The Regret

by Dan Malakin

  The Regret

  Dan Malakin

  Contents

  Spear Phishing

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part II

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part III

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © Dan Malakin

  The right of Dan Malakin to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-912986-67-5

  For Delia

  Spear Phishing

  Want to know how to break into someone’s life?

  Send them an e-mail supposedly from their bank, or Amazon, or eBay. Same logo, same corporate talk, some lines of scaremongering spiel. We have detected a problem with your account. If they’re dumb enough to click on the link, they’ll go to a web page hosted on your server, where an authentic-looking form will capture their login details.

  That kind of phishing attack, it’s like a net. Throw it far and wide, and hope you reel in someone stupid. But if you want to target one person – let’s call her Rachel – and if she’s savvy enough to swim around the net, then the attack can be fired.

  It’s called Spear Phishing.

  This is how it’s done.

  Get to know everything about Rachel’s life. The shifts she works as a nurse at St Pancras Hospital. The relationship she has with her three-year-old daughter. Use that to plan for when Rachel will be so busy she’ll miss a cleverly worded, smartly disguised e-mail that’ll convince her to download a piece of spyware to her phone to capture her passwords. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat: these are the digital doors and windows to our private lives, and people are sloppy with the locks. Despite who may be lurking outside.

  This e-mail can’t be some syntactically tortured spam, like a plea for airfare from a disgraced Congolese prince – soon as he lands, he’ll pay you back from the millions locked in his offshore account, promise. The mail needs to be important, requiring immediate attention.

  It’s about getting her to click on the link.

  Easiest way to make an e-mail look authentic? Add more mails to the bottom, so the one they receive looks like part of a chain. People scroll down, glance at the history, and believe it’s real.

  It will be the same for Rachel as for the others.

  Think of it as a kind of seduction.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Rachel

  No matter how organised she tried to be, preparing her uniform the night before, laying out Lily’s clothes, something always made them late. Her nurse’s fob watch vanished or her daughter refused to brush her teeth. The half hour to get dressed, scrubbed, and out the door, inevitably disappeared.

  That morning, they were falling at the final hurdle – shoes. Lily wanted to put them on herself. That was fine until she got to the buckle, where she had to slip a slender leather tongue through a delicate frame, and impale the tiny hole in it with a flimsy prong. No chance. The sun would grow to engulf them all in a fiery inferno before that ever happened.

  ‘Please, honey,’ Rachel said, kneeling in front of her. ‘Let Mummy.’

  Lily twisted her body away, cheeks bunched in concentration, and lifted her heel to her eye to get a better look at what she was doing wrong.

  Rachel looked out of the window at the grey skies and sighed. Another grimy morning, the rooftops of the Victorian terraces stretching down the street slicked with autumn rain; the summer had disappeared way too soon. London always looked so concrete under grey skies. Sometimes the gloom seemed to seep into her soul, especially the way she was feeling today. It didn’t help that Konrad had got in late last night, crashing around downstairs, waking her up. It took her ages to get back to sleep. She didn’t mind him coming back to hers after a night out, it made more sense than him trekking to his parents’ in High Barnet, but the least he could do was be quiet when he got home.

  Then again, he’d been acting strange all week – ever since he’d turned up with those bruises covering his cheek. At the time he said that Pete, his best mate and partner in their office relocating business, had accidentally caught his face closing the van door, but that didn’t explain how he’d been since then. Ignoring her calls during the day, and moody when she did see him. Drinking a lot too, like the other night when he finished a four-pack of beer in front of the telly without even saying a word to her. It was so different from his usual easy-going nature.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Rachel said, trying to grapple the shoe from Lily’s hands. ‘We’re going to be late.’

  She pulled away. ‘No, Mummy! I do it.’

  ‘If you don’t give me that right now, then I’ll tell Daddy no cartoons after school.’

  Who knew bribery would be such a big part of parenting? It was a wonder that all children didn’t grow up to be corrupt politicians.

  Rachel felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She rocked back, got it out and saw she had an e-mail. Probably just some mailing list, but it could be her dad about picking Lily up later; she was staying at his that night. When his phone ran out of credit, he sent her e-mails from the computer in the public library.

  It was from work, the payroll department. The subject said: Bank check urgent. She opened the message.

  Hi Rachel, there was an issue with the payroll software overnight, and some people’s bank details may be out of date. Please can you check the attached file to confirm yours are correct, and let me know.

  It’s kind of urgent. Sorry!

  Thanks, Ian

  She didn’t have time for this, but if there was a problem, she needed to know. They lived month to month on her wages, so by now, on payday, her current account was down to single digits. She scrolled through the mail and saw it was the last of a chain, with lots of important people copied in on the previous ones, even the chairman of Camden and Islington NHS Trust.

  The attachment was called Rachel Stone details.pdf. She tapped on it and waited for the file to download. Nothing happened. She presse
d it again and again, but still nothing. Stupid phone. It was a white Samsung S4 Mini with a cracked screen and a broken headphone port, donated by Mark, Lily’s dad, after Rachel’s had fallen in the bath while lifting her daughter out. Another of its “features” was its tendency to turn off at the most annoying moments, such as right now.

  Rachel scowled at the blank screen. Great, typical. She’d have to call HR from the hospital. Sorry, Doris, can you hang on for your analgesic. I’m just on hold listening to the same piece of smooth jazz for the thousandth time!

  Konrad’s voice startled her. ‘Morning, beautiful.’

  He was leaning against the doorway, still in his going out clothes, his cream Diesel T-shirt crumpled beneath his charcoal overcoat. Cute with his bed hair, Rachel almost forgave him for having woken her up. And if that had been the only thing, she probably would have done, but this wasn’t an isolated incident. How he was acting couldn’t go on.

  ‘Are you annoyed with me?’ he asked.

  ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  He tried for a smile. ‘Your face?’

  ‘You don’t remember coming in and crashing round downstairs? I don’t know what’s going on with you, but–’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rach,’ he said, dropping into a crouch beside her. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  She recoiled from the smell of alcohol clinging to his skin. ‘I bet the sofa stinks of booze now as well.’

  ‘I’ve been a bit stressed, that’s all. With work and stuff. Last night I had to blow off some steam. But I promise, I swear, if I get that hammered again, I’ll head back to Barnet. I won’t come here and wake you up.’

  She wanted to believe him, but the way his eyes darted one way then the other when he spoke, like he was checking no-one was behind him, made her think he was lying. Was it something to do with her? She’d been stressing about it all week, but couldn’t think what she’d done wrong. The last eleven months with him had been like something from a romance, the way their lives had clicked, albeit a slightly boring one where the two leads went to work every day then snuggled on the sofa in the evening to watch Love Island. Amazingly, the feelings were just as they’d been described – the jump in her chest when he came to her mind, how she couldn’t wait to see him in the evening so they could share funny stories about their day, the sense that she’d maybe found the one, long after giving up the idea that such a thing was any more real than the tooth fairy. She didn’t want to lose that.

  Rachel squeezed her forehead, the start of a migraine pulsing in her temples, and glanced at Lily. Still struggling with her buckle. As she would be until the end of days.

  ‘Fine,’ Rachel said. ‘Let’s leave it. Just don’t be late tonight, okay?’

  ‘Six thirty, on the dot.’

  As they embraced, she felt the tension seep from her stomach. They pulled apart and she saw him wince in pain, his hand going to his forearm.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I banged it yesterday at work, that’s all.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  He pulled his arm to his chest, eyes wide, looking – what? Scared?

  ‘I’ve really got to go,’ he said.

  Rachel looked at the faded yellow bruises on his cheek, creeping out the top of his stubble. ‘I want to see your arm, Konrad.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But don’t freak out.’

  Chapter Two

  Burns

  ‘What do mean, a game?’

  They were in the bathroom, Konrad sitting on the edge of the tub while she hunted in the cupboard under the sink for the Dettol and cotton pads.

  ‘Drinking game,’ he replied. ‘Way too much vodka. Someone suggested we try to see who could stand the most pain… I know, I know, it’s stupid. You don’t have to tell me!’

  She uncapped the antiseptic and tipped it on the pad, the medicinal smell calming her, making her feel more in control. When she first saw the wounds – three raw crimson circles, each the size of a ten pence piece, crusted round the edges, and spotted with black in the middle – she thought they were bullet holes. She even flipped his arm, expecting exit wounds, but the underside was clear. Then she realised – they were cigar burns. Someone had stubbed cigars out on his arm.

  He winced as she dabbed at the pus collecting in the crevices of the scabs. The shiny pink skin edging the worst of the wounds was concerning; he’d need to monitor that, maybe get antibiotics if it got any worse. She knew how quickly sepsis could spread, even when you were as young and healthy as him.

  ‘So who were you out with?’ she asked. ‘When you decided to use each other as ashtrays?’

  He shrugged and looked to the side. ‘You know, the lads.’

  ‘Pete there?’

  Another pause, a frown. ‘It wasn’t Pete’s fault.’

  ‘Oh, right. Now I get it.’

  ‘Rach, come on.’

  There was no love lost between her and Konrad’s best mate. How could there be? There was never any love to begin with. The first time they met he looked her up and down, and sneered, ‘So you’re the bird who stole my wingman.’

  From that day he’d treated her with disdain. She was an irritation, a distraction, the Yoko to his Beatles, if the Beatles spent their time sleazing up to girls at clubs instead of writing albums. In fact, never had that description sleaze been more appropriate for someone than for Pete, with his sad man bun and tribal tattoos and his misplaced delusion that every woman gushed like a raincloud in his presence. He even called her toots. Toots! To her face. That was what she and Lily called farts.

  ‘If this is what happens when you hang out with Pete,’ Rachel said, ‘then maybe you shouldn’t.’

  ‘I told you, it wasn’t–’

  ‘I’m telling you.’ She felt tears rising up and held them back. No way did she have time to do her make-up again. ‘You can’t bring… trouble into my house. Not with Lily here. I don’t want to lose you–’

  ‘You won’t, you won’t! It’ll never happen again, I promise.’ He took her hands. ‘Please, Rachel. You and Lily mean the world to me. All I want is for the three of us to be together.’

  She fixed on his pale green eyes. Before the last week, he’d never been anything less than a perfect boyfriend. So as much as she still didn’t think he was telling her the whole truth, if that was what he said happened, and if the previous night was the last time he did anything like that, didn’t he deserve the benefit of the doubt?

  ‘This is it, Konrad,’ she said. ‘No more.’

  They went to kiss, but before their lips could touch, Lily shrieked. Rachel ran to the bedroom to find her pouting at the shoe, defeated. She knelt and fitted it on Lily’s foot, catching the time on the lock screen of her restarted phone. Seven thirty-eight. If they hurried, they’d make it to nursery on time. Scooping up her daughter, she sent a smile of gratitude to the heavens.

  Perhaps today will be a good day after all, she thought, unaware that nothing would be further from the truth.

  Chapter Three

  E-mail

  Rachel worked at St Pancras Hospital, on the Oakwood ward, caring for eighteen beds of pleasant patients, many of whom remembered a time before the NHS, and appreciated how much effort the nurses put in to looking after them. Senior health care hadn’t been her first choice; part of her reason for becoming a nurse was to give something back, after the time she’d spent in hospital as a teenager.

  When she first qualified, she took a job at The Northside Centre in Wood Green, a place devoted to adolescent mental health. But the hours, the stress – the kids there were needy, damaged, tormented – along with looking after Lily, as well as her gran when she got sick, was too much. So Rachel took the position at St Pancras.

  Life on the geriatric ward, however, was no easy ride. That morning was worse than most as they had two new admissions, including a sweet old gent whose entire left side had frozen after a stroke. It was half eleven before she even had time to catch her breath. She needed to call HR to con
firm her bank details before they went to lunch.

  She hurried into the break room. First things first – more coffee! The kettle was still hot, so she grabbed an I Heart NHS mug from the drying rack, heaped it with instant, filled it half with boiling water and topped it up with cold from the tap. She paused, the cup to her lips, her stomach spasming with hunger. Last night she’d managed one mouthful of pasta, giving up after the food sat in her stomach as solid and full of mass as stone, and she didn’t even attempt breakfast this morning. Better have something now, as she might not get another break until the end of the day. She hunted in the cupboard under the sink for her sachets of vanilla Ensure, a sickly sweet high-calorie powder she could always somehow force down, no matter how stressed, and poured one into her coffee. Calories are calories. Don’t make it a big deal.

  First, check her bank details in the e-mail. Maybe there was nothing to even worry about. She finished half her drink, got her phone and opened Gmail, but found she was logged out. Why did this always happen when she was in a hurry?