Malice Read Free Page B

road for a few days. I remember it because it had an Irish sticker,
Beautiful Kilkenny
, on the back window.’
    â€˜Let’s check it out,’ Boges said.
    I grabbed my torch.
    Two minutes later, the four of us were standing around an abandoned old van parked on the high point of the hill in Mansfield Way. There was a large towing notice stuck to the windscreen. I did a quick check up and down the street, then deftly dealt with the lock on the driver’s side.
    Swiftly, I unlocked all the other doors. ‘Ballet and art weren’t the only things I learned living with Sligo,’ I muttered.
    I switched on the torch and ran the light across the front seats of the van as Boges slid in for a closer look.
    â€˜Look at these newspapers—they’re just from the last couple of days,’ he said, moving across into the driver’s seat. ‘Someone’s been sitting here reading and doing a lot of crosswords.’
    Ryan and Cal flung open the rear doors and crawled into the back of the van. ‘OK,’ Ryan said. ‘Let’s turn it inside out, see if they left a calling card.’
    â€˜There’s nothing much in the back, I’m afraid,’ Cal called out as they rummaged around. ‘Any luck up front?’
    There was a plastic bag hanging off the gear stick as a makeshift rubbish bin. Carefully, I tipped out the contents onto the passenger seat. Three empty plastic sandwich cases had ‘packed on’ dates that suggested the spy had been monitoring my place for at least three days. This did not make me feel any better. There was, however, no empty case with today’s date.
    â€˜You were right, Boges,’ Ryan said. ‘He didn’t need to listen anymore because he’d found the file.’ Normally, Boges would’ve grinned and said something like,
I’m pretty much always right
, but today, what with everything that had happened, he let the joke go.
    â€˜Hey, look at this!’ I yelled, plucking something from the corner of the floor mat near the accelerator. I held it up. A Triple Mint chewing gum wrapper, balled up in exactly the same way as the wrapper in my study.
    â€˜Snap!’ said Ryan. ‘This has got to be our guy. Is there anything else in that plastic bag?’
    â€˜Only some ripped up paper.’ Boges spread the pieces out. We could see that there was writing on it but it had been torn up over and over.
    â€˜Let’s go back to your place,’ Cal said, ‘and see if we can fit these pieces of paper together. Look at what we’ve got.’
    â€˜OK. I want to find out how this person got into my house,’ I said angrily. ‘And make sure they can’t ever do it again.’
    We checked every door and window of my place. It didn’t take us long to find the weak spot. One of the laundry windows was just a little open at the top and there were dirty finger marks along the top of the dusty frame. ‘He’s been coming in and out through here,’ I said, ‘and I thought that window was locked. It definitely is now.’ I closed it firmly and locked it. ‘I’ll lock the laundry door too, just in case.’
    We sat around the glass-topped coffee table in my living room. ‘Let’s try to put this paper together,’ I said. ‘It looks like something from a business notepad.’ Eventually, we fitted the pieces back together like a jigsaw and got sticky tape to hold it all together. Someone had scribbled:

    â€˜It’s the job description, the job he was doing,’ I cried. ‘Spying on me!’
    But the best thing of all was the small print running along the bottom of the notepaper:
Mulligan Business Services, Shop 21, Liberty Mall.
    â€˜I’m pretty sure U/C means “undercover”,’ Boges said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll practise a little surveillance of our own, on Mulligan Business Services. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a few