Five Seconds to Doomsday

by Simon Cheshire

  ‘They’ll re-arrest him straightaway,’ said Luke.

  My phone rang. It was Izzy.

  ‘Get back over here! Now!’

  ‘Can’t – something urgent’s come up!’ I told her.

  ‘This is urgent too!’ cried Izzy. ‘Those games are being sold online, right now! Get here!’

  The police car drew up outside Lyndon’s house. The two officers got out, followed by a thin, scruffily-dressed man whose face displayed a mixture of embarrassment and anger.

  ‘I’ve got to get to Izzy’s,’ I said. ‘You stay here. Stop them.’

  ‘Huh? How?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Just delay them, tell them what I’ve just told you, anything you like.’

  I jumped on Muddy’s bike and pedalled away as fast as I could. The situation was hotting up faster than a quick-boil kettle in a lava flow!

  VISIT No. 3: Izzy’s house again.

  I stared at the screen of Izzy’s computer, watching numbers tick rapidly left to right.

  ‘What’s this site called?’ I said.

  ‘Buy-Big-Bargains,’ said Izzy. ‘They’re one of the largest auction sites. A seller has been offering copies of the game for auction since the early hours of this morning.’

  There was a photo of one of the discs, boxed up and complete with cover. Across the screen, scrolling text declared: Limited Time . . . 100% Genuine Stock, Imported Direct from Factory . . . Free Delivery Worldwide . . . Be First to Play MOTZ3 . . . Why Wait? Buy Direct . . . Buy Extra Copies for your Friends . . .

  ‘The crooks could have sold hundreds of those discs by now, if not thousands,’ said Izzy. ‘Each copy is going for about ten times what it would have cost in the shops. There are people from right around the world bidding!’

  ‘Don’t they know the discs are stolen?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably not,’ replied Izzy. ‘The robbery hasn’t been front-page news, and certainly not across the rest of the planet. Even if some bidders do know, they probably don’t care. There are plenty of people like that in the world.’

  ‘Why doesn’t the site just pull the auction?’

  ‘If the games are genuine, which these are,’ said Izzy, ‘Buy-Big-Bargains won’t do anything to interfere unless someone proves to them that stolen goods are involved. It’s in their small print, their terms and conditions. The crooks have been very clever about it. It could take days to get this auction removed and by then the thieves will have sold half the truck-load.’

  ‘What’s the seller’s name listed as?’ I said. The screen flashed up another sale, and another, and another.

  ‘The person everyone’s paying is called Daphne Steel,’ said Izzy. ‘Her profile shows a five-star honesty rating and a five-star feedback rating and a five-star delivery rating. How, I have no idea. We have to assume the crooks have covered their tracks. We’ll never trace them through this auction. Like I said, they’ve been very clever.’

  I let out a sharp snort. ‘Right, well, this Daphne Steel isn’t the thief’s real name, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  I gazed at the computer screen, watching helplessly as tick, tick, tick, tick, the stolen discs were bought for eye-bogglingly large sums of money.

  What could I do? How could I stop this? How could I track the real crooks down? How could I show Peter Lyndon was innocent?

  ‘Who’d give themselves an old-fashioned name like Daphne?’ muttered Izzy.

  Izzy’s words bounced around inside my head – and then, suddenly they helped me spot the final clue. The last piece of the jigsaw. Everything became clear. Daphne Steel! I was so overjoyed I almost grabbed Izzy and kissed her. Luckily I was able to stop myself in time!

  ‘Daphne Steel!’ I squeaked, leaping to my feet. ‘I know what’s been going on!’

  I dashed out of the room. (I seem to have a habit of dashing out of Izzy’s room . . .) I pounced on to Muddy’s bike and rode off. I tried to steer with one hand and call Luke with the other. I ended up wobbling across the road and dropping the phone.

  The whole case was made up of a surprisingly large number of different elements. Among the most intriguing were:

  1. The name Daphne Steel.

  2. The mud on the tyres of both those trucks.

  3. Len Dale’s backache.

  How much of the puzzle have you pieced together?

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, I was back at Dales Ltd. I stood in front of the long line of trucks at the back of the warehouse. Arranged in front of me, left to right, were Len Dale, Stephen Dale, Mr Pratt, Luke, Peter Lyndon and the two police officers who’d arrived at Lyndon’s house.

  The police officers were eyeing me suspiciously. One of them, a red-faced man with a chin like a house brick, was holding a see-through plastic bag containing March of the Zombies 3 discs and covers, collected up from the floor of Peter Lyndon’s garage.

  ‘I’ve heard about you, Saxby Smart,’ he growled quietly, ‘from Inspector Godalming, back at the station. (See the case file The Eye of the Serpent.) ‘We’ll give you one chance to prove your case and if we’re not convinced, we’re arresting Mr Lyndon here on suspicion of theft. Again. Is that clear?’

  ‘Completely,’ I said. I tried not to show how nervous I was. Which wasn’t easy because I was as nervous as a mouse at a cat show.

  ‘OK,’ I began. ‘For a start, Peter Lyndon is innocent. He told the truth when he said that he collected those discs and delivered them here to Dales as arranged. You can all see the truck he used, parked over there.’

  ‘Then how did the truck get into that field?’ protested Len Dale.

  ‘Once Lyndon had gone home,’ I said, ‘the truck was driven back out of here. It was then driven to the field, driven around the field and then dumped further down the road. A second truck went with it. This truck here, this one which also has mud from the field on its tyres. A second truck was taken out for two reasons. Firstly, because the field needed to have two distinct sets of tracks all over it if the police were going to believe that the first truck had been unloaded there. Secondly, because once the first truck was dumped, the driver would need a lift back here to the depot. The fact that two trucks were used that night showed me there were at least two people involved.’

  ‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Len Dale wearily. ‘What on earth was the point of doing all that? If someone was out to steal those discs, why not just take the truck from here?’

  ‘Because the thieves needed to draw the police’s attention away from themselves,’ I said. ‘The truck was dumped as part of a plot to frame Peter Lyndon. Someone drove two trucks all over that field, to make it look like the unloading had occurred there. But they forgot one detail. Footprints. They didn’t leave any, so obviously the tyre tracks were only there to fool us. That’s why I couldn’t make sense of those tracks – I was looking for a logical pattern, and there wasn’t one! But questions remained: Where did the discs get unloaded? Where did they go?’

  ‘Well?’ said one of the police officers.

  ‘They were taken out of the first truck,’ I said. ‘They had to be, or the first truck couldn’t have been dumped, empty at the side of the road. They were taken out of the first truck and put into the second truck. But none of that happened in the field. It happened right here, where we’re standing. Why? Well, unloading and reloading all those boxes of discs would take a while, especially for just two people. And you’d ideally need a forklift. There’d be no point doing all that out in the open, where you might be seen. Not when you could do the unloading in here and stay safely hidden.’

  ‘You’re making a serious allegation there,’ said the police officer. ‘The only break-in there’s been at Dales was last night. There was no break-in on the night the discs were stolen. If we’re to believe your theory, all this truck-shifting business must have been carried out by persons with regular access to this depot. An inside job.’

  ‘What?’ said Len Dale. ‘You’re saying th
at two of our trusted employees did this? Then framed a third employee, Peter Lyndon here?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said softly my heart thumping, ‘I’m saying that you did it, Mr Dale. You, and your son Stephen.’

  Peter Lyndon had stayed silent and still until now. Now he turned sharply to stare in horror at Len and Stephen Dale. Len shook his head and tutted loudly.

  ‘Oh really?’ said Len, rocking slightly from foot to foot and crossing his arms. ‘Stephen and I stole goods from our own business? When, instead, we could simply have distributed those discs to shops as normal and then made our normal profit from our normal business in the normal way? That makes sense, does it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it wouldn’t make sense if Dales weren’t in so much money trouble, no. But my guess is you know this company is going to close down soon so you seized an opportunity to pile up a large amount of cash for yourself, quickly, before it was too late. Your backache was a clue. All that re-loading would have been hard work, even using forklifts. You’re an older man, if you don’t mind my saying so, and naturally all that effort would have an effect. Of course, the backache isn’t evidence, it could be nothing more than a coincidence, but it does fit into the overall picture.’

  ‘And you think we’d do that, do you?’ said Len Dale. He glared at me. ‘We’d grab the money and run, is that it?’

  ‘Dad . . .’ murmured Stephen Dale.

  The police officer tipped his cap back a bit on his head and scratched at his brick-like chin. ‘What’s this opportunity that got seized, then?’

  ‘Dales is in deep trouble,’ I said. ‘If it closes down, its owners – the Dale family, Len Dale in particular – might lose everything. But a job turns up which presents a way to cushion the blow.

  ‘Bomb-Blast Games, one of Dales’ customers, are having troubles of their own. Their latest game, March of the Zombies 3, is likely to be a big hit worldwide, but they’re short of cash. They decide to release the game in this country first, in order to build up enough cash to fund the release of the game everywhere else. They’re being extra cautious. They’re even having the game’s covers printed separately.

  ‘Dales are handling the game’s distribution. And here’s the opportunity that’s waiting to be seized: it occurs to Len Dale that, when the discs arrive in the depot, Dales will have the entire world’s supply of the game. A game which a lot of fans would pay well over the usual shop price for, if they could get their hands on it early.

  ‘Dales couldn’t exactly start selling copies on the sly But suppose all those discs got stolen? There was literally a fortune to be made. Dales might be about to go under, but the Dale family could still come out ahead.

  ‘Len and Stephen hatch a plan. They’ll steal the discs, and get someone else blamed for the crime. So Len hires someone they can easily frame: someone who’s just come out of prison, who’s not only got a criminal record, but a record which includes robbery from a vehicle too. Peter Lyndon was perfect for them.

  ‘Suspiciously perfect, in fact. From my point of view, at least. But the idea of the plan was to make sure that the police would focus on the clear and obvious suspect, while the guilty ones got on with the rest of their scheme. The police would be convinced that Lyndon, and a bunch of partners in crime, were the ones responsible. And if, in the end, there wasn’t enough evidence to put him back in prison, it didn’t really matter too much. By then the discs would be long gone and Len and Stephen would have their stash of cash and the police would still be watching Lyndon, waiting for him to make a slip-up and reveal “the truth”. In the meantime, Dales’ insurance cover would settle the bill with the software company, since the police were on the case and a suspect had already been arrested.

  ‘So the discs are missing and Lyndon is being questioned at the police station. Move ahead a day or so, and now Dales has had the game’s cover delivered. Len and Stephen need that too if they’re going to sell the complete game as totally genuine, so they fake a break-in at this depot and steal the covers as well.

  ‘The same night, last night, two other things happen: first, they put the selling part of their plan into operation. I’ll get to that in a minute. Second, they plant evidence at Peter Lyndon’s house so that when the police release him he gets re-arrested and diverts the police’s attention for another couple of days. The planted evidence would back up the police’s suspicion that Lyndon was working with others.’

  ‘We’ve got Peter Lyndon’s house keys, have we?’ said Len Dale.

  ‘You didn’t need them,’ I said. ‘You could fling a few copies of the game and its cover into the small gap under the door of the garage. It would only take a minute.

  ‘While Len is planting that evidence, Stephen is back here in the office setting up an online auction for the games and packaging up a load of games ready to mail. The office lights are seen from a passing car, by the way. He uploads a photo to show the world that it’s buying the real thing. The plastic cases for putting the discs and covers in, and all the envelopes for mailing, are stuff that can easily be supplied from the Dales warehouse. They do mail-outs for customers regularly, after all.

  ‘The online auction begins late last night, and is continuing as I speak, run under the name of one Daphne Steel. Each copy of March of the Zombies 3 is going for several times its regular price, so only a couple of thousand copies will need to be sold to amass a fortune. And then, once the games have been packaged up in secret, possibly during the night, they can be anonymously slipped into the hundreds of deliveries that leave this depot every day.

  ‘By the time the Buy-Big-Bargains website has shut the auction down and the police have finally accepted that Lyndon knows nothing, it’s too late. The discs that have been sold are on their way around the world. Len and Stephen have erased anything linking them to the mysterious Daphne Steel. The remaining discs can then be “found” somewhere. Oh, look, the crooks have abandoned them! Oh, goody, we can supply shops with the game after all! Oh, isn’t that lovely, everything’s turned out OK. If only there were some clue to the identity of those naughty robbers, eh? Tut, tut, never mind, thanks for your help, officer. No, you can be sure we’ll sack that Lyndon character, can’t trust him at all!’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense,’ growled Len Dale. ‘You haven’t a shred of proof, this is all just a wild theory.’

  Stephen stood there silently, his face flushed a shade of red that a beetroot would be proud of. Peter Lyndon gaped horrified at the pair of them.

  ‘Len Dale is quite correct,’ said the police officer. ‘At the moment, this is all just theory. How do we know this online auction is linked to the accused here?’

  ‘There was one little detail which unlocked this whole case for me,’ I explained. ‘The mysterious Daphne Steel. Until I came across her, nothing seemed to fit properly.’

  ‘Who is she then?’ piped up Luke.

  ‘She’s a fake identity who’s been constructed very cleverly and with great care,’ I said. ‘Except in one small respect. Perhaps this one weak spot was simply the result of a moment’s carelessness. Or maybe a mistaken belief that the connection wouldn’t be spotted.’

  ‘What connection?’ said the police officer, scratching his chin again.

  ‘Her name,’ I said. ‘Daphne Steel is an anagram of Stephen Dale.’

  All seven people in front of me did a double-take. Both police officers looked over at the Dales. Len and Stephen Dale went slightly pale. Peter Lyndon and Luke looked like they’d been slapped in the face with a wet fish. Mr Pratt just looked bewildered.

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘that’s still not proof. It could still be the case that some other employee of this company set that ID up to frame Stephen. A kind of frame within a frame! But, like Len’s backache, you put it all together and the overall picture becomes clear. Especially when you realise where the discs have been all this time. Mr Pratt, could you drive this second muddy-wheeled truck forward a few metres, so it can be opened up at the back.�
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  ‘Right then,’ said Mr Pratt.

  He climbed up into the cabin. The engine started up with a jolting roar and the truck rolled ahead of the rest of the line of vehicles. It moved slowly through ninety degrees and stopped with a sharp hiss of hydraulic brakes. Mr Pratt hopped down, and unbolted the rear of the truck. As the bolt clanged back and the truck’s rear end swung open, we could see that the inside was filled with hundreds of cardboard boxes. One or two of them had been opened. Copies of March of the Zombies 3 were clearly visible.

  ‘Wow, that was risky, wasn’t it?’ cried Luke. ‘Leaving all those discs right here? Anyone could have found them!’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, during our visit, Stephen Dale told us himself that he’s the only person who controls all the movements of vehicles around here. All he had to do was make sure this particular truck wasn’t used. Then the discs could be hidden here, right under everyone’s noses.’

  The two police officers advanced on Len and Stephen Dale.

  ‘I’ve never seen those before!’ cried Len, pointing to the truck.

  ‘Dad, forget it,’ said Stephen in a low voice. ‘We’re finished.’

  The pair of them looked tired and unhappy, like leftover sandwiches after a birthday party. Remember how, back at the start of Chapter One, I said this case got me thinking about motives? Len Dale came over to me, and said something which made me feel like a leftover sandwich too.

  ‘You’re right about what we did, young man,’ he said. ‘But not about why we did it. Yes, this company is in deep financial trouble. Yes, we needed cash, and we needed it fast. But not for ourselves. Without the money from selling those discs, we won’t be able to pay our staff this month. Dozens of people work here, they rely on us, and I’m proud of them. Stephen and I have put years and years of hard work into this place and we were determined to stop it all being ruined because of a few bad debts. We didn’t want to sell up, or close the depot, it would be like spitting in the faces of every worker here. So we took a risk and it didn’t pay off. I know, we treated Peter Lyndon appallingly and I’m sorry. But as we saw it, it was injustice for one person weighed against injustice for dozens of people. What would you have done, young man? Still, you found us out and that’s the important thing, eh? Got any bright ideas about how we can save everyone’s jobs now?’