by Carl Goodman
He curled his lip. He answered none the less. ‘I went to work. The City, you can check. And what, because I’m Russian you think I’ve got Putin’s mafia on my back? Wouldn’t that be an easy answer for you?’
‘Childishly easy,’ Eva conceded, ‘but I have to know the routine questions have been asked and answered so we can put them behind us.’
He wanted to talk. She could see that. All she needed to do was give him permission. ‘My business,’ Stepanov said, ‘it’s equities. Stocks and shares, nothing more exciting than that. I deal in companies listed on Moskovskaya Birzha, the Moscow Exchange. I work for a bank. I make good money. That is the extent of my wrongdoing.’
‘No connections that will cause the investigation difficulties at a later date?’
He looked exhausted. ‘I’m Russian. Believe it or not we’re not all criminals.’
Eva nodded. ‘Have there been any threats against you or your family?’ Even as she asked the question Stepanov shook his head.
‘Really. I don’t think this was a personal thing, not against my Irina. I think it’s some sort of devil. A madman if you want to call him that, but a devil none the less.’
Everyone thinks it was a psychopath, Eva thought. Stepanov probably hadn’t even heard about the previous killings and he too seemed to have jumped to that conclusion. Perhaps it was to be expected. At first glance the murder had seemed so horrific that only a madman, a ‘devil’ as Stepanov called him, could be capable of it. She had seen the meticulous care that had been taken first-hand, though. She had to believe the evidence would eventually prove her right.
‘Let’s leave no stone unturned,’ Eva told Stepanov. ‘We will pursue the idea that this is a madman, and we will do so with every resource available. But we also have to take into account that the killer had a parcel with your wife’s name on it. Where did he get her name? If it was at random, what was the source? Had he seen her, maybe in some local shop? If he had, how did he then get her address? Did he follow her home? This man was very careful. His planning was meticulous.’
‘And yet,’ Stepanov gasped, ‘I hear that someone almost caught him. Was that you?’
She chose her words. ‘I came across the van a little way away from your house. The killer was still there. He had an electric stun gun. I’m very sorry to say he got away.’
Stepanov stared at her as though now seeing her for the first time. Eva knew she had the beginnings of a bruise on her cheek and her ear lobe was still scarred from where it had been split open. She had been as honest with him as she could have been, and she suspected he could sense that. The poor bastard is still in shock, she thought, and I’ve just presented myself as an authority figure that’s entirely sympathetic to him. Let’s hope to God he doesn’t get fixated. There was a risk, she knew, of something akin to Stockholm syndrome. Stepanov was already a wreck. She did not want to make him worse.
His shoulders slumped, though. He seemed barely able to keep his head off the desk. ‘I’ll do my best to help you,’ he said to Eva. ‘I’ll try to answer all your questions as best I can.’ He managed to raise his eyes to meet hers once more. ‘Just not today.’
Chapter Eight
Rebecca Flynn walked around the side of the car. She had something clutched in her hand, Eva saw through the binoculars. What was it? She tried to focus. Flynn was trying to conceal it. It looked like a bottle of perfume, Eva thought. Then she realised. Flynn was carrying a small can of PAVA pepper spray.
‘She really doesn’t like this guy much, does she?’ Eva said.
‘Not much,’ Will Moresby agreed, ‘but then there’s not much to like. Robbie Poole is basically a low-life git. It all depends on how he’s going to react to being asked to come down to the station. He might get sarcastic and decide it’d be fun to waste our time until a duty brief rocks up. Or he might get all high and mighty and do the usual “I know my rights” stuff. It could go either way.’
‘So why was Flynn adamant that she wanted to pick him up on her own?’
Moresby grinned. ‘She just wants to see the look on his face.’
When she finally saw him, Eva thought Robbie Poole looked like the kind of person you would cross the street to avoid. He had a thin, mealy face that was set into a sneer even before he spotted Rebecca Flynn. He was about five-eleven, Eva guessed, with a scrawny build and slicked-back hair. He wore a hoodie, jeans and trainers, but then everybody on the Allen estate seemed to wear those. When he saw Flynn he hesitated for a moment. Flynn stood her ground, Eva saw, as though challenging Poole to ignore her. After a few moments he sidled up towards her, hands in pockets and an expression of contempt painted across his face.
‘Here we go,’ Moresby said. He opened the car door slightly, not enough to attract Poole’s attention. Eva kept watching but put the binoculars down. They were only thirty or so metres away. She could see the look on Poole’s face and that was enough.
It annoyed her, though. ‘It’s just a distraction,’ she told Moresby.
‘What is, ma’am?’
‘This. I know we have to cross him off the list but look at the guy. He’s barely got a dozen brain cells to rub together. There’s no way he could have killed Swain or Stepanov.’
‘He could have done the previous girls,’ Moresby reminded her. She did not press him on the obvious problem with that statement. Even if only in his mind, Moresby had also separated the two cases.
‘What’s he going to do, get snarky or storm off?’ Eva mused. Poole’s face was for the moment unreadable, as though whatever Flynn was saying to him was slowly sinking in.
‘If he tries to take a swing at her she’ll spray him, no hesitation.’
‘She looks like she wants him to,’ Eva grumbled. ‘Is she goading him?’
‘Becks isn’t that daft,’ Moresby said. ‘She knows not to cross the line—’
Suddenly, without any warning at all, Poole threw a kick at Flynn’s stomach. She almost moved out of the way in time but it caught her, on one side of her abdomen. Poole stepped in to punch her but she had the spray up and ready. She couldn’t aim it properly though, Eva saw. She was already out of the car. Moresby was ahead of her.
Flynn stumbled and fell, one hand clutching her side. Just winded, Eva guessed. Flynn rolled around on the ground. She was on her back, but she held the spray in front of her with both hands. Poole looked like he was going to kick her in the legs.
Eva bellowed as she ran. ‘Police!’ Poole looked towards her and then saw Moresby bearing down on him like an express train. Poole turned and ran.
Moresby was surprisingly fleet for his weight, but Eva was faster. She sprinted after Poole, who slipped around the side of one of the blocks of flats that made up the estate. No you don’t, she thought as she ran. No, you sodding don’t.
Poole was twenty metres in front of her; he was fast enough, but she was faster still. She could catch him, she was certain of that. What the hell she was going to do when she caught him though was another matter entirely. She had not worked that out.
After another hundred metres he started to slow. At the end of one building he stopped and turned to face her. ‘Well, that was stupid,’ Poole panted at her. ‘I’m going to break your fucking face now you stupid bitch.’
No one behind her; Eva dropped into a fighting stance, as best as she could remember it from uni. Kick for the knees, straight fingers in the eyes, she told herself. Poole rushed her.
Third option; get out the bloody way. She sidestepped just as he lunged towards her, spun on her heel and kicked him behind the knee. It didn’t do much damage but he stumbled, lost his footing, careened on for three or four extra paces. Then he turned on her again.
‘Think you’re fucking clever,’ Poole snarled at her. ‘Not so clever now, are you?’
‘I’ll tell you something, shit for brains,’ Eva spat. ‘I’m a damn sight cleverer than you.’ Poole was about to come out with some other abusive comment when Will Moresby hit him like a truck.
Moresby rammed
him. There was no other way Eva could have described it. He body-slammed Poole into a wall so hard she could almost imagine the stars Poole must be seeing inside his head, which had bounced against the concrete. It was as if Poole had lost control of his facial muscles; everything dropped. He crumpled to the ground and lay there, groaning.
Eva looked down on him. ‘Perfect timing, Sergeant,’ she told Moresby. ‘How’s Flynn?’
‘No idea,’ Moresby said. ‘And I’m not going to ask her in case I get my head bitten off.’
Flynn appeared just then, face like thunder and striding towards them. Clearly not hurt, Eva thought. Flynn had her fists clenched. She marched up to them and then she too looked down at where Robbie Poole lay stunned on the ground. Eva was about to say something when Flynn reached down and squirted pepper spray in his eyes.
Poole screamed. So did Eva. ‘Detective Sergeant,’ she bellowed.
Flynn looked nonplussed. ‘So sorry, ma’am,’ she told Eva, ‘my mistake. I thought the shit-faced pig-ignorant animal-shagging scum-sucker was resisting arrest.’
* * *
Eva stood with her fists on her hips in front of Sutton’s desk. Sutton did her best not to look amused. ‘Poole assaulted a police officer and then did a runner. Is anybody going to be surprised that he got what’s coming to him?’
‘He was on the ground,’ Eva said. ‘Moresby had already broken a rib and dislocated his shoulder. Flynn’s actions were disproportionate.’
‘Actually,’ Sutton said, ‘I disagree with that. If she’d had a gun and shot him, that would have been disproportionate. Poole is a low-level toerag who got his lumps. Get over it, Detective Inspector Harris.’
She had to admit it. Sutton was probably right. Poole had humiliated Flynn in front of the estate, so Flynn had put him in his place. ‘Are you going to interview Poole?’ Sutton asked.
‘No. I’ll leave that to Jamie and Raj. I don’t think it’s going to get us anywhere.’
‘Neither do I, but it has to be done. How’s Jamie doing with your medical database?’
Eva slumped. ‘I had no idea there would be so many clinics dealing in elective surgery. I started off trying to figure out if there were any other connections, such as Botox treatments or other sorts of plastic surgery, although Irina Stepanov hadn’t had any of those, but the numbers just got out of hand. I’ve shown Jamie how to write some SQL queries so he can start grouping them together, but there’s still an awful lot to get through.’
Sutton frowned. ‘Write what?’
‘Structured Query Language,’ Eva said. ‘It’s how you interrogate a database efficiently. It’s not that difficult.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Sutton said. ‘What are your next steps?’
‘Interview the others from the old suspect list, interview Jodie Swain’s partner as soon as he arrives and is in a fit state. Keep going through the medical facilities in the county for anything at all that stands out, and re-interview Grigori Stepanov, as soon as anyone can find out where he is.’
‘What is he,’ Sutton asked, ‘vengeful, or hiding in a hole somewhere?’
‘Both,’ Eva said. ‘Wouldn’t you be?’
‘I’m both glad and ashamed to say I have no idea,’ Sutton admitted.
No, Eva thought, but I do.
* * *
She crawled into her apartment around eleven that night. Jamie Newton had managed to string together a few good SQL queries but he was not exactly the fastest learner in the world. He kept at it though, and she admired him for that. Not everybody finds it easy, Eva reminded herself. Not everyone gets a kick out of it.
On the table in her living room the laptop and the eGPU churned away. The algorithm had tried nearly forty billion permutations so far. It’s probably more than eight characters, Eva mused. The eGPU made a huge difference. It crunched through combinations a hundred times faster than the laptop on its own could manage, but the time it would take to crack the password still depended on the type of characters that had been used. It was a gamble, she knew that. It might still take literally forever. She took a small bottle of beer from the fridge and opened it. I’ll give it a month, she thought. If it’s still playing hard to get, then I’ll have to break some rules.
Everything she had done so far had been legal. She had been careful to ensure that. Mostly legal, she corrected herself. The disk image was not technically theft and the laptop and eGPU were only on loan. She knew that Alastair Hadley would feel differently about both of those points, but then again he would not find out until it was too late. If it dragged on, though. If it turned out that the password had been correctly constructed, using a random combination of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters like ampersands and exclamation marks, then it would probably be beyond the capacity of even the eGPU. In which case, Eva thought, I’ll need to try something else.
There were two other possibilities for cracking the password, and both involved brute force. One was to get time on a supercomputer somewhere. Something like the orange monster of a Cray XC machine they kept in the basement at the University of Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre. That wasn’t going to happen. There was no way she would ever be able to borrow time on a system like that. So the second alternative was the hacker approach. The buggers I spent a year shutting down. If this doesn’t work I’m going to end up like one of them. She had no choice, she knew that. She had to crack the password. Literally everything, the whole of the rest of her life, depended on it. So if she had to she would break the law, and although it would be totally illegal she would have to run her password-cracking algorithm on a botnet.
You could buy them from Ukrainian hackers for a few hundred bucks, but Eva did not need to do that. She could build her own. There was plenty of raw material out there on the Internet, poorly protected servers and computers that could be co-opted by malware into acting as part of an illicit network of number crunchers. A robot network, or botnet in hacker parlance. The eGPU Leticia North had sent her increased the processing speed of her handy little programme by a factor of almost a hundred, but Eva reckoned she could find half a million unwitting computers to use if she wrote her malware cleverly enough. She knew how to do it. When it came down to it, it was what she had lived and breathed.
By hook or by crook, she told herself as she watched the counter that marked the number of permutations the algorithm had tried steadily increase, I will break you.
* * *
Sunrise was at seven o’clock the following morning. Eva had been at her desk since before six. The bloody sun painted the sky above the river. For a few brief moments the room was flooded with crimson, but as the disc crept higher it turned to gold.
Jamie Newton had turned up almost four hundred medical facilities within a twenty-mile radius. She had never imagined there could be so many, but when she dug into his numbers she saw he had been quite liberal with what he defined as a ‘medical facility’. Hospitals were on his list, but then again so were dental practices, plastic surgeons and even physiotherapists. She needed to find some more useful criteria if she was going to make any sense of the data.
The killer had felt the need to conceal the exact nature of the sedative. That meant for whatever reason they felt it might provide a route back to them. The trouble with that, Eva thought as she focused on the data, was that they could be wrong. Wren had said there was no way of cross-referencing a batch number from any chemical signatures in the drug, but apparently the killer was not certain of that. To some extent it did not make any difference, she thought as she ran her fingers over rows in spreadsheets. The killer had still sedated the victims. Thanks to the droplet collected from the water bottle at the crime scene, Wren had identified the make and brand of the drug, so even though they might not be able to narrow it down any further, it seemed probable to her that the killer had a connection with one of these clinics that made use of the sedative. Whether she could get any further than that just with data analysis, she had no id
ea whatsoever.
Luckily, the manufacturer of the sedative had been quick to respond to her emails. She noted that some supporting communications from Judy Wren’s associates at the forensic chemistry company had helped that process along. The manufacturer had sent her a number of spreadsheet files. Eva wrote a few short scripts that reorganised the data into a format that was useful to her, and then set it running against Jamie Newton’s lashed-together database.
She ended up matching most of the files by postcode. The specifics of company names, addresses, contact names and phone numbers all varied somewhat from list to list, but at least the postcodes lined up. When she was happy that her files were organised and cross-referenced correctly she started paying attention to the actual data.
There were seventy-eight locations within a twenty-mile radius that used the sedative. The frequency of usage varied dramatically. Some outpatient clinics employed it on a daily basis. Others, such as dentists, only made use of it every month or so. First, she ranked the facilities by frequency of use, but that one statistic told her nothing of value. Start again, Eva thought.
Even her twenty-mile limit seemed arbitrary. The other part of the problem was that she was really interested in individuals, not companies or clinics, and the data from the manufacturer told her little in that regard. Contact details only meant administrative contacts, she realised. They gave her the names of the people who had placed the most recent orders, but that too was a broadly useless piece of information. She pushed her chair back from her desk and stared at the screen of her laptop. What else did she know?
She knew, because Judy Wren had told her, that the killer was skilled. He had removed the eyes with a high degree of care. What did that make him? What level of medical training was required to know how to cut out an eye in an almost forensic manner? For a moment she wondered if it might actually be someone with a background in forensic science, but the exsanguination suggested otherwise. He drained their blood, most likely to disguise the nature of the sedative being used, but that was a mistake. The sedative could not lead them directly to him even if there had been some minor chemical differences in batch numbers. That was not the action of someone who really understood forensics. It was the act of someone who was anally cautious.
