SEE HER DIE a totally gripping mystery thriller (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 2)

by MARGARET MURPHY

  Hart stopped for a second, her fingers resting on the keyboard. ‘I don’t know, Sarge.’

  ‘How many times have I asked you to call me Lee?’ Foster asked.

  She started typing again, but slowly. ‘Dozens,’ she said.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem,’ Hart said. ‘It just feels . . . odd.’

  ‘So, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I pissed you off in the interview room?’

  Hart stopped typing again and looked up at him.

  ‘Well, something’s bugging you,’ he said.

  He really wasn’t going to leave until they’d talked this through.

  At this time of day, the CID Room felt big and empty, despite the untidy jumble of paper and personal belongings that littered the desks. Voices carried and it was easy to eavesdrop. There were three other officers in the room, all of them men. She noticed one of them watching her. ‘I need to finish this report,’ she said. ‘The DCI wants to see it, and I need to concentrate.’

  Foster unfolded his arms and gripped the edge of the desk. ‘You think I deliberately wound him up,’ he said. ‘You think I was argumentative and sarcastic. You think Bentley clammed up because I didn’t make him feel good about stalking Sara Geddes.’

  Hart swung her chair around. ‘How do you think it feels for me, as a woman, interviewing a self-justifying creep like Bentley?’ she demanded. ‘D’you think I enjoyed making him feel I understand his twisted mind?’

  Foster leaned off her desk. ‘You’re saying I screwed up.’

  Hart clenched her jaw tight against the temptation to apologise or make some conciliatory remark.

  Foster studied her for a few seconds. ‘If you want to talk about this, I’ll be in my office.’ He glanced around the room and the other personnel became suddenly engrossed in their paperwork.

  *

  It took Hart fifteen minutes to make her way to see Foster. She could lie — tell him she had overreacted and avoid a show-down. Or she could tell him the truth — that with a little more cajoling she thought they could have had the full story from Bentley. She still hadn’t come to a decision when she knocked and opened the door of Foster’s office.

  It was neat and bland, as before; in some ways it reminded her of Megan’s. The stolen fan stood in the corner, rotating backward and forward like a giant mechanised nodding dog.

  Foster didn’t look up immediately. He was staring at the shoebox they had found in Megan’s bedroom. It was yellowed with age, except for a paler patch at one of the narrow ends, where it seemed a label had been stuck on with Sellotape and later removed. The box was almost square — only a few centimetres longer than it was wide.

  ‘Sarge,’ she said. Now was not the time to take him up on his offer of first-name terms.

  Foster turned to her. He seemed a little unfocused.

  She took a breath. ‘Look—’

  ‘You were right,’ Foster interrupted. ‘I screwed up.’ He leaned past her and pushed the door closed. ‘Arseholes like Bentley piss me off. I can see they would probably piss you off more — and I know I should’ve kept my big gob shut.’

  She exhaled loudly. ‘You could have told me that fifteen minutes ago — saved me a lot of angst.’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Did you see who was ear-wigging our little chat? It would’ve been all round Merseyside by tomorrow, DS Foster’s a wuss who admits he’s wrong to girls!’

  Hart had to bite her lip to stop herself from laughing. ‘I see that could have serious repercussions,’ she said solemnly.

  ‘You’re dead right,’ he grinned. ‘Now will you call me Lee?’

  That damn smile of his will be my downfall, she thought. She pulled a chair up and sat next to Foster.

  ‘Okay, she said. ‘I believe Bentley. The sleaze is obsessed with Sara, not Megan.’

  ‘So why did she run?’

  Hart thought about it for a few moments. ‘Bentley was stalking Sara, but Megan thought he was stalking her, right?’

  Foster grunted agreement, slouching down in his seat as he sometimes did when he was thinking.

  ‘So maybe she ran because he spooked her.’

  ‘Or maybe she confronted him and things went bad,’ Foster said. ‘We know Bentley’s got a temper.’

  ‘Or,’ Hart continued, ‘there was something else she was afraid of.’

  Foster tilted his head. ‘That’s plenty to be going on with.’

  ‘Maybe the answer is in there.’

  They both looked at the shoebox.

  Foster sat up from his slouch and lifted the lid of the box, releasing a whiff of old paper and dust. He had to switch the fan off after a while, to prevent it whisking their carefully separated piles into a flurry of confetti. They worked together, sorting the brochures from the bus tickets, the pop-star pull-outs from the badges, the pen knife and the lock of hair. Foster picked up the photograph of the family group and stared at it for a full minute as if it held some hidden clue, then he riffled through the papers in his in-tray and found the sketch Sara had drawn of Megan.

  Something about the rapt way he concentrated on the two pictures sparked an unreasonable jealousy in Hart and she said, ‘Falling in love with a spectre?’

  Foster didn’t respond to the jibe, instead, he put the two likenesses down and indicated the assorted memorabilia with a gesture of his hand. ‘What does this tell us?’

  Hart studied the forlorn piles of ageing slips and cuttings. ‘She liked Take That and B*Witched in her childhood; moved on to Indie bands in the late nineties.’ She stirred a pile of ticket stubs with one finger. ‘She went to Blackpool Tower and Camelot, Granada Studios, Alton Towers—’

  ‘Well that’s something,’ Foster said.

  She looked again. ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘All the attractions she visited as a kid are in the north of England,’ Foster said. ‘So, Megan was brought up in the north.’

  Hart raised her eyebrows. ‘Sarge, there’s about twenty-five million people in the north of England,’ she said.

  ‘But only about twelve and a half million women.’

  Hart laughed. Foster smiled, clearly gratified, but he continued to study the stacks of paper. ‘There’s nothing here beyond her late teens,’ he said. ‘No photo-booth snapshots of her with her mates, no membership cards, no bank account details — nothing.’

  ‘She must have money,’ Hart said. ‘She bought a sports car for cash.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘What?’ Hart said. ‘The car?’

  ‘The car, the cash — the rest of her life.’

  Hart thought about it. ‘She’s into computers — and if she moves around a lot, it would make sense to bank online, rather than have to change her branch every time she ups sticks and moves to another town.’

  ‘Have we got anything on the dealer who sold her the car?’ Foster asked.

  Hart shook her head. ‘Sara didn’t even know the make.’

  ‘Okay.’ Foster reached for a copy of the Yellow Pages from his desk drawer. ‘Let’s start with Mercs and BMWs.’

  After an hour of working the phones in tandem, they had the dealer on the line. He had sold Megan an Audi TT 150 Roadster for twenty-one thousand pounds six weeks previously. He confirmed she had paid cash — he’d thrown in road tax and she had talked him into paying for a year’s insurance. He seemed unsure exactly how she had managed that particular feat of reverse salesmanship.

  ‘D’you have the car’s ID number — and Miss Ward’s Driver Number would be really helpful,’ Hart said.

  Foster arched his eyebrows in question and she gave him the thumbs-up.

  The DVLA had come up with a Mercedes, registered to the Norwich Megan Ward. They had yet to send a photo. If they could match the Driver Number, they would have at least one definite connection.

  After a pause, the dealer said, ‘I’m not sure I can . . .’

  ‘You’re concerned about confidentiali
ty,’ Hart said. Doing this the long way, using all the right forms, would take days, and she had already reached her frustration tolerance limits. ‘You respect your clients’ privacy,’ she went on. ‘And that’s commendable. But this is a missing persons enquiry, and Miss Ward might be in trouble.’

  The dealer still seemed unsure.

  She took a breath. ‘Tell you what — I’ll fax a request through to you on headed notepaper and you can fax me her details right back — how’s that?’ Coercion worked, where persuasion hadn’t. Minutes later, the task completed, they waited, trying not to watch the fax machine.

  ‘We could ask the Department for Work and Pensions for her National Insurance number,’ Foster suggested. ‘But we’d need clearance from the boss for that.’

  ‘For what?’ Rickman stood in the doorway. They had been so intent on the phone call that they hadn’t heard him knock.

  ‘DWP request,’ Foster said. ‘Bentley’s our stalker all right, but he wasn’t stalking Megan.’

  Rickman nodded. ‘I know — I’ve had Naomi’s report.’

  Foster couldn’t hide his amused surprise that she had come to sort things out with him after filing her report with the DCI. Hart treated him to an arched eyebrow.

  ‘You’ve got your clearance,’ Rickman said. ‘What else?’

  ‘We’re waiting on a fax—’ Foster was interrupted by a single ring from the fax machine, then a copy of Megan’s registration details hummed through. Foster glanced at it, then passed it to Rickman.

  ‘It might be worth giving out her car ID to the traffic police,’ Foster said.

  The DCI considered. ‘Let me think on that one — we still don’t know if she wants to be found; an area-wide alert might be overkill. What about her treasure trove?’ he asked, lifting his chin to indicate the shoebox, now lying empty on the desk.

  ‘She was probably brought up in the north of England,’ Foster said. ‘Otherwise, there’s bugger-all of any use in this little lot.’ He lifted the lid to replace it on the box and frowned.

  ‘What?’ Rickman asked.

  ‘Dunno.’ Foster shook the lid. ‘Feels off.’ He set the lid down on his desk and picked up the penknife from the sorted paraphernalia.

  Rickman gave a cough. Foster grimaced and put the knife down again, mouthing, ‘Evidence.’ Then he fished in his pocket, taking out a Swiss Army knife.

  ‘Well, dib-dib-dib,’ Hart said, gently mocking.

  He took it in good part. ‘Ex-boy scouts, ex-marines — we always like to be prepared,’ he said, teasing the blade of the knife under the lining paper. Though yellowed and brittle, it peeled away without tearing. Hidden beneath was a credit card in the name of Megan Ward.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nathan Wilde was tripping. Maybe not full-on, mind-blowing psychedelic oblivion, but an altered mental state, for sure. He was seeing things: cyber-bugs — oval transparent shapes, all light and no substance. They scuttled like beetles on the periphery of his vision, making him flinch, freaked for a second, till his head cleared, and they vanished, and although he looked really closely, there was nothing, not even a shadow that could have caused the apparition.

  The sharpness of vision and the blinding insights of the first two days had given way to a frightening cacophony of sensory input. Flashing lights slashed the soothing velvet darkness when he closed his eyes. Sounds, too — loud buzzing sounds, like angry hornets, distortions of speech, a constant hiss like a burst steam-pipe in his right ear. Drug-induced or a product of sleep deprivation, he couldn’t say, but he knew for sure that he was going crazy.

  He had slept in two-hour breaks, sometimes involuntarily napping at the keyboard; this apart, he had been in Patrick Doran’s office for almost five days. Imprisoned — or as good as — in the dark and darkened room. Doran and Warrender, sometimes one, sometimes both, acting as jailers. Was it night or day? He couldn’t say. This room felt like a tunnel, a cave.

  The hacker now had a name: Warlock. Not that Nathan had discovered it; Warlock had presented it to them as a gift and a taunt: catch me if you think you’re fast enough — or smart enough. Nathan knew that he was neither.

  Warlock was using a meerkat application, which worked a look-out rota similar to the little ground-squirrels, sticking its head up every few minutes to check who was on the system that might pose a threat. Every time Nathan got onto exactly which part of the operating system was under attack, Warlock would disappear, only to pop up somewhere else moments later. It was like trying to catch smoke.

  ‘Can’t catch smoke,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’ Doran demanded.

  Nathan looked at his boss. ‘What?’ he echoed.

  ‘You said something.’

  Nathan looked beyond Doran to Warrender, who was dozing in a chair. ‘Shut down.’ It seemed as good a suggestion as any he had made, so far. ‘You have to do what I’m telling you.’

  ‘No,’ Doran said. ‘I don’t. You know why? Because I’m the boss.’

  ‘And I’m the systems manager,’ Nathan said. He knew the danger but felt no fear. He was past fear, past pain, past anything but a hacker’s instinct to survive this assault and learn from the experience.

  ‘You pay me for — this.’ He waved a hand at the computers; the soft hum of their cooling fans sounded like the breathing of a sleeping animal. One that might awake and attack without warning. He lowered his voice, irrationally fearful that Warlock might hear. ‘Neither one of us has the final say here — Warlock does.’

  A muscle jumped in Doran’s jaw. ‘I thought you said this “Warlock” was an amateur.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with amateurs.’ Nathan spoke half to himself as he scrolled through multiple monitors on multiple screens. ‘They really love what they do. They don’t do it for the money, and they won’t stop till they find a weakness, a flaw, an exploit. Some way around or over or under or through your defences.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be a professional. Like you said, it’s what I pay you for.’ The menace in Doran’s voice was barely masked. ‘This guy is taking the piss — why can’t you stop him?’

  Nathan swallowed. He was jazzed on speed and the odd blast of vasopressin, his head throbbed, and he was parched and nauseous. ‘I dunno,’ he said, almost feverish with heat and exhaustion. ‘Maybe he teamed up with somebody else — a mentor. Sometimes experienced hackers will help out a novice if it’s an interesting enough project.’

  Doran stared with a dawning horror at the computers ranked on his desk as he began to appreciate the potential of this new threat. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’

  ‘Because they can.’ Nathan had to make Doran understand, and for the first time since all of this started, he thought that his boss might listen — really listen, instead of blustering and giving orders. ‘It’s about power and control,’ he said. ‘The bigger and more powerful the people you hack, the better it makes you feel.’

  ‘Speaking from experience, Nathan?’ Warrender had spoken for the first time in hours.

  ‘Well — yeah . . .’ Nathan frowned at the stupidity of the question. ‘In cyberspace, it isn’t money or muscle that matters — it’s brains and energy and imagination. Synergy of man and machine.’

  ‘You’re telling me those wankers on their PlayStations or whatever are about energy and imagination?’ Doran demanded.

  ‘Hacking is like PlayStation with real villains who could really rip your head off if they found you,’ Nathan said. ‘But small and weak as the hacker might be in reality, when he’s lurking in your system, or messing with your files, he’s the one with the power.’

  ‘You said you could do some mojo — get into his machine,’ Doran said.

  ‘I’m trying to,’ Nathan said. ‘I almost had him, then he switched computers — he’s working from a laptop now.’

  ‘Well how d’you think you’re gonna get a street address off a laptop, moron?’

  Nathan looked into his employer’s dark blue eyes and saw a whisper of insanity
. ‘Documents,’ he said, scrambling for ideas. ‘Receipts? Letters?’

  ‘When? Next year? My system has been under attack for five days. I want a result.’

  Nathan didn’t respond. He was staring at the monitor closest to him with absolute concentration. His scalp tingled and an ice-cold shiver ran down his spine.

  ‘I’m . . .’ His fingers hovered over the keyboard. ‘My God — I’m in.’

  It took Doran a few moments to understand the significance of what Nathan had said. Then he let his systems manager work and for nearly an hour, he watched, fascinated, as Nathan trawled through Warlock’s files.

  ‘Most of these files are encrypted,’ Nathan said after a long, eerie silence during which the only sounds were the rustle of his fingers over the keyboard and the whisper of the computers’ cooling fans. ‘The rest he must read and delete.’

  Doran’s shoulders sagged. ‘You can’t find him.’

  ‘Oh, I can find him,’ Nathan said, an unshakeable calm settling on him. He stared at the machine, his hands rippling over the keyboard by touch, stepping through the configuration like it was a series of rooms, which to Nathan it was — a three-dimensional space he could walk through and manipulate.

  ‘Deleted files aren’t really deleted, only hidden,’ he explained. ‘The first letter of the file name is erased, so it’s hard to find.’ He smiled a little. ‘But not impossible.’

  Another ten minutes passed during which Nathan worked in almost a trance state, typing in commands, filtering and categorising files.

  ‘Gotcha,’ Nathan said quietly.

  ‘You’ve got an address?’ Doran asked.

  Nathan held up a hand. ‘Wait.’ The tone of command, the absolute confidence, was impossible to ignore, and again, Doran deferred to his young systems manager.

  ‘You are good,’ Nathan murmured softly, ‘but you’re not God.’ Then, with a glance to Warrender, who had roused himself from his torpor and now sat at the edge of his seat. ‘Printer.’

  Seconds later, the printer activated and a sheet of paper appeared. ‘It’s a receipt for hardware,’ Nathan said, as Warrender handed the sheet to Doran. ‘The name’s probably fake. But the street name might be worth checking.’