Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  Tony got out of his chair to go to comfort Rachel but she waved him back down.

  ‘His biggest regret is that girl who was found on Inchmahome – his last major case and the one that stays with him. He frets about it, Danny, and I know he wakes up in the middle of the night haunted by it.’

  Neilson sat with his chin on his hands, looking at Rachel, taking in every word she said but giving nothing away.

  ‘I can’t do much for him,’ she continued. ‘I can’t give him some magic pill to make it all better. I can’t pay for some Harley Street doctor to cure him because there is no cure. I can’t even look after him because he’s in a home. There’s only one thing I know how to do and that’s my job.’

  Danny slowly took one of his hands away from beneath his chin and held it up in front of him, his palm facing Rachel in a ‘stop’ gesture.

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt you, Rachel, but I can see how much this is hurting you. I know you are going to tell me what you want from me when you’re good and ready. Whatever it is, if I can do it, then I will. Okay?’

  Rachel smiled sadly and nodded.

  ‘I know you wouldn’t be asking unless you felt you really needed to,’ Danny continued. ‘Just tell me what you want.’

  It hurt Winter to see Rachel upset and that was bad enough but it also stung that he was being held at arm’s length. She was the one who had to help her dad, he knew that, and it made it difficult for her to let him in. There had always been this invisible police tape between them when it came to her work and he could feel it again now, putting him in his place.

  ‘Why did neither of you tell me about what was happening tonight? Okay, I get that you might need Danny’s help with whatever you’re planning, Rachel, but you could have told me.’

  She looked at him, a faint smile playing across her lips.

  ‘Boys and their egos,’ she teased and she rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not Danny I need, you idiot. It’s you.’

  Tony brightened briefly before confusion set in again.

  ‘I need help from someone I can trust,’ she explained. ‘I can’t do this by the book and I can’t ask anyone from the job. And you . . . bizarrely, you have a knack for this. When the sniper was taking out the drug lords, you saw things we missed and you instinctively knew what to do. You knew how to join the dots. I need that now.’

  Tony nodded, appeased but still uncertain.

  ‘It’s just that I’m not sure you’re capable of doing everything that’s needed on your own, so we need Danny to help you out,’ she continued. ‘He’s been round the block and you always say he’s the smartest man you’ve ever known. Every cop I know in Strathclyde who knew Danny says he was top drawer. We need him. I need both of you.’

  Both men just looked at her, waiting for the punchline.

  ‘Danny, my dad had a suspect for the killing. It was never anything firm but his nose told him this guy was involved – a student teacher named Laurence Paton. He hung about the scene when they did a reconstruction a year later and admitted he’d been in the area at the time of the killing. He was nervous, evasive. My dad liked him for the murder but never had any evidence to link him, so nothing was ever done. He had Paton in a couple of times under the pretence of interviewing potential witnesses but nothing.’

  Danny listened intently, saying nothing.

  ‘On the anniversary of the killing, we went to the Lake of Menteith and made a few waves, asked a few questions, unsettled some dust. Then we went to Paton’s house. I made sure Paton knew I was there even though he couldn’t have known who I was. Three days later, Paton falls off a ladder while doing DIY outside his house and dies on the spot. What does your copper’s nose tell you about that, Danny?’

  The older man took a long draw on his beer and let it swill around his mouth, savouring the taste and buying himself time to think. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and looked at Rachel.

  ‘It stinks,’ he told her. ‘I was never one for coincidences.’

  ‘Nor me,’ she agreed.

  Danny chewed on his bottom lip as he considered the options and tried to second-guess what her plan was. Whatever it was, he knew he would agree to it. His blood was already racing and he hadn’t felt that in a while. It felt dangerous and good. It felt alive.

  ‘So what is Central saying?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not much. They are insistent it was an accident. Say they have a witness that corroborates it. They say there’s nothing to prove Paton had anything to do with the lake killing and I need to keep my nose out of it.’

  ‘Then you’d better do that,’ Danny mused. ‘We, on the other hand . . .’

  She smiled, grateful that he understood.

  ‘I’m going to ask this for the last time,’ Tony grumbled. ‘What do you want me and Danny to do?’

  ‘If Laurence Paton killed this girl, then I want to find something to prove it. I want you to find something. As I said, I need you to do this for me.’

  ‘And how am I going to do that?’

  ‘I want you and Danny to break into Paton’s house. I want you to search his home, hack his computer – whatever it takes. I want you to find me proof that my dad was right and Paton killed the Lady in the Lake.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Tuesday 4 December. 1.00 a.m.

  Winter and Neilson parked quietly on Sutherland Avenue, a good few hundred yards away from the corner where it adjoined Wallace Place. Danny had instructed Tony to try to get halfway between the street lights to make best use of such darkness as there was. They quietly got out of the car, shivering as the cold bit into them, and started out on foot.

  A glance behind them saw the splendour of Stirling Castle, lit up in its festive finery and sitting proudly on the rock overlooking the town that thought it was a city. Ahead were the snow-covered Ochil Hills, framing the horizon but disappearing softly into a frozen haze.

  Danny had driven through to Stirling the night before and checked out the situation. He’d gone so far as to wander into Laurence Paton’s back garden unchallenged. He said there was no sign of a burglar alarm and breaking into the place would be a piece of cake. He’d admitted a career that included many hours mopping up after house break-ins was a great apprenticeship for doing it yourself. He’d also gone back that afternoon and knocked on Paton’s door, getting no answer, then tried a neighbour, saying he was a friend hoping to pay his condolences. The neighbour had told him that Irene, Paton’s wife, had gone to stay with family and wouldn’t be back till the next day. It gave them a one-night window of opportunity.

  What if someone had actually answered Paton’s door, Tony had asked him. Danny had sighed and retorted that he wasn’t so stupid as to have left it to chance and had phoned the house twice before making his move to be sure that the place was empty.

  But what if there was a burglar alarm, Winter persisted – a unit hidden out of sight maybe? Danny had exhaled again and explained that a burglar alarm couldn’t stop anyone from breaking into a house and it wasn’t designed to do so. It was a deterrent and there wasn’t much point in an alarm that couldn’t be seen.

  The pair walked silently down Sutherland Avenue, breath freezing before them, lost in their own thoughts about what lay ahead and what had already been. Winter had considered telling Danny about the dreams he’d been having, the ones he couldn’t tell Rachel about. In the end, he decided to keep them to himself but couldn’t help but wonder if the other two were dreaming the same dreams he was.

  They had started the night after he and Rachel had been to the island and he’d ‘seen’ Lily lying on the frozen ground, abandoned and alone. She’d lain there for four months and part of her was still there, waiting to go home. He’d tried to photograph that part of her, that thing that might be soul or plasma or memory.

  The house where Paton had lived was half of the first semi at the end of the street and only a thigh-high fence and a neighbour’s garden separated them from the dead man’s back door. The gardens on Paton’s s
ide of the street were maybe thirty yards long and backed on to more gardens coming the other way, separated by a six-foot-high wall. Bedroom lights still flamed in a few of the homes on the other side of the wall but those neighbouring Paton’s house were, reassuringly, shrouded in darkness.

  As they approached, Danny reached into the pockets of his jacket and produced two balaclavas. When the headgear was wordlessly shared and pulled on, it was Tony’s turn to dig into his pockets and come out with two pairs of nitrile gloves and two pairs of elasticated shoe covers, all liberated from the office stores. They stopped briefly before the rust-coloured fence and slipped the protective coverings over their feet and hands, ready for the task ahead.

  With an easy stride that belied his age and increasing girth, Neilson stepped over the fence first, followed by Winter. The photographer was the taller of the two by an inch or so but his uncle Danny was easily the bigger man. Sometimes he looked as broad as he was tall, burly and thickset, and not someone to be messed with despite being in his sixties. The pair of them padded across the manicured lawn, their covered footsteps leaving a crunchy wake in the frosted grass, then stepped across a narrow area laid out with stone chips so as to avoid unnecessary noise. No fence separated the neighbour’s house from Paton’s and they simply walked across the grass to the English teacher’s back door.

  The houses in Wallace Place dated back to just after the First World War and that, according to Danny, was good news for them and any other would-be housebreakers.

  ‘Old house, old locks,’ he’d told Winter.

  As they stood outside the back door, their breath clouding the air in front of them, Tony moved from foot to foot in a vain attempt to stop the frost from invading his feet until a glare from Danny brought him grudgingly to a standstill. Neilson reached inside his jacket and brought out a selection of thin pieces of card, the moonlight reflecting off their plastic surfaces. As he approached the door, Winter turned his back, looking around edgily in case their arrival had been noticed and fearful that the time it would take to open the door would put them at risk.

  Tony had barely begun to scope the lights in the houses beyond the garden wall, wondering if anyone was watching them through barely closed curtains and reaching for a telephone to call the police, when he heard a hissing sound behind him. He turned and Danny was standing inside Paton’s house, gesturing for Winter to join him inside.

  Taking a deep breath, Winter crossed over the threshold into criminal activity and stepped into Paton’s kitchen, Neilson quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. Both of the men had torches, Danny having been insistent that they couldn’t take the chance of turning on the house lights. With no sign of a computer in the kitchen, Neilson led them into a hallway, their plastic-covered feet making no more than quiet sliding sounds as they moved slowly across the carpets.

  In the first of two reception rooms facing the street, they saw photographs on the mantelpiece and both men paused to look. A man in his mid-forties looked back at them, his arm around a woman of similar age: Mr and Mrs Paton, they presumed – Laurence and Irene. He had fair hair that was greying at the temples, a tight smile that seemed to be forced onto his lips and a blush to the cheeks of his otherwise fair skin. She wore dark-rimmed glasses the colour of her hair and grinned at the camera in an altogether more carefree way than her husband could manage. Winter knew that he now had a face to put to his mental images of Paton lying fatally fractured and bleeding on the path outside. His internal camera snapped an image that would sustain his need. All the photographs above the fire were of the Patons, either together or individually, but with no evidence of any extensions to the family.

  Neilson tugged at Winter’s sleeve and led him out of the room, back into the hallway and into the next room. In the light afforded by the streetlamp, they could make out walls lined with books, a low table covered in magazines and then in the corner they saw it: a wooden desk and a computer.

  Tony crossed the floor, looking to see the model and age of the PC, running his gloved fingers lightly over it as he appraised it like a safecracker.

  Danny raised his eyebrows at him, asking if he could do it. Winter nodded and reached into the pocket of his trousers; it was his turn to bring out a small piece of rectangular plastic and metal.

  ‘What’s that?’ Neilson asked in a low voice.

  ‘It’s a bootable USB stick,’ Winter whispered back at him. ‘You can buy one for fifty quid but I thought it better that no one knew what we were going to do so I made this one myself. It should do the job. Thankfully his PC is just a few years old so we can bypass the hard drive and use this little beauty to boot it up instead.’

  Winter inserted the stick into one of the computer’s USB ports and within a minute it had grumbled into life, the noise worrying both of them, and he had access to the computer’s files. He swiftly copied everything he could see onto the stick, gobbling up every bit of information.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered.

  ‘What is it?’ Danny asked. ‘Even I can see the files transferring across.’

  ‘Yeah, and that’s fine as far as it goes. We can take the stick and look at everything on here in our own time. But I can’t get into his emails this way. He’s using Web-based mail rather than something like Outlook Express or Evolution.’

  ‘So we’re stuck?’

  Winter shook his head and produced another stick from his pocket.

  ‘Plan B. It’s not ideal because if someone takes the time to check the log files, then they’ll know we’ve logged in. The other way would have left no trace but the saving grace is they won’t know who we are.’

  Neilson breathed heavier as he deliberated.

  ‘Okay. Do it.’

  Winter switched the PC off again, then put the second stick into a USB port.

  ‘So what’s different about this stick then?’ Neilson asked as quietly as he could.

  ‘This is a bootable stick as well but I’ve downloaded the ophcrack ISO on to it. It’s a self-contained operating system that includes a password-cracking utility.’

  ‘Am I supposed to understand any of this?’

  ‘Not really. If you did, then everyone would do it. I’ve downloaded and installed rainbow tables for ophcrack onto the stick. They’re precomputed tables for reverse encryption.’

  ‘English, please, son.’

  Tony switched the computer on again.

  ‘It’s going to tell us all his passwords.’

  As the PC hummed back into life, Winter keyed into setup and amended the boot sequence so it would do a one-time boot from the USB stick rather than its hard disk. He then exited setup and let the boot continue, seeing it automatically launch ophcrack and the rainbow tables scanning the user accounts.

  ‘It’s brute-forcing the passwords,’ Winter explained. ‘And now . . . we’ll see them displayed in GUI.’

  Neilson groaned softly. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. Gooey?’

  ‘Graphical User Interface. And . . . there we go . . .’

  Words flashed up on the screen. Not words really, Winter thought: alphanumerics with numbers substituted for letters in the middle of words.

  W4ll4ce

  R4ng3rs1873

  P4tons16

  LP4ton71

  ‘Looks like separate passwords for Laurence and his missus,’ Tony mused. ‘Probably didn’t have access to each other’s email accounts. Did our boy have something to hide, by any chance?’

  ‘We’ve all got things to hide,’ Danny muttered. ‘What now?’

  ‘Now I write these down . . . remove this magic stick . . . and reboot the PC the normal way. When it comes up again, I’ll log in with whichever of these passwords does the trick.’

  Within a minute, Winter had Paton’s email account laid bare in front of him. It struck him that reading someone else’s emails might have left him feeling a bit dirty at the best of times but it was definitely grubby when the person was dead and barely cold in the ground. So be it.

  There
were twenty-odd unopened pieces of mail in Paton’s inbox, the first of them arriving late in the afternoon of the day he’d died. Winter was wary of opening any of them, as that would leave a big, muddy forensic footprint saying they had been there. But from the subject lines, he could see there was the usual share of spam mail offering chances to claim lottery wins and legacies in foreign countries, a larger penis and pills to help keep it interested. There were also a couple of emails from a teaching organisation regarding renewed membership and two notifications from Facebook on his last day on earth. None of that was worth the risk of opening them.

  He started going back through the opened mail, working his way through personal messages and hoping he was invading the privacy of someone who had done something wrong. It was the only thing that would justify what he was doing. There was an invitation to a nephew’s birthday party Paton would never attend; an update on a fundraising committee raising cash for a cancer charity; a long letter from what seemed to be an aged aunt in Canada; on and on, an endless stream of undeleted banality.

  Then he found something much more interesting. The sender was named as a Kyle Irving and the subject line was straight to the point: ‘Re: Help’. Winter opened it and found a few paragraphs of what seemed to be advice to Paton. The letter was all couched in jargon that screamed psychology.

  Dear Laurence,

  I am most concerned with your current psychological state and I fear there is a grave risk of you decompensating back into psychosis. If that happens, then much of our good work may be undone.

  You know that your depression is the product of antecedent conflict. While you cannot change those original events, you can control how you react to them now. We need to return to a position of self-efficacy. Once you regain the confidence to know that you can master everything you set out to accomplish, then I’m sure you will see that what currently seem to be insurmountable psychological issues are merely V codes. They are problems of living rather than a disorder.