by Jack Gatland
She looked to the floor, back to the still smouldering cigarette butt.
‘I’m not gonna do that,’ she hissed. ‘I’m not gonna betray Donna like that.’
Declan leaned in. ‘And us?’ he whispered. Kendis smiled, a sad, remorseful one as she stroked at his hair, protruding out from under the baseball cap.
‘Once I do this, we can go away together,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Peter. It’ll work out.’ She kissed Declan on the cheek. ‘Just watch out for me. I’ll be off grid for a few days. And then I’ll bring the fireworks.’
With that, Kendis Taylor nodded to Nasir and walked off down the path, back towards the southern entrance of the cemetery. Declan looked back to the photographer.
‘And you’re alright with this?’ he asked angrily. Nasir shrugged.
‘You’ve met her, right?’ he replied. ‘You tell her not to do something, it’ll just make her more intent at doing it. I’ll monitor her. It’s my job.’
Declan sighed. Nasir was right. All he could do was wait now and hope to hell that nothing bad happened to Kendis Taylor before he killed her himself.
Billy Fitzwarren sat at his desk, examining a hard drive in his hands, turning it carefully around as he did so. This was the brains of DCI Monroe’s laptop, and somewhere deep inside it was the clue that he needed to find, that explained how this random file had arrived on the screen.
He’d worked out that the file had been uploaded rather than downloaded, so perhaps Monroe had clicked onto a link that had provided malware to do so? No, because that couldn’t happen because of the firewall. Billy had designed it himself, and would have ensured that strange files couldn’t travel through it. Because of the firewall, you could log every keystroke that—
Billy almost dropped the hard drive as a thought came to him. Placing it aside, he opened up his own laptop, clicking on a homemade server application that he’d built from scratch a few months back, firing up the application. Taking the laptop into the briefing room, he attached it directly to the LAN network port, entering the router details. Then, bringing up a second terminal window, he started typing in commands at machine gun speed, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he sent process after process into the system.
Eventually, after what felt like a dozen failed attempts, he stopped.
On the screen was a terminal process receipt.
‘Jo, are you still there?’ he called out.
‘You meant ‘DC Davey,’ didn’t you?’ A voice called out from Monroe’s office, where the forensics officer was still hunting for the smallest clues that could help.
‘Sorry,’ Billy replied. ‘Can you confirm the time of attack again?’
‘The guard claimed that he heard glass breaking at ten-twelve pm,’ DC Davey now popped her head around the door, her frizzy ginger hair wild. ‘Why?’
‘The file didn’t appear on Monroe’s screen until ten-fifteen,’ Billy replied. ‘Which meant that Monroe never saw it, because by that point he’d been attacked.’
‘The attacker put it on?’
‘No, it would have been sent before then, but it’d been delayed in the server, like in some kind of command code limbo,’ Billy spun the laptop to show DC Davey. ‘Look, you see? There’s a back door into our system. Someone opened it and entered our system at ten on the dot, and then attempted to upload it to a particular address, Monroe’s laptop, a minute or so later. But then here, you can see that something else forced the network to freeze for ten minutes. Dumb luck, but they countered each other out. That’s probably why only the front page appeared.’
‘So the network freezing and the attack were two separate incidents?’
Billy leaned back in the chair, staring at the screen.
‘Yeah, I actually think so,’ he said. ‘Which means this could have been two different people, working without knowledge of the other.’ He smiled. ‘But with this, I can now start trying to reverse the transaction.’
‘Good,’ DC Davey left the door, walking back into the office. ‘Can you do it outside? You’re still trailing contaminates all over the crime scene.’
‘But it’s cold outside!’ Billy protested.
‘Then wear a coat,’ Davey’s voice shouted out.
‘You know we’re the same rank, right?’ Billy folded his arms. ‘I don’t have to take orders from you.’
DC Davey’s head popped around the door again.
‘I know how to kill you and make you disappear forever,’ she said, before leaving once more.
Billy shivered.
‘I’ll get my coat then,’ he muttered.
In a small office in Portcullis House, Malcolm Gladwell sat at his desk, reading a daily report while munching on a chocolate digestive. It was his only vice, really. Everything he ate was organically grown and ethically farmed, but these bloody things were his Kryptonite. He’d finished one and was about to reach for another when a line in the report stopped him.
‘Denise!’ he shouted out of his door. A moment later a mousey blonde woman in her late thirties, slim but shapelessly dressed appeared, notebook in hand.
‘You summoned me, oh lord and master?’ she enquired. Gladwell glared at her.
‘Why was I under surveillance last night?’ he asked, pointing at a line in the report. Denise squinted, but standing across the room, there was no way that she could see what he was showing. Irritated, Gladwell looked back at it.
‘It says here that security services were outside The Horse and Guard last night, while I was in there,’ he muttered. ‘Is someone making a bloody play for me? Have you heard anything?’
‘Nothing on the drums,’ Denise walked in now, snatching the report from Gladwell and reading it. ‘And this doesn’t say that they were surveilling you. Just that they were there.’
‘It’s a pokey little nowhere pub in the arse end of Chelsea,’ Gladwell snapped. ‘Nobody else would…’
He stopped.
‘Unless they were following who I met with.’
‘And who was that?’
‘Never you mind,’ Gladwell rummaged through his desk. ‘I don’t need you now.’
As Denise wandered back out of the office, Gladwell pulled a cheap-looking burner phone out of his drawer. Turning it on, he walked over to his office door, closing it as he dialled a number. After a few rings, it went to voicemail.
‘They’re watching you,’ he said. ‘We need to talk as soon as possible.’
Disconnecting the call, Gladwell once more dismantled the phone, placing it back into his drawer. Sitting back in his chair, he leaned up, staring at the ceiling.
He was so close right now.
Nobody was going to stop him.
6
Wine Barred
Anjli had returned to Temple Inn after a hastily grabbed lunch, and a change of clothes back in her shared apartment in Shoreditch. She hadn’t been out the night before, but had thrown on the first things that she could find, half in the dark, when she’d heard the news about Monroe. Now she’d showered, imbibed a litre of the finest coffee she had in stock, checked in with her mum to ensure that the chemotherapy sessions were still going okay, and now had what she called her battle armour on; her most official looking suit and her bitch please boots. If anything or anyone came at her today, she’d give them a damned good kicking.
Billy was waiting outside the Crime Unit when she arrived. She didn’t have a car because of a lack of parking around her home, so she often pooled any driving cases with him, including a terrifying, breakneck drive through country roads the previous day as they hunted the captured Monroe.
Fat lot of good that did.
‘What have you got?’ she asked. ‘Or has Marcos kicked you out of the office again?’
‘She’s with Monroe right now,’ Billy replied indignantly. Anjli smiled.
‘So it’s DC Davey that’s kicked you out?’
‘Shut up,’ Billy muttered. ‘She scares me.’
‘Everyone scares you,’ Anjli replied, pat
ting Billy on the shoulder. ‘So again, what have you got?’
‘Not sure,’ Billy admitted. ‘The file that Monroe had on his laptop, the one that had frozen it? I realised that there was no route for it.’
‘What do you mean, route?’ Anjli frowned.
‘Journey, procedure, whatever you want to call it. To end up on Monroe’s screen, there had to be a route. Either he had it emailed to him, or he downloaded it from a server, maybe even found it on a website, it doesn’t matter. Files don’t magically appear.’
‘Except this one did.’
Billy nodded. ‘You know when you’re online and a cookie window appears, advertising something? That’s exactly what happened here. Something or rather someone sent this to Monroe without him asking for it, and straight through the network.’
‘I thought we had fail-safes on the network?’
Billy shrugged, looking around the car park. ‘We’re City of London police. We have exactly the same firewalls as they do. More so, because I upgraded them. The only way that this could have come in was if someone had a backdoor in. So, I ran a few processes, and bingo. Someone used a backdoor to send this directly to his laptop. However, someone else seemed to have the same idea to hack our server at the same time, there was some kind of server blip when they did, and it broke the laptop.’
Anjli raised a hand to stop Billy. ‘Someone with a backdoor… Are you saying this was Trix?’
Trixibelle Preston had been an intern at the unit a few weeks ago, but was forcibly removed when it was discovered that she was a mole for a suspect in a murder case, and had been working for Pearce Associates the whole time. She’d bugged the rooms in the Crime Unit when she was in the offices, so there was no reason she couldn’t have bypassed the network.
‘Possibly,’ Billy said. ‘But then I don’t know how we’d find out. She disappeared off the grid after the Devington affair.’
‘We should do something about that,’ Anjli muttered. ‘Okay then. Anything else?’
Billy shook his head. ‘CCTV had nothing and nobody was in the other buildings.’
Anjli nodded, deciding. ‘Right then, we need to sweep the area. See if anyone saw something suspicious.’
‘There’s a bar just outside the Eastern Gate,’ Billy suggested. ‘It’s a long shot, but they might have seen the attacker enter?’
Anjli and Billy started down Temple Lane, out into Tudor Street. It wasn’t worth driving, as everything nearby was within a short walk. And, exactly as Billy had said, outside the gates of Temple Inn was a wine bar. Walking across the road and up to the door, Anjli could see that the afternoon trade was already thriving. With Billy beside her, Anjli opened the glass door and entered.
To the outside it looked like a simple bar with blacked-out windows and minimal flamboyance, but once inside it was like a new world. Mirrors lined the walls, reflecting into the bar, with comfortable chairs and expensive looking oak tables on either side of the hardwood floor. Along the top of the walls were old drinks adverts, lit by small lamps and a selection of fairy lights, stapled up so that they were strewn across the ceiling.
Walking through to the end, Anjli found that the wine bar opened up more as they passed into a larger back room, a long wooden bar to their left, and diners to the right sitting at small tables, deep in conversation. Behind the bar was a man in a black shirt, currently pouring a generous white wine for a group of ladies on the other side.
‘With you in a minute,’ he said, passing the glass over and taking a credit card. Pressing it to his card machine, allowing the receipt to go through, he passed card and paper to the ladies and, as they walked away turned his attention to Anjli.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. Anjli showed her warrant card.
‘I’m DS Kapoor, and this is DC Fitzwarren,’ she said. ‘We work in the Temple Inn Crime Unit.’
The barman nodded conversationally. ‘Do you want to see the manager?’ he asked. ‘I’m guessing this is a noise thing?’
‘Actually, no,’ Billy interrupted. ‘There was an incident in the Unit late last night. They attacked one of our own. We believe the assailant entered through the gate, just outside, and we hoped that you may have a camera or something that we could check? Or perhaps someone was outside and saw anyone coming or going?’
‘A lot of people come and go from that place,’ the barman started drying a freshly washed glass as he thought. ‘We have side tables down Temple Lane, but we don’t have any CCTV as such. Just covering the door.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I could ask the staff who were in last night, see if any of them saw anything?’
‘Please,’ Anjli replied, passing a card over. ‘This is my number. If you think of anything, call me immediately.’
‘There was one thing,’ the barman said as he pocketed the card. ‘What time was this?’
‘Some time around ten pm,’ Billy replied. The barman thought for a moment and then nodded.
‘We had a car parked outside,’ he said, pointing through the wall towards the approximate location of Tudor Street. ‘Not outside us, but to the left, outside next door’s office. It’s a single yellow so you’re allowed to in the evening, but it just felt odd. He was sitting there for a good half hour, maybe more. I came out around ten thirty for a smoke and it’d gone.’
‘Did you see the man inside the car?’ Billy asked. The barman shrugged.
‘Not really. I think he was white, dark hair? I know that’s pretty much most people. Sorry.’
‘What type of car was it?’ Anjli continued the questioning. The barman considered this.
‘I don’t know cars well,’ he admitted, ‘but it was grey and it had these four interlocking rings on the front grill. Is that Audi? Or Saab?’
‘You saw a grey Audi parked outside for half an hour around ten pm?’ Anjli was writing this into her notepad. ‘Thanks, you’ve been incredibly helpful.’
The barman smiled, happy to be of service as Anjli and Billy walked back out of the wine bar. Exiting out into the street, Anjli paused, looking to her partner.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Just going through everything in my head,’ Anjli replied. ‘The guard said he considered nothing off about the man who passed last night, as he thought it was Declan.’ She looked back to the junction of Tudor Street and Bouverie Street. ‘And apparently, a grey Audi waited just there before Monroe was attacked. Declan drives a grey Audi. We need to see where it was last night.’
‘You can’t seriously believe that Walsh did this!’ Billy exclaimed. Anjli shook her head.
‘I don’t, but I’m thinking that someone wants people to,’ she admitted. ‘Your source said that Baker is after Declan, and us by default. The same day you get this, we have a late night attack on Monroe, and circumstantial evidence is racking up against Declan. Something’s off. There are too many things in play. I’m not sure who we can even trust right now.’
‘We need a codeword,’ Billy suggested. ‘You know, so that when someone says ‘this reminds me of Belgrade’, we know what they really mean.’
‘I’ve never been to Belgrade,’ Anjli muttered as she started back towards the arched entrance to Temple Inn. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’
Billy smiled. ‘Like in the movies. Spy codes. So when I say ‘this reminds me of Belgrade—’
‘I’ve not been to Belgrade.’
‘You don’t need to, I mean that when I say the code word, you know I’m really saying ‘I’m gonna kill the man on the left and jump through a window.’
‘Why in God’s name would you do either of those?’
‘I don’t mean those exact actions,’ Billy grinned. ‘I’m going to work us out some.’
Anjli sighed. ‘Can you do it after we’ve solved the attack on our boss?’ she asked sweetly. ‘You know, as that’s the important bit here?’
Anjli knew she was right. Someone was trying to cause doubt on Declan. But then a memory came back to her.
‘How d
id you get here so fast? There’s no way you made it here from Hurley in half an hour.’
‘I was in the apartment in Tottenham. I give the keys back soon, so needed to check it out. Dozed off there.’
Had Declan really been in Tottenham? What would his tracker say? And how could she believe he would do such a thing, when there were far more obvious targets out there?
Shaking her head to dispel the thoughts, Anjli followed Billy back into Temple Inn.
It was almost five when Declan returned to the ACCU ward, seeing Doctor Marcos alone beside Monroe’s bed.
‘Any change?’ he asked as he entered the room. Doctor Marcos looked up.
‘A little,’ she said. ‘He’s responding to stimulus, which is good. But we still don’t know how bad things are in there until he wakes. And it impacted one of his teeth, so he’ll need to see a dental surgeon. Probably at half-past two.’
‘Why then?’ Declan was confused at this. Doctor Marcos gave a small smile.
‘It’s their favourite time,’ she said. ‘Two thirty.’
Tooth hurty.
Declan almost groaned, but saw that with the faint attempt of a joke over, Doctor Marcos’ face had returned to the grim concern that it had been when he arrived.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Declan stood at the end of the bed now. ‘He’s Glaswegian. This is a holiday.’
‘If he’d just been attacked, I might feel the same way about the tough old bugger,’ Doctor Marcos replied. ‘But considering what he’s gone through over the last couple of days…’
Declan sat on a second chair, a small, rickety one, and stared at the bed and his boss. ‘They’re bringing in a DCI to look into this,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the Chief Superintendent earlier.’
‘They should just leave it to us,’ Doctor Marcos muttered. ‘We’d work it out way faster than any clown they called in. Any idea who it’ll be?’
‘No idea,’ Declan shook his head. ‘Only DCIs I know are Bullman from yesterday, Farrow in Tottenham and Ford, although she’s not police anymore.’
