by Iain Cameron
She tried to smile. ‘That’s a bad joke even for you Mr H. Anyway, the nurses told me everything that’s been going on.’
There was a scraping noise behind him and he turned to see Phil pushing a spare chair towards him.
‘Thanks,’ he said and sat down.
‘Do you remember anything about the crash?’
‘Is this a formal police interview or are you just trying to sound like a reporter?’
‘You’ve forgotten none of your acerbic wit, I’m sorry to say.’
She moved, setting off a jangling of wires and tubes as she tried to lie more comfortably. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much after leaving the Show Ground.’
‘The doctor I spoke to, said you might lose your memory for a while but it’ll come back in time.’
‘That’s a relief. I’m not much bloody use as a journalist without one.’
‘Rachel,’ he said solemnly, ‘as you probably know, it was a fairly bad smash and I’m sorry to tell you, as I know how much you loved that car, but your pride and joy is now a complete write-off.’
‘Bloody hell! I finally find a car I really like and then…this. I’m gutted.’
‘I called the Accident Investigation Unit and they said the sub-frame was badly twisted, the engine had shifted on its mountings and most of the body panels were bent and twisted.’
‘How are the other people?’
‘The woman you hit, Mary Davidson was treated for shock and whiplash but the child in the back was fine. The tractor driver suffered a bad gash to the head when he struck the steering wheel but he was allowed home after treatment.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it and thank the Lord that I was insured.’
‘If you weren’t, I’d probably be out of a job for going out with a criminal but you should get back more or less what you paid for it as you haven’t owned it for more than a couple of weeks. The guy I spoke to in Traffic says no fault is attached to you. The blame is on Davidson.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Maybe for the next one you should to go for something bigger. These little two-seat sports cars don’t offer you enough protection.’
In an everyday situation, a comment like that would have been incendiary and lead to an instant red card and an early bath, as she was addicted to cars in the same way an old uncle of his was addicted to booze as there was no way she would ever buy a ‘sensible’ saloon or a sedate hatchback.
What he knew about cars wouldn’t fill a dust cap but he did know that the little sports cars she liked, were too low on the ground and offered little protection from flying debris, stinging insects or mindless idiots throwing stones or lighted cigarettes for a lark, and he had seen at first-hand the damage caused to a small car after it had been in collision with a lorry.
‘You were saved by the seatbelt and air bags, love,’ Phil said. ‘Without the belt, who knows where you might have ended up, maybe in the field across the road.’ He turned to Henderson. ‘I suppose you see a lot of things like that in your line of business, Angus.’
Aged around fifty with a thick crop of slightly greying, black hair and a tanned, lightly lined face that rarely changed from studied seriousness, Phil was a corporate financier with a large Japanese bank in London and spent as much time overseas as he did at home. He was seriously well paid and probably paid more tax than he earned, which allowed his wife to indulge in the many hairdressers, manicurists and beauticians she frequented. It would be disingenuous to suggest it was a facile pursuit and she was simply wasting his money as she was six years older than her husband but could easily pass for a much younger woman.
‘It’s been a few years since I’ve dealt directly with a traffic accident and nowadays its only if the victim was murdered first.’
‘Sorry, I was forgetting you were in CID. What case are you working on now?’
‘A student from one of the local universities here in Brighton was found murdered on a golf course near Horsham.’
‘I heard about that one, wasn’t there something about it in our local newspaper, Karen?’
‘Yes there was. That was a girl called Sarah Robson, wasn’t it?’
Henderson nodded.
‘The Robson’s live only a few streets away from us,’ Phil said, ‘and Owen’s in the same Rotary as me although I must admit, I don’t go that often so I don’t know him that well. It’s a terrible business though, to lose a daughter like that. I don’t know how we would cope if we lost Rachel,’ he said, turning to look at her and smiling. ‘How’s the investigation going? Do you have any suspects?’
Henderson blew a frustrated sigh. ‘We didn’t get much from the crime scene and local people didn’t spot anything unusual, so we didn’t get off to a good start. At the moment, we’re piecing together her last evening in Brighton and interviewing everyone who knew her.’
Phil was about to ask something else when Henderson’s phone rang. He apologised and moved out of the room and into the corridor and stood in front of a sign, which warned, ‘Using a Mobile Phone in the IC Unit is Prohibited.’
‘Hi boss, its Gerry. How are things going down at the hospital?’
‘She’s awake now and slowly getting back to her old self. She’s got a broken leg, broken wrist, badly gashed arm and loads of bruises and scratches, but nothing that won’t heal in time or put her off buying another two-seater sports car or driving slower. If I have anything to do with it, I’ll make her buy a Volvo estate, they’re built like tanks.’
‘Glad to hear she’s ok, it could have been so much worse. Have they found out what happened?’
‘It seems she was overtaking on a narrow road when a people carrier came out of a concealed driveway and Rachel ploughed straight into it. The other driver claimed she was momentarily distracted by a screaming child in the back, and didn’t look in the mirror that her husband positioned on the tree opposite their driveway to give them a better view of on-coming cars, but Traffic suspect she was on the phone and are pulling her mobile phone records.’
‘You know what I think about people using mobiles when they’re driving. I hope they throw the book at her for causing an accident like that.’ He paused for a few moments. ‘The other reason I called was to let you know there’s been a new development in the Robson case.’
‘Great. What is it?’
‘Are you still up for it?’ his voice was deadpan but he had been worked with Gerry Hobbs long enough to know when he was being serious.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the Chief’s making noises about you not being around the office for the next few weeks and suggesting your head might be somewhere else.’
‘For God’s sake!’ he snapped. ‘She’s only been in hospital for a morning and already he’s pensioning me off.’
‘No worries boss, I know what he’s like; he’s an awkward sod when he puts his mind to it. If he was schoolteacher, he’d be in charge of taking the bloody register or supervising detention.’
‘Let’s forget about Steve Harris for a minute and concentrate on the case. Tell me about this new development.’
‘I’d rather not say over the phone as I need you to judge how important you think it is, but I’ve got something on CCTV you need to see.’
‘You’re in the office?’
‘Yeah.’
He looked at his watch: two-fifteen. ‘I’ll see you at three.’
ELEVEN
An anonymous warehouse in Hollingbury was the nerve centre for Jon Lehman’s finest creation, a website that was taking the web by storm. Out went the tired old slappers, the mainstay of other adult websites with tattooed arses, more metal rivets and pins on their flesh than an old Land Rover and as many lines on their faces as a Network Rail map, and in came nubile young things with barely a blemish on their beautiful bodies and looking as young, intelligent and sexy as many of his students, which in fact many of them were.
In the past, he was a keen browser of this sort of material but was bec
oming increasingly alarmed at rocketing prices, the source of many of the models and security. He, and many others, were put off supplying credit card details to these sites as they imagined, quite rightly, it was owned by a fat, sweaty oik, operating a bank of servers from a seedy, dank basement in the back streets of Kiev or Tirana who sold their details to his friends in the Russian mafia, which they used to bombard computers in the west with spam emails for Viagra or how to make a killing from Forex trading.
Their website was cheaper than most but not too cheap to suggest tacky. They used SSL encryption technology to scramble credit card details and this was subtly emphasised along with their UK credentials, which all served to engender feelings of stability, security and legality. In only four months of trading, the business grew from one hundred thousand hits a week and a couple of hundred subscribers, to a dizzying half a million hits a week with over one hundred thousand subscribers and growing at over twenty per cent per month.
The main floor area of the warehouse was subdivided by partitions to create several individual room scenes where models would pose, and these could be quickly altered when the photographs became tired or were being copied too frequently by other web sites. This month, Room A was furnished to replicate the kitchen of a modern apartment with granite and chrome worktop fittings, large flat screen television and stylish appliances that would never be used to cook, iron or wash.
Room B, the largest, was a 1950s school room with blackboards, canes and desks, while Room C looked like a real doctor’s surgery with an examination table, height measuring devices, wall charts and a screened changing area, all supplied by a medical friend of Alan Stark, left over after the health centre where he worked was refurbished. Ideas for new scenes were never in short supply although he would appreciate a return to some of his old favourites, particularly the sixteenth-century French boudoir with the luxurious four-poster bed.
He visited Hollingbury as little as possible as even though he liked to watch the photographic and video sessions, the permanent resident of the place, their computer operator and systems designer, DeeZee was an odd character with questionable cleanliness habits and always left his server den smelling of his body odour and the crap he was continually throwing down his gullet. He couldn’t remonstrate with the fat runt as he had been warned to tread carefully by Alan Stark since he was not only a valuable employee of the business, but also the nephew of Dominic Green, a fellow investor in the business.
To the public at large, Green was a respectable, millionaire property developer with many landmark shopping centres and office blocks to his name, but it was no secret to those in the know that he received his leg-up in business by housing DSS claimants in seedy conditions and using violence to ensure they kept their mouths shut. Green not only supplied his nephew, DeeZee but the team that developed the software used by the site and so he was an important member of the management team, but if rumours were true and Green had been involved in at least two murders, Stark’s warning to tread carefully was a wise one.
Today, there was genuine reason for him being there. Normally he was sent an email from DeeZee once a month with all the web stats, the numbers of people visiting the site, how many clicked on pictures, how many were joining on a weekly, monthly or annual subscription basis and how long they stayed, but this month he didn’t receive it.
It wouldn’t be sensible to come in here all guns blazing as it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the email was in fact sent to him but deleted in a drunken haze. To save him the journey he could have called, but that would deny him the joy of seeing his ‘baby,’ and it gave him another chance to prove to Stark that he was not a useless drunk and taking his small, but important role as Finance Director seriously.
The fat slob grunted something he couldn’t quite hear, probably talking as much to the equipment as to him, while slurping a large cup of Day-Glo coloured goo, which probably contained as many toxic chemicals as a bottle of toilet cleaner, while tapping the keys of the computer keyboard in response to his request. A few seconds later, his report began to appear in the out-tray on one of a number of laser printers that were lined up on a table at the back of the room.
Close to the printers and pinned up on the wall was the photographic shoot schedule. The shoots usually took place whenever a new model agreed to pose for them or a popular girl returned to freshen up her portfolio. When that happened, freelance photographers Graham Roffey or Jeff Joham would come in and set-up their stuff under the watchful eye of a close associate of Dominic Green, John Lester.
If one or two weeks went by without a new shoot, either because the photographers were unavailable or no new girls had come forward, it wasn’t a problem. The web site was stocked with thousands of pictures and several thousand more were stored on back-up servers and so no one would ever feel short-changed, although some punters were more easily satisfied than others as they didn’t browse much and came back time and again to their old favourites.
He picked up a chair and placed as close to DeeZee as the aura of his aroma would allow. His real name was Brian Calder but he rarely used it, as life in a council estate in Worthing with a girl exhibiting severe Bulimia issues was no match for his exciting and dynamic on-line persona. He was a member of a loose computer hacking network that targeted organisations whose actions rocked the strict moral compass of their members by employing child labour in Asia, dumping toxic waste in poor African countries or raping third world countries of their natural resources. In Jon Lehman’s mind, this laudable moralist stance raised him up above something he might find at the bottom of a pond, but only just.
Lehman was holding the recently printed email and after a cursory glance said, ‘these growth numbers look suspect to me.’
‘Eh?’ He said without taking his eyes off the screen.
‘They look too high. We’ve almost doubled the hit rate in three months. Surely that’s not right?’
‘The fuck you know? Of course it’s right; comes straight off the web stats.’
‘Ok, ok I’ll take your word for it and look at them more closely later.’ He paused, thinking. ‘What about that request for new kit you sent me?’
‘What about it?’
‘You’ve asked for a new Apple IMac, additional hard drives for two servers and another printer. Do you really need all that? You’ve got more computer kit here than it takes to run…I don’t know, CERN.’
‘What the fuck’s CERN? Something you picked up in a sci-fi movie or something?’
‘It doesn’t matter but do you really need all this kit just to run a web site?’
‘You joking, man? It's not just a web site. I need to store thousands of pics and vids. They’re all in high-def so it takes huge amounts of disk space. That extra kit is needed to cope with the growth that’s there, in black and white, in your fucking mitts.’
He looked vacantly down at the paper he was holding. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Just order it man; don’t give me grief.’
Why a boy from Worthing spoke in a pseudo-Bronx accent was beyond him and only confirmed his opinion that the prick was watching too many DVD’s when he should have been working. He was out of new cards to play, cards that would encourage this man to open up and so he decided to show his hand, the real reason for him being there.
‘I can see that Sarah Robson’s pictures no longer appear on the web site but have they also been removed from the servers, back up files and the off-site storage?’
He was not trying to expunge Sarah from his life, far from it as there were still plenty of pictures of her on his home computer and memories in his head but in the light of her murder, he and his fellow investors did not want to encourage the police to come snooping round or alert the university authorities as to their activities.
DeeZee turned to face him, his black greasy hair plastered across his forehead, a lollipop stick protruding from the side of his mouth and the hint of a grin spreading across his pale, podgy face, revealing a
n uneven row of yellowing teeth. In the Middle Ages he might have been mistaken for a carrier of Black Death or TB and be put down; chance would be a fine thing.
‘Why d’you wanna know, man? You been shagging her or somethin’ and startin’ to feel guilty about it now she’s dead?’
The cheeky little bastard. If it were not for the fear of ending up naked in a skip with an axe through his head, he would have thumped him. ‘Have some more reverence for the dead, Calder.’
‘I told you not to call me that, ’ he said, his face momentarily crumpled like a collapsed soufflé.
‘Oops must have slipped my mind. So have you?’
‘Have I what?’
‘Taken her pictures off the server and all the other places in this...’ he said sweeping his arm around expansively around the room, ‘this expensive box of tricks?’
‘Yeah man, I told you. It’s all been done. It’s all cool.’
‘It better be,’ Lehman said, his anger rising at this insolent slob’s impudence and off-hand attitude. ‘The police are looking for a murderer and if they come calling here, I don’t want to find anything that links her to me, Alan Stark or good old Uncle Dom or you’ll be dropped in the shit, or more likely, the Channel with weights in your pockets. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I hear you man.’
Even if he said so himself, he thought as he walked away, he had been masterful. He told that little prick where his place in life was, not wearing Church’s shoes, but under his.
TWELVE
Henderson left the hospital where Rachel was being treated later than intended, and only after making a promise to return later in the evening. Before he could do that, he needed to head back to Sussex House and find out what the latest developments in the Robson case were that were getting Gerry Hobbs so excited. Almost as soon as he exited the hospital car park and turned into Eastern Road, his phone rang.
