Free Two Women by Brian Freemantle

photographs, although it was very clearly not Muriel Northcote. Each was inscribed on the back with a date – a two-week period in 1983 when Carver knew Northcote to have been married and Muriel to be still alive – and locations, Capri and Madrid. There was also a name, Anna. One showed she and Northcote openly embracing, two more with their arms entwined, the fourth holding hands.
    Each was a picture of two very happy people, very much in love.
    George Northcote’s bedroom was once again heavily furnished, the bed and dressing-room wardrobes thick, dark wood, although Carver didn’t think it was mahogany. He imagined he could detect the smell of the man, a musky cologne mixed vaguely with cigars, but decided in the pristine surroundings that was what it had to be, imagination. He supposed the neatness was not Northcote’s but one of the staff, maybe even Jennings. There was what was clearly pocket contents in a segregated tray on the nightstand, house keys, a cigar cutter and lighter, a wad of money, hundred-dollar notes on the outside, in a silver clip and a snakeskin wallet. One half of the wallet was a personalized, week-by-week diary. The entries for that week were identical to those in the larger version downstairs, even to the entry for this day simply reading ‘2.30’. There was a selection of credit and business cards in their separate pockets at the top of the opposing side, with a slim jotting pad at its bottom. It was blank.
    Carver felt a quick flare of hope when he opened the nightstand door and saw the bundle of fine-lined accountancy sheets, lifting them all out and laying them on the bed to hurry through. His first awareness was that they were old files, all dated five years earlier. His second was that none contained any references to Mulder, Encomp or Innsflow. They were the accounts of two companies – BHYF and NOXT – neither of which Carver could remember discussing personally with Northcote, nor more generally at partners’ meetings. And he was sure they hadn’t shown on the computer search he’d attempted downstairs of Northcote’s personally handled accounts. More mob companies? His unavoidable question. Which prompted another. Why left like this, not in the downstairs safe? Because, incredibly, unbelievably, Northcote had believed he was safe: that there was no need for security. Could they be, even, part – maybe even all – of what Northcote had planned to give him, the insurance against the firm’s destruction? Carver wanted to believe it: wanted to believe it more than anything he’d wanted to believe in his life. Whatever, they were potentially the most important discovery he’d made that night. There was a bedside table on the opposite side from the nightstand, free of anything except a biography of Maynard Keynes, and Carver carefully stacked the sheets there to go downstairs with everything else he’d already set aside to take back to Manhattan.
    Carver went painstakingly through all the drawers in Northcote’s dressing room, discovering nothing more in any of them but the expected underwear, linen and shirts. He actually explored every pocket of every one of the twelve suits that hung from the dressing-room rails, as well as the two topcoats. Carver had half hoped for another, better-hidden safe but he didn’t find one, despite looking behind every picture for something wall-mounted, checking every cupboard and recess for an upright model to match that downstairs, and finally scuffing his feet across the carpet, as he had in the study, searching for a security vault sunk into the floor. There was no tell-tale unevenness wherever he looked or felt.
    Enough, Carver decided. He ached with tiredness: ached so much he couldn’t think straight, could hardly see straight. It had to be BHYF and NOXT. He didn’t know how or where to take it forward from here, but there had to be some significance. Would Janice