A Trail part 1 (Trouble Part 7)

I was pondering where I should take this new train of thought, when the phone rang. I picked up, expecting my father to give me some new ideas that popped up in his mind. My instinct was wrong yet again, Madeleine had called me. She had news: apparently her husband was going on a business trip of some sort, three or four days on the old continent. She invited me over to look through his stuff. This would be a great opportunity to get more information, maybe get in his head a little. I asked Madeleine what airline he was flying, and I lucked out. I knew someone who worked for them at the airport. This case was starting to be a lot more than I expected, so I was fully prepared to pull in some favours all over town. I made arrangements to meet Madeleine two days later, and called my friend. No luck, it ended on his voice mail. Whatever, I left a message and hopefully he will pick it up before tomorrow. The promise of a nice bottle of wine should be enough to get him to help me. And since I was told cost was not an issue, I won’t end up with the bill.

After a day of relaxation, and laundry, I was ready to meet with Madeleine. I picked up a copy of all her books at a book store on the way over, I figured I might do a little extra for my father. On the way over, I started regretting doing this, she might see me as a star struck idiot. I was starting to feel like such a fool that I considered throwing the books out on the way from the bus stop to her place, but this was a nice neighbourhood that lacked in recycling bins on the streets. I was heading toward her place when I decided to check my messages yet again. My friend had not called me, and he was unreachable by all the means I had tried. When I reached her house, I remembered why I hated this neighbourhood. I guess you can never get used to the difference between the richest and poorest people in town. I rang at the gate, which opened almost instantly. Even under the rain, it was obvious the garden was well maintained, the grass was green and the flowers nice. Yet I could not help but think about how much space was wasted in this neighbourhood on houses with huge backyards with no one to enjoy them other than the people hired to maintain them.

I went up to the door, trying to forget my issues with this part of town, and knocked. She answered wearing simple clothes. She hadn’t been crying today, and she was much more attractive than last time I saw her. She also spotted the bag with the books and after greeting me, she asked while looking at them: “Learning a bit more about the client?” I had no choice but to explain that I had read her books before, and that I bought these hoping she would autograph them for my father. She smiled said it was not a problem, and asked what I thought about her view of the world of detectives. I politely explained that when I managed to stop being so critical of her outsider’s misconceptions, the books were actually entertaining. I also told her that it wasn’t her fault this type of job had been romanticised and that obviously a simple cheating spouse specialist like me would not provide much material for a novel.

She apologised for the state of the house, she casually mentioned she asked the cleaning service to come after my visit, that way I would see his office in its natural state, and it would cover my tracks a little better. If only all clients were that smart, I guess she does have the ability to think like one of us. Noticing a motion detector, I asked if their security system was linked to a station. She told me it wasn’t, the cop had come once by accident and Albert felt it was too much. I asked if he had any cameras in his office, and she said she did not think so. I decided to make sure of this before I would go in his office, she seemed curious at that idea. At that point, I felt it was my duty to tell her that I suspected her husband of being involved in some sort of fiscal evasion scheme or something worse. She first laughed, but then decided to ask about the evidence. She said we were in no rush, and that she would be offering dinner if I had to stay too late because of her questions. I decided to first look at the wiring for their security system, nanny-cams can watch a lot more than a babysitter, and a DVR would be easy to spot. I went downstairs, with a flashlight, but did a first inspection in the dark. I installed so many surveillance equipments, that I knew a bit what I was doing. And it turns out my instinct was right, there was a camera watching over a DVR in a locked box I managed to open on the first try. I would have hated to show my only client at the time that I had a hard time picking locks. Thankfully, I knew what type of setup he had, and I knew what to do to make it fail to see us snooping around. This particular brand had an extremely high default encoding rate, but a small hard disc, it was meant for day to day backups, and would certainly fill up quickly judging by the 6 video feeds it was receiving if it was on default settings. I also knew that these things went back to default setting after a loss of power unless you changed these defaults, so I simply went to the breaker box in the dark, killed the power to the DVR, unplugged the battery, and then reconnected everything and started the whole system. I then waited in the dark to see the little red light warning about the lack of space turn on.

[Again, I am slowing down my story. No sense in rushing it, right?]