Looking Good Dead

by Peter James

  Grace held up his warrant card. ‘Detective Superintendent Grace of Brighton CID, and this is Detective Sergeant Branson. Are you Mrs Margaret Stevenson?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You are Mrs Kellie Bryce’s mother?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Yes. ’E’s not here. You’re looking for Tom? ’E’s not here.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Do you know where my daughter is?’

  ‘No, we’re trying to find her.’

  ‘She wouldn’t disappear – she wouldn’t leave the children. She didn’t never hardly bear to let them outta her sight. She wouldn’t even leave them with us. Tom brung the kids here about an hour ago. Just rang the bell, bundled them in, then left.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘No. ’E said ’e’d call me later.’

  The screaming got worse behind her. She turned anxiously.

  Grace fished a card out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Please call me if you hear from him – the mobile number.’

  Taking the card, she asked, ‘Do you want to come in? A cup of tea? I must stop Jessica crying; my husband’s gotta have his sleep. He’s got the Parkinson’s. ’E must have rest.’

  ‘I’m sorry we disturbed you,’ Grace said. ‘Mr Bryce didn’t say anything at all?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘He didn’t explain why he was bringing the children over in the middle of the night?’

  ‘For their safety, that’s what ’e said. That was all.’

  ‘Safety from what?’

  ‘Didn’t say. Where’s Kellie? Where do you think she is?’

  ‘We don’t know, Mrs Stevenson,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘As soon as we find her, we’ll call you. Mr Bryce really didn’t say where he was going?’

  ‘Going to find Kellie, ’e said.’

  ‘He didn’t say where?’

  She shook her head. The screaming got louder still. Grace and Branson exchanged glances – a question and a shrug.

  ‘I’m sorry we disturbed you,’ Grace said. He gave her a smile, trying to reassure her. ‘We’ll find your daughter.’

  68

  Tom, driving Kellie’s Espace slowly north out of Brighton, holding his mobile phone in his hand, was shaking. The road was quiet, just occasional headlights coming the other way and, from time to time, lights appearing in his mirror, then passing him.

  Indistinct thoughts flitted in and out of his mind, like the shadows made by his headlights. His whole body was clenched tight. He leaned forward, peering through the windscreen, shooting nervous, darting glances into the mirror, fear riddling his stomach.

  Oh my God. My darling, where are you?

  He did not know what he was doing here or what to expect. His brain felt locked; he was unable to think out of this box, unable to think beyond those words on his computer screen.

  He had visions of the girl, Janie Stretton, in her room being butchered by the hooded man with the stiletto blade. But it wasn’t Janie Stretton now, it was Kellie.

  He couldn’t imagine where Kellie was nor what was going through her mind. He just had to get to her, whatever it took, whatever it cost.

  Money. That’s what they would want, he suspected hazily. They had kidnapped Kellie and now they wanted money. And they would have to believe him when he told them he did not have very much, but he would give them everything he had in the world. Everything.

  A road sign loomed up. cowfold. haywards heath.

  Suddenly the display on his mobile lit up and it began ringing:

  Private number calling

  Nervously, he pressed the answer key. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Mr Bryce?’

  It was DS Branson. Shit. He killed the call.

  Moments later there was the double beep of a message waiting.

  He played it. It was DS Branson, for the third time, asking him to phone him back.

  Kellie, my darling, for God’s sake call me!

  Headlights loomed in his mirror. Although he was only doing forty on a dual carriageway, this time they stayed behind him, right on his tail. He dropped his speed to thirty. Still the headlights stayed behind him. His throat tightened.

  His phone rang again. On the caller display was a number he did not recognize. He answered, a cautious, shaky, ‘Hello?’

  A male voice in a guttural eastern European accent said, ‘Mr Bryce, how are you doing?’

  ‘Who – who are you?’ he said. The lights were right behind him, dazzling him.

  ‘Your wife would like to see you.’

  Finding it hard to see the road ahead, he said, ‘Is she OK? Where is she?’

  ‘She’s fine, she’s great. She is looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘There is a lay-by coming up in half a mile. Pull into it and turn your engine off. Stay in your car and do not turn round.’ The phone went dead.

  He did not know what to do. Some distance ahead, as he started down a long hill with signs to a garden centre on his left, his headlights picked up a blue p sign for a parking area.

  Then he saw the lay-by.

  His heart was thrashing like a crazed bird inside his ribcage, and his mouth was dry with fear. He tried desperately to think clearly, rationally. A voice somewhere inside his head was screaming at him not to pull over, to keep going, to call DS Branson back, to let the police handle this.

  And another voice, a much quieter, more logical one, was telling him that if he did not pull over, Kellie would die.

  Her scream of terror on his computer echoed all around him. That scream had been real.

  That woman on his computer last Tuesday night being cut to ribbons by the stiletto blade was real.

  He indicated left, slowed, pulled over.

  The headlights followed him.

  He braked, switched off the engine, then sat rigidly staring ahead, frozen in fear but determined to stick this out, somehow.

  The headlights in his mirror went off. Darkness. Silence. The engine pinged. He thought he saw shadows moving. Behind him tiny pinpricks of light appeared. They grew larger. A lorry roared past, shaking his car, and he saw its red tail lights fade slowly into the distance.

  Then both rear doors of the Espace opened simultaneously. A hand, like a vice, gripped his throat.

  Something was pressed over his mouth and nose, a damp cloth with a sharp, sour reek. He felt an instant, blinding headache, like a cheese-wire slicing through his brain.

  Behind his eyes it was as if a television had been switched off: one small diminishing pinprick of light, rapidly fading to black.

  69

  The next Sussex police officer to get an early-morning call was Detective Sergeant Jon Rye of the High Tech Crime Unit. His alarm clock showed 2.43 a.m. as his mobile began to ring, and he cursed not having turned the damned thing off.

  His wife stirred but didn’t say anything as he snapped on the bedside light, waking up fast, looked at the caller display and saw only Private number calling. Almost certainly to do with work, he thought.

  It was the SIO of the Janie Stretton case on the line. Rye glanced at his wife, asked Roy Grace to hold for a moment, then pulled on a dressing gown and hurried downstairs into the kitchen and closed the door.

  ‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ the Detective Superintendent said. ‘I need to ask you something urgently. Last night you logged an incident on the system – a “War Driving”.’

  Oh shite, Jon Rye thought blearily. He’d only logged that bloody phone call from that Swiss engineer out of cussedness. More as a joke than anything, really. Talk about something coming back to bite you!

  ‘You put down the registration details of a white Ford Transit van. That van was outside a crime scene the previous night, and it has been involved in an accident following a high-speed pursuit tonight.’

  ‘I see,’ the head of the High Tech Crime Unit said. />
  ‘I’ve never heard of this expression, “War Driving”, before. What did you mean by it?’

  Rye explained.

  When he had finished, Grace said, ‘OK, if I understand correctly, you are saying that people with Wi-Fi – a wireless internet connection – can log onto any system that is not password-protected?’

  ‘Correct, sir. The wireless router – a small bit of hardware that costs about fifty quid – puts out a signal, and anyone with Wi-Fi who’s within range can log on to the internet through it, if they are not locked out by a password request.’

  ‘So they can get a free high-speed internet connection doing this?’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’

  ‘Why would they bother?’

  ‘If you are out and about, wanting to pick up or send emails, it can be just out of convenience. I’ve done it myself.’ Rye, wide awake now, stepped over to the kettle, checked it had water and switched it on, deciding to have a cup of tea.

  ‘You’ve done it yourself? How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been a passenger in a car in Brighton, stopped at lights, with my laptop open, and suddenly I’ve realized I’m online – my Wi-Fi’s picked up a signal from a wireless router. In a few seconds you can download and pick up a lot of emails – and web pages.’

  Grace was quiet for a moment, digesting this. ‘So Mr Seiler, who made the complaint, was angry about a man in a white van outside his house, connected to his wireless router by his Wi-Fi.’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like to me, sir.’

  ‘But why would Mr Seiler have been angry? Would it have mattered?’

  ‘Yes. If he’d been trying to send or download email, in particular large files, it would have slowed his connection speed down.’ Rye searched for an analogy. ‘If you imagine in your house you turn on every tap at the same time, water’s going to come more slowly out of each of them than if you had just one running. It’s not a perfect analogy.’

  ‘So this man in the van realized he had found a good spot to surf the net from?’

  ‘Yes, sounds like it; it’s a way to use the net without paying.’

  The Detective Superintendent was quiet for some moments. ‘But the charges are pretty small now. Could there be another reason?’

  The kettle was hissing, coming to the boil. It was pitch dark outside. On the fridge door was a crayoned drawing of a spindly man in a cap, in a boxy little car with four uneven wheels, and the word DADDY beneath it. It had been drawn by his daughter Becky a good ten years back, when he had been in Traffic; she must have been about nine. Strange what tiredness did to you, he thought. He probably hadn’t looked at that drawing for the best part of a decade.

  ‘Another reason?’ Jon Rye said. ‘Yes, if you had emails you wanted to send or receive that you wanted to make as hard as possible for anyone to track.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Grace said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘No problem. That information about the routings from the laptop I was given – from your Mr Bryce – was it helpful?’

  ‘Incredibly, yes.’

  ‘Good, we’re still working on it.’

  ‘Maybe talk later in the day.’

  ‘I’ll call you if we find anything more.’ He sensed an anxiety in the Detective Superintendent’s tone, as if the SIO was anxious to end the call – that it was now keeping him from something else he wanted to be doing. Something even more urgent than this call, which had woken his entire household up in the middle of the sodding night.

  70

  Grace, seated at the workstation in MIR One, hung up the phone and took a sip of the strong, sweet, white coffee he had just made himself. Since he had left the cleaners seemed to have been; the place was spotless, the smell of food replaced with the slightly metallic tang of polish, the bins emptied. Nick Nicholl, seated beside him, also hung up his phone.

  ‘No news from the hospital,’ the DC announced.

  At this moment, Grace thought, no news was good news. No news meant that E-J was still alive. ‘OK,’ he said, nodding at the laptop that Nick Nicholl had taken from the van, which was now sitting in a plastic evidence bag in front of him. ‘I want to check out the in-box and sent mail on this machine.’

  He glanced at the Vantage screen, taking a quick look through the incident log for the night so far. Other than the flurry surrounding their own activities, it was a quiet night, typical of Sunday. Come Thursday and Friday nights, there would be ten times the activity.

  The Detective Constable pulled on latex gloves, removed the laptop from the bag and popped its lid. It was still powered up, but had gone to sleep. For some moments the processor went through its wake-up checks, then it opened at the Entourage email program that must have been running, Nicholl realized, when they had approached the vehicle.

  Branson, sitting opposite them, asked, ‘Was Jon Rye helpful?’

  ‘More helpful than I’d be to most people at this hour of the morning,’ Grace retorted, blowing on the coffee to cool it.

  ‘Yeah, well he used to be in Traffic. Serves him right to get a bit of payback. One of them bastards done me about ten years ago; could have been him.’

  Grace grinned. ‘Pissed? Breathalysed?’

  ‘No, just speeding. Empty bloody road – I wasn’t that much over. Bastard threw the book at me.’

  ‘Yeah, I got done for speeding three years ago,’ Grace said. ‘By an unmarked car just up the A23. Told him I was a cop and that just made it worse. They seem to get sadistic pleasure out of nicking their own.’

  ‘Know that old joke?’ Branson said. ‘About the difference between a hedgehog and a Traffic cop car?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘I don’t,’ Nicholl said.

  ‘With the cop car, the pricks are on the inside,’ Branson said.

  Nicholl frowned for a moment as if his tired brain didn’t get it. Then he grinned. ‘Right! That’s funny,’ he said, moving the laptop so Grace could see the screen clearly.

  ‘Start with the in-box,’ Grace said. ‘Anything that’s come in since’ – he looked down at his notes to check the time of Jon Rye’s log – ‘since six thirty yesterday evening.’

  There was just one email sitting in the in-box, and it had a massive attachment, marked SC5w12. A symbol showed the email and attachment had been forwarded on to someone. The address of the sender was postmaster@scarab.tisana.al. Grace felt a surge of adrenalin as he saw the word ‘scarab’. ‘We’ve hit the damn jackpot!’

  ‘Dot al,’ Branson wondered, now standing behind them, reading over their shoulders. ‘What country is al?’

  ‘Albania,’ Nick Nicholl said.

  Grace looked at him. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You some kind of a closet geek, man?’ Branson asked admiringly. ‘How do you know that?’

  The detective turned to Branson and grinned a little sheepishly. ‘It was the answer to one of the questions at a quiz night down at our local a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I’ve never been to one,’ Branson said. ‘Maybe I should go with Ari, improve our general knowledge.’ Might improve our marriage, more importantly, he thought. Try and find a few things to do together, other than argue.

  Grace was looking at the address again. ‘Tisana,’ he said. ‘Did they have that one in your pub quiz too?’

  Nicholl shook his head. ‘Let’s Google it.’

  He keyed a search, but all that came up was an Italian website with a translator option. Nicholl clicked on that. Moments later they were staring at a long, detailed list of pathologies and plants. Acne, Grace read. Carrot, soluble Tisana vitamins, Germ of Grain, Oil of Borragine, Burdock. Then, more interesting to him at this late – or early – hour, he read, Fatigue. Ginseng, Guarana, Elueterococco, Tisana vitamins and minerals. Lecitina di Soia.

  ‘Maybe he’s a health nut,’ Glenn Branson wisecracked. Nicholl ignored him, too weary for jokes at the moment.

  ‘Go to the sent mail box,’ Grace said.

 
Nicholl clicked on that. It contained just one email – the same one, with the same attachment.

  ‘Can you see who it was sent to?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Strange,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘There’s no recipient showing.’

  He double-clicked on it, and moments later the reason why became evident. There were hundreds and hundreds of recipients, all blind-copied. And all had email addresses that were just sequences of numbers combined with Tisana.

  Grace read the first one: 110897@tisana.al. Then the next one: 244651@tisana.al.

  ‘The first part looks like the name – obviously coded,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘Tisana must be the internet service provider.’

  ‘So why didn’t Tisana show up on the search?’ Grace queried.

  ‘My guess is because someone doesn’t want it to.’

  ‘Can you hide things from search engines like Google?’

  ‘I’m sure if you know what you are doing, you can conceal anything you want.’

  Nodding, Grace said, ‘Let’s take a look at the attachment. See what that has to tell us.’

  He stared at the screen as Nick Nicholl moved the cursor onto the attachment and double-clicked on it. Then, moments later, he was rather wishing he hadn’t suggested it be opened after all.

  All three of them watched in numb silence for the next four minutes.

  71

  At 6.30 a.m. Roy Grace rang Dennis Ponds, the senior Public Relations Officer, at home, apologetically waking him and asking him to come and see him at eight fifteen in his temporary office in the Major Incident Suite.

  Grace had managed to snatch two hours of restless sleep, slumped, vaguely horizontally, across the two armchairs in the Interview Room, before heading back to his desk at the workstation shortly after 6 a.m. Branson had fared better, borrowing the sofa in the Chief Superintendent’s office. Nicholl had gone home for a couple of hours, concerned at leaving his heavily pregnant wife on her own for too long.