Bred in the Bone

by Christopher Brookmyre

  He was forgetting his own shifts had changed as of today. He had been in here since stupid o’clock and lost track of time as he trawled fruitlessly through Stevie Fullerton’s laptop. He was starting to think he would have preferred to be back in the morgue, having another crack at exhuming the Julie Muir case files. At least down there he knew there was something specific he was tasked with tracking down. The past couple of days had been a soul-wearying exercise in not being sure what he was looking for, and hoping that he’d recognise it if he saw it.

  He had begun to nickname Fallan’s computer ‘Procrastination’, as it was the thief of time. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of a PC, a buzzing, humming abomination sporting several different internal hard drives, each of which was partitioned, and each partition of which booted a different operating system. Even a simple search using dates as a filter to bring up recently accessed files had to be repeated multiple times, as certain documents and programmes were only recognised by certain OSs. A perverse part of him wanted to lock some Mac-zealot friends of his in a room with the thing, just to see how long it was before they started to cry.

  Adding to the sense of futility was the knowledge that anything worth looking at was probably inaccessible. There were whole areas protected by encryption software that was literally military-grade. Anthony didn’t even dare attempt a password guess in case some blokes in black ski masks came belaying through the windows in response.

  Fullerton’s laptop was a simpler affair, but no less frustrating. It was messy but clean: the digital equivalent of an overstuffed suitcase, but so far not one in which anybody had found so much as a smuggled cigarette. There were so many icons on display that it was difficult to see the wallpaper: every add-on, shortcut and useless piece of bloatware it had ever downloaded still sitting proudly on the desktop.

  The cache bore testament to browsing habits that suggested he and his wife shared the machine; either that or Stevie was a secret shoe fetishist and commercial tableware enthusiast.

  A long, slow scroll down a truly colossal Internet Explorer history did at least throw up a number of search results pertaining to the Julie Muir murder case, but he found no text or other documents with ‘Muir’ or ‘Sheehan’ in the search string. As Paul over at LOCUST had also concluded, Fullerton simply wouldn’t have stored anything sensitive on a machine he shared with the missus. If there was treasure to be found, it was stored elsewhere, on a detachable drive or these days just as likely off site, though the browser history hadn’t thrown up any login pages for FTP or cloud storage.

  Anthony recalled that the gunman had taken Fullerton’s phone, so perhaps there was something important on there, but that seemed even less likely than keeping anything compromising on a laptop, as the mobile was more likely to be misplaced or stolen. Nonetheless, there had to be a strong motive for taking it, as a hitman wouldn’t run the risk of tying himself to the murder for the sake of the extra hundred quid he might raise by flogging the handset later.

  He was about ready to run up the white flag and tell McLeod he’d struck out yet again. LOCUST could have it back if they wanted, though that desire would probably only last until they realised McLeod had been pulling their chain; and if not it would be parcelled off to be gutted by the division’s IT geeks.

  He heard McLeod’s door open and looked up instinctively. Which instinct was that, though? He already knew who was coming out of there, so it wasn’t caution or curiosity, neither of which would, furthermore, demand that his gaze lingered.

  Adrienne emerged and looked his way also. Their eyes met for a short moment, both of them managing an apologetic wish-it-were-otherwise smile, then she started to walk away.

  She had a background in IT, Anthony remembered. There were maybe things that she would know to do that would never have occurred to him. He wasn’t sure whether he believed this was likely to make much difference to his efforts, or whether it was just a pretext to get her over here. He wasn’t sure whether it mattered either.

  Adrienne began to hit her stride, heading back the way she came. She would soon be out of reasonable ‘hey, while you’re here’ range.

  He almost waved, almost called.

  A couple more paces took her past the point where a wave would catch her attention. He was conscious of the very moment she passed the event horizon, the point when he knew the opportunity had been lost. It was also the point when he realised how much he had wanted it.

  He got off his arse and ran, calling her name before she reached the lifts.

  She turned around, a little surprised, a little curious, a little apprehensive.

  ‘Have you got a minute? I’m going mental hunting through a laptop here, and I thought a fresh pair of eyes . . .’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  She didn’t smile but her eyes seemed bright. They both knew what this was.

  It was only a matter of yards, but Anthony’s heart was thumping by the time he got back to his desk, as though he’d run up every stair in the building. He sat down in his chair again, Adrienne hovering at the side of the desk.

  ‘It’s Stevie Fullerton’s laptop. I’m looking for anything linking to Julie Muir or Brenda Sheehan, but I’m at the end of my tether. I was about to jack it in and hand the machine in to PC World.’

  By this he meant send the laptop in to the division’s tech geeks. They called it that because the experience was much the same as putting a PC in to the store for repair: it took so long to get results that by the time it came back you had usually done whatever you needed to without it.

  ‘I suspect if he was using it for anything interesting, then the files are off-site, but I can’t even find links to cloud storage or anything.’

  ‘If we can find out who he’s got a web storage account with, we can put in a request to the provider, but that’s a message-in-a-bottle job,’ Adrienne replied. ‘If it’s UK-based we’d be in with a shout, although it’ll take months, but if it’s overseas, forget it. It’s not good marketing for IPs and storage outfits if it gets around that the authorities can crowbar open your online vault.’

  She wore a rather unhopeful frown, and he thought she was about to walk away. Instead she wheeled over a free chair and took a seat next to him.

  ‘Budge up,’ she said, her hands falling on the keyboard, her foot brushing his ankle just for a second as she nudged him to move aside.

  She opened a control panel and set the machine to compile a list of all installed programmes. It took a while, as it was cluttered with all manner of auto-installed and unnecessarily bundled crap.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, having apparently seen what she was hoping to. ‘He’s got Firefox installed, but despite there being icons spammed all over his desktop like confetti, it isn’t one of them. It’s not installed where it normally defaults to either. We could be in business here.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘It’s nothing to geek out over. This isn’t IT expertise you’re seeing here, it’s divorcee expertise.’

  ‘I’m intrigued either way,’ he replied, suddenly aware that he sounded disproportionately excited. It wasn’t about what she was doing with the laptop; it was because they were talking to each other the way they used to.

  She began opening system folders, digging her way down to where the Firefox.exe was inconspicuously tucked away.

  ‘My ex, Phil, did most of his browsing on Internet Explorer. But when I had become suspicious that he was playing away, I had a wee snoop one night and found that he was also running Firefox. Just like Fullerton’s laptop here, you wouldn’t have known the other browser was even installed. I only found it because I was searching unlikely folders for where he might have stashed photos or whatever.’

  Adrienne clicked on the bookmarks. To Anthony’s disappointment, it displayed the default URLs that came with a clean install. Adrienne nonetheless ran the cursor down the list, hovering briefly over each entry.

  She smiled, but he couldn’t see why. She pointed to the bottom corn
er, where the corresponding address was displayed, so that the destination could be seen without clicking.

  ‘You can give a bookmark any name,’ she said. ‘No matter what the URL actually points to.’

  Adrienne clicked on Help and Tutorials in the Mozilla sub-menu. A moment later they were looking at the login screen for ‘E-Vault Back-up and Storage’.

  Her smile grew wider and Anthony simply gaped as he looked at the login fields. Fullerton’s username appeared in the top one, above a line of black bullet points, the ‘Remember Me’ box ticked by default underneath.

  ‘Same as Phil. He hid the car where nobody would look, but left the keys in the ignition for convenience.’

  She clicked the login button.

  Sins of Omission

  Catherine looked at the two different printouts, carefully laid side by side, page for page, for the purposes of comparison. At a glance they were identical: same headers, same layout, same logos, same tagging. You would really have to know there was something missing before it would even occur to you to look for it, which was why it never struck anyone to be suspicious of the original.

  She had asked Intell to send Stevie Fullerton’s phone records a second time; or rather, Adrienne Cruickshank had asked on her behalf, as Adrienne had a good contact over there who could fast-track the request and, just as crucially, make sure it came to Catherine and Catherine alone. To that end, the new file came in by email rather than on a flash drive. Catherine had expected its predecessor to arrive that way too, but somebody had gone to the trouble of making sure that didn’t happen.

  She wanted to be absolutely certain before she confronted Abercorn: wanted the evidence to be right in front of her, indisputable. Not that evidence being right in front of her was any kind of guarantee around here, she reflected, casting a glance towards the CCTV stills that mocked her from elsewhere on the desk.

  Every year, at the squad’s Christmas night out, she announced the Wood for the Trees Award, for the piece of evidence that it took them the longest to realise was staring them in the face. It was a good-humoured exercise, focusing on the article of evidence itself rather than pinning blame on anybody. The purpose was to remind them all how easy it could be to miss what was three feet in front of them when their focus was on the minutiae.

  Last year it had been an apparent suicide, the victim having slashed both her wrists in the bath. It had taken an embarrassingly long time for anybody to wonder how she had managed to grip the knife for the second cut, having severed all the tendons in her other arm.

  There were a few weeks left before Christmas, but it would be fair to say that the Land Rover had this year’s title in the bag.

  She took a pink highlighter pen and put a thick stroke through each entry displaying Gordon Ewart’s phone number. They had been carefully deleted from the version Abercorn passed on to her, though as it was an Acrobat document this couldn’t have been straightforward. The original subscriber check must have been Photoshopped and then the adulterated image saved as a PDF again.

  A bit less of a giveaway than a big black marker, but he’d been caught nonetheless. And now she was going to nail his balls to the wall.

  He appeared at her door within an hour of being called: new league record. Abercorn seldom responded to the first or even fourth request to talk, but she had been a little disingenuous in her summons. Rather than phone him up and say she needed a word, she had got Beano to phone Paul Clayton and let slip that they had unearthed something LOCUST had missed on Stevie Fullerton’s laptop. When, inevitably, Paul had begged Beano to say what it was, he had claimed it was now out of his hands and that the laptop was irretrievably in Catherine’s possession.

  As far as she knew, Beano hadn’t found anything. In fact, he had apparently spent yesterday lost in the labyrinthine hell that was Fallan’s PC, and was only getting around to looking at Fullerton’s laptop this morning. Nonetheless, merely the suggestion that he had unearthed something tasty proved irresistible LOCUST bait.

  ‘I’m told you put in your thumb and pulled out a plum,’ Abercorn suggested with an eager smile, rapping on the inside of her doorframe. His winning manner was intended to disguise the fact that he was (a) crapping himself and (b) livid about the prospect that something damaging had fallen into Catherine’s hands.

  She watched his eyes gobble up the room, scanning anxiously for the laptop.

  ‘I’ve discovered an interesting file, yes,’ she said.

  ‘On Fullerton’s laptop?’

  She feigned confusion.

  ‘No. On a USB stick that you gave me. You’ll remember: it was accidentally sent to LOCUST.’

  Abercorn looked wary. He could sense the ambush coming; he just didn’t know from where.

  ‘I got Intell to send me the same subscriber check this morning and I’ve been playing a wee game of spot the difference. Maybe you’d like to join in. As a wee hint, the redacted phone numbers are in pink.’

  Abercorn stared at the printouts on her desk: they were upside down from his perspective but he didn’t need to see the fine details. He had a look on his face like he’d just given his first blowjob and nobody had warned him what happened at the end.

  ‘You’ll be wondering how I found out. Allow me to enlighten you. Yesterday evening I had a very unsatisfactory conversation with a thoroughly unlovely specimen who seemed to be under the impression that he had been eliminated from my investigations, despite his only coming to the attention of my investigation a matter of hours before. This individual also made a point of stressing to me that these matters had been decided so far above my rank that I’d be giving hand shandies to probationers by the end of the month if I didn’t drop it.’

  Abercorn stood up straight, like he was on parade awaiting inspection.

  ‘I can only apologise,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that from your perspective this is inexcusable, and I don’t expect you to be anything less than outraged. The nature of my remit means that there are unavoidable compromises, and occasions when the purview of an investigation overlaps other ongoing inquiries. Sometimes we get away with it, sometimes nobody notices. But every now and then we’re going to get our dicks caught in the zipper. This is one of those times.’

  It was a disarmingly open and unequivocal mea culpa, the kind she never thought she’d live to hear from Abercorn. But that in itself told her something wasn’t right. As she had mused just the other day, Abercorn was thick-skinned about LOCUST’s unpopularity: sometimes infuriatingly so. He never apologised, because he didn’t believe he had anything to apologise for. In a way, this was almost a backhanded compliment to counterparts’ professionalism that he expected them to understand – even though they didn’t like it – why he had to go about his business the way he did.

  Then it occurred to her that he had been unexpectedly conciliatory when she first challenged him about the USB stick. He had even asked around on her behalf to garner some more information on the symbol.

  Abercorn never did favours, not without subtly guaranteeing that he would get something bigger in return. He had behaved, she realised, like someone who had making up to do: like a man with a guilty conscience. Except, as she had just considered, Abercorn never had a guilty conscience about anything he did professionally. It was all in the game, nothing personal. Why would he suddenly be feeling conflicted over this?

  Then she worked it out.

  ‘Whose phone number is this?’ she demanded, pointing to one of the pink streaks.

  ‘Let’s not play games, Catherine. We both know whose number it is, but I am not in a position to discuss the matter any further.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to discuss it because you don’t know. You’re covering for somebody.’

  He remained standing to attention, but seemed to shrink away from her. She could tell he was thinking about how best to stage his retreat, so she got up and closed the door, putting herself between it and him.

  ‘Who gave you the stick, Dougie?’

&n
bsp; He stiffened again, composing that famous poker face of his. But she had already seen his hand.

  ‘I know you won’t give up your superior, and I respect you for that, but something’s rotten in the state of Govan and your loyalty is helping the wrong people. Somebody’s fucking with my murder investigation and you’re going to tell me who. You don’t need to name names: just look into my eyes and tell me it wasn’t Drummond who gave you the flash drive.’

  His mouth said nothing but his eyes blabbed like a supergrass. He couldn’t tolerate her gaze.

  Abercorn reached past her to grab the door handle. She didn’t get in his way but did follow him out into the corridor. She observed his retreat but to her surprise did not relish the sight of him defeated. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t part of it: he had merely covered for his boss because he thought that was his duty.

  As she watched him walk away she became aware of somebody waving to her from a nearby desk. It was Beano, sitting next to Adrienne. The sight surprised her. The two of them had seemed all pally-pally for a long time and then suddenly they were never to be found together, like matter and antimatter. Catherine had seen it before, two people like those battling tops you used to get: they spun around in each other’s orbits, closer and closer, then when they finally touched it threw them violently apart.

  Something was uniting them at the moment, though. They both looked like they were about to wet the seat.

  ‘Boss, you really have to see this.’

  Reality TV

  Catherine was looking at Brenda Sheehan sitting in an armchair in her living room, gazing back from the screen as though gazing over Adrienne’s shoulder and out through the blinds. She was dressed in a baggy green sweater beneath a blue housecoat, a garment that always piqued Catherine’s curiosity as to where such unflattering and anachronistic items were still on sale. Watt Brothers, probably.