Stranded

by Val McDermid

  At first glance, nothing in the flat looked different. I stepped round the bed towards the alcove where Thomas had his workstation. ‘His laptop’s gone,’ I said, pointing to the cable lying disconnected on the desk.

  ‘Great. So now we know we’re looking for a killer with a laptop,’ Dennis said. ‘That’ll narrow it down.’

  Back on the landing, Phil told us abruptly to head back to base. ‘We’ll have a debrief in an hour,’ he said. ‘The Drugs Squad guys can run us through Thomas’s known associates and enemies. Maybe they’ll recognise somebody from our surveillance.’

  I walked back to my car, turning everything over in my head. The timing stuck in my throat. It felt like an uncomfortable coincidence that Greg Thomas had been killed the very night we’d lost our video cover. I knew Phil Barclay and Samuels were tight from way back and wondered whether my boss had mentioned the problem to Samuels. If the mole knew we were watching, he might have decided the best way to avoid detection was to silence his paymaster for good. That would also explain the silence. None of Thomas’s rivals could have known about the need to keep the noise levels down.

  Slowly, an idea began to form in my head. We might have lost the direct route to the Drugs Squad’s bad apple, but maybe there was still an indirect passage to the truth. I made a wee detour on the way back to the office, wondering at my own temerity for even daring to think the way I was.

  The debrief was the usual mixture of knowledge and speculation, but because there were three separate teams involved, the atmosphere was edgy. The DI from the Crime Squad told us to assume our unidentified drunk was the killer. He hadn’t been heading for a flat, he’d been making for the back stairs. Apparently the lock on the door leading to the penthouse floor showed signs of having been forced. He’d probably left by the same route, using the fire door at the rear of the building. He showed our pix on the big screen but not even the guy’s mother could have identified him from that. ‘And that is all we know so far,’ he said.

  The silhouette I’d been expecting finally showed up outside the frosted glass door of the briefing room. I put up my hand. ‘Not quite all, sir,’ I said. ‘We also know he’s allergic to lily pollen.’

  As I spoke, the door opened and the desk officer walked in, looking sheepish behind a big bouquet of stargazer lilies. The fragrance spread out in an arc before him as he walked towards Samuels. ‘I was told these were urgent,’ he said apologetically.

  I held my breath, my eyes nailed to the astonished faces of Samuels and his cohort of Drugs Squad detectives.

  And that’s when Phil Barclay shattered the stunned silence with a fusillade of sneezes.

  Guilt Trip

  As neither of my parents was too bothered about religion, I managed to miss out on Catholic guilt. Then I found myself working with Shelley. A guilt trip on legs, our office manager. If she treats her two teenagers like she treats me, those kids are going to be in therapy for years. ‘You play, you pay,’ she said sweetly, pushing the new case file towards me for the third time.

  ‘Just because I play computer games doesn’t mean I’m qualified to deal with the nerds who write them,’ I protested. It was only a white lie; although my business partner Bill Mortensen deals with most of the work we do involving computers, I’m not exactly a techno-illiterate. I pushed the file back towards Shelley. ‘It’s one for Bill.’

  ‘Bill’s too busy. You know that,’ Shelley said. ‘Anyway, it’s not software as such. It’s either piracy or industrial sabotage and that’s your forte.’ The file slid back to me.

  ‘Sealsoft are Bill’s clients.’ Brannigan’s last stand.

  ‘All the more reason you should get to know them.’

  I gave in and picked up the file. Shelley gave a tight little smile and turned back to her computer screen. One of these days I’m going to get the last word. Just wait till hell freezes over, that’s all. Just wait. On my way out of the door and down the stairs, I browsed the file. Sealsoft was a local Manchester games software house. They’d started off back in the dawn of computer gaming in the mid-eighties, writing programs for a whole range of hardware. Some of the machines they produced games for had never been intended as anything other than word processors, but Sealsoft had grabbed the challenge and come up with some fun stuff. The first platform game I’d ever played, on a word processor that now looked as antique as a Model-T Ford, had been a Sealsoft game.

  They’d never grown to rival any of the big players in the field, but somehow Sealsoft had always hung in there, coming up every now and again with seemingly simple games that became classics. In the last year or two they’d managed to win the odd film tie-in licence, and their latest acquisition was the new Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis boys ’n’ toys epic. But now, two weeks before the game was launched, they had a problem. And when people have problems, Mortensen and Brannigan is where they turn if they’ve got sense and cash enough.

  I had a ten o’clock appointment with Sealsoft’s boss. Luckily I could get there on foot, since parking round by Sealsoft is a game for the terminally reckless. The company had started off on the top floor of a virtually derelict canal-side warehouse that has since been gutted and turned into expansive and expensive studio flats where the marginally criminal rub shoulders with the marginally legitimate lads from the financial services industries. Sealsoft had moved into modern premises a couple of streets away from the canal, but the towpath was still the quickest way to get from my office in Oxford Road to their concrete pillbox in Castlefield.

  Fintan O’Donohoe had milkwhite skin and freckles so pale it looked like he’d last seen daylight somewhere in the nineteenth century. He looked about seventeen, which was slightly worrying since I knew he’d been with the company since it started up in 1983. Add that to the red-rimmed eyes and I felt like I’d stumbled into Interview with the Vampire. We settled in his chrome and black-leather office, each of us clutching our designer combinations of mineral water, herbs and juices.

  ‘Call me Fin,’ he said, with no trace of any accent other than pure Mancunian.

  I resisted the invitation. It wasn’t the hardest thing I’d done that day. ‘I’m told you have a problem,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not the word I’d use,’ he sighed. ‘A major disaster waiting to happen is what we’ve got. We’ve got a boss moneyearner about to hit the streets and suddenly our whole operation’s under threat.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘It started about six weeks ago. There were just one or two at first, but we’ve had getting on for sixty in the last two days. It’s a nightmare,’ O’Donohoe told me earnestly, leaning forward and fiddling anxiously with a pencil.

  ‘What exactly are we talking about here?’ He might not have anything better to do than take a long tour round the houses, but I certainly did. Apart from anything else, there was a cappuccino at the Atlas café with my name on it.

  ‘Copies of our games with the right packaging, the right manuals, the guarantee cards, everything, are being returned to us because the people who buy them are shoving the disks into their computers and finding they’re completely blank. Nothing on them at all. Just bogstandard highdensity preformatted unbranded three-and-a-half-inch disks.’ He threw himself back in his chair, pouting like a five year old.

  ‘Sounds like pirates,’ I said. ‘Bunch of schneid merchants copying your packaging and stuffing any old shit in there.’

  He shook his head. ‘My first thought. But that’s not how the pirates work. They bust your copy protection codes, make hundreds of copies of the program and stick it inside pretty crudely copied packaging. This is the opposite of that. There’s no game, but the packaging is perfect. It’s ours.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a box measuring about eight inches by ten and a couple of inches deep. The cover showed an orc and a human in mortal combat outlined in embossed silver foil. O’Donohoe opened the box and t
ipped out a game manual, a story book, four disks with labels reading 1–4 and guarantee card. ‘Right down to the hologram seal on the guarantee, look,’ he pointed out.

  I leaned forward and picked up the card, turning it to check the hologram. He was right; if this was piracy, I’d never seen quality like it. And if they could produce packaging this good, I was damn sure they could have copied the game too. So why the combination of spoton packaging and blank disks? ‘Weird,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not kidding.’

  ‘Is this happening to any of your competitors?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. And I would have heard, I think.’

  Sounded as if one of Sealsoft’s rivals was paying off an insider to screw O’Donohoe’s operation into the deck. ‘Where are the punters buying them? Market stalls?’ I asked.

  Head down, O’Donohoe said, ‘Nope.’ For the first time I noted the dark shadows under his eyes. ‘They’re mostly coming back to us via the retailers, though some are coming direct.’

  ‘Which retailers? Independents or chains?’ I was sitting forward in my seat now, intrigued. What had sounded like a boring piece of routine was getting more interesting by the minute. Call me shallow and superficial, but I like a bit of excitement in my day.

  ‘Mostly smallish independents, but increasingly we’re getting returns from the big chain stores now. We’ve been in touch with quite a few of the customers as well, and they’re all saying that the games were shrink-wrapped when they bought them.’

  I sat back, disappointed. The shrink-wrapping was the clincher.

  ‘It’s an inside job,’ I said flatly. ‘Industrial sabotage.’

  ‘No way,’ O’Donohoe said, two pale pink spots suddenly burning on his cheekbones.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s the message no employer wants to hear. But it’s clearly an inside job.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ he insisted bluntly. ‘Look, I’m not a dummy. I’ve been in this game a while. I know the wrinkles. I know how piracy happens. And I guard against it. Our boxes are printed in one place, our booklets in another, our guarantee cards in a third. The disks get copied in-house onto disks that are overprinted with our logo and the name of the game, so you couldn’t just slip in a few blanks like these,’ he said contemptuously, throwing the disks across the desk.

  ‘Where does it all come together?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re a small company,’ he answered obliquely. ‘But that’s not the only reason we pack by hand rather than on a production line. I know where we’re vulnerable to sabotage, and I’ve covered the bases. The boxes are packed and sealed in shrinkwrap in a room behind the despatch room.’

  ‘Then that’s where your saboteur is.’

  His lip curled. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve only got two workers in there. We’ve always had a policy of employing friends and family at Sealsoft. The packers are my mum and her sister, my Auntie Geraldine. They’d kill anybody that was trying to sabotage this business, take my word for it. When they’re not working, the door’s double-locked. They wouldn’t even let the parish priest in there, believe me.’

  ‘So what exactly do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t want you questioning my staff,’ he said irritably. ‘Other than that, it’s up to you. You’re the detective. Find out who’s putting the shaft in, then come back and tell me.’

  When I left Sealsoft ten minutes later, all I had to go on was a list of customers and companies involved in returns of Sealsoft’s games, and details of who’d sent back what. I was still pretty sure the villain was inside the walls rather than outside, but the client wasn’t letting me anywhere near his good Catholic mother and Auntie Geraldine. Can’t say I blamed him.

  I figured there wasn’t a lot of point in starting with the chain stores. Even if something hooky was going on, they were the last people I could lean on to find out. With dole queues still well into seven figures, the staff there weren’t going to tell me anything that might cost them their jobs. I sat in the Atlas over the coffee I’d promised myself and read through the names. At first glance, I didn’t recognise any of the computer-game suppliers. We buy all our equipment and consumables by mail order, and the only shop we’ve ever used in dire emergencies was the one that used to occupy the ground floor of our building before it became a supermarket.

  Time for some expert help. I pulled out my mobile and rang my tame darkside hacker, Gizmo. By day he works for Telecom as a systems manager. By night, he becomes the Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace. Or so he tells me. ‘Giz? Kate.’

  ‘Not a secure line,’ he grumbled. ‘You should know better.’

  ‘Not a problem. This isn’t top secret. Do you know anybody who works at any of these outlets?’ I started to read out the list, Gizmo grunting negatively after each name. About halfway through the list, he stopped me.

  ‘Wait a minute. That last one, Epic PC?’

  ‘You know someone there?’

  ‘I don’t but you do. It’s wossname, the geezer that used to have that place under your office.’

  ‘Deke? He went bust, didn’t he?’

  ‘’S right. Bombed. Went into liquidation, opened up a new place in Prestwich Village a week later, didn’t he? That’s his shop. Epic PC. I remember because I thought it was such a crap name. That everything?’

  ‘That’ll do nicely, Giz.’ I was speaking to empty air. I like a man who doesn’t waste my time. I drained my cup, walked up the steps to Deansgate station and jumped on the next tram to Prestwich.

  Epic PC was a small shop on the main drag. I recognised the special offer stickers. It looked like Deke Harper didn’t have the kind of fresh ideas that would save Epic PC from its predecessor’s fate. I pushed open the door and an electric buzzer vibrated in the stuffy air. Deke himself was seated behind a PC in the middle of a long room that was stuffed with hardware and software, his fingers clattering over the keys. He’d trained himself well in the art of looking busy; he let a whole five seconds pass between the buzzer sounding and his eyes leaving the screen in front of him. When he registered who his customer was, his eyebrows climbed in his narrow face. ‘Hello,’ he said uncertainly, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. ‘Stranger.’

  ‘Believe me, Deke, it gets a lot stranger still,’ I said drily.

  ‘I didn’t know you lived out this way,’ he said nervously, hitting a key to clear his screen as I drew level with him.

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. Sometimes it’s just more fun to let them come to you.

  ‘You were passing?’

  ‘No.’ I leaned against his desk. His eyes kept flickering between me and his uninformative screen.

  ‘You needed something for the computer? Some disks?’

  ‘Three in a row, Deke. You lose. My turn now. I’m here about these moody computer games you’ve been selling. Where are they coming from?’

  A thin blue vein in his temple seemed to pup up from nowhere. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ he said, too nonchalantly. ‘What moody computer games?’

  I rattled off half a dozen Sealsoft games. ‘I sell them, sure,’ he said defensively. ‘But they’re not hooky. Look, I got invoices for them,’ he added, pushing past me and yanking a drawer open. He pulled out a loose-leaf file and flicked through fast enough to rip a couple of pages before he arrived at a clutch of invoices from Sealsoft.

  I took the file from him and walked over to the shelves and counted. ‘According to this, Deke, you bought six copies of Sheer Fire II when it was released last month.’

  ‘That’s right. And there’s only five there now, right? I sold one.’

  ‘Wrong. You sold at least three. That’s how many of your customers have returned blank copies of Sheer Fire II to Sealsoft. Care to explain the discrepancy? Or do I have to call your local friendly Trading Standards Officer?’ I asked sw
eetly. ‘You can go down for this kind of thing these days, can’t you?’ I added conversationally.

  Half an hour later I was sitting outside Epic PC behind the wheel of Deke’s six-year-old Mercedes, waiting for a lad he knew only as Jazbo to turn up in response to a call on his mobile. Amazing what people will do with a little incentive. I spotted Jazbo right away from Deke’s description. A shade under six feet, jeans, trainers and a Chicago Cubs bomber jacket. And Tony Blair complains about Manchester United’s merchandising. At least they’re local.

  He got out of a battered boy racer’s hatchback, clutching a carrier bag with box-shaped outlines pressing against it. I banged off a couple of snaps with the camera from my backpack. Jazbo was in and out of Epic PC inside five minutes. We headed back into town down Bury New Road, me sitting snugly on his tail with only one car between us. We skirted the city centre and headed east. Jazbo eventually parked up in one of the few remaining terraced streets in Gorton and let himself into one of the houses. I took a note of the address and drove Deke’s Merc back to Prestwich before he started getting too twitchy about the idea of me with his wheels.

  Next morning, I was back outside Jazbo’s house just before seven. Early risers, villains, in my experience. According to the electoral roll, Gladys and Albert Conway lived there. I suspected the information on the list was well out of date. With names like that, they might have been Jazbo’s grandparents, but a more likely scenario was that he’d taken over the house after the Conways had died or suffered the fate worse than death of an old people’s home. The man himself emerged about five past the hour. There was less traffic around, but I managed to stay in contact with him into the city centre, where he parked in a loading bay behind Deansgate and let himself into the back of the shop.

  I took a chance and left my wheels on a single yellow while I walked round the front of the row of shops and counted back to where Jazbo had let himself in. JJ’s Butty Bar. Another piece of the jigsaw clicked into place.