by Peter James
Jon had always been interested in technology and in gadgets, and when the use of computers had started to explode a decade back, he had seen the massive new opportunities for criminals they would bring, and how ill-equipped the police were at that time to deal with computer crime. He decided the best job security in the force would be in computer crime, and that after he retired from the police, with his background in the field, getting a well-paid job in the civilian world would be easy.
He had given up trying to convince his wife Nadine that this crazy job was only temporary and would not go on for ever; or maybe she had given up listening when he told her. He glanced around at some of the other members of his team who were also in today, and wondered how many of them had domestic grief over being here.
The simple fact was that they were overrun. They currently had a nine-month backlog of seized computers waiting to be forensically examined; as usual, it came down to resources. He suspected that the chiefs preferred to spend their money on making the police more visible – putting them out on the streets, nicking burglars, muggers, drug dealers, making the crime statistics look good – and that they regarded the High Tech Crime Unit as necessary but not something which won Sussex Police many brownie points.
Quite a few of his team were real geeks, recruited from outside the police – a couple straight from university, others from IT departments in industry and local government. At the workstation right behind him he watched the geekiest of all, Andy Gidney.
Gidney, who was twenty-eight, was just plain weird. Almost pitifully thin, with a complexion that did not look as if it had ever seen fresh air, hair that he surely cut himself, clothes and glasses that looked like they had come from a closing-down sale at a charity shop and a generally antisocial demeanour, the man was nonetheless utterly brilliant at his work – by far the cleverest member of his team. He spoke seven languages fluently, including Russian, and had never yet been defeated by a password.
They did not need passwords to actually get into a computer, because the software they used took them in through a back door, but some password-protected zipped files gave them grief. Andy had been working for most of the past week on a particularly intransigent file seized from a suspect in a massive phishing scam in which online banking websites were being cloned. He was refusing to give up and allow the machine to be sent to a specialist decryption facility.
Jon did not care for Gidney, but he admired his tenacity and respected his abilities. He had long come to accept that the people in this unit were very different to the petrol-head cops he used to work with on Traffic, where he had spent nearly ten of his twenty years to date with the force. In Traffic you saw mostly grim sights, and sometimes heart-rending tragedy. But here in High Tech Crime, you saw the true dark side of human nature.
He started as he did on every case, by carrying the computer through into the locked Evidence Room, where the walls were lined with wooden racks stacked with seized computers, all regarded as crime scenes and all bagged in shiny, translucent plastic evidence bags and tagged. Some of them had been here a long while. Several large plastic bins on the floor, piled high with more bagged computer equipment, carried the overspill.
Rye put Tom Bryce’s laptop down on a work surface, unscrewed the casing and removed the hard drive, which he carefully connected to a tall, rectangular steel box with a glass front. This contained a write-blocking device, the Fastbloc, which would make a byte-by-byte forensic copy of the disk.
When that was completed, he reassembled the computer, carried it back to his desk, then plugged it in and began work. Out of habit, the first search command he entered was Buffy. Nothing came up. The second was Star Trek. Again nothing came up. Not proof, but a useful indicator that Tom Bryce was not a paedophile. The department had discovered a curious fact over recent years: a high percentage of paedophiles were simultaneously Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans and Trekkies. If you found both of those on a computer, you had your first alert.
Jon worked quickly and methodically. He scanned through the photograph album, with its many pictures of an attractive woman with wavy blonde hair and two kids, a boy and a girl, their development charted from the time each was a few days old, if even that, to now when the girl was about four and the boy about seven. Normal family pictures. Nothing to ring any alarms.
Then he started on Bryce’s website bookmarks, but there was nothing remarkable there. He went back, following the man’s footprints over the past year, looking at every website address he had visited. There were dozens of porn sites, as there were on just about any man’s computer he had ever looked at, but apart from a few lesbian sites nothing to suggest the man was kinky.
Then he came across something that puzzled him. At first he thought it was traces of a virus, but then he realized it was source code for some self-installing spyware. The design of it rang a bell, but he could not immediately fathom why. He followed it carefully, allowing himself to be led through the links. And he saw that the software had recently generated a user name and password; he entered them but they had been invalidated, and he found his progress blocked.
He turned round. Andy Gidney, behind him, iPod plugged into his ears, was concentrating hard, his fingers moving over his keyboard with the speed and grace of a concert pianist. The Detective Sergeant got up, walked over to his colleague and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘I need some help, Andy. Can you drop what you are doing for a few minutes and see if you can find a password and user name to get me through a firewall?’
Without saying a word, the geek huffily went over and sat down at Rye’s desk. Jon went and got himself a coffee, and when he returned five minutes later Andy was back at work at his own desk.
‘Did you manage it?’ Rye asked.
‘It’s an eight-digit password, for God’s sake,’ Gidney said to Rye, as if the man was an idiot. ‘Could take me days.’
The head of the High Tech Crime Unit sat back down at his desk, unpeeled the plastic lid of his coffee cup and set the cup down a safe distance from the computer. He went back through the footprints of the spyware and then, suddenly, he realized why the design of it had rung a bell.
He remembered exactly!
Moments later he was back in the Evidence Room, carefully removing the opaque plastic, marked police evidence bag, that encased a desktop computer and server tower which had been brought in just a few weeks ago.
38
‘Come on! Jesus, we are so incredibly late! Jessica, get back into bed right now!’ Tom Bryce yelled at his daughter, who had come running downstairs in her pink dressing gown for the third, or maybe fourth, time.
His nerves were all shot to hell and back.
Upstairs, Max yelled out, ‘Daddeeeeeeeee!’
‘Max, shut up! Go to sleep!’
‘Noooo!’
Tom, dressed up and ready to go out in a black Armani jacket, white shirt, blue chinos and his suede Gucci loafers, was pacing around the living room gulping down a massive vodka martini. ‘Kellie! What the hell are you doing? And where the hell is the babysitter?’
‘She’ll be here any moment!’ she yelled back. ‘I’m coming.’ Then, louder, she shouted, ‘Jessica, come back up here at once!’
‘Daddy, I don’t like Mandy. Why can’t we have Holly?’
‘Jessica! Come back up here!’
‘Holly was already booked up,’ Tom said to his daughter. ‘OK? Anyhow, Mandy is nice; what’s your problem with her?’
Jessica, proudly wearing two rubber bracelets to copy her brother, a pink one and a yellow one, plonked herself down on the sofa, picked up the remote and began to channel-surf the television. Tom snatched the remote back and switched the television off. ‘Upstairs, young lady!’
‘Mandy spends all the time on the phone to her boyfriend.’
‘She has her own mobile; she can do what she wants,’ Tom retorted.
Jessica, freshly bathed and pink-faced, pushed back her hair, tilted her face in a very grown-up lady
like manner. ‘They talk about sex.’
‘Jessica, firstly it is rude to listen to other people’s phone conversations, and secondly you should be in bed, asleep, when she’s here babysitting, so why does it matter?’
‘Because,’ Jessica said huffily.
Kellie came tripping down the stairs, looking stunning and reeking of a new Gucci scent Tom had bought her recently, which he found incredibly sexy on her. She was wearing a tight-fitting short black dress, which both revealed a daring amount of cleavage and showed off her terrific legs to their best, and she had on a huge Roman-style silver choker around her neck. She looked very classy.
Just perfect for tonight.
They had been invited to dinner by a new client Tom desperately wanted to impress.
Kellie looked at Tom. ‘Drinking already?’
‘Dutch courage,’ he said.
Her eyes widened disapprovingly. ‘I thought you were going to drive tonight, to save money on taxis.’ Then she turned to Jessica. ‘Upstairs to bed at once,’ she said sharply. ‘Or no television tomorrow, and I mean it.’
Jessica looked sullenly at her mother, then her father. She seemed about to say something back, then thought better of it and began to walk, infuriatingly slowly, out of the room.
‘I’ll only have one glass of wine when I get there, then I’ll go on to water.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll bloody drive, again.’
‘I think we both need to drink tonight,’ Tom said. He walked towards her, slipped his arms around her, held her tightly and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You look beautiful.’
‘You look nice, too,’ she said. ‘I always like you in a white shirt.’
Jessica was walking up the stairs now.
Tom nuzzled Kellie’s ear. ‘I’d just like to take you straight to bed.’
‘Well you’re going to have to wait. I’m not taking all this lot off and starting again.’
The doorbell rang. There was the thump of the dog flap, and Lady came bounding into the hall, barking loudly.
Tom stayed in the living room and drained his cocktail, the alcohol already starting to give him a buzz that was lifting his mood, giving him some confidence.
Then Mandy came into the room and his jaw almost dropped. The daughter of a friend of Kellie’s from her keep-fit classes, Mandy had done some babysitting for them before on a few occasions over the past three years. And during that time he had noticed her progression from a little girl into something altogether more mature. And tonight she was – there were no other words for it – raw sex on legs.
She was seventeen now maybe even eighteen, short, blonde, a Britney Spears clone with a terrific figure, most of it visible. She was wearing an almost see-through glitter top, definitely the smallest miniskirt he had ever seen and patent leather boots that went up to her thighs. Her face was carefully made up, and he noticed she had glitter varnish on her nails and was clutching a very glitzy-looking mobile phone. She was a total mini-chav.
Her parents had let her go out babysitting like this? And, he thought, dismayed, in not many years maybe Jessica would be dolling herself up like this.
‘Good evening, Mr Bryce,’ she said breezily.
‘How are you doing, Mandy?’
‘Yeah, all right. Got me exams this month, so I’m swotting.’
Grinning, he said, ‘These are your swotting clothes?’
Not getting the joke, she said, very seriously, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Then she added, ‘I passed my driving test.’
‘Brilliant. Well done!’
‘Third time. Me mum said she’ll let me borrow her car sometimes; she’s got a brand new Toyota.’
‘That’s very noble of her,’ he said, mentally clocking another thing to not look forward to about Max and Jessica growing up.
Kellie came back into the room. ‘We’ll be back about half twelve or so, Mandy; is that OK?’
‘Yeah, great. Have a brilliant evening.’
Tom raised his empty glass, took one more long, lusting look at the girl and suddenly realized he was feeling a bit drunk. He needed to be careful, he thought. Philip Angelides had been well up the rankings in the recent Sunday Times Rich List, with a personal net worth of over two hundred and fifty million pounds. He had a business empire that included a company making generic drugs, a chain of car dealerships, a group of travel agencies, a property company that built developments in Spain and a very successful sports management company – all areas that could use BryceRight products.
Tom had met him, as he met many of his potential clients, at the golf club, and he owned, by all accounts, a very serious house about half an hour’s drive from Brighton in the country. Tonight’s invitation to a dinner party was a big opportunity. Except Tom wasn’t in any mood to go out tonight.
He had been fretting all day since going to the CID headquarters building up on the Hollingbury estate and telling his story to the tall black Detective Sergeant. DS Branson appeared to have taken everything he had told him very seriously, and had given him assurances that it would be treated with total confidentiality. Nonetheless it had made him extremely nervous when Branson had asked if they could borrow his laptop over the weekend to see what they could find from it. He had returned to the building with the laptop a little later that morning with many misgivings, although Kellie remained adamant he was doing the right thing.
This afternoon he had played a totally crap round of golf – one of the worst games of his life. His mind had just not been on it. He was scared; a deep, insidious darkness swirled through him. He could not stop thinking about what he had done: that he had put his wife and his kids in danger.
That maybe, just maybe, he had made the worst mistake of his life.
39
‘A vodka and tonic, please,’ Cleo Morey said.
The waiter turned to Roy Grace.
‘I’ll have a Peroni.’ Then he changed his mind, suddenly deciding he was in need of a stronger alcohol hit than beer, despite the fact that he was driving. He would worry about that later. ‘Actually, no, make that a large Glenfiddich on the rocks.’
They were seated at a table towards the back of Latin in the Lanes, an Italian restaurant just off Brighton seafront. There were newer, hipper restaurants he could have chosen, like the Hotel du Vin; smarter, more inventive ones, like Blanche House; there were a load of restaurants that he had never been to with Sandy.
So why had he chosen the one that had been his and Sandy’s favourite?
He wasn’t sure of the answer. Perhaps because the place was familiar to him he thought he might feel comfortable there, know the ropes. Or was it a further laying of her ghost to rest?
He recognized some familiar faces from way back among the staff, and a couple of them seemed to remember him – if not his name – welcoming him back like a long-lost friend. The place had a lively Saturday evening buzz to it, and at nine o’clock – later than Grace had planned on being here – every table was occupied.
The six thirty briefing had taken longer than he had anticipated, and he’d needed to stay on after, doing follow-ups, although there had really been only one development during the day.
Bella had tracked down Janie Stretton’s previous boyfriend Justin Remington and discovered he had just flown back this morning from his honeymoon in Thailand. She had gone to see him, and it was now her opinion, supported by the visa stamps in his passport, that he could be crossed off the suspects list.
DC Nicholl’s trawl of the bars, pubs and clubs in the Brighton and Hove area with a photograph of Janie Stretton had so far yielded nothing. It was Jon Rye in the High Tech Crime Unit who seemed to have come up with their first real lead.
DS Rye’s examination of the computer belonging to the witness who had made a statement to Branson that morning had revealed that this witness – apparently unwittingly – had followed a complex internet routing to a server in Albania. This was the same routing, the same IP addresses and protocols found on the co
mputer seized from a suspect in a major child porn ring investigation, which DS Rye had recently examined. Its owner, Reginald D’Eath, was already on the Sex Offenders List, with past convictions for a violent sexual assault and for trafficking child pornography.
D’Eath, now a key prosecution witness in a child pornography case being prepared against a Russian syndicate operating in the UK, was currently in hiding for his own protection in a safe house provided by the Witness Protection Scheme. Grace had spent a frustrating hour on the phone after the briefing, dealing with a jobsworth WPS duty officer, politely at first then losing his rag with her, trying to get the damned woman to put him through to someone who would sanction the release to him of Reggie D’Eath’s address. In the end he’d had to settle for a grudging undertaking from the jobsworth that someone would call him in the morning by ten o’clock.
Cleo, facing him across the table, across the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling glasses, looked simply stunning. Her hair was shimmering in the flickering candlelight, and her eyes were the colour of sunlight on ice. She was wearing a perfume which was tantalizing Grace. It wafted over him, overpowering the tempting smells of hot olive oil, frying garlic and searing fish coming from the kitchen. He breathed it in, getting increasingly turned on.
In truth he was aroused by everything about her. By her cute turned-up nose, her rosebud lips, her dimpled chin. By her stylish cream jacket, the loose, low-cut silky grey T-shirt, the ocelot scarf slung around her slender neck, by her two huge, funky but classy silver earrings. He noticed more rings on her fingers: a gold signet ring with a crest on it, an ornate antique with a large ruby set in a clasp of diamonds, and a modern-looking silver one with a square, pale blue stone.
She was a classic, English-rose beauty in every way. And she was here, on a date with him! The butterflies in his stomach were out of control. The waiters were all eyeing her. So were other diners. She was the most beautiful woman in this restaurant by a thousand miles. She was looking absolutely, bloody, drop-dead gorgeous!
