Which meant leaving Jason to sleep and not asking him to come with them.
Quietly she rolled out of bed and got dressed. He still hadn’t stirred, and she picked up her keys and her wallet from her desk.
Jason mumbled something in his sleep and turned over on his side, reaching out as if he was searching for her. She slid a cushion under his arm, and he went quiet again.
Charlie was waiting for her in the hall. ‘What took you so long?’
‘I wanted to wait for Jason to fall asleep.’
‘Mm, I suppose you were at it like rabbits again.’
‘It does help with the falling asleep bit,’ Helen replied, glad that Charlie couldn’t see the colour rush to her cheeks. ‘And anyway, that’s none of your business.’
‘Absolutely. The less details, the better. Come on, we’d better go while we still can.’
Letitia’s penthouse flat overlooking Hyde Park was deserted. They entered through a hallway which led to a large sitting room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a balcony, and moonlight streamed in through the tall windows, bathing the room in a pale bluish light.
The living room was elegantly furnished with a dark leather suite and a glass coffee table, a wall-mounted wide screen TV, a mahogany dining table and chairs, and a sideboard with a silver drinks tray on top. Above the sideboard hung an Expressionist painting, which looked very much like a genuine Kandinsky.
Two rooms led off the living room, one the bedroom, the other a home office.
‘Bingo,’ said Charlie when she spotted Letitia’s computer on the desk.
Helen wasn’t so sure this was a ‘bingo’ moment. She and Charlie were looking for two different things. Charlie for evidence that Letitia was ‘dirty’, Helen for a convincing link to Moody.
Unlike the pristine living room, the office was crammed with filing cabinets, folders, box files, magazine holders, CD racks and four elegant leather boxes filled with papers.
‘Where do I begin?’
‘Start with anything that’s locked,’ said Charlie.
Helen tested the filing cabinets, but they weren’t locked. She wondered if Letitia had a safe and looked under the few pictures on the walls. Nothing, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have one somewhere else.
The desk, modern, made of blond wood with a traditional blotter pad of tooled leather, stood with the back to the window. Charlie had already cracked whatever password Letitia had – no doubt using the same social engineering skills she’d used last time – and Helen tried the desk drawers on either side. The left-hand drawers were unlocked and contained nothing but stationary, the right-hand drawers held personal items like hand cream, lipstick, breath mints, and a phone charger.
The bottom drawer was locked. Using a trick she’d learned at the children’s home she’d lived in for a while, where everything was always under lock and key, even food, she pulled out the drawer above it, then lifted it out of the catch which stopped it from sliding all the way out, and put it on the floor. Then she ran her finger inside the bottom drawer, flicked the locking mechanism at the front, and pulled it out.
The drawer was full of papers and folders. Helen began riffling through the contents. There had to be something important in here, what, she didn’t know, but the fact that the drawer had been locked spoke volumes.
‘Aha,’ said Charlie.
Helen looked up. ‘You found something?’
‘Did I find something? I hit the jackpot!’ She pointed to a spreadsheet on the screen, similar to the one they’d found on Letitia’s office computer. ‘And there’s more.’ She minimised the open document and clicked on the directory. File after file appeared on screen, each given a name and the year which the figures covered, stretching back years. Evidence that Letitia’s little scheme had been going on for a long time.
The numbered files didn’t go as far back as the year Helen’s mother was murdered, so whatever had led to that, it couldn’t be this. Unless it was because they didn’t use computerised records back then.
‘She didn’t even have a password on this directory,’ Charlie said with a disgusted snort. ‘Probably thinks she’s completely safe.’
‘By why would she keep the information going back that far? If she was investigated, it’d be an open and shut case.’
‘To keep all these people on their toes, I imagine. See all those names in the file? And I bet this isn’t the only copy.’
Helen ran her eyes down the list, looking for one particular name, but Moody wasn’t on it. Now she definitely was disappointed – he’d fitted the bill of the cold-blooded killer so well.