Ignoring the kitchen, Charlie headed straight for the bedroom. It was exceptionally neat and clean. Donning her latex gloves, she began to search. The wardrobes were full of clothes, the drawers of underwear and bondage gear, and the bed was neatly made. A single paperback – by a Polish author Charlie hadn’t heard of – rested on the bedside table. And that was it. Was that all there was to her?
The bathroom yielded little of any interest, so Charlie headed into the box room, which served as a space for drying laundry and a mini-office. A phone and cheap laptop sat on a battered desk. Charlie pressed the On button on the computer. It buzzed aggressively as if coming to life, but the screen remained resolutely blank. Charlie pressed a few keys. Still nothing.
‘You got your penknife?’ she asked DC Fortune. She knew he would have it (even though he wasn’t supposed to), he was that kind of guy. Nothing pleased him more than fixing a broken machine in front of his female colleagues. He was a modern kind of caveman.
Taking it from him, Charlie flipped out the screwdriver extension and undid the panels on the back of the computer. As she expected, the battery was still in place, but the hard drive had been removed.
So the flat had been swept. From the moment she’d stepped into the place Charlie had had a suspicion that it had been tidied up. Nobody’s life was this ordered. Someone who knew that the police would be coming had trawled the flat, divesting it of any trace of Alexia, either physical or digital. What had she been doing to earn all this money? And why was someone so keen to conceal it?
There was no point in looking for anything in the usual places any more. It was now a question of lifting wardrobes and tables, pulling up mattresses and rifling through pockets. Looking under, behind, above. It felt very much like a wild-goose chase and Charlie had to put up with a lot of unsubtle sighing by her colleague – who was probably imagining himself busting heads on the Empress Road – but finally after two and a half hours of diligent searching the pair got a break.
The kitchen had an island in it with a pull-out bin. The bin had been lifted out and emptied but whoever had done so hadn’t spotted a piece of paper on the floor of the pull-out drawer. It must have slipped between the bin edge and the drawer wall when tossed inside and lain there undetected ever since. Charlie pulled it out.
