'Big Bob,' muttered McGuire, fervently, to the empty room, 'you may be constitutionally incapable of keeping your hands off your officers' investigations, but every so often you do come up with a beauty.'
He cradled the phone, stood, and walked out of his office into the Special Branch room outside. Alec Smith's squat, grey, ugly safe stood in the middle of the floor. Maggie sat on the edge of a desk, making conversation with a middle-aged man in a brown suit, who had not been there when McGuire had left to make his telephone call.
'Mario,' she said. 'This is Mr Evans from Guardian Security; he's their top locksmith, so the company told me.'
The little man smiled in what was meant to be a self-deprecating way, but the Inspector knew that he was not about to disagree with the description. 'I do my best,' he said, lamely.
'Nothing else will do, Mr Evans,' McGuire boomed. 'Nothing else.' He looked at his wife and smiled. 'The Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society came up trumps; the late Mrs Mary Eglinton Smith, of Morocco Lane, Lochgelly, was indeed a member, to the day she died… you might even say to the day the Co-op undertaker put her in the ground. Her membership number was five… three… six… four.' Maggie noted the four digits down as he spoke.
'There's nothing else for it, sir,' he said to the locksmith.
'We'll have to go with that as the combination. Can you open it for us?'
Mr Evans frowned. 'It's not just the numbers,' he said. 'This is a classic circular combination lock, not one of these shoddy keyboard jobs – you have to know the direction as well. Four digits, possibly in random order, either right or left, not necessarily alternately. Yes, that cuts the odds against guessing right down to around one hundred thousand to one.
'Forget all that stuff you've seen in films, too, where the safecracker uses a stethoscope to listen for clicks as the mechanism works. This lock is silent; when you key the first digit you have to hold it in position for five seconds before it engages, with the next it's six seconds, then seven, and finally eight.
'Yes,' Mr Evans said, proudly. 'It's a clever little bugger.' McGuire's face fell. 'So we're no further forward,' he muttered.
'In theory.' The little man beamed. 'But in practice… I built this thing and although I didn't tell my colleagues, I did include one little fail-safe, against the outside possibility of a situation such as this arising.'
'Like what?'
'I programme my own signature into the locking mechanism of every safe I build. It over-rides the owner's combination. Naturally, I have never breathed a word of this to a soul, not even within the group. If my small secret leaked out, I'd be a prime target for kidnap, wouldn't