Then she bumped into Frank Manners. Literally. The old crime hack who had once caused her such trouble turned abruptly away from the bar just as Jo was heading for the door and they collided. She hadn’t seen him since his enforced early retirement deal nineteen years earlier now and Manners, who must have reached his late seventies, looked to be in far better fettle than he deserved. His complexion was a little more florid, which might in any event have been down to his obviously well-oiled state, but other than that he had changed astonishingly little.
‘Good God, it’s the golden girl,’ he bellowed. ‘Got any other poor sod sacked lately?’
A slight hush fell in their part of the bar. Manners’s attitude hadn’t changed either, she thought. Why did he have to be such a bastard? He must have known he’d been asking for trouble after what he’d done all those years ago, surely. Remembering the shock and distress of it, the anger washed over her. ‘If you’ve got something to say, Frank, say it straight,’ she snapped. ‘If you hadn’t taken to making bloody poisonous anonymous phone calls you’d have kept your job for as long as you wanted it, and you know it!’
Frank stared at her in slack-mouthed bewilderment. ‘Have you finally gone totally and utterly barking mad, woman?’ he enquired. ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what the fuck you’re talking about.’
She opened her mouth to make a suitably cutting reply. Something in his expression and in the way that he had spoken stopped her in her tracks. Suddenly she knew, with terrible devastating clarity, that he was telling the truth. She pushed past him, desperate to get away from the crush of noisy drinkers.
Outside she took deep breaths of the autumn air. Her brain was spinning. There was an all too clear alternative to the various assumptions she had made so long ago about Manners, which had just never occurred to her before. Now it seemed glaringly obvious. And she was horrified.
‘Oh, my God,’ she thought. ‘Paul!’
*
For the rest of the afternoon and evening Joanna operated on autopilot. She travelled home to Richmond in a kind of daze, somehow managing both to arrive there as promised before Emily and to go through the normal motions of family life. She cooked them both a meal and forced herself to sit down and eat with her daughter whose chief topic of conversation was Saturday’s planned shopping trip and how her life would be ruined unless, as well as new clothes, her mother bought her yet another trendy new computer game, which of course absolutely everybody else at school already had.
Joanna, totally preoccupied, found she kept drifting off, but after a while a thought struck her. ‘You like playing computer games, and going on the Net and stuff with your dad, don’t you, Em?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Her daughter’s face lit up. ‘He’s brilliant.’
‘Is he really?’
‘Oh, yeah. Dad can do anything on a computer.’
‘Anything?’
‘Pretty well. Alice Rivers’s father’s a real geek and he doesn’t know half as much as Dad.’
‘Bit of a super-hacker, is he then, your dad?’
Emily looked doubtful. ‘He said I wasn’t to tell,’ she said.
‘Tell what? I can keep a secret.’
Emily still looked doubtful.
‘Anyway, if it’s your father’s secret I expect I know it already.’
Joanna had the grace to feel ashamed of herself. Not only was she pumping her daughter for information about her father, but she was also playing on Emily’s special relationship with him. She thought there was a fair chance that Emily would not be able to resist demonstrating that Paul confided more in her than in his wife. And she was right.
‘Once he let me watch him hack into the Daily Mirror,’ Emily blurted out.
Jo tried not to let her surprise show. ‘Ah,’ she said non-committally.
‘It took him a long time and he said he couldn’t get into the whole system but he was actually able to look at some of their stories for the next day. It was awesome.’ Emily’s eyes shone with pride.
‘Awesome,’ agreed Jo absently, foreboding growing with everything her daughter told her.
After Emily had eventually gone to bed, Jo decided, in spite of her resolution, that she needed another drink. She poured herself her usual half-tumbler or so of Scotch and then, thinking better of it, emptied two-thirds of it back into the bottle. She carried her glass into the living room, dimmed the lights and sat very still on the big, squashy black sofa, waiting for Paul to come home. She needed to think.
She had never before talked much about computer skills with either her husband or her child. Jo was able enough, but her interest in computers was strictly limited to their use as a tool of her trade. She’d had no idea Paul was as adept as Emily had suggested. It had never occurred to her before to ask. And she had only done so now because of her chance meeting with Frank Manners earlier in the day, what she felt she had learned from it and the thoughts to which that revelation had led her.
Frank’s reaction had convinced her totally that he had not been responsible for those poisonous phone calls and her suspicions had somehow switched instantly to Paul. But could he really have made those awful calls to Chris, deliberately setting out to wreck her first marriage, later even pretending that he had received an anonymous call himself? Was he that manipulative, that wicked? If so, could he also be responsible for much more than that?
After a while she heard Paul’s chauffeur-driven car pull up outside and a few seconds later his key turned in the lock. He didn’t seem surprised to see her sitting in near-darkness. He glanced pointedly at her drink. She guessed he thought she was drunk again. Actually, she had barely touched her glass and, in spite of all the champagne at the wake that afternoon, she had never felt more sober.
‘Emily all right?’ he enquired casually, as he too poured himself a whisky. A small one with lots of water.
She nodded. ‘Went to bed an hour or so ago. She was telling me what a whizz-kid you are with computers. I had no idea.’
He sat down in an armchair opposite her, putting the whisky bottle on the low table between them, and shot her a quizzical look.
Oh, God, she hadn’t meant to blurt out anything like that. She’d no intention of confronting him. Not yet, anyway. The last time she had allowed her behaviour to be governed by crazy suspicions it had led to the awful hotel room confrontation with Mike Fielding, the very thought of which still made her cringe.
‘You’ve never shown any interest,’ he told her reasonably. ‘In any case, no doubt Emily was exaggerating.’
‘She said you can hack into the Daily Mirror?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ He grinned easily. ‘I got lucky one night. Impressed Em no end. But I couldn’t get to any of the important stuff, of course, that was far too well protected, just the pre-print.’
That meant non-newsy features and service pages like travel and motoring. She had no idea whether or not he was playing it down, but even what he was admitting to impressed Joanna just as much as it had her daughter.
She let it pass.
‘How was the memorial service?’ he enquired after a bit. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t get away today. McKane could be a pain in the arse but he was a fine newspaperman.’
Joanna nodded. ‘It went well enough. Good turnout. I saw Frank Manners there.’
Off she went again. She hadn’t really meant to start on that either, but now that she had she knew she was not going to be able to stop. ‘He accused me of getting him sacked.’
Paul laughed lightly. ‘Well, to coin a famous phrase, he would, wouldn’t he?’
‘The subject of those moody phone calls came up. He denied all knowledge.’
‘And he would do that, too, wouldn’t he?’ Paul repeated.
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed meekly.
He studied her thoughtfully. ‘Don’t let that old bastard get to you after all these years,’ he told her. ‘I think you’d better have another drink.’ He picked up the whisky bottle and poured a hefty measure into he
r glass, filling it almost to the brim. Well, she supposed that was the way she had been drinking lately, but he didn’t usually encourage her like this.
She thought she had better back off before she talked herself into a corner. After all, she didn’t really know what to believe about anything any more. ‘I’m tired, I think I’ll go on up,’ she said eventually.
Paul watched Joanna leave the room and head for the stairs, taking the nearly full glass of whisky with her. He was uneasy. Those remarks about his computer skills and the moody phone calls had been distinctly pointed. What was going on in her head, he wondered anxiously.
She was drinking too much, of course, but usually she didn’t let it show. He believed that she would pull herself together sooner or later. She was that sort of woman. The important thing was that she was back in line.
He would have preferred just to have been able to wave a magic wand and make Joanna love him so much she wouldn’t even have wanted to rekindle her old affair with Fielding. He would have settled just for being able to make her see how very much he loved her. He had no idea why he had never been able to do even that, but he knew that he hadn’t.
At least she understood now that he was not prepared to lose her. Men like him didn’t take kindly to losing what they had won with hard work and diligent application. For Paul, the same went for his marriage and his wife as for his job. His world, both at home and at work, would carry on, now, just as it had always done. That was all he had ever wanted, that and to ensure that his prospect of being knighted, almost certainly in the new year’s honours list the following January he had been led to believe, would not be affected by some unseemly scandal.
He didn’t believe that he would face any further problems from Joanna, even though Fielding had been freed. Or at least, he hadn’t until this evening.
Paul had never been remotely under suspicion of organising the e-mail frame-up, as he had known he would not be. For a start nobody, not even Joanna, understood the strength of his motivation. And, of course, no one had ever realised quite how adept he was with computers and with working the Net. It was one of the secrets of his success in newspapers. He could hack into the memories of other people’s computers and hence into their lives, and even into other newspapers, with surprising frequency. His only mistake had been to show off to his daughter. He basked in her pride in him. How he wished his wife would love him half as much and as unconditionally as he was sure his daughter did. He shouldn’t ever have revealed so much of his skill to Emily, of course. He just hoped that Joanna had believed him when he had played down his abilities and achievements. He couldn’t be sure whether she had or not, but even Emily had no idea just how good he really was.
What he had done was complex but certainly not impossible, particularly if you had a leaning in that direction. All the software you needed, and the instructions, were available to anybody, free on the Net. It was called LINUX – a robust, fully featured operating system with a mind-blowing hacking capacity. All you had to do was download it and understand it – then you could make it do pretty much anything you wanted. Even Paul didn’t understand the half of it. He wondered if anybody did except the brilliant software technicians who had written the programme. But he had managed to decipher and understand enough for his purposes.
With the help of LINUX he had written a virus, which he had lodged in Mike Fielding’s computer by attaching it to an inconsequential e-mail. The virus installed the phoney e-mail files, at the same time hiding them from view by burying them deep in the computer’s memory. The phoney e-mails left no footprints because they were only ever files within the virus and the e-mail Paul had attached the virus to was, of course, untraceable – despatched from yet another Excite address, set up and operated from a second-hand laptop.
It wasn’t just East End villains who knew about computer markets and the advantages of their stock. Even before the love-bug hackers had been caught through the codes inside their Microsoft software, Paul had taken no chances. He kept his street-market-acquired laptop locked in a box in a dark corner of the garden shed that was his own secret retreat.
Paul had so far been quite pleased with himself in the circumstances. He supposed it would have been overly optimistic to have expected his ruse to result in Fielding actually being convicted for a crime he had not committed. He’d settled for knowing that he’d wreaked havoc in the policeman’s life, just the way Fielding had wreaked havoc in his. He’d rather the policeman had been convicted, of course, sent down for good. But his plan had proved effective enough. It had ended Fielding’s career and been the final nail in the coffin of the detective’s affair with Joanna. Actually, he’d been quite content to settle for that – and for getting Joanna back.
But now he was not quite sure of her again. For a moment, as they had sat together earlier, he had thought she had been going to level some kind of accusation at him. He couldn’t be certain, but he reckoned he ought to play safe. Joanna must never know what he had done. That would ruin everything.
He finished his drink, put the empty glass in the sink in the kitchen and left the house through the kitchen door. As he headed across the lawn, he glanced behind him up at the window of the bedroom he and Jo shared. The light had been switched off. He’d had an ulterior motive in pouring her that extra large Scotch. She was certain to be deep into a whisky-induced sleep by now. Nothing was going to wake her for several hours.
At the bottom of the garden he unlocked the shed. The second-hand laptop was still safe in its usual hiding place. He knew he ought to have disposed of it before now and wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. A kind of arrogance, he supposed. He had always been so far ahead of the game he hadn’t felt the need to abide by the normal rules. But Joanna had rattled his confidence somewhat and he was going to take no more risks.
He picked up the laptop, all its various software and connecting bits, and carried the lot back into the house cradled in his arms. He closed and locked the kitchen door behind him, walked through the house to the front and put the pile on the hall table while he opened the door to the cupboard alongside and rummaged around for the holdall he knew was there somewhere. When he’d found it he transferred everything into it and left the house through the front door as quietly as possible, setting off on foot down the hill. He had considered using either Jo’s car or his own, locked in the garage, but he didn’t know where her keys were and opening up the garage could well make enough noise to wake even Joanna. No more risks. That was his new rule. He’d walk. After all, the river wasn’t far away.
Less than a minute later Joanna slipped out of the house behind him.
She hadn’t drunk the huge whisky Paul had poured for her. She hadn’t wanted it. Neither had she wanted to sleep. She had just wanted to be alone to carry on thinking. She had switched off the bedroom lights and sat, still fully clothed, in the chair by the window overlooking the garden.
It was a clear, starry night and anyway it never got properly dark in London or the suburbs. She had seen Paul padding across the lawn, disappearing past the fruit trees into the dense shrubby area at the bottom of the garden. At first she took little notice, he quite frequently went into the garden when he came home at night. She had no idea what he did down there and had never given it much thought until now. She certainly had no idea of any of the uses he had for the garden shed. He just told her that he enjoyed the fresh night air after a day cooped up in an air-conditioned building and that had always seemed perfectly reasonable. But watching idly as he reappeared, walking back across the lawn towards the house just a few minutes later, she saw that he was carrying something in his arms, although the light was too dim for her to see what it was.
She heard him lock up the back of the house and make his way through to the front, then open the hall cupboard and start rummaging about. On impulse, she made her way as silently as possible out through the already ajar bedroom door to the top of the stairs. Looking down, she could clearly see an unfamiliar laptop computer on
the hall table. She backed away on to the landing as Paul emerged from the cupboard clutching a holdall and, peeping cautiously through the banisters, she watched him load the little computer into the bag, sling it over his shoulder and leave the house.
Again acting on impulse, she decided to follow him, hardly believing what she was doing. It was almost one o’clock on an autumn night; there were hardly any other pedestrians about and very little traffic. She was wearing only jeans and a cotton shirt, as she hadn’t waited to grab a coat or a jacket. She shivered in the cool air and was careful to keep well back as Paul made his way down Richmond Hill and into Hill Rise past their favourite Chinese restaurant. Then he turned smartly left towards the river and set off purposefully across Richmond Bridge. Jo ducked into a convenient doorway, realising she would have to wait until he had crossed over before following him if she was to have any chance of avoiding being seen.
But halfway over the bridge Paul paused, glancing briefly around him as if checking there was nobody nearby. Then he moved closer to the bridge wall. His back was towards Jo. The street lighting on the bridge was not as bright as it might have been and Jo’s angle of sight was all wrong. From the doorway she could not quite see what he was doing. She moved out on to the pavement and took a few cautious steps forward in order to get a better view. As she did so, she saw Paul remove the holdall from his shoulder and in one fluent movement toss it into the River Thames.
Joanna gasped and only just stopped herself crying out. She supposed this was what she had been half expecting. It was also what she had been dreading. She went into shock.
Her husband stood for just a few seconds longer, looking down at the water, then turned round and began to walk briskly back towards her. At that moment a car swung over the bridge, its headlights fully illuminating Jo. She felt like a rabbit trapped by a lamper. She just couldn’t move. She froze.
A Kind Of Wild Justice Page 36
