In Too Deep (Knight & Culverhouse Book 5) (7 page)

A
lthough Wendy was
happy to have been asked to accompany Culverhouse to the offices of The Inquirer, she did have more pressing matters to attend to. Besides which, she asked herself, did it really need two officers to travel down to London? The team was short-staffed as it was, and while the addition of Ryan Mackenzie might help in the long-run, the time it would take for her to get up to speed with how things worked at Mildenheath CID would effectively make them even more short-staffed in the short-term.

As far as Wendy was concerned, this would be the perfect task to give to Ryan, having her accompany Culverhouse instead. She could shadow him and watch how things were done, even if they weren’t usually the best ways of doing things. But Culverhouse was a stubborn old bugger. If he’d decided he didn’t like Mackenzie, that was it. He’d do all he could to undermine her and show her who was really in charge.

While Wendy wouldn’t have traded places with her in a million years, she quite liked Ryan. She reminded her a lot of herself when she first started out: keen to make a strong impression, and aware that she needed to stand up for herself in this male-dominated environment. But she’d since learnt that there were certain ways to do that — ways that worked and didn’t get people’s backs up. She was sure Ryan would pick that up soon enough — after all, she seemed like a smart girl — but then again, Culverhouse had been knocking around a lot longer, and he still had no idea how to work through a day without getting people’s backs up.

The offices of The Inquirer weren’t half as plush as Wendy had expected. She half thought she might end up walking through a big revolving glass door on Fleet Street, men in suits barging past her on their mobile phones as stories flew in across the news desk, while pictures of the paper’s previous front pages stared down at her from every inch of available wall space. What she actually found was a rather mundane and run-of-the-mill office which might just as well have been that of a telemarketing firm.

Young school leavers sat around either in baggy Aran sweaters or thin t-shirts with the sleeves rolled right up, exposing their tattooed arms. She thought that if she closed her eyes and concentrated, it would probably smell of vinyl records and political pessimism.

They sat down in the waiting area, which was actually just a corner of the office that had three contraptions they called sofas but were actually just slightly padded platforms with no backs.

One of the journalists — a rolled-up-t-shirt one — came over to see if they wanted a drink while they were waiting. ‘Coffee? Tea?’ he asked, without saying hello or introducing himself.

Wendy said she’d have tea, Culverhouse opted for coffee.

‘Americano? Cappuccino? Latte? Macchiato? Espresso?’ came the next question.

‘No, coffee,’ Culverhouse replied.

‘What sort of coffee?’ the journalist asked.

Culverhouse just looked at him. ‘In a mug.’

The journalist raised his eyebrows and walked off in the direction of the kitchen.

‘Shouldn’t have any trouble finding a mug,’ Culverhouse said as the journalist left. ‘There’s a fucking dozen of them sitting out there in stupid jumpers.’ Wendy wanted to laugh, but decided it would be best not to humour him. ‘Says a lot about our national press these days. What’s the betting that they’re just sitting there churning out that “seven ways to tell your partner is cheating on you” bollocks for Twitter?’

‘I think The Inquirer is a little more professional than that,’ Wendy replied. ‘They do serious investigative journalism.’

‘Christ. That’s even worse. Just think what the fucking redtop rags must be like.’

A few moments later the journalist returned with their drinks, and Culverhouse took his minute cup of coffee without saying a word.

Before long, they were met by a woman in her mid to late fifties, who introduced herself as Susan Kellerman. ‘I’m the editor,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come through to my office?’

When the three of them got to Susan Kellerman’s office, she sat them down and perched on the corner of her desk, one leg crossed over the other, her hands planted firmly on one knee.

‘So, how can I help?’

Culverhouse was about to tell her she could start by sitting down on a chair like a normal person, but Wendy saw that coming and got in first.

‘As I mentioned on the phone, we wanted to talk to you a bit more about Tanya Henderson,’ Wendy said. ‘To get an idea about her working practises and to see if something she was investigating might be pertinent to our inquiries into her attack.’

‘Her attempted murder, you mean,’ Susan replied.

‘Well, yes. Do you know what she’d been investigating recently?’

Susan Kellerman looked at them both for a couple of moments before speaking. ‘You do know the Inquirer specialises in investigative journalism, don’t you?’

‘We had worked that much out, yes,’ Culverhouse said. ‘We’re detectives, after all.’

‘Then you’ll be aware that we have to be extraordinarily careful when talking about our ongoing investigations. A lot of the work we do consists of uncovering corruption within the Establishment. That includes the police.’

‘Are you saying that Tanya Henderson was investigating police corruption?’ Wendy asked.

‘I couldn’t possibly say. Anyway, we have a policy of complete non-discussion of investigations in progress unless it is absolutely necessary.’

‘One of your employees has been attacked, Mrs Kellerman,’ Wendy said. ‘And this is a police investigation. I really think it would be in your best interests to cooperate.’

Susan Kellerman crossed her arms. ‘Firstly, Tanya Henderson is not an employee. She’s freelance. Secondly, I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know anything. That policy of non-discussion extends to me, too. She told me nothing. And thirdly,’ she added, crossing her arms, ‘it’s Ms.’

Wendy jumped in again before Culverhouse could put his foot in it. ‘So you’re saying you know nothing about what Tanya Henderson was investigating recently?’

‘That’s what I just said,’ Susan Kellerman replied, without a hint of emotion in her voice. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got just as much of an idea as you have as to why someone would want to attack her.’

With that, she stood up, gesturing at the door. ‘Thank you for coming. You can see yourselves out, can’t you?’

I
’m suddenly
aware of my consciousness, but not of time. I don’t know whether I’ve been continually here, my mind whirring, or whether there’s been a big gap. It’s impossible to tell. I only know that I’ve thought stuff before, and that I’ve thought it here, but not when. There’s no sense of time passing. I’m not even sure if it is. What if I’m dead? What if this is the afterlife?

No. There’s no reason why I should be dead. Is there? I try to think. Think back. But memory doesn’t seem to be a thing. It’s all images, flashing lights and signs. Nothing concrete. Nothing that I can...

Again, I become aware. Aware that I am. That’s the only way I can put it into words. I know it’s not the first time I’ve been aware, but I don’t know how many times came before, either.

A flash of orange.

A face. It’s black.

A screeching sound.

I’m aware. I’m almost... I feel like I’m me. I know that sounds strange. It feels strange. The fact is that I don’t know when the last time I felt like me was. It might have been years. It might have been seconds. This might happen all the time, over and over again, on repeat, like—

Like that film. Films. I remember films. The images. The noises. The one where the same day happened time and time again. Is that what this is? It’s the outside world. Films are from the outside world. I need to hang on to that, need to...

Yes. There’s something. I can only describe it as an abstract sense of knowing. The only problem is I don’t know what I know. I’m trying to link it all up, trying to connect the...

Back to films. Yes. I know what films are. It’s a concept. A strong concept. If I focus on that I can use it to anchor myself in reality. Try to go from there, remember, work out what’s...

I remember some badness. I remember evil. I remember writing. Asking. Knowing.

I was working. There was a sound. I started to move. I saw something. I heard something. I felt something.

It all feels just out of reach... I’m trying to grasp it but I can’t...

Dark.

W
endy got
home from the offices of The Inquirer with a little over an hour to spare. That would barely be enough time to get ready, let alone start to get anything cooking. She hoped this didn’t mean the entire evening would be a complete disaster. She showered, chose an outfit, and was just pulling a bottle of wine from the wine rack when the doorbell rang.

When she opened the door, she was pleasantly surprised to see that Xavier looked even better in his casual clothes than he did in his work suit. And in her opinion he usually looked pretty good in his work suit.

She ushered him through to her sitting room, which she’d had some trouble with earlier. She hadn’t wanted to go the whole hog with candles, incense, and soft jazz music, but she had wanted to at least put the thought in Xav’s mind that she might be interested. In the end, she’d opted for a bit of mood lighting and left it at that.

They were barely halfway through the first glass of wine and the usual pleasantries when Xav brought up the matter of Tanya Henderson’s laptop.

‘It’s another one of those reports that has a lot of words but doesn’t actually say much,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think these guys like to make themselves sound important by bamboozling people and making you go to them with any questions. Sad, really. That’s why I want to get into that line of work. Shake things up a bit.’

Wendy smiled. She liked his ambition.

‘Basically,’ he continued, ‘it’s an access problem. Seems Tanya Henderson was pretty smart when it came to computer security. Either that or she had some help. When the laptop starts up it needs a username and password to get in. Nothing too strange there, but we can usually get round that. There’s a setting that’s enabled by default which allows you to boot the machine up from an external disk, or to boot it into a certain restricted mode. That’s been disabled, though.’

‘What, so you can’t get in?’

‘Nope. Not easily. Perhaps not at all. But there are two things they found out. Firstly, when they tried to examine the hard drive separately, they found that it was heavily encrypted. Not just by the operating system, but by another piece of software. They can’t say for sure without looking into it further, but it looks like it might be something like TrueCrypt.’

‘Is that good?’ Wendy asked.

‘It is for security. Not so much for us. This is just an educated guess based on what we know so far, but I’d be willing to bet that she’s not using the simplest form of encryption on this bad boy. She’ll have gone the whole hog.’

‘Great,’ Wendy sighed.

‘That’s not necessarily the end of the line, though,’ he added. ‘I must admit I went a little further and took it upon myself to call Tanya’s Internet Service Provider.’

‘Xav!’ she exclaimed. ‘You could get yourself into some serious trouble doing that. I shouldn’t have even shown you the report, let alone got you involved in the investigation.’ Even as Wendy spoke, she knew she didn’t mean it. She was actually pretty impressed by the lengths he’d gone to and the potential risks he’d taken to help her.

‘I know, but it needed doing. Anyway, I’ve got a friend there. Officially, no-one from the police has spoken to anyone at the company. It’ll be fine. Point is, I got him to check the traffic routes from her network. They have logs of where data has gone in and out from. With that, we can potentially trace it.’

‘And?’ Wendy asked, hopefully.

‘And every single packet of data that left or entered Tanya Henderson’s machine went through a VPN: a Virtual Private Network. Basically, let’s say I have a website and you want to go on it. You type in the address and your computer makes a connection to the website, which is just another computer, via your internet service provider. If you use a VPN, the connection goes from your computer and through a number of re-routing networks before it reaches the website. There might be a hundred different connections on the way, but it all happens in under a second. What that does is put a whole load of encryption and confusion in between the starting point and the destination.’ He paused for a moment, thinking how best to describe it. ‘Imagine a huge game of Chinese Whispers. Your computer never speaks directly to my website. The message is just passed on down the line, encrypted, decrypted and re-encrypted the whole way.’

‘What, so the traffic to and from Tanya’s machine is essentially untraceable?’

‘That’s about the long and short of it, yes.’

‘Is there anything we can do at all?’ she asked, though she wasn’t feeling very hopeful now.

‘It’s tricky. There’s nothing straightforward. The nature of computer security means it goes beyond what humans can do. We’re talking billions of mathematical calculations every second, all based on random numbers. And to be honest, I’m not sure they’d even bother trying; if Tanya Henderson dies, it might be different, but they’re unlikely to do much for an attack.’

‘It’s being treated as attempted murder,’ Wendy replied. ‘That should put it on a par with actual murder in terms of investigation power.’

‘True, but they’ll need to prioritise.’

Wendy sighed and drank more of her wine. ‘There must be more we can do.’

‘Unfortunately not,’ Xav replied, raising his eyebrows. ‘You see it in the news all the time. Even the FBI aren’t able to unlock people’s iPhones if they don’t have the four-digit passcode. There’s no way in hell Mildenheath CID are going to be able to crack some of the strongest encryption known to man.’ He shrugged, smiling, before adding, ‘Listen, I might have one idea.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re pretty highly regarded at Milton House. And you know how much I want to get involved with the major crimes unit in IT forensics. I was just wondering... Well, perhaps you might be able to request my involvement and suggest that my skills might be able to... You know. Then I could have a proper look at the machine, might be able to find something they haven’t.’

‘Do you think that’d work?’

Xav shrugged. ‘You never know. But I can’t promise anything, of course. Certainly not at the moment.’

‘Well, in that case, we’d better move on to something else, hadn’t we?’ Wendy said, holding the wine bottle aloft.

W
ithin an hour
they were on their second bottle, and the conversation had moved on through a number of topics. They’d started talking — inevitably — about work, had spent a few minutes discussing Jack Culverhouse’s recent eyebrow-raising comments and actions, going on through politics and society, and had just finished a two-person diatribe on the abysmal state of British TV. Wendy was happy, though. The conversation was flowing because the wine was flowing, and she felt more relaxed than she had done in a long time.

‘Looks like you’re going to have to leave your car here,’ she said to him, gesturing at the empty wine glass sitting next to him on the coffee table.

‘Ah. See, I thought ahead. I got a cab.’

Wendy didn’t know whether to be impressed or worried by his presumptuousness. ‘Blimey. That must’ve cost a bit. I always said we were paying civilian staff far too much,’ she said, winking at him.

‘Yeah, well, arrest me,’ Xav joked back.

‘Cab back’ll cost even more. Especially this time of night. It’s a fair journey, Xav.’

‘It’ll give me a chance to sober up, then, won’t it?’ he replied.

‘Well, if you want to save the money and hassle you’re more than welcome to stay here.’ She smiled, before quickly adding, ‘I mean, I’ve got a spare room.’

Xavier smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I presumed that was what you meant anyway.’

Wendy paused for a moment. ‘As long as your wife or girlfriend doesn’t mind, that is.’

Xavier laughed. ‘I don’t have a wife or girlfriend. I’ve told you this before.’

Wendy brought the wine glass to her lips, murmuring into the glass before taking a sip. ‘Just checking.’

T
wo hours later
, Wendy pulled her numb arm from under the dead weight of Xavier, who rolled over onto his side, taking the soft cotton sheets with him. She sat up and took a sip of water, looking over at him as he began to snore.

She smiled.