited and another to a local computer store. Stapled to the back were a receipt for a Dell laptop and an invoice for the vault, both dated some six months previously.
Harry raised her eyebrows at the woman’s efficiency. Either her personal accounts were in better shape than Harry’s, or she’d been planning this for some time. She ran her eye over the rest of the statement, noting the substantial payments made to men’s clothing outlets, utilities, supermarkets and petrol stations. It was clear Beth paid for a significant chunk of the household outgoings, whether her husband contributed or not.
Harry handed the paperwork back to Beth. ‘So what’s on the laptop that’s so important?’
‘Proof that he has money of his own.’
Harry threw her a sharp look, and Beth nodded.
‘He’s had money for some time, I’m convinced of it,’ she said. ‘Six months, maybe more. His suits are flashier, he’s upgraded his car. And I haven’t been getting the bills.’
‘Surely that’s good?’
Beth stared at Harry from behind her dark shades.
‘I’m about to divorce him. I need to show he has money of his own, otherwise he’ll come after mine.’ A tiny muscle flexed in her jaw. ‘And he’s had all he’s getting from me.’
Harry flashed on the scam she’d pulled in the Bahamas that year. She’d soft-soaped a banker with tales of a cheating spouse and the need to hide her assets before her divorce. Sympathy and plausibility. Vital ingredients for any fraud. Was Beth’s story really any different?
Harry stared at the woman’s pinched profile reflected in the vault door.
‘Has the black eye anything to do with it?’ she said.
Beth shot her a look, and Harry pointed at the shining steel.
‘The glasses hide a lot, but you can still see it from the side.’
Beth checked her reflection, then dropped her gaze. She slipped off the glasses and fiddled with the stems, not meeting Harry’s eyes.
She looked older without the shades, her weathered skin at odds with her youthful frame. She was probably in her mid-thirties, just a few years older than Harry, and she had the slanted eyes and fine bone structure of the woman in the passport photo. The only difference was her left eye. The skin around it was plum-purple, the cornea shot through with blood.
‘How’d that happen?’ Harry asked.
Beth didn’t answer. Instead, she tugged her shirt collar tighter round her neck, but not before Harry had spotted the bruises. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Finally Harry said, ‘Are you planning on cleaning him out?’
Beth hugged her chest. ‘I don’t want anything from him, I just want to get away.’ She glanced at her watch and rubbed her arms, as though trying to keep warm. ‘Look, are you going to help me or not? Because we’re running out of time,