‘I’ve come in to get a jump on the weekly figures, before the meeting with Lothar.’ His voice, bouncing back off the metal walls, sounded sincere. It was good to practise; this was something he always did, when he had a lie he knew he was likely to have to tell: say it out loud, to check how it sounded. ‘Got to get ready for the meeting,’ he said. ‘It’s like they say in the SAS. The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance.’
He was fine. There would in all probability be no one in before six o’clock or so. Certainly no one was in yet; he had checked the out-of-hours sign-in sheet when he came through security.
Mark liked being on his own in the trading room. There was something creepy about the empty space, the blank monitors and the dark outside, the uncanny stillness in a room designed for a crowd, for noise, for shouting and anxiety and action and looking at three screens while talking on two phones while juggling a dozen trades; but that unsettlingness was what he liked about it. Most people could not do this. They would be too freaked out. But he was not most people. That was the whole point.
He dropped his briefcase at his desk, took his jacket off, and stretched. Today’s mission was passwords. About a year before, Pinker Lloyd had called in a team of outside consultants to assess its levels of risk in relation to computer fraud and hacking attacks. One of the main recommendations had been that the bank was too lax in the security level of its passwords, in particular because it allowed employees to set their own. In too many cases people used passwords that they used on other computers; in some of the most egregious cases, people even had the same password on all their accounts, for work and home. This was flagrantly unsafe: any third party getting hold of someone’s private email password, or eBay account password, or any password set up on any internet shopping site, would have access straight into Pinker Lloyd’s systems. Not acceptable. So the recommendation was for the company to adopt new protocols for anything that allowed access to its systems, unguessable chains of letters and numbers with rAnd0m caPItalisåtiºn. The new passwords would change weekly. The logic was impeccable. But it was also mistaken, because the new passwords had a flaw: they might be unguessable, but they were also unmemorisable. Since no one could keep the passwords in their heads, everybody wrote them down. So all you had to do to get access to someone’s account was to find where they had written down their password.
Mark first went into Roger’s office. His undeserved corner office, with the view of Canary Wharf and the river, the family photos on the desk; the office which was going to be his. He woke Roger’s computer up from sleep, then navigated to the file called ‘Passwords’. If he had to sum up his boss’s stupidity in one detail, it would be the fact that he hid his passwords in a file marked ‘Passwords’. The file was itself protected by a password, but Mark had seen Roger type the first few letters of it, and because Mark was not an ordinary man, with only a little thought he had been able to deduce the rest. The first letters typed were c o n so it had been easy to work out that the password was conradjoshua, his horrible children’s names run together. He opened the file to see Roger’s bank passwords. They were the usual strings of letters and numbers. Mark took a note of them in his little Moleskine book.
He went back on the trading floor. He began with the passwords whose hiding places he knew: on a piece of paper; in a locked drawer, whose key was in turn left in a jar of pencils; on the bottom slip of a set of Post-it notes (the bottom slip chucked away when a new password was set); on notepads left beside monitors. He collected five passwords in as many minutes. His dream was to find his way into another department, Compliance, and unlock some of their passwords. Compliance’s job was to make sure that the bank was obeying all the idiotic legislation designed to make the City safe for the timid and the frightened and the conventional and the weak, all the pathetic little bits of string with which governments tried to tie down the giant. Access to Compliance’s systems would be useful for the things he had under way. Root access and administrator privileges for the bank’s mainframe would be even better; but that would not be easy, and it would be silly to focus on something likely to be unachievable.
A few more passwords in this room, however, would be very easy to achieve. All he had done so far was gather the low-hanging fruit. Jez, the room’s most successful trader, moved more money than anyone else, and dealt with more accounts, and so access to his systems would be very handy. Jez was someone Mark greatly disliked, not least because he could sense in him a real competitor, someone whose view of life was very similar to his own. Jez liked to win. Well, they would see who would win. Mark went to Jez’s desk. He switched on the monitor and was greeted by a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s arse in pink knickers, freeze-framed from the opening shot of Lost in Translation. Despite himself, Mark smiled for a moment. He ran a search for ‘Password’ but nothing came up. He hadn’t expected it to. Then he stepped back and had a look around Jez’s desktop. A rule of thumb was that things were always in the most obvious place. Arsenal mug, blank yellow legal pad, copy of Mountain Bike Monthly, Casio calculator in its plastic case. Mark peeked inside the mug, flicked through the magazine, riffled the legal pad, checked the underside of the keyboard, and opened the two desk drawers, both of which were empty apart from stationery and a Caffè Nero loyalty card. Jez might have been forceful and noisy but he kept nothing personal at work; interesting. As he was putting the office junk back, though, Mark felt something else, a piece of paper lying flat pressed against the back of the lower drawer – and had the secretive person’s instinctive feeling for when he might have come across a secret. But the piece of paper was hard to get a good hold on, it seemed to have stuck to the metal at the end of the compartment, so Mark was stretching and reaching and trying to get his fingers around the piece of paper to pull it out without crumpling it too much, which would give away that it had been taken out and looked at, when he heard a voice loudly say,
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Oh no. Jez. He stood at the entrance of the room, his hair wet from a shower, a bag of sports kit over his shoulder. This can’t be, thought Mark – it’s only two minutes past six – and then he thought, oh no, he must be here to get something done in Tokyo, and at the same time how useless that thought was since here he was up to the neck in shit and sinking fast. And then Mark realised he had a big problem: he had turned on Jez’s computer monitor. There was no possible, no conceivable, innocent reason to do that. If Jez moved three or four steps into the room he would be graced with a look at Scarlett Johansson’s bum-cheeks, and Mark would be out of a job. Even while the thoughts were running through his mind, Mark was moving: he jerked backwards from the drawer and pushed it shut. It would not be possible to look more like a man with a guilty conscience. He felt complicated, nauseating things happen in his stomach.
‘Stationery. Legal pad . . . couldn’t find mine. I know you used them, thought I’d take one, didn’t think you’d mind.’
Jez just stared at him. He hadn’t moved and he looked angry, suspicious, hostile.
‘Been to the gym?’ Mark said.
Jez started chewing gum. He must have had a piece on the go and then suddenly stopped when he came into the room and saw Mark. But other than that he didn’t move or speak.
‘Good habit,’ said Mark. He moved slightly closer to the edge of the desk, where the monitor’s off button was no more than nine inches away from his hand. But Jez had a perfect view of his upper body and there was no way he could just reach out and turn the thing off without Jez seeing.
‘Here for Tokyo?’ he said. Jez grunted, a sound which could have been yes or no or fuck off or none of your business. Then he took a step forward, so Mark had no choice but to contort his face and shout –
‘Behind you!’
– and as Jez turned, reach out and turn off the monitor, which in his heightened sense of the moment seemed to take long seconds to fizz and flare and close to a point and go black. Then Jez turned back to him
, now unmistakably furious.
‘Made you look!’ said Mark. Jez was walking towards him. ‘Sorry,’ he went on. ‘Schoolboy joke. Silly.’
Jez stopped very close to him; too close. He was invading his space. But this wasn’t, perhaps, the moment to complain. Jez was a big man, seen at close range; bigger than he looked. He smelled of shower gel.
‘I don’t see any legal pad,’ said Jez in his estuary accent.
Mark didn’t know what to say to that. He moved back and sideways to get away, but Jez closed the space between them again, and leaned in towards him. Then he put his face right up to Mark’s, tilting his head sideways, and loudly, deliberately, sniffed. Then he did the same thing again. Jez straightened up.
‘You don’t smell right,’ he said. And then he walked away.
61
DI Mill sat at his desk, head in his hands, pile of folders stacked up in front of him, and the rest of the room in its usual hubbub. He looked the picture of gloom. The files were those of the We Want What You Have inquiry, and they had now mounted up, because complaints from Pepys Road had kept stacking up. As a brief, it was a nightmare: a significant number of irritable, entitled upper-middle-class people were annoyed, and as a group they were horrible to deal with, not least because they could never get two sentences into any exchange without mentioning how much tax they paid. There were no clear leads, no clear suspects, no apparent motive, and no obvious directions for the inquiry. Up until recently, there was also no obvious crime. It wasn’t clear in what way he/she/they, the person or persons behind the campaign, had broken the law. But then there had been some changes with We Want What You Have. First, some way into the new year, the cards and videos had stopped, and the blog was no longer being updated. It wasn’t taken down but it no longer had any new content. Then, about a month later, the blog suddenly disappeared. When he saw that, Mill, who had the page bookmarked and checked it twice a day, punched the air. Fantastic! It was the best sort of problem, one which had gone away of its own right. The whole episode could be filed in that large, happy category of things you just ignored until they didn’t matter any more.
Then, about a month after that, disaster. Every single person in the street got a fresh postcard of their own front door, with nothing written on the back except a short URL. Mill typed in the address and sure enough the blog was back up, hosted on a new platform and with all the content that had been there before – only now it was worse. The same photos were there, but they had been defaced by digital graffiti. Somebody had written swear words across the pictures; not all the pictures, just some of them; about one in three. The swear words focused on very simple, very direct abuse: ‘Rich cunts’, ‘Wankers’, ‘Arsehole’, ‘Tory scum’, ‘Kill the rich’, and so on.
So this should have been a nightmare for Mill. Having gone away, the problem had now un-gone away. That should have been a perfect formula to produce the gloom that Mill, with his head in his hands, looked as if he was feeling. But that wasn’t what he really felt, not at all. What Mill mainly felt was curious. Most police work is routine. Mill didn’t complain about that since the job was the job; also, when the work wasn’t routine, and you didn’t know exactly what had happened, you still in some sense knew what had happened. If some drug-dealing toerag bled to death on an estate stairwell, even if you didn’t know who’d done it, you still knew who’d done it: some other drug-dealing toerag. Kosovan pimp shot outside a kebab shop, ditto. This case was not like that, and though the anthropology of the station prevented him from saying so, he was pleased it was up and running again. He had spent about forty-five minutes looking through the new material on the site, and his main feeling now was happy curiosity, with a twinge of something else. The new material felt, seemed, somehow different.
Taking the top folder down off the stack in front of him, Mill tried to focus on what it was about the new stuff that was hitting a fresh note. Talking it through with the DC who’d been helping him with the first wave of enquiries, Mill had reached a conclusion.
‘It could be an arty thing,’ said the DC. ‘You know, a performance. Something people are supposed to look at. To make them think, you know, stuff.’
He gave Mill a glance which clearly said: you should know, more your sort of thing than mine.
‘It doesn’t seem like that, though, does it?’ said Mill. ‘The photos are a bit shit, as opposed to seeming a bit shit but then when you look at them they’re actually quite good so it’s sort of art. You know that Fatboy Slim video, “Praise You”, where they’re dancing in a mall, really rubbish dancing, then when you look closely, you can see they’re really good dancers pretending to be crap ones? Well, not like that. This is bad photography which when you look closely looks more like bad photography.’
‘But he’s also done nothing violent. He doesn’t seem to single out individuals. It’s more about the houses.’
‘Yes – the houses and the place. It’s somewhere he knows well. And it feels like a he. A bloke. It’s a bit obsessive. A tiny bit OCD or Asperger’s. Going over the same thing over and over. He has feelings about the place, he knows it well. He walks or has walked past these houses over and over again. He’s boiling over with what he wants to say to the people in the houses. So, yes, it’s local. He’s local.’
And that was where they had left it. But now there was a whole load of new material, much darker and more abusive. Mill rummaged through the pile of photos and found the list of Pepys Road inhabitants he and the DC had made when they’d been working on the case, a few weeks before.
His mobile rang. Janie. Mill was pleased and also annoyed – why did his girlfriend always, but always, ring when he was in the station house?
‘I can’t talk.’
‘I know but I’m in Sainsbury’s, I want to do that kale soup I was talking about, the one with chorizo and garlic, but it’s got potato in it, are you still doing that low-carb thing?’
Janie was a serious cook and Mill, as he got closer to thirty, was starting to think about maintaining his weight. Being boyish was not always easy for a detective inspector, but it was better than being fat.
‘That’s correct.’
‘Is this because you couldn’t fit in those jeans? I told you, they’re Japanese, and a Japanese thirty is like an English twenty-six. You’re skinnier than you were when we met.’
They had been shopping at the weekend and Mill had had a denim crisis.
‘I can’t confirm that.’
‘Well, I’m going to make it anyway, there’s about a hundred grams of potato in the whole recipe. So long fatso, love you,’ said Janie and hung up. Mill tried to keep his face straight while he broke the connection, and didn’t quite succeed. Janie knew him too well.
Yes – and that was the thought. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have knew the street well or at least had strong feelings about it. He looked again at the list of names and opened up his web browser again to the new blog page. He scrolled through the list of names and cross-checked with the graffiti that had suddenly sprung up.
Mill’s notes said:
‘51 Pepys Road: Roger and Arabella Yount, two small children: banker and housewife, 40 and 37.’
Written across the top was ‘Tory cunts’. It was a handy generic insult for well-off people who worked in the City, and so yes, that might have been written by someone who knew them. Or it might have been a lucky guess.
‘42 Pepys Road: Petunia Howe, 82, widow, lives on her own.’
That had been defaced by ‘Wanker’. And that seemed odd. It wasn’t a word you’d use for a geriatric single woman, not if you were trying to be personally abusive. And if you weren’t trying to be personally abusive, what was the point of personal insults?
‘68 Pepys Road: Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal, 36 and 32, newsagent and his wife, two small children, shop downstairs living quarters upstairs.’
This had the word ‘Bell-end’. Now that was a very good insult, one of Mill’s favourites, but again, what had it to do w
ith the Kamals? He had dropped into their shop to ask if they had been getting the cards – he had suspected that, since they lived in a shop and not a posh house, they might not. But they had, and had kept them, and were polite and helpful, so much so that he had only been able to get out of there after a cup of tea and two insanely sweet, highly transgressive gulab jamuns. No, the Kamals could not be described as a bell-end.
46 Pepys Road, Mrs Trimble and her son Alan, 58 and 30, divorced housewife and son an IT consultant. Single word ‘Plonkers’. Not a perfect fit but not 100 per cent off.
Ah, here it was. 27 Pepys Road. Mickey Lipton-Miller, agent and factotum for a Premiership football club; Mill hadn’t spoken to him but he knew he was the owner. The house was lived in by Patrick Kamo, 48, policeman from Senegal and his son Freddy, 17, a footballer. The graffito daubed over the picture of their front door said ‘Fat tossers’.
Mill and the DC together had done that interview, for the unlofty motive that they both wanted to meet Freddy Kamo. He had been very nice, almost speechless with shy politeness, and his dad was obviously a copper of the old school. He’d fit right in at the station. It had been interesting. But no sane person could call Patrick or Freddy Kamo fat. Something had changed. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have either didn’t know anything about the inhabitants of Pepys Road, or didn’t care.
62
Even before her mother had died, Mary had been dreading the funeral. The last weeks of Petunia’s life were the longest sustained period they had spent together since Mary’s childhood. That now seemed a terrible fact, and one which bore down heavily on her, with the weight of the trips to London she could have made, the weekend visits her mother could have spent in Essex, the holidays they could have invited her to join. A time would come when Mary would see things more in balance, and would remember all the reasons, the good reasons, why none of that had happened; but at the moment what she mainly felt was guilt for all the things she hadn’t done. Balancing that guilt was the time she had spent with her mother when she was dying, the long hard lonely days and longer lonelier harder nights. It had been a journey she had taken on her own. That was why she dreaded the funeral, a public acting out of her mother’s death, which, deep inside, she felt belonged only to her. It was her loss alone. It wasn’t really anything to do with all these other people.
Capital: A Novel Page 31
