The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [145]
Gaddis told the driver to pull up on Royal Hospital Road, fifty metres from the corner of Tite Street. He had concluded that his best tactic would be to behave as naturally as possible. From the point of view of a surveillance officer, there was nothing at all unusual in a man visiting his girlfriend at her flat.
A light was on in the first-floor window of Holly’s building. By a quick calculation, Gaddis worked out that the flat number was either 5 or 6; Holly was one storey higher in 7, with 8 on the opposite landing. He walked up the steps and pushed the buzzer for Flat 6.
No answer. He waited fifteen seconds, then pressed it again. Nothing. He tried the buzzer for 5. This time the owner answered almost immediately.
‘Yes?’
It was an elderly woman. Gaddis hoped that she knew Holly.
‘Delivery. Flowers for a Miss Levette.’
‘Holly? You want number seven,’ came the reply. ‘Nobody’s sent me flowers for years.’
‘There’s no answer on seven, I’m afraid, luv.’ Gaddis had switched his accent to delivery Cockney. ‘Any chance you could let me in?’
‘Well, I don’t—’
The door clicked open. He could not hear what the old lady had said. Had she triggered the lock or had somebody in Flat 6 eventually come to the intercom and buzzed him inside?
He called out ‘Thanks’ and stepped into the foyer. There was a staircase ahead of him and he immediately walked down towards the basement. There were two flats at the bottom of the stairs, on either side of a small landing. To reach the storage area, Gaddis had to go through a fire door, walk a few metres along a short corridor and then turn right into a narrow passage. He pushed a timer light and saw ten storage cupboards, one for each flat, on either side of the passage. There was a heavy padlock on ‘7’ and he took out the saw.
It was utterly quiet: no sound of a television or radio, no muffled conversations, no child crying out or laughing. He began to cut the bolt. The noise of this was so obtrusive that Gaddis was certain he would be overheard. The saw slipped on the metal; he wasn’t able to angle the blade so that it could grip on the bolt. He tried sawing with his left hand but that was also hopeless. He turned around and lifted the padlock as far from the door as it would allow, almost slicing through his index finger as he attacked it from the opposite side. He moved the blade more slowly this time, but still it slipped. He swore and then the timer light gave out. Gaddis released the padlock, walked back down the passage and pushed the switch. He reckoned he had no more than a minute before it would black-out again. This time, though, the saw made a narrow incision in the bolt; the blade warped repeatedly, but at least it was cutting.
He began to saw, steadily and methodically. The noise was still embarrassingly loud: anybody who overheard what he was doing would surely immediately conclude that he was cutting through a lock. The light gave out a second time. Gaddis switched it on again and, within a few seconds of returning, finally cut through the bolt. He opened the storage-cupboard door, found a light switch and cast his eyes over the piles of boxes, books, bin liners and hangers of dry cleaning left by Katya Levette. He would have to go through each box, one by one, until he found what he was looking for. He was convinced that he would find the tape, but it was the conviction of a man who has nothing left in which to believe.
He started at the back first, on the basis that most of the files Holly had given to him had come from the front section of the cupboard. He made a small space for himself and ducked down to floor level, reaching for the boxes. It occurred to him, in the sweat of the cramped space, that Holly could come home at any moment, walk down to the basement and find him busily going through her mother’s private possessions with a sawn-off padlock at his feet. How was he going to explain that one?
A small box tucked in the far corner