by Neil White
Sam looked at Charlotte, frustrated, but then Tony said, ‘There is one thing, though.’
When Sam turned back to him, Tony was smiling. This was the postscript, the silver lining.
‘What is it?’
‘Online chat. I found fragments of conversation in the internet cache. Just snippets, the occasional sentence. It was sexual, though.’ And he passed over a printout with words appearing randomly, interspersed by symbols.
‘It’s where the software has tried to overwrite the data but not got everything,’ Tony said.
Sam skimmed through the printout. It contained long paragraphs of symbols and random letters, but occasionally a phrase or word would appear. It was sleazy, with words like ‘fuc’k and ‘cunt’ appearing like someone had tried to delete the expletives but ended up deleting everything but.
‘Who was he speaking to?’ Charlotte said, glancing over Sam’s shoulder.
‘This is where it gets interesting,’ Tony said. ‘No site name, but I have a username: vodkagirl.’
Someone young but up for fun, Sam thought.
‘But that’s only any use if we know where the username is from,’ Charlotte said.
‘You’re the detectives. But look at the fifth page. I’ve circled a word. It appears twice.’
Sam turned to that page and he whistled. Surrounded in red pen was the word ‘meet’. They had something.
‘Come on, back to the station,’ Sam said.
They walked back to the car with more urgency. Henry Mason’s story was beginning to unfold.
Twenty-seven
He drove aimlessly, wanting to avoid the stillness of his house. He was waiting for the message. His phone was on the passenger seat. At every junction, every red light, he glanced across, looking for the flashing light that told him that there was news, but it was never there.
So he kept on driving, thinking all the time of his box and revisiting his past. He needed his things back, his precious memories. Without the physical items, all he had was what was left in his head, but it was harder to pin down the memories without something to prompt them.
He’d been outside Joe Parker’s office when Gina had stormed out. He’d parked further up the road, deciding what he should do, when she’d walked past him, wiping her eyes, looking down. He remembered her from years before. She’d hardly changed. Pretty then, pretty now. He’d watched her from time to time. He did that with all those involved as he kept watch on his past. He’d breathed death into their lives and watched it spread. It was an intoxicating power.
He checked on Joe Parker most of all. He remembered him from the day he’d taken Ellie. He didn’t like the word ‘killed’, because it was more than that. He’d been waiting for Ellie that day. She always took the short cut and he’d decided that day was going to be the day. His first. That made her special. The demand for it had been like a siren in his head, making him want to clamp his hands over his ears.
He’d tried to satisfy it in other ways, with thoughts of her when he was on his own, but the need was still there even when he thought he’d got rid of the desire. He tried abstaining, to get used to the steady burn of what his mind said he craved. It didn’t change anything. He realised then that it hadn’t been about Ellie.
But Joe had seen him. As soon as he stood up to follow her, he couldn’t resist one look back, and there he was, the brother.
He’d followed her anyway. He could always back out. Or maybe it had been a sign, that somehow fate would help him and stop him from acting.
Fate had worked differently. Joe had ignored him. He’d taken the longest route and let Ellie walk to her death. So as the canopy of trees got bigger, and the lighting dissolved into shadow, he’d gone after her. Joe Parker could have saved her. Ellie’s own brother had let her down. Everything that followed was down to Joe Parker.
But Ruby was his jewel. A new life born from the misery he’d created; the new life that followed on from the old.
He pulled up close to the woodland where Ellie had died. There were memories there.
Things were changing. He could feel it like a shift in the breeze. And if he couldn’t stop whatever came next, he had to make sure people remembered him. Hurt those who hurt you. That had always been his way.
Sam threw his jacket over the back of the chair. The Incident Room was as it had been before; there was no excited buzz that you get with a development, a break in the case. Charlotte sat down and pulled her chair up to Sam’s.
‘Where do we start looking for this vodkagirl?’ Charlotte said.
‘Just search the name and see what turns up,’ Sam said, and typed it into the search bar.
‘Nearly sixty thousand results,’ Sam said.
‘Try adding “Manchester”,’ Charlotte said. ‘If they were planning to meet, she has to be local.
Sam typed in then sat back confused. ‘Fifteen million hits now.’ He went back to the previous search and started to scroll through.
There were links to photo-sharing and social-networking sites, and as they browsed there was nothing that seemed to have any connection to Henry Mason. They were either based overseas or sites that had no real chat facility.
They were on the eleventh page when they clicked on a link that took them to a site called No One Tells.
A lurid homepage of silver lettering on a purple background filled the screen, with photographs in a list. There were some faces, but mainly they were bodies, or body parts, or just a blank square where someone had been unwilling to be identified.
‘It’s some kind of dating site,’ Charlotte said.
‘Hardly a dating site,’ Sam said. ‘Dating sites are full of hope, people looking for shared interests, a good sense of humour and all that. Look at the descriptions here. “Likes it rough.” “Loves oral and being dominated.” This is somewhere for married people to find affairs. It’s just sad and desperate, pages and pages of failed marriages.’
‘It fits Henry Mason, but it might not be our site.’
Sam went to the search bar and narrowed the display to women from Manchester. Fifty pages of profiles were shown, with around sixty people on each page.
Sam clicked on a few profiles and the difference from a normal dating site became more obvious. It was a fuck-site, as simple as that. There was no need for anyone to turn up with wine and roses. Just a spare couple of hours and an anything goes attitude.
‘This is making me feel grubby,’ Charlotte said.
‘There’re a lot of people out there looking for someone else,’ he said.
He found vodkagirl’s profile on the twelfth page, trapped between a woman in her fifties staring into a webcam, glasses down her nose, and a woman who looked like she was wearing a dog collar, the studs gleaming in the picture. Sam clicked on vodkagirl’s picture.
After a few seconds, a user profile came up. Sam and Charlotte both leaned closer.
The picture was a silhouette, a young woman backlit, her face in shadow. Her hair was light and long and wavy, her shoulders bare and skinny. It was her profile that caught their attention, though. More particularly, the opening four words: I’m not really eighteen.
Sam felt a chill. The site wasn’t just about adults.
The words were ambiguous, because it could mean that she was much older, but the rest of the profile made it clear that she was still at school but looking for a man, a real man, to teach her about the world. And her location said she was from Manchester.
‘She’s underage,’ Sam said. ‘That fits in with what we know Mason liked, the search terms.’
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Charlotte said. ‘If he met an underage girl, why would he end up dead? And what about Keith Welsby, the teacher? On its own, this dating site link is significant, but a fingerprint connects two dead men. That’s the connection we need to explore.’
Sam sighed. Charlotte was right. Vodkagirl was a red herring, just something that Mason was doing before he was killed. His life might have been full of things
like that. He’d been murdered for reasons they couldn’t fathom, and on the way they’d learned that he liked young girls.
‘So do we ignore it?’ Sam said.
Charlotte tilted her head as she thought about that. ‘What does your gut feeling tell you?’
‘Does that beat logic?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘I trust your instinct.’
‘I don’t think we should ignore it,’ he said. ‘If Henry Mason was on this site and chatting to this vodkagirl, he was talking about a “meet”, which fits in with what we know about his murder. If we can work out whether it connects with the other murder, we’ve got something to work on.’
‘So let’s carry on,’ Charlotte said. ‘But if there is any connection with Henry Mason, we need to find him on here, and Keith Welsby.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Let’s look into the murky world of No One Tells.’
‘We’ll try there,’ Sam said, and pointed to a link to a support page.
‘How come?’
‘They will have some record of vodkagirl’s use of the site. In the internet frauds I did before I joined this squad, the IP addresses used to create online accounts got people. This might be the same, so we might be able to track her down, whoever she is. Or even show that Mason was chatting with her.’
When he looked at the support page, there was just an email address, with all queries to go through there. He started to type:
My name is Detective Constable Sam Parker from Greater Manchester Police. Can someone from your site please contact me as a matter of urgency, in connection with an inquiry into child pornography.
He added his direct line number.
‘Not strictly true, but close enough,’ Sam said as he clicked SEND. ‘If I’d said it was to trace a site user, they’ll tell me to get a warrant. This will get a quicker response.’
He browsed the site for a few minutes before his phone rang. The screen on his phone showed a London number.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said, and picked up the phone. ‘Good afternoon, DC Parker speaking.’
‘You asked someone to call,’ a voice said, the accent southern, the tone hesitant. ‘I’m David from the No One Tells website.’
Sam glanced at Charlotte as he spoke. ‘Thanks for calling, David. I’m afraid there’s a problem with your site. It’s being used to facilitate child abuse.’
A pause and then, ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘I’m afraid so. One of your user profiles even states that, more or less. We need to know who’s been visiting the profile.’
‘I can’t disclose that kind of thing,’ David said, wariness in his voice now. ‘The name of the website is No One Tells, and that includes us. We promise discretion.’
‘I don’t want to cause you any trouble,’ Sam said, ‘but I could get your site closed down until all the user profiles are examined. Trace them through their IP addresses.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘This is a serious investigation.’
‘No, you actually can’t do that. We use a server based in the Philippines to stop this exact thing. All our traffic goes through there, and everything is held there, all the user data. Like I said, the site is called No One Tells. That includes us.’
David fell silent, and Sam let it fester. All he could hear was the slight nasal rasp of David’s breath. After a moment, David said, ‘What’s the user name?’
‘Vodkagirl.’
Sam listened to the tapping of a computer keyboard as David navigated the site. Then there was a sigh. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘We keep an eye out for things like this, and you aren’t allowed to register yourself unless you say you’re over eighteen, but she’s used the profile to mask it. It won’t cause you problems for much longer, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A user request was sent this morning to close down the profile. We say on the site that it can take two weeks to process it, but it’s really in case they change their mind. People were registering and then deregistering all the time, guilt trips and postings, depending on their mood. I can take the profile down now.’
‘No, don’t do that,’ Sam said. ‘We need to know who she is. What IP address does she use when she logs on?’
There was a pause before David said, ‘I can let you have that, I suppose, seeing as her account is a fraud. We don’t allow underage people on here. I’ll contact the server. Everyone else is off-limits.’ He sighed. ‘Look, there are other ways to go about this.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Have a good look around her profile.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve nothing more to say. Good luck with it. The profile will be gone in fourteen days, and I’ll email you with her own IP address.’
‘Wait, wait,’ Sam said.
A sigh and then, ‘What is it?’
‘How do you make your money?’
‘Easy. The profile is free, and you’re allowed to contact five people. You start with a seven-day trial period. After that, if you want to send messages, you’ve got to buy credits. If you want to contact more than five people, you’ve got to buy credits.’
‘Do a lot of people go on to buy after those first five contacts?’
David laughed. ‘There are a lot of desperate people out there.’
‘And how will it look on the bank statement?’
‘TSJ Publishing,’ David said. ‘Named after my kids.’ And then he hung up.
Sam went back to the bank statements piled on the desk next to his monitor. He thumbed through until he reached the month leading up to Henry Mason’s murder. He ran his finger down the columns until he found what he was looking for. He jabbed the bank statement. ‘There,’ he said. ‘TSJ Publishing. A twenty-five-pound payment. I’d presumed it was a magazine subscription. We’ve got him. Henry Mason was a member and he was buying credits.’
‘To chat to vodkagirl,’ Charlotte said, nodding.
‘So it’s about time we did the same,’ he said. ‘Let’s find out about Henry Mason’s secret life.’
‘Are you going to set up a profile?’ Charlotte said.
‘Why not? It’s a way of speaking directly with someone who had contact with our victim. I’ll let Brabham know, so I can monitor it from here.’
‘Are you going to tell your wife?’ Charlotte said, a glint of amusement in her eye. ‘You’re going to have to use a personal email. You can’t use a police one.’
‘I’ve got an old Google email I never use,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ll join with that.’
Charlotte watched over his shoulder as he filled in fake details. Six feet two, gym instructor, thirty years of age. ‘You need to be careful,’ she said. ‘You might get a few requests yourself.’
‘Reality would chase them away again,’ he said. ‘I need a username.’
‘Make it geographical.’
He typed in ‘manchester-guy’ and pressed the enter button. The site whirred away for a few seconds, before it flashed up an acceptance page.
‘I’m in,’ he said. ‘I’m about to enter a dark world.’
‘Just make sure you cancel once we’ve checked it out,’ Charlotte said. ‘You might have emails you can’t explain at home.’
Sam navigated to vodkagirl’s page and pressed the SEND A MESSAGE button. It flashed up a box.
‘How should I start it?’ he said.
‘Sound hesitant, like you’re curious but nervous. It will put her in control, so she thinks.’
‘It might not even be a “she”,’ Sam said.
‘So he’ll get off on the power trip even more.’
Sam started to type.
Hi. I saw your profile. You sound interesting. I’m not used to this kind of thing. Is it okay if I message you?
They both watched the screen for a few minutes, but there was no response.
‘Leave the page open and let Brabham know what you’re doing,’ Charlotte said.
‘Good idea,’ he said
.
As he walked over to the other side of the room, his mind went back to what Joe had said: that the person locked up a couple of nights before was Ellie’s killer. He checked his watch. It was nearly lunchtime. He needed to look into what Joe had said. Once people started to drift out, he’d take a look to see what he could find out.
He’d been fighting it all morning, but he was feeling that same burning need for revenge that had fuelled Joe through the years. If Mark Proctor had killed Ellie, he was going to find out. He didn’t trust Joe’s motives, but if Joe was right, Sam was going to catch him.
