by TM Logan
‘Clearly. What do you know about my son?’
‘Could we talk inside for a couple of minutes?’
She crossed her arms and her voice took on a harder edge.
‘I’m not sure you realise quite how odd it is, Mr King, you just turning up here out of the blue – no phone call, no warning. Just arriving on my doorstep asking about my Benjamin.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. Everything was a bit rushed, there was no time to call a –’
‘It’s not normal behaviour.’
‘This is not a normal situation.’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘I’ve no idea who you are. You could be anyone.’
‘I’m a friend of Ben’s.’
‘So you say. How do I know it wasn’t Ben that gave you those bruises?’
That’s uncomfortably close to the truth.
I held my hands up.
‘Listen, Mrs Delaney, I just want to make sure that your son’s all right. He’s a cracking bloke and I know he’d do the same for me if I went AWOL. That’s all.’
She peered at me then, a little less certain.
‘Do you think he’s in some kind of trouble?’
‘He’s been out of contact, which is unlike him. He’s not answering his phone, and . . .’
‘And?’
I checked up and down the street again, in case anyone else was in earshot.
‘He and Beth are having some . . . issues.’
‘So the police said, but I don’t believe it. Not my Ben.’
‘It’s true. I wish it wasn’t.’
She stared at me, sizing me up, concern for her own safety tempered by fear for her son. She seemed torn between the prospect of letting a complete stranger into her house and the worry for her boy and his situation. I wondered whether she would be guided by her head or her heart.
Finally, her concern as a mother won out. She called the dogs back to her side and unhooked the door chain.
‘Why don’t you come in for a minute?’ Her voice softened a little. ‘Since you’ve come all this way.’
73
Mrs Delaney showed me into the immaculate lounge while she busied herself in the kitchen making a fresh pot of coffee. The wall and mantelpiece were decorated with pictures of the Delaney family. Holidays in Sydney, Rio, Florida, Egypt among them. Many of the pictures I recognised from Ben’s own study back in Hampstead.
Mrs Delaney appeared again, both dogs trotting alongside her. She handed me a coffee in a bone china cup and saw the picture I was looking at, teenaged Ben with his prefect badge.
‘That was the year our Ben got the school prize,’ she said. ‘Such a clever boy.’
I sipped my coffee. It was good, smooth and strong, an expensive blend.
‘His school looks a bit posher than mine.’
‘Top three in the north-east.’
‘Your daughter-in-law said he didn’t go to the local comp.’
‘Brayfield? God no, pet. I’d rather have home-schooled him than sent him there. Terrible place, full of all the wrong sort. And it’s even worse now than it was when Benjamin was a lad.’
She gestured towards an armchair at the end of the lounge and asked me to sit down. I liked her, liked the fact that she had listened to me, let me into her house, given me the benefit of the doubt when most people would have slammed the door in my face. She seemed genuine, and the worry on her face was clear to see.
‘My name’s Ruth, by the way.’
‘Thanks for letting me in.’ I sank back into the deep leather armchair. ‘Can’t believe that Ben’s been out of touch for this long, you must be worried sick.’
‘I’ve barely slept. A few hours a night.’
‘When did you last hear from him?’
‘He was never the best at staying in touch, to be honest. Normally every other weekend, sometimes every third weekend depending on what he had going on at work. He was so busy with his business, he wasn’t in touch the weekend just gone.’
‘I think he came up here from London last night,’ I added. ‘I thought he might have dropped in to see you.’
‘Benjamin’s not been to visit me since the summer,’ she said slowly.
My mobile rang.
The display showed a mobile number that the phone didn’t recognise. Probably junk. I rejected the call.
‘Sorry about that.’
‘Tell me more about the . . . woman they say he’s involved with,’ she said. ‘A friend’s wife, the policeman told me?’
‘Don’t really know her that well,’ I lied. ‘Apparently they’d been having a fling for a few months but she wanted to break it off.’
‘Probably realised she couldn’t get her hands on his money. Trollops like that are always after something.’
I felt myself stiffen involuntarily. ‘I’m not sure that’s quite how it happened.’
‘Really?’ she said slowly, her tone changing. ‘So how do you think it happened?’
‘From what I heard, it was more of a mutual –’
A flickering in the glass-framed pictures on the mantelpiece caught my eye. Pulses of reflected light.
Flashing lights.
Flashing blue lights.
There was a police patrol car outside the house, blue lights revolving. As I watched, both doors flew open and a pair of uniformed officers jumped out.
And now Ruth Delaney was on her feet, a kitchen knife in her hand – the blade up and pointed towards me.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’
‘Who?’
‘Her husband! The husband of the woman who threw herself at Benjamin, I knew it the moment I saw you.’
‘You called the police.’ I couldn’t quite believe it.
‘They warned me about you!’ Her voice was suddenly as hard as stone.
I stood up quickly, adrenalin jolting me upright. The police officers were across the road, one of them talking into his radio.
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘The police said you might come here. And I should call them if you did. And now you’re going to stay right here and tell them the truth about what you did to my boy!’
The sound of boots crunching quickly up the gravel drive to the front door. I moved towards the hallway. I had only seconds.
‘Mrs Delaney, I had nothing to do with –’
‘Don’t come near me!’ She jabbed the knife in my direction and the dogs picked up her fear instantly, their hackles raised, mouths drawn back in a snarl to show rows of teeth.
I held my hands out as I edged past her.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
One of the Jack Russells leaped forward and locked onto my ankle with a growl. I stumbled backwards into the hall, dragging the dog with me, its teeth like a line of needles in my flesh. There was a hammering on the front door and shouts from the two police officers, dark shapes through the glass of the front door.
Got to get out of here.
The dog continued snarling and biting down and I half dragged it down the hallway with me as I headed for the kitchen, feeling its hot breath on my skin, blood in my shoe. Finally I shook it loose, turned and ran as Ruth Delaney started screaming.
‘This is your bitch wife’s fault! God help you if you’ve hurt Benjamin, you bastard! I’ll kill you myself, I swear it!’
I turned right into a conservatory, sent a wicker side table flying and burst through the open French doors, sprinting the length of her garden without looking back. I could still hear wild barking and screaming as I smashed through a trellis panel and dived headlong over the wall into her neighbour’s garden.
I kicked through a panel in the next fence and kept going.
74
There were seven splinters in the heel of my right palm from the variety of fences I had vaulted, shinned up and heaved myself over as I ran from the police. Four of the tiny wooden shards came out, but the other three were lodged too deep, and the more I tried to wheedle them out, the deeper the
y went. The harder you push, the more you struggle, the deeper the barb is buried.
I had pushed too hard, and now it was me that was about to be buried.
With the hoodie of my sweatshirt pulled over my head, I sat on a bench at Sunderland train station, near the end of the platform. As far away from other people as I could get. I had dodged a slack-looking young policeman on the way in, and was keeping an eye on him as he checked slowly up and down the platforms. Looking for someone.
My right arm ached from where I had jumped a wall and landed badly. The wound from the dog bite on my left ankle had bled down into my shoe, four distinct punctures on each side of my leg, and was now a low throbbing ache stiffening the joint and making it painful to walk on. I flexed my ankle, rotating it, teeth gritted against the pain. It had never been great since metal pins were put in it more than ten years ago, after one drunken night that had wrecked my sporting career.
I dialled Larssen’s number and he picked up after the first ring.
‘Joe, your phone’s been off. What have you been doing?’
I touched the bruise by my eye socket.
‘This and that.’
‘Are you OK? You sound terrible.’
‘I’ve been worse. Can’t remember when, but hey-ho.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Waiting for a train.’
‘You’re coming back to London?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. We need to talk about your options.’
I tensed, anticipating another sucker punch, unsure how it was possible to make things any worse at this point.
‘Options?’
‘As in what we do next. Your best course of action at this point.’
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Turned my head slightly so I could track the progress of the young police officer. He’d moved to the next platform over and was talking to a fluorescent-jacketed member of the station staff.
‘So, what do you think I should do? What’s your advice?’
‘Well, Joe, the police have your admission that you were at the scene of the incident, backed up with forensic evidence, they’ve found your mobile at the supposed burial location, plus Mr Delaney’s blood in the boot of your car. They also have suspicious internet searches on your mobile and metadata that looks like you were sending messages using his phone to mislead the police. They have forensic authorship analysis indicating that he was not the author of messages posted. And underlying it all, of course, is the fact that your wife was sexually involved with Ben Delaney.’
He said nothing for a moment, letting the news sink in.
All I could think of was Ben’s grinning face.
Game, set and match, big fella.
The bright steel railway tracks were only a few feet in front of me. I sat forward on the bench and stared at them. How much pain would there be if you got hit by an intercity doing 100 miles an hour? Probably nothing at all, or maybe just for a second. It would be too fast. One second you’d be there – living, breathing, thinking. A functioning member of the human race. The next second scattered, extinguished, destroyed. Gone.
Larssen said: ‘Joe, are you still there?’
‘I’m fucked, aren’t I?’
He paused before answering.
‘We need to sit down and talk about this properly, Joe. Face-to-face. No more phone calls, no more getting on trains and running around the country. That’s my advice.’
‘Are you still representing me?’
He hesitated again, more electronic silence hanging between us.
‘If we start doing things my way.’
‘Does that include walking into a police station and giving myself up?’
‘You make it sound like you’ve been on some kind of crime spree.’
‘Just asking the question.’
‘The advice I gave you yesterday still stands, yes.’
The phone was hot against my ear.
‘So this is it, then.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Police, a murder charge, bail if I’m really lucky.’
‘Nothing’s certain at this stage. But we need to start being smart about all this.’
‘Do you think I’ll get bail?’
Once again, he avoided my question.
‘Are you on your way back to London?’
‘Due back in about three and a half hours.’
I agreed to get a taxi from King’s Cross as soon as my train got in and go straight to his office – no detours, no visits, no unscheduled stops – for 3 p.m. He and I would prepare and discuss strategy for an hour, and he would send one of the firm’s young associates to my house to pick up a suit for me to change into. Then he would drive me to Kilburn Police Station and I would give myself up to DCI Naylor before close of play today. Except Larssen didn’t call it ‘giving myself up’, he called it ‘making myself available for further questioning’.
It was 10.55 a.m. A week and a day ago, at this very moment, I had been standing in front of a Year Ten class discussing Of Mice and Men. Eight days ago.
I promised Larssen I would be there at 3 p.m.
75
In the rearmost carriage on the train home, as far from other passengers as possible, I sat in a corner seat with the hoodie pulled over my head. I had nothing to do. Nothing to read, no one to talk to. Nothing to think about apart from police stations and DNA evidence and what I would say to my wife and child. My mobile phone, on the train table in front of me, was my only companion. And however much I tried to look out of the window as eastern England rolled by, my eyes were drawn back to the rectangle of black plastic time and again. It was my only connection to my family. My only weapon in the fight.
Except this weapon – or rather its predecessors – had already burned me twice. The first by its discovery in a suspicious place. Then by a suspicious internet search history stored in the memory of its replacement. Maybe this expensive piece of highly engineered electronics was ready to betray me for a third time. What else could it be hiding?
I opened up Google and went through the search history from the last couple of days. How did you even hack into that? The searches all looked familiar in any case: train timetables, maps, the solicitor’s number from Mel’s secret mobile, searches on Sunderland and casinos in the city centre. No surprises there. What else could it be? All the text messages looked familiar. The only image in memory was the naked selfie of Mel, and I couldn’t bear to look at that again. I put the mobile on the train table in front of me, turning it over so it was face down. The camera lens looked at me, reminding me of the webcam on our home PC, how it had been watching me on Sunday night.
Maybe it’s not what I’m doing, but what the phone’s doing.
The train was pulling out of Newark Northgate station. Maybe halfway home. We picked up speed and soon the outskirts of the market town were left behind, replaced with flat countryside ploughed brown for the coming winter.
I turned the phone face up again.
How are you going to betray me next time, you little bastard?
So much of our existence was on these things: networks of friends and colleagues, social media, email, apps, photos, music, work calendar, lists of birthdays. A download of our lives. There were a dozen or so apps in the memory. Back up, MyFiles, Diagnostics. Most of them were familiar: the usual default apps that were pre-installed when you got a new phone. Administrative apps that helped you manage your phone’s memory or move files around. The kind of thing I didn’t usually bother with.
Except one. An app called SysAdminTrack. That was a bit weird: it sounded like some bit of essential code to keep the phone running. And yet it was the only app that had been downloaded. Its icon was a pair of crossed spanners encircled by an old-fashioned cog. I opened the app and the icon enlarged to fill the mobile’s small screen, a short menu appearing on the left-hand side. Just four items in the menu: ‘About’, ‘Version’, ‘Upgrade’ and ‘Permissions’. The first three yielded alm
ost nothing, the briefest of text saying where it had been written, what year, some code writer’s pseudonym and associated gobbledygook. It didn’t actually seem to do anything. It wasn’t a game, productivity app, social media app – none of those things.
The ‘Permissions’ tab was more revealing. When I tapped it, a drop-down list appeared, detailing what the app could use on the phone. It had permission to access and use both front and rear cameras for stills and video, plus the microphone for audio, GPS location, internet browser, text messages, emails, apps and internal storage. In other words, permission to access pretty much everything on my phone – for no obvious reason.
I went back to the main menu, scoured the other options for more information, and finally gave up. SysAdminTrack had been created in 2014, somewhere in the USA – that was all the information it yielded.
A string of results came up for it on Google, a Wikipedia entry at the top:
‘SysAdminTrack is one of the names given to a piece of software originally developed by a white hat hacking group referred to as the Electronic Orchard Collective. They developed SysAdminTrack to demonstrate the weaknesses of cellphone operating systems, and their vulnerabilities to potential intrusion by government agencies. The app exploits various vulnerabilities to allow access to the phone’s functions from a third party cellphone user. That user can then operate the phone’s functionality from a remote location, including access to the cameras and microphone, which can be activated without any of the standard visual cues. It keeps running even when the app is closed.
‘The app has been banned in the USA because of fears over privacy and the potential for users to unwittingly reveal personal information, pictures and video to third parties.’
I felt a shock of realisation, as if I had grabbed hold of an electrified fence. If it could record audio, and if this app was installed on my previous phones as well, it could have recorded every conversation I’d had – with my solicitor, with the police, everyone I’d come into contact with. My mobile was always there. And if it could access texts and emails remotely as well, it could have sent that audio to a third party.
A lot of ifs. But who could have done it?
