Fogarty: A City of London Thriller (27 page)

Vastrick Security Offices, No 1, Poultry, London.

Monday 22
nd
August 2011; 6pm.

Neither Ben nor Max could trust themselves to be reasoned in their thinking after the events of the day. They knew that, if they were hoping to find out who was responsible for the beatings, they needed to have clear minds. They needed to be analytical. In an effort to bring some clear thought to the process, they decided to visit Vastrick Security. Dee Hammond was already investigating the Rectory murders for Ben, and she had requested a meeting with Max, so she agreed to help where she could.

Operations Room 1 had paper blu-tacked to every wall. As Ben and Max waited for Dee they looked at the collated information relating to the Rectory murders. There were photos, notes, graphics with blue and red lines connecting individuals, and there was a preliminary Scene of Crimes Report marked ‘Confidential’ which should never have left the confines of Scotland Yard. “This girl has certainly got some contacts,” Max thought to himself, and then he noticed the name of the auth
or of the report. He uttered a string of expletives under his breath, but loud enough for Ben to look at him in surprise.

Ben was about to ask what had caught Max’s attention when Dee waddled into the room, her ungainly gait being the result of swollen ankl
es and a hugely swollen belly.

“We meet at last,” Max said to Dee, as he pulled out a chair for her to sit in. Dee extended her hand. “We do indeed, Max. You look nothing like your picture.” Dee was referring to the photograph which usually accompanied his investigative journalism. “I don’t think I thanked you for your thorough work on the Marati corrup
tion case earlier in the year.”

“Mrs Hammond, Vastrick dropped the story in my lap. I ran with it because it was a great story. I should be thanking you.” One way or another, the three were connected by a string of different relationships. Ben hoped that was a good omen.

“Max, lets drop the Mrs Hammond tag. I’m Dee to my friends, and to one journalist now.”

Max smiled and remembered the report on the wall. “I think we may have a mutual friend,” he said. Dee lo
oked puzzled. “I’ve been close to Tilly Morgan for some time, although she never talks about work. It’s a kind of rule we have.”

“A sensible rule for a police officer in a relationship with an investigative journalist,” Dee suggested, without obliquely confirming that she knew Tilly Morgan through the Association of Women in Law Enforcement.

***

Dee outlined her understanding of the status of the police investigations into the Rectory murders, which was similar to Max’s analysis of Saturday morning. Hardly surprising, perhaps, as they shared at least one source, and that source was a doozy.

Ben listened with a growing sense of doom. Every piece of evidence pointed to the conclusion that there were no intruders involved in the murders, and as Ben knew he hadn’t done it, the
spotlight was fixed on Ashley.

“Look, even if Ashley wasn’t my twin sister I still wouldn’t believe that she could kill three men in cold blood,” Ben commented, sadness tingeing his voice.

Max reminded Ben that Ashley had alluded to being sexually abused by Grierson in the past. It was quite possible that his twin sister recognised the fact that, once Den was ensconced in the Rectory, the abuse could become more systematic and frequent. Dee jumped in and suggested that Ashley probably resented her husband for his weakness and his failure to protect her against her sadistic father. She pointed out that Ashley may well have grown to despise them both, especially as her husband had effectively traded his wife for liquidity and to save his own reputation as a property developer. The other victim was just collateral damage, in the view of both Max and Dee.

Ben was still unsure, even in the
face of overwhelming evidence.

“OK. Let’s work on the premise that Ashley disposed of two scumbags who either abused her or who offered her up for abuse. I can’t excus
e it, but I can understand it.”

“So can we, Ben,” Dee concurred. “But the police are ahead of us on this. Who knows what new evidence may be coming in from the forensics team and the outside labs? I think you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact tha
t your sister will be charged.”

“Do you think it’
ll come to that?” Ben asked, already knowing the answer. Silence reigned in the room.

***

Dee returned to the operations room after a much needed comfort break. Her visits to the restrooms were becoming more frequent as the baby grew. Max and Ben were drinking coffee and munching on muffins when she returned. Neither man had eaten so far during the day, and hunger was gnawing at their stomachs. Once he had finished his muffin, Max gave the others a rundown of what had happened on Saturday at the flats, moving on to the meeting of residents, the call to the police and the violence of earlier in the day. When he had finished, Dee asked Ben to make a list on the whiteboard. She would normally have done it herself, but getting up and down was becoming a burden.

Ben took up a black marker pen and wrote on the whiteboard. With input from a
ll three of them the list read:

E
vents:

•      
  Operation Bilbao, flats cleared, green Jag spotted by Mary Akuta.
  
•      
  New gang arrive, green jag is back.
  
•      
  Gang impose new regime
  
•      
  Residents meet and organise a fight back
  
•      
  Residents call Operation Bilbao hotline (Sunday pm)
  
•      
  Thugs turn up and beat up Mary and May (Monday am)
  
•      
  One thug called other ‘Rafe’
  
•      
  Car used was stolen and abandoned according to Sky News bulletin
  

“I think there are two assumptions we can make here. Please write them up in red, Ben.” Dee dictated, and Ben wrote:


         
Gavin Mapperley/ green jag  is behind takeover


         
Beatings were carried out by Mapperley’s men


         
Mapperley must have been told of the call to Op. Bilbao


         
Mapperley has a corrupt contact at the Yard!!!

“I think we have to go to Scotland Yard with this. Ben, you and I both know DCI Coombes. We could approach him with what we know. This isn’t something we can handle ourselves.” Dee knew that her suggestion would meet with resistance.

“Who the hell is Gavin Mapperley, and where did he suddenly spring from anyway?” Ben asked angrily. Dee looked at Max, who was the only one of the three who
knew anything about Mapperley.

“Mapperley is a bit of a mystery, Ben. I came across him when I was doing an expo
se on ‘Boiler rooms’ in 2008.”

Dee interrupted Max. “That was when fake stock broking firms were set up all over London selling worthless shares,” sh
e clarified, for Ben’s benefit.

“Yes. Max explained that to me on Saturday. Was Mapperley caught
, or not?”

Max took up the story.

“Hardly anyone was prosecuted. They were too fleet of foot. By the time the police knew the location of a ‘boiler room’ it was closed down. Grierson was thought to be peripherally involved because an empty apartment in the Trafalgar House Flats was used for one scam, but police couldn’t prove that he was directly involved and so he was never pursued. Mapperley was suspected because he was seen with Grierson at the flat where the scammers worked, and because he’s had several jobs in the finance industry over the years, all legitimate. Anyway, he was interviewed, but the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t take him to court. They said there was insufficient evidence.

One reason I believe that Mapperley has a source in the police is that
, when I was working on my story for the News of the World, I found a lad who had worked in a boiler room and who had electronic evidence to link Mapperley to the operation. Unfortunately the data was on his laptop, which had been taken when the police raided his house, along with his backup. As I wrote in my article, by the time the outside lab examined the laptop they found that the hard drive was corrupted and virtually unreadable. They got some data from a surface scan, but not enough to be of any use. Someone had got at it.”

Dee looked pensive.

“I’ve read that name recently, but I can’t remember where. Hold on.” She picked up the phone and asked a young man called Simon to come to the Ops room and bring his laptop. Moments later a gangly young man with glasses came into the room. In appearance he was close to what everyone would describe as a geek. After brief introductions, he sat down, opened his laptop and connected it with a cable that had been projecting from a data hub in the middle of the table.

“T
his is a Thunderbolt connection,” he explained. “It’s twelve times faster than a firewire and twenty times faster than a USB 2.0.”  Dee spoke.

“Right, Simon.
I’d like you to please run the name Gavin Mapperley and cross check it with the Rectory murder investigation.”

Simon queried the spelling of Mapperley and then typed away at the keyboard. After a moment he rubbed his chin
and looked up from his screen.

“Nothing on the investigation
,
per se
. Do you want me to check against all of the PDFs and outside documents related to the case?”

Dee nodded. She thought she knew what he meant. He would be scanning through all of the research her investigators had dug up on the case so far.

“This will take a few minutes, because the software will have to convert the PDFs to readable text before it can search them. You see, PDFs
are essentially pictures....”

“Thank you, Simon.
We don’t mind waiting,” Dee interrupted, and she didn’t have long to wait. Simon looked doubtful.

“Only one hit
, and it’s a bit remote. Someone called Mapperley created a spreadsheet appended to the business plan for the property company that took over the Rectory.”

The three others in the room immediately saw the link to Dennis Grierson, and almost as one they asked if Simo
n could print out the evidence.

“Sorry. I said it was remote. His name doesn’t appear on the document. In the properties box of the spreadsheet, h
e’s named as the author. That’s the only reference. Hold on.” Simon connected a second cable to the laptop and a flat screen TV came to life. The contents of Simon’s laptop screen were now on the TV screen for all to see. Simon highlighted a document entitled ‘Rectory Cash Flow & Business Plan’. Whilst the cursor was resting on the item, he right-clicked the wireless mouse and a dialogue box appeared. “Properties” was the last entry, and Simon clicked on it. Immediately a box opened, showing the title of the document, when it was written, edited and last printed and saved. Below that information was the author’s name, G Mapperley. Below that was the name of the computer he had used to create the spreadsheet, GaBrLon10012.

“Our problem is that a spreadsheet carries that data for all of its life
, unless it’s changed. He may have created the template for another project completely and someone else might have been using his template for this project.”

“What about the computer ID? Does tha
t tell us anything?” Max asked.

“Probably not. Usually the IT department of any major company will give each computer a name so that they can track it and re
pair it remotely if necessary.”

“Could you access it remotely?” Max asked, his excitement rising
, only for his hopes to be dashed again almost at once.

“No. The user has to consent by pressing a button, and in any event we have no ide
a which company it belongs to.”

“Can we find out?” Dee asked.

“I could do a search for the name G Mapperley and put in wild cards for Ga and Br. I’m guessing Lon means London.” He was already tapping away. The three spectators watched the screen as Simon typed in the data and the word London and clicked on search. The specialist search engine threw up 41,762 answers in .46 seconds, according to the script at the top of the page. Most of the results were useless. Anything which included the words Great Britain in London was showing up. Simon narrowed the search to the specific letters alone, in the order in which they had been typed.

When the results finally appeared, Ben swore loudly and dropped his head into his hands. The others looked at him with concern and then looked up at the screen, where the cause of his anguish was cl
ear to see. The top result was:

“.......Garner-Brinkman Property Developers........
London...... new project.....”

“Oh,
hell!” Dee exclaimed to a still bewildered Max and Simon. “Gavin Mapperley’s laptop is registered to Garner-Brinkman, the property developer whose MD is Ashley Garner, Ben’s twin sister.”