Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (11 page)

After two months, Brody decided that he couldn’t continue the charade he’d caught himself within. He finally revealed the truth, explaining that he wasn’t a location scout, and his parents and siblings hadn’t died in a car crash. He told her about his life as a computer hacker and how he made his income from pentest consultancy assignments. She’d left before he’d even had a chance to explain that he’d concocted it all to protect her from the real world dangers of his hacking life. How he had made many enemies within the organised crime syndicates littering the underworld of the Internet, any of whom would absolutely love five minutes with him if they could somehow track him down in the real world. He had been trying to protect her; that was all. 

But the truth had come too late. Wounded, Mel had accused him of being a manipulating cheat and a compulsive lier. She declared that she’d never been so betrayed. And with that, she turned and walked out of his life. 

Brody answered Leroy’s question, “I choose to live my life this way. It’s a price I have to pay.”

“No strings. Yes, I know. It’s just a shame . . .” Leroy faltered when he saw Brody’s glare and changed tack, “ . . . Are you going to dazzle this lawyer lady with a visit to Bromptons?”

He was referring to the private members’ club in South Kensington, a well-hidden destination for those in the know. Brody had become a member three years previously, although he mostly frequented when trying to impress his dates.

“Probably, but we’ll have dinner somewhere else first.”

“Good. I’ll probably be there later with Danny.”

In two days time, Leroy and Danny would be celebrating their fifth anniversary, which Brody still found incredible. At university, Brody had watched Leroy have fling after fling right up until the last few months, when he’d finally fallen deeply in love with a fellow student actor called Jed. Leroy had followed his new partner out to Hollywood where they both attempted to break into the movie business. Leroy’s father even cut his allowance in an attempt to bring him back to the UK to ‘find a proper job’. Leroy and Jed waited tables and eventually Leroy made a few television pilots, but none got picked up as a series. He blamed his Welsh accent and so cultivated an English one instead, which ultimately became his day-to-day speaking voice. After eighteen months, their relationship ended when Leroy found out Jed had secretly made a few porn movies. Jed’s on-camera sexual infidelities bothered Leroy, but nowhere near as much as his lowering his standards to work in the porn industry.

Eventually a more grown-up version of Leroy returned to London, and Brody and Leroy carried on where they’d left off, but happily without the chaos of their university days. Leroy won occasional bit parts in TV soaps and stage productions, but rarely anything with a regular income. He frequently turned up on Brody’s doorstep, desperate and penniless, and Brody would put him up in the guest room for a while, before some new acting role swept him off to the latest glamorous destination. 

Five years ago Leroy met Danny while on holiday in the Florida Keys. Danny was a fellow Welshman and ran his own modest recruitment business in Cardiff, which was not quite the centre of the professional acting universe for Leroy, otherwise they’d have got a place together years ago. As it was, they managed to spend most weekends with each other, either in Cardiff or London. This time, Leroy had been staying at Brody’s for three months, but a few weeks ago Leroy had landed a part in a new stage production. It had a limited West End run and in a few more weeks it would begin a nationwide tour. And Leroy with it. 

Brody was looking forward to the peace and quiet. 

Leroy said, “Don’t worry, I’ll remind Danny you’re a big shot Hollywood cameraman. He’ll play along and we’ll make your cover story even more credible.”

“Yeah, well make sure —”

“Bloody hell, you pervert. What kind of weird shit are you working on?” 

Brody followed Leroy’s pointing finger to the left hand screen still displaying thumbnail video feeds from the SWY website. He recognised the dark haired girl from the
Au Pair Affair
feed. Only now it looked as though she was naked in the bath. Brody clicked the image and it enlarged to fill the screen. He pressed un-mute. The camera looked down from ceiling height, a wide-angle lens positioned to take in the shower, bath and even the toilet. 

The young woman arched her back, her pelvis rising above the water revealing a neat strip of black pubic hair. Hungrily, she rubbed herself between her legs, deep panting breaths coming faster and faster. The noise was tinny, echoing from the tiled bathroom walls. She lifted one leg over the side to spread herself more widely. Frothy water spilled on the floor.

“So that’s how girls do it, then,” said Leroy through a mouthful of toast, “Seems much more complicated.”

Brody gaped at the image, completely mesmerised. 

She reached a crescendo, panting giving way to a hoarse, guttural scream. Then a deep, contented sigh. Slowly, her lithe body retreated back under the water.

“So this is your next job, is it darling?” Suspicion punctuated Leroy’s clarification. “Do you want me to leave you two alone?”

Brody ignored him. SWY really was full of surprises. Pleasant ones as well. He’d already proved the site was fed from real locations. Which meant somewhere in the world right this minute, this particular girl lay in a bath having just finished pleasuring herself. 

“What is this site then?” asked Leroy. 

“It’s called SecretlyWatchingYou. Hundreds of private webcam feeds from all over the world.”

“Secret, eh? So you’re saying she has no idea she’s got an audience?”

Almost as if she heard Leroy, the young woman opened her eyes, tilted her head, looked straight at the camera and smiled.

“Well, well. I guess she does know. That’s very interesting,” said Brody.

“Can she hear us?” asked Leroy excitedly. He leant towards the laptop and barked to the naked girl. “Don’t forget to wash behind your ears, young lady!”

“Leroy, you fool, the audio is one-way only.”

“Oh.” He leaned back, disappointed. “What is this job you’re doing, then?”

“Just a favour for a mate.”

“One of your hacker mates?”

“Yeah, kind off.”

“Have you ever met this
mate
?”

“Sure, loads of times.”

Leroy stood up and drained his mug of tea. “In the real world? You know, in the flesh. As in,
offline
?” 

“Makes no difference to me.”

Leroy sprawled on the sofa. “You talk such shit sometimes, darling. You can’t truly get to know someone just from talking to them in a chat room.” 

Brody didn’t answer. They’d had this argument before. What did Leroy know anyway? Brody had built up plenty of friendships with people he’d never met in person. And not just other hackers. Online, people were a lot more open about themselves, cutting to the chase, brutally honest. In the real world, there was so much dancing around, never quite saying what they meant, always holding back. The anonymity of the Internet made everything possible. It was one of the reasons he loved it so much.

“Just ignore me, Brody. It’s my hangover talking. Making me tetchy. I think I’ll go back to bed.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Leroy raised himself up and delicately shuffled back to his room. He opened his bedroom door, paused and said, “What makes you think they’re from all over the world?”

“What?”

“The private webcams in your pervy website. You said they were from all over the world.”

“It’s the Internet.” Brody couldn’t keep the condescending tone out of his voice. “It’s a global phenomenon.” 

Leroy turned around and lumbered back to lean on Brody’s desk. He pointed at the girl in the bathroom, who was now drying herself off with a towel.

“Bet you a foot massage she’s in the UK somewhere.”

“How can you tell that?”

“You taking the bet, darling?”

“Fuck off, Leroy.”

Leroy chuckled to himself, “Back in a mo.” He ambled off down the hallway. Brody heard the bathroom door open. 

Brody stared at the screen, confused. The girl wrapped one towel around her hair and the other around her body. She grabbed a mobile phone from the window mantle and pressed some keys rapidly with two thumbs. She looked up at the camera again, pointed her phone upwards and pressed a button. Smiling, she left the bathroom. This girl definitely knew she was being watched.

Brody recalled her voice from earlier in the day when he’d observed her talking nonsense to the baby. He’d formed the impression that her accent sounded Scandinavian. So how did Leroy come up with the UK?

Leroy returned and slammed a plastic bottle of toilet cleaner on his desk and said triumphantly, “Asda, you knob.” 

Brody instinctively recoiled from the yellow bottle in disgust. It lived behind their toilet and probably had dried urine all over it. Perhaps that’s why the packaging designers had chosen yellow.

Yellow bottle. 

Yellow bottle, red lid with a black and white label. 

He stared at the motionless bathroom video feed. Although very small on the screen, there, by the toilet, was exactly the same shape yellow bottle with a red lid and a black and white label.

Leroy ambled off to his room. “Much to learn, you still have . . . my young Padawan. Good night.” 

Brody smiled at Leroy’s use of Yoda’s line from
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
. But then he frowned. How did the presence of toilet cleaner connect the webcam location to the UK? And then he realised.
Asda
. Asda was a UK-only supermarket. It was owned by Wal-Mart, the American giant. In every other country, Wal-Mart traded under its own brand, but in the UK it was Asda. And the toilet cleaner was Asda’s own brand.

The location of this video feed was somewhere in the UK.

He clicked back to the office location webcams and selected the feed with the readerboard. The date and time scrolled by again. Sure enough, it was still one minute out. He’d noted earlier that it was in the same time zone as he was, but there were plenty of other countries on Greenwich Mean Time. He’d looked them up: Ghana, Iceland, Ireland, Morocco, Liberia, Portugal, Senegal, Sierra Leone and some others he’d only vaguely heard of.  

But, with
Au Pair Affair
located somewhere in the UK, he had a sneaking suspicion that the office location was in the UK as well.

* * *

Her window wipers at full speed, Jenny Price turned her silver Audi A3 into Troughton Road in Charlton, the address Trinity College had  provided for Anna Parker. Pastel colours and fake cladding sporadically broke the redbrick monotony of the long Edwardian terrace. The original town planners could never have predicted that the inhabitants of the two-up two-down houses would one day own their own cars and park them proudly in front of their homes, shrinking the usable width of the road to a single slalom track. Jenny zigzagged her way past two oncoming cars, the passing places formed by houses that had exchanged their personal patch of lawn for a private concrete driveway. Fifteen or so houses beyond the house Anna Parker had shared, Jenny finally found a space and then groaned as she spotted the dropped kerb outside warding strangers from parking there. 

Sod it. She parked anyway, the continuous downpour overcoming her civic morals. Partially protected under her extendable umbrella, Jenny bolted back up the road, through the gate and up the path. With perfect timing, DS Karim Malik opened the front door and Jenny charged into the hallway. She shook the rain off herself and the umbrella. 

“Thank fuck you’re here, Jen.”

“What’s going on, Karim?” 

“Got one of the victim’s flatmates in the kitchen in floods. What am I supposed to do? I’m a copper, not a fucking counsellor.”

“Tea and sympathy, Karim. That’s all you can do.”

Jenny had long ago stopped picking up Karim on his foul language, although she found it amusing that he managed to curb it whenever Da Silva was in earshot. Being a Muslim police officer was tough and Jenny supposed Karim’s foul language was some kind of defence mechanism, a way to make him appear less noticeable to his colleagues. And, even though it often seemed exaggerated, it worked. Karim was well liked within the squad. Jenny had no idea what the
Qur’an
’s position on swearing was. If it was a problem it was Karim’s problem, not hers. 

 “What’s the flatmate’s name?” she asked.

“Kim Chang. She’s a dance student.”

“Where’re all the other flatmates?”

“It’s some kind of study week, so the other three flew off on holiday together last week. Imagine it. One house, five students. All birds. Fucking fantastic.” 

“Have a bit of decency, Karim. One of them’s the victim.”

“Sorry boss.”

“What have you told her?”

“Nothing really. I didn’t get much past telling her that Anna had been found dead before she started wailing.”

 Jenny followed Karim into the kitchen. A dark-haired girl sat at the table, puffy eyes almost masking her delicate Oriental features. She looked up, hope on her face. Karim introduced Jenny and her features collapsed once again. Jenny made the standard noises about how sorry she was, feeling utterly false. Karim leaned against the sink, out of the girl’s eye-line. 

“Poor Anna,” the girl said, her voice cracking as she reached for another tissue.

Jenny sat down opposite her. “I know it’s devastating, Miss Chang, but I need you to answer a few questions.” 

“Kim,” she said, blowing her nose. 

“Okay, Kim. When did you last see Anna?”

“Friday morning. When I left for college, she was practising for an audition she was going to that afternoon.”

Karim opened his mouth to jump in but Jenny raised a hand enough for him to notice. He held back. Jenny had also realised the significance of the audition. 

 “What was she auditioning for?”

“A summer work placement in the Royal Opera House Orchestra. That was her dream, you know, to play for a ballet company. She never thought she’d ever get a shot at the Royal Opera House.”