Free Maloney's Law by Anne Brooke Page A

The CD hasn’t helped so far either. Maybe Jade will have more luck on Monday. At the moment none of the folders tell me anything useful, none of them give me so much as a hint of anything underhand. It’s all perfect, maybe too perfect. Thanks to Jade’s and my searches, I now know even more about the history, financial dealings, and planned future of Delta than I ever want to know. There’s no mention of DG Allen Enterprises elsewhere than in the name of the Allen folder, nothing to lay to rest the potential takeover concerns of Blake’s staff, so I estimate the talks Dominic mentioned, if any, must be at a very early stage.
    The Allen folder itself is a mystery, something for Jade to solve. I hope she’s now happily asleep and looking forward to tomorrow. I hope she’s not sitting up trying to solve the case I’ve taken on against her better judgement, or even trying to get into the Allen file. Because it’s beaten me back each time. Easy enough to hack in to the password encryption it carries in the way Jade showed me, but less easy to work out the significance of what it might contain. It’s nonsense, files that appear to have half their contents missing and long lists of names, dates, and numbers mixed up like an unreadable crossword puzzle. Not only that but it carries with it some kind of internal virus that causes the whole folder to crash three minutes and forty seconds after I’ve opened it. Each time I reopen it, the lists are in a different order, and I can’t help wondering if Mr. Blake Kenzie, in his rich Cairo residence somewhere, being waited on by his oppressed servants, is laughing at me.
    I wouldn’t be surprised. That knife attack, not to mention the gun crazies, seemed serious enough. Although the guards worked for the owner of the building, not for Blake himself, I bet he’d been first in line for allowing guards to take pot-shots at passing burglars. It wouldn’t surprise me anyway. Perhaps it’s all just a game to someone like him. Maybe the threats and hints he made in his office were a game too, along with the knife thug and the CD. After all, if Blake’s that good then why would the knifeman fail? Nobody is that lucky. Especially not me.
    But if it’s a game, then what are the rules? What are...?
    A second or two of blankness and I jump, woken by the soft thud of the empty whisky glass onto the carpet. Leaning over, I rescue it. It’s decent quality, and I don’t want to buy another. It’s gone midnight, so not that late but, hell, I’ve had a tough few days, and I ought to get some sleep. I need to be bright for Jade and her parents tomorrow.

    The morning starts with the knowledge that I’ve overslept, so when the phone rings I’m already in the shower and don’t hear the message. I just hear the ansaphone click on and off again, but there’s no time to respond. Only when I’m dragging on my jacket and grabbing my shades from the hall table do I realise it might have been Jade.
    It’s not. Neither is it Dominic. Not that I ever thought it might be, of course.
    When I pick Jade up in Stratford, she looks like a cool angel in cream linen trousers and a crisp cotton top, navy blue with a thin green stripe. Even her earrings are verging on discreet. Almost. It makes her look professional rather than arty, but by now I’m used to her concept of “parent chic” so I make no comment, pausing only to pat her tied-back hair.
    ‘Nice, very Miss Moneypenny.’
    ‘Oh yes, you do like to live dangerously, don’t you?’ She slaps my hand away, grins, and sashays into the passenger seat. Her flowery scent fills the car.
    Jade’s parents live halfway between Colchester and Clacton, in a house built by her grandfather in a time when planning permission was less rigorous. Not that there’s anything wrong with it; I just think things must have been simpler then. It’s a higgledy-piggledy sort of a place, with rooms curling off from corridors in places you least expect them, and