20/20

by Carl Goodman

  Eva could think of absolutely no reason whatsoever why DCI Sutton would be interested in DS Flynn’s sleeping arrangements, but she asked anyway. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was dating the union rep,’ Flynn grinned. ‘I think the DCI knows messing with that can be more trouble than it’s worth.’

  She made it back to the station just after midday. Flynn had been as good as her word. While Eva slept she had negotiated a budget with DCI Sutton and once she was awake they had gone shopping for clothes in the town centre. By late morning she had something to wear and bags to put her new gear in. It wasn’t exactly haute couture, Eva thought as she checked herself in a mirror in a department store, but at least it was something.

  At the station she slipped a SIM card into her new phone and then connected to a cloud server to download her data. When she checked she saw she had a bunch of emails, including one that looked like spam from a file-sharing company in Mauritania. Tisha, Eva thought as she hid the mail in an archive folder. Yet again, she had not let her down.

  * * *

  ‘I need a new computer,’ Eva told Sutton. Sutton didn’t seem to want to talk about such things.

  ‘Harris,’ she began.

  Eva shook her head. ‘Can we please just skip it for now? I’m really not in the mood. If I start thinking about it I’m going to freak, so I need to get on with stuff I can solve. I need to be able to work. My laptop was in the flat.’

  Sutton held her with her gaze. Eva did not look away. ‘I can get IT to make it a priority,’ Sutton said eventually.

  ‘I’ll do it myself, ma’am,’ Eva said. ‘IT are going to be really pissed off with me, but I want to get some MPCCU tools installed. Sorry to seem blunt but there’s only one thing I need from you right now,’ she told Sutton.

  Sutton glared. ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Money.’

  She knew Sutton had a contingency budget. She planned to make full use of it. Eva went back to the town centre and did a quick tour of the handful of stores that sold computers. In the end she wound up in a shop with a shiny logo paying an arm and a leg for a silver machine so highly specified she could probably have animated a feature film on it, but that suited her just fine. When she left the store she went straight back to the station and sat at the desk in her office with the door closed setting the computer up. Eva had no intention whatsoever of letting the IT subcontractor that normally provided support for the county police service anywhere near the laptop. She had her network account and sign-in from the machine she had carried home with her the evening before. Everything else she planned to build herself.

  Machines within machines. She partitioned the hard drive and installed two separate operating systems, then went about creating virtual machines within each of them. She got onto the network, went to her MPCCU account and downloaded a number of applications that would help her both cover her own tracks and follow other people’s.

  Eva looked up at her door. Nobody seemed brave enough to disturb her that afternoon. Or perhaps Flynn had told them all to leave her alone and give her some space. Despite Flynn’s hard-as-nails exterior Eva was starting to see through the brusque non-nonsense DS, and what she saw she found she liked. She felt safe for a moment, so Eva used the MPCCU tools to cloak what she was doing and went to fetch Leticia’s disc image from a server in Mauritania.

  It took thirty minutes to download. Eva hid it in an already concealed location on her hard drive and then encrypted that too. Only when she was certain that nothing and nobody would be able to access it without her say-so did she try the password.

  She already had the user account name. She typed FuckU2hell!? and waited for a moment while a blue circle sat spinning. A machine within a machine. An emulation of the laptop that sat in an evidence locker complete with data and all the layers of security that protected it, all now made accessible by the eGPU Leticia North had sent her. That and hundreds of hours of number crunching. Her stomach knotted as the wheel spun. Then, slower than usual because it was just a virtual machine, the login box disappeared and the image of the laptop revealed itself to her.

  Eva held her breath. She followed all the usual paths, looked in all the usual places. He had not been a tidy user. His files were not well structured, but that did not matter. When she went searching she found what she wanted. The offline backup of his email folder. When she opened it she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  You bastard, she thought as she stared at the screen. Got you, you bastard. It was all she could have ever hoped for. His emails, their emails. Supposedly lost forever, but she had known there would be a backup somewhere. Eva made another copy on a different location on her computer and then shut down the virtual machine.

  One down. She had the bullet. She would pull the trigger at a time of her choosing. Three to go. Eva stood, opened her door and walked to the incident room. Three pairs of eyes looked at her, none of them knowing what to expect.

  ‘Raj, Jamie,’ she said, making sure her voice stayed calm and even, ‘would you mind bringing me everything you have on Chatham Centre financials and Grau Laska?’

  * * *

  Raj and Jamie sat in front of her desk. Flynn lounged in the doorway. Eva didn’t mind that, she just didn’t particularly want to show her new computer off around the station in case somebody knew enough to make a connection. That was probably paranoia, she admitted to herself. On the other hand somebody had tried to kill her twice now.

  ‘Tell me about Chatham.’

  ‘It’s a good business,’ Newton said. ‘Turnover is about fifteen million, it has eight or nine hundred patients a year. Each one pays an average of around twenty grand for a treatment. Chatham Centre Limited Liability Partnership is sound. Chatham Centre Holdings Ltd,’ he said, pushing a printout towards her, ‘is a different story.’ Eva glanced at the document but waited for him to explain. ‘CCH looks like an investment vehicle. It’s a joint venture with ProOptica SRO of Slovakia. That’s the lens manufacturer you mentioned.’

  Eva searched as Newton spoke, not only with standard browsers but with darknet and deep-web tools as well. ‘How much are we talking about?’

  ‘Sixty million quid.’

  She found ProOptica’s website in moments. She also found half a dozen other accounts for various company collaboration services. Eva started probing using the MPCCU tools, but it didn’t take long. A couple of accounts had weak passwords. The tools opened those in just a few minutes. ‘How’s your Slovakian?’

  ‘Non-existent,’ Newton said. ‘Is that legal, ma’am?’

  ‘Reasonable suspicion,’ Eva told him, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced. She glanced at Newton. ‘Where did the investment come from?’

  ‘From the shareholders’ private funds. Jeremy Odie, Head of Business Affairs, seems to have organised the lion’s share. I guess you’d expect that.’

  ‘Anything out of the ordinary?’

  ‘I think it’s putting a strain on them. They seem to be cash-flowing R&D for this factory in Slovakia and it’s not paying back yet.’

  The posts on the collaboration services weren’t exactly revealing. She put a few through a translation tool. It came back with some mundane conversations about project milestones and deadlines.

  ‘I did come across one other thing though,’ Newton said. ‘There’s been an auditor appointed.’ He nodded at DS Chakrabati. ‘Raj found some details at Companies House. She works for one of the big consultancy firms and she specialises in preparing companies to be sold. In particular to larger companies in the US. We think she’s arranging an exit strategy.’ Eva flicked a glance at them. ‘It means they’re planning to cash in on their investment and get out. This lens thing you were talking about?’

  ‘Bright Eyes,’ Eva said.

  ‘It looks like it’s a big deal. Chatham Centre has invested in developing it, used it in patients and now wants to sell it on. It’s a common enough approach apparently. One company takes all the initial risks and then passes it on t
o another company that can take it to the next level. The directors of the original company get minted in the process.’

  Eva kept searching. ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘None that we can see,’ Newton told her, ‘except that they’re very exposed. They need to do a deal soon or they’re going to have to find more money from somewhere.’

  ‘Could that be a problem?’

  Newton spread his hands. ‘Who knows? I can’t get everything from the statutory filings. It depends if somebody thinks they’ll get bought out soon. I don’t see Chatham being able to afford to keep carrying the cash-flow, though.’

  ‘And Grau Laska?’

  Chakrabati did his best not to look smug but failed completely. ‘Grau Matous Laska,’ he told her, ‘born December 14th 1984 in the city of Prešov in Slovakia. He did his PhD in Optics, Lasers and Optical Spectroscopy at the Comenius University in Bratislava. He’s got a bunch of papers published in scientific journals with titles I can barely read let alone understand. This guy is so bright it makes my teeth hurt. He works for ProOptica. He’s their principal lens designer.’

  Eva’s hands froze over the keyboard. ‘What?’

  ‘I reckon Laska is the brains behind Bright Eyes. If there was going to be a buyout then Laska’s contract would have to be part of the deal. That would just be standard practice.’

  ‘And if he wasn’t part of the deal?’

  Raj shrugged. ‘Chances are then no deal. He brings the detailed knowledge of how things work to the party. If you don’t have him, you don’t have that. Worse, it means he could be available for a competitor to employ. Grau Laska is in a strong position with ProOptica, even though he might not actually know that yet.’

  ‘A bit unfortunate,’ Eva said.

  Raj frowned. ‘Why?’

  Eva turned her laptop to face them. It showed a translation of a post on the ProOptica Workplace group. ‘Because Grau Laska resigned from ProOptica three months ago.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  That afternoon she and Flynn headed to New Thought. Eva let Flynn drive. They sat in roadworks for ten minutes outside Chertsey. Eva watched the arm of a mechanical digger as it gouged out a ragged chunk of road and deposited it on a pile of dark, broken rubble. Like carved flesh. It made her think back to the way Irina Stepanov’s arm had split apart when Wren sliced it with a scalpel to reveal the empty tubes of veins and arteries. She saw severed pipes lining the side of the trench, edges ragged and broken. Was that how Stepanov’s veins would have looked in close-up, she wondered?

  When Flynn spoke she dragged Eva away from her morbid reverie. ‘What did you mean when you said you got Lynch killed?’

  She regretted that slip the instant she made it, because Eva knew Flynn would not have missed it. She wouldn’t let it go either. It seemed safest to answer her question as best she could.

  ‘I’d been allowed to return to work after a few months. They didn’t want me anywhere near the Lynch investigation but he’d disappeared after he killed Dom and tried to kill me. No surprise there but it meant information on him was really thin until a rumour surfaced about a shipment of opium coming in from Afghanistan. A big one, but then Lynch only did big. I knew the background better than anyone, so I was allowed back on the investigation on a temporary basis.’ She stopped speaking for a while. Flynn waited, patiently.

  ‘I just wanted to get the bastard,’ Eva admitted. ‘I knew the way he worked by then. We’d called the route “black alpha” because we knew it crossed the Black Sea to the Balkans. From there it would have run through northern Italy and eventually to the Netherlands, where it would have been shipped to somewhere in the UK in a container. I say opium. I really mean the morphine base derived from it. The final manufacture of heroin would have been done in the UK under Lynch’s control. He had a chemist who would have made it and then cut it, ready for distribution. This shipment was a big deal though, even for Lynch, and I knew he would have wanted to make certain all his pieces were in place.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  Eva shrugged. ‘There’s a man in the Ukraine by the name of Semion Razin. Razin is one of the most influential criminals in the world today. He’s known as the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. His organisation is like a multinational corporation, with divisions and franchises. We knew Razin’s people in the UK didn’t like Colin Lynch. Lynch was competition as far as they were concerned. I was responsible for collating intelligence about the meeting and distributing it to those who needed to know about it. Somehow that information was picked up by Razin’s organisation.’

  The traffic lights changed. Flynn pulled away. ‘I don’t see how that’s your fault? Once you start sending out stuff like that there’s always a chance something is going to leak. So what, somebody turned up and shot Lynch?’

  Eva gazed into the distance. ‘There was a place called Winter’s Gate Farm on the edge of the New Forest. A fifteenth-century farmhouse that had been restored by some builder. Lynch sometimes used it for his meetings. It was where he buried our car while we were on stake-out. Somebody found out Lynch and his people planned to rock up there again one evening.’

  Flynn waited for her to finish. Eventually, she had to push. ‘And?’

  ‘Winter’s Gate Farm isn’t there any more. Somebody put explosives from a commercial quarry into an old coal chute at the back of the house. They wired the detonator to the light switch. When Lynch turned on the lights it blew, and so did the farmhouse. Literally nothing remained apart from a thirty-metre crater. We found enough of Colin Lynch to be certain he hadn’t faked his own death. Small pieces though,’ Eva said as she gazed out the window. ‘Very small pieces.’

  ‘And Lynch’s men blame you for this?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Eva lied. Then she told the truth. ‘And I really don’t care.’

  * * *

  The door to New Thought was open. She had known it would be. She also knew what Flynn would say when she saw the fresco. ‘Bloody hell.’ Eva watched her as she walked up to the wall. ‘That is absolutely sodding beautiful.’

  ‘Glad you like it.’

  Mathew Harred appeared from the top of a tower of scaffolding and climbed down a ladder. He wore a T-shirt and his biceps flexed as he lowered himself to the ground. Eva noted the look on Flynn’s face. Her mouth hung slightly open, so Eva nudged her discreetly. ‘Good to see you again, Eva,’ Harred said. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said, extending his hand to Flynn.

  ‘This is DS Rebecca Flynn,’ Eva told Harred. Harred smiled his most engaging smile. Flynn looked flushed.

  ‘What’s it about?’ Flynn asked, awkwardly.

  Harred shrugged. ‘It’s about your dreams. The good ones,’ he added quickly. ‘I guess as police officers you see things that must give you bad ones. It’s an idea of our true selves. Of what we really are, not what we are constrained to be by this sad little domain in which we all currently exist. A realm where we can be heroes and live like legends. A far better place, although of course the way we each interpret these things is often in the eye of the beholder,’ he told them. He turned to look at Eva. ‘But you know that already, don’t you?’

  She didn’t know how to respond. She couldn’t decide whether Harred was being sincere or whether he was playing mind games with her. ‘I have a first draft of you in the painting,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to see it?’

  Suddenly mute, Eva could only nod her head. She had no control over how Harred represented her. He could do whatever he wanted. A sudden and totally unexpected sense of dread grew within her. What might he have done? She couldn’t hide her discomfort. It was Flynn’s turn to stare.

  Harred smiled, but said nothing. He led the way to another scaffolding tower that sat behind the polythene sheets, hiding the unfinished sections of the fresco from view. They had to climb up a sloping metal ladder, but that wasn’t hard.

  Eva, Flynn and Harred stood on wooden planks bolted to the metal tower. Flynn gasped when she saw what
Harred wanted to show them. ‘Christ boss, it’s incredible. It really is you.’

  Eva couldn’t disagree. On the slope of a hill of a world that sat beneath what looked like a gas giant planet, she recognised herself. Her face anyway. Dressed in classical attire, she held a spear in one hand. An owl perched on her other. Harred watched her as she stared. ‘I took the liberty of imagining you as Pallas Athena,’ he told her, ‘the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare.’ Harred had taken a picture of her face so the accuracy of that did not surprise her. What disturbed her more was her figure. Her body.

  He had captured that perfectly too. She could see that even though a thin robe covered her. It was as if he had looked through her to see the structure of the muscles and bones that comprised her. It felt like her. He had caught her stance perfectly.

  ‘In the Iliad and the Odyssey,’ Harred said, ‘Homer frequently described Athena using the term Glaukopis. It means “bright-eyed”, or “with gleaming eyes”. I thought that was appropriate, don’t you?’

  She turned to look at him. Was he mocking her? ‘What did you mean by destroyer?’

  ‘I think you understand,’ Harred said. ‘I have every confidence you’ll find whoever is killing these people. I truly believe that Eva. And when you do, you will end them.’

  She didn’t know how to answer. ‘I’ll certainly put them in prison,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Well that’s an end, isn’t it? For whoever it is killing these women that confinement would surely be enough to destroy them.’ He didn’t mean that. She watched his eyes and she was damned certain he didn’t mean that at all. Harred saw her suspicion and frowned. Eva could see his disappointment then too. ‘Maybe Athena wasn’t the right choice,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have tried you as an avenging angel.’