Death Of A Devil

by Derek Farrell

  “Any news on the other thing?” I asked as we walked back down the hallway.

  “Nothing so far,” Ray admitted. “Dash is out right now canvassing the local pubs. We’ve got the picture of Carlton but nothing much has sparked so far. Couple of pubs recognised him but couldn’t say whether it was from that night or some other night he’d been in.”

  “Well keep looking,” I said. “Someone will recognise him, and it’s only going to take one to start the chain off. So this guy is good?”

  “The best,” Ray said, patting my shoulder. “Relax. You’re in safe hands.”

  “Jesus,” I sighed, feeling older than Methuselah, “let’s do this.”

  Phoenix held a finger up for silence, tapped a few more keys and said, “Prawn cocktail,” which caused Ray to gasp, charge back out to the hallway and return with three packs of the required flavour of crisps. He tore one of them open and placed it on the table before the boy, who shovelled a handful of crisps into his mouth, chewed twice, washed them down with another giant swig from the Red Bull can and looked up at us.

  “Already half done,” he announced.

  “That was quick.”

  “Well I had the address, and earlier I figured out the service provider, server locator and router he was using. So right now, I’m basically in his internet gateway.” He tapped a few more keys and sat back. “Yeah, this is definitely him. He’s got some interesting security.”

  At that moment, my phone rang.

  “Yeah,” I said, answering it and stepping out of the kitchen and into the hallway.

  “You alone?” It was Chopper.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Phoenix was still tapping away at his laptop, Ray peering over his shoulder, while Caz attempted to look nonchalant, but had her eyes fixed on the boy’s hands.

  “I’m alone,” I confirmed.

  “So how’d it go with the widow Ho?” he asked.

  I frowned. Chopper was too interested in this situation. It was unlike him to do much more than tell me to ‘Sort it’ – whatever ‘it’ was – and his sudden keenness bothered me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “not much there.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, I figured she’d keep things close to her chest. I did some digging and the money for them restaurants came from an uncle of hers back in Hong Kong. I don’t think Ho had anything to do with pinching the stones.”

  And then it hit me. “Listen, Mr Falzone,” I said, interrupting him, “you know you said you were having me followed?”

  “Not any more, Danny. Not now we’ve got an agreement.”

  “Agreement? What agreement?”

  “The stones. You find ‘em, you call me. We’ll split them eighty twenty.”

  “Eighty twenty?”

  “Alright, seventy-five twenty-five. I’m gonna be the one having to find somewhere to flog ‘em.”

  “Yeah, how long have you been following me?” I asked.

  There was a silence at the end of the line, then Chopper said, “A few days. But we’re good now.”

  “So before Jimmy was killed,” I said.

  “Yeah. Since the other stiff turned up in the cellar. What of it?”

  I was aware that I was now skating on very thin ice, but I was already pissed off and this was the final straw.

  “You knew, didn’t you? You knew who the body was. And you knew about the jewellery heist. You knew right from the beginning.”

  The silence was there again. “I tend to keep an ear to the ground, Danny, and in my game it helps to have a very long memory. I didn’t know anything. But I had my suspicions.”

  “I’m going to ask you again,” I said, and from the other end of the line his voice came back.

  “And I’m gonna answer you again.”

  “Did you kill the body in the cellar? Did you murder Billy Bryant?”

  “Dan, if I’d offed him, d’you think I’d be looking for them stones now? I didn’t know he was there but from the descriptions, the time frame, the fact that it was well-known that Billy had done a runner with them stones – Christ, the rest of the gang tore half of London up looking for him and them stones back in the day – I figured it was a good bet.”

  “So you had me followed.”

  “I like to know where the people who work for me are. Especially when they’re as resourceful as you.”

  “I don’t work for you,” I said through gritted teeth.

  He chuckled. “Ah Danny, everyone works for me. One way or another. Listen,” he said, getting back down to business, “I found another name for you. No joy with this Gary the Ghost. Nobody I’ve spoken to knows who he was, but are you still looking for Tiny Tim?”

  I said that I was.

  “You got a pen and paper?”

  “Hang on,” I switched the phone to speaker, shoved it under my chin, pulled a receipt from my back pocket and a stub of pencil from behind my ear. “Go on,” I said.

  He gave me an address. “Don’t go alone,” he chuckled, “don’t go too close to the bars, and for fuck’s sake don’t bring donuts or feed him after midnight.”

  “What?” I asked but, chuckling, he rang off, leaving me staring at the paper in my hand, as the phone slipped from under my chin and dropped, clattering to the floor.

  I picked it up, shoved it and the receipt back in my pocket, and re-entered the kitchen.

  Now, Phoenix was bent further over the keyboard, Caz was out of her chair and was peering over his left shoulder, while Ray was peering over his right.

  “How are we doing?” I asked, as Phoenix grunted, Caz and Ray both shushing me worriedly.

  “Got ya, you fucker,” Phoenix smiled wolfishly, and hammered away at the keyboard.

  “What’s going on?” I sidled up to Caz and whispered the question.

  “We’ve had some,” she glanced at Ray, essayed, “issues,” received a nod of agreement from him and pulled me gently away from the table.

  “So he’s found the server – the gateway – whatever it was that he needed to find to start the trace to wherever Lowe’s parked the files. Only there’s a lot more security and encryption on everything than he usually sees. Phoenix reckons it’s like Lowe was expecting us.”

  “Really?” I aped surprise. “Cos I can’t imagine why anyone who blackmails people to the tune of millions on a regular basis wouldn’t think they might need a little more security on their computer. So what’s Phoenix doing?”

  “He’s trying to shut down the security protocols,” she answered, making me smile.

  “For a second there, you actually sounded like you had a clue what you were talking about,” I said.

  She smirked. “Osmosis, my friend.”

  Suddenly, behind us, the mood changed.

  “Fuck!” Phoenix screamed, hammering on the keyboard like a thing possessed.

  “What’s up?” I rushed back to his side.

  “He’s got a guard dog,” Phoenix snapped, tapping furiously at the keys.

  “A guard dog?” I looked quizzically at Caz, who returned my confusion and eyeballed the three empty Red Bull cans on the table.

  “And is this a bad thing?” she enquired.

  “Course it’s a bad thing,” he snappedback, pausing to read something on the screen, mutter under his breath and start tapping again.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

  “Because?” I asked.

  “I haven’t got time for this,” he bit back, typing a three-letter code and hitting return a dozen or more times. “Wait,” he held a hand up, “it might be asleep.”

  His shoulders relaxed.

  “So, to be clear,” I said, tentatively feeling my way back into the conversation, “we’re not talking about a real guard dog, are we?”


  Phoenix frowned, half-turned himself in the chair and looked at me as though I were deranged. “Are you on fucking drugs?”

  “No,” I protested, and before I could get any further, Ray interrupted.

  “They’re old, mate. Tell ‘em in plain language.”

  “Old?” Caz and I chorused in outrage, but before we could further expand on our feelings around the ageist insult, Phoenix rolled his eyes, wheezed like a consumptive at their last, rattled one of the Red Bull cans, swigged the dregs from it and turned to face us.

  “Most people put security on their machines, yeah?”

  Caz and I eyeballed each other, both of us, I was sure, aware that any wrong move could have us labelled, next time, as geriatrics and nodded.

  “Yeah,” we agreed.

  “Well, most people just want the security to stop a burglar. If the padlock stops you getting in, it’s done its job. And if it doesn’t, it’s failed, and you’re in and all their stuff is yours.”

  “You sound like you’ve done a spot of breaking and entering before,” Caz opined, but Phoenix roundly ignored her.

  “This guy,” he said, gesturing at the laptop, “went one step further. He’s put a piece of code in place after the standard security, so that – even if you get past that – you’ve got problems.”

  “Problems?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “What do guard dogs usually do?” he asked, trying – and failing – to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  “Bite you?” I guessed, and Phoenix nodded, a glint in his eyes.

  “Security keeps you out. A guard dog sees to it that – even if you get in – you get bitten. Or worse.”

  “Worse?” Caz asked, and we exchanged a look.

  “And to be clear,” I said, “still not talking about a real guard dog.”

  “Bitten,” Ray said, from the other side of Phoenix, “means the program will latch on to you. Find out who you are. Follow you back along whatever road you took to get here and start deleting your data.”

  I swallowed hard. “And worse.”

  “If you get mauled, it isn’t just your data that gets trashed. They can take your data first – passwords, credit cards, the lot. Publish them on the web. And then fry the hardware – routers, laptop, phones. All of it.”

  “So what do we do?” Caz asked.

  “Well the guard dog software is still sleeping,” Phoenix said. “It might mean we haven’t triggered whatever protocols activate it.”

  “Okay,” I said cautiously.

  And waited.

  At length, Phoenix cracked his knuckles, turned back to the laptop and gingerly tapped a couple of keys. “Okay,” he said, “we might have something. I can see a server he’s been visiting more regularly than many of the others.” He typed a few more commands and silence descended.

  “What’s he doing now?” Caz interrupted the silence in a stage whisper and received, for her efforts, an angry glare from Phoenix. “Ooh,” Caz said, pointing at the laptop screen, “why’s it doing that?”

  Phoenix turned back to the screen, all the blood draining from his face.

  “Oh fuck,” he said.

  On the screen, our faces – Ray, Caz, me and Phoenix – were clearly visible.

  “Terribly lit,” Caz murmured as it dawned on me that the laptop camera had been turned on.

  “Fuck,” Phoenix whispered in what sounded like terror, as the screen froze, blinked, the sound of a shutter issued clearly from the laptop and the camera switched off, returning us to the screen that Phoenix had been entering commands to.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, louder this time, as he slammed the lid of the laptop closed. “Where’s your router?” he screamed, yanking every cable out of the laptop and hurling it – like a ticking time bomb – across the table.

  “Router?” I looked at Caz, who looked at me, and it was Ray, already running, who called out from the hallway “Bar! It’s in the bar!”

  We three went charging after him, with Phoenix getting there before Caz and me and ripping the router off the shelf it was on, before yanking all cables from the back of the device.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t asleep,” he almost sobbed. “The bastard had something that looked dormant and used the time I was faffing around with you two to wriggle its way back here.”

  “So less of a guard dog, more of a guard worm, then?” Caz asked, and Phoenix turned on her.

  “He’s got your fucking face,” he said, the colour – along with a look of complete disdain for all of us – returning to his face.

  “If you’re lucky, that’s all he’s got. But I have no idea how long he was in the router, in my laptop, in your system. Right,” Phoenix suddenly charged back down the hallway, into the kitchen and began stuffing everything – laptop, cables, even the empty Red Bull cans – into his messenger bag.

  “I’m outta here,” he said, slinging the bag over his shoulder.

  “Wait,” Caz pleaded. “Is that it? I mean, is there nothing else you can do?”

  “Missus—” Phoenix paused in the door.

  “Miss,” Caz corrected him for the second time.

  “I don’t know who you’ve crossed or what they want. But whoever they are, and whatever it is, I’d give it to them. Cos you’re messing with the big boys now. That,” he pointed at the now bare table, “was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  Phoenix shook his head, opined, “You’re all fucked,” turned and almost ran from the pub.

  The three of us remained staring at each other in open-mouth astonishment.

  “What. Just. Happened?” I asked after a few minutes.

  “I’m not sure,” Caz answered.

  “But whatever it was,” Ray expanded, “I don’t think this thing is over yet. Cos now, your Mr Lowe has photographic proof we’ve been trying to break into his system.”

  “He’s right,” I said, nodding at the doorway that Phoenix had lately stood in. “We’re fucked.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “So how did you spring this?” I asked, pressing the intercom on the stuccoed pillar outside Tim Boyle’s Highgate home, eyeballing, as I did so, the inset plate reading, ‘Gethsemane Gardens.’

  “Oh, you know,” Caz said vaguely, “I did what a lady always does when she needs something from a man.”

  “Odd,” I said as the rattling gargle of the intercom continued to ring, “I don’t recall you having any virtue left to promise.”

  “Ah ha ha,” she deadpanned, eyeballing the box of delicacies I had acquired from Fortnum’s that morning.

  “Hello,” a voice – tinny, but still managing to contain every line Uriah Heep ever spoke – issued from the intercom.

  “It’s,” I glanced at Caz, who gestured at me, “Mr Danny Bird, to see Mr Boyle.”

  There was a moment’s silence, during which a dark car bearing the livery of a private protection company drove past slowly and meaningfully behind us.

  “Come straight up the driveway,” the voice said, “turn right at the gatekeeper’s cottage and left at the lake. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  There was a click, a buzz and the gates swung open. I glanced at Caz. “I suspect he thinks we’re approaching on wheels.”

  “Which will make our approach on foot all the more off-putting,” she answered.

  I stepped past the gates, onto a tree-lined drive, Caz behind me. “And off-putting, I suspect, is exactly what you want to be at times like this,” she said.

  She had a point, and I nodded my agreement. “So, if not by the offering of favours,” I asked, “gow did you get us in here?”

  “By appealing to his vanity,” she said simply. “You boys – no matter who you are and how you got there – all love the chance to remind another boy who you are and how you got where you are.”

  “True,” I admitted. “So, who is he, how did he get here?” I gestured at the trees as we approached a redbrick building that I assume
d was the gatekeeper’s cottage. “And more importantly, who, for the purposes of today, am I?”

  “He,” Caz announced, again eyeballing the box of sweeties which I was holding rigidly at the end of a butler-like arm, “is SE Man.”

  She announced this as though it should, truly, mean something to me. “Semen?” I frowned. “He made all this from porn?”

  “SE Man,” she repeated, looking at me with the obvious expectation that what she was saying would suddenly mean something to me.

  I stopped. “Caz, you can repeat that phrase as many times as you want but, at this point, and – I suspect – until you explain yourself, it’s not gonna mean anything to me.”

  Caz shook her head. “Well thank God at least one of us reads the tabloids,” she said. “SE Man was an unnamed man from South East London. Hence the ‘SE’.”

  “What? Like Piltdown Man?” I essayed, and she nodded cautiously.

  “Yes, dear,” Caz said, as though talking to an elderly relative who had woken up and asked if that nice Mr Mosely was prime minister yet, “just like Piltdown Man. If he’d been the largest individual winner of the lottery in London. Ever. In history.”

  I stopped. “Tiny Tim won the lottery?”

  Caz nodded, eyeing the Fortnum’s box as it wobbled precariously on my extended arm.

  My shoulder ached.

  “An absolute fortune,” she explained. “And he ticked the ‘No Publicity’ box, which meant he was referred to by the tabloids as SE Man for about a year until he dumped his girlfriend at the time, and she went to the papers crying about what a miser he was and how she’d been binned despite all her loyalty.”

  “So now everyone knows who he is and how he got here,” I said, and Caz nodded.

  “Mind you,” she pointed out, “it also makes it rather unlikely that any of this came from a vault in Hatton Garden.”

  “He could still be our man, though,” I pointed out. “I mean, he could have offed Billy the Brick, grabbed the jewels and then realised that – thanks to fate and the lottery – it had all been unnecessary.”

  Caz moued. “Valid point,” she admitted, “which is why I decided that you – in your guise as a reporter for the Ham & High might be interested in talking to Mr Boyle about his, um, achievements.”