Dead if You Don’t

38

Saturday 12 August

19.30–20.30

On the A23, two miles north of Brighton, Mike Roberts, driving the PORTSLADE DOMESTIC APPLIANCES lorry as fast as he dared safely, saw strobing blue lights in his mirror and heard a siren. He pulled into a lay-by a short distance ahead, putting on his hazard flashers. A police motorcycle pulled up in front of him.

The rider dismounted and hurried up to the passenger door. Iain Scotland passed Mungo Brown’s laptop out of the window. The rider ran back to his machine, put the computer in his pannier and raced off into the distance.

Fifteen minutes later, ignoring the building’s slow lift, the police motorcyclist, holding the boy’s laptop and the clone of his father’s phone, ran up to the second floor of Haywards Heath police station. He passed the hall of fame — or notoriety — of convicted villains, on the wall, and rang the buzzer at the entrance to Digital Forensics — as the High Tech Crime Unit was now named.

Aiden Gilbert, a stocky, energetic civilian with short dark hair turning to grey, and dressed in a blue T-shirt, jeans and trainers, greeted him. He led him in and through to the large, open-plan office, to his desk where he signed a receipt, for chain-of-evidence purposes, for the laptop and the clone. With him were three colleagues, similarly casually dressed, Daniel Salter, Jason Quigley and Shaun Robbins, a retired police officer who had returned as a civilian to this unit.

Quigley immediately plugged a USB into a port on Mungo’s Mac, while Salter set to work on the phone, to identify the source of the text. The motorcyclist left and the unit members waited patiently for the ten minutes that it took for the contents of the computer to upload. They had been instructed to look, urgently, for all communications Mungo Brown had had in the past four weeks, on email and on social media.

When the download was complete, Quigley plugged the USB into his own system and immediately, with the others peering over his shoulder, began studying his large Apple Mac screen.

This unit was one of the very few in Sussex Police to have escaped the current round of budget cuts, and had recently benefitted from extra funding. They had also benefitted from the Proceeds of Crime Act, under which any computer seized from someone convicted of a drugs or pornography offence was ordered by the courts to be confiscated and destroyed — or used for crime-fighting purposes. Digital Forensics had gained several high-powered Macs and large screens from this, including the one he was now using.

Mungo Brown’s mail began to appear. Seconds later they were up to date.

The most recent of them, sent at 2.40 p.m. this afternoon, was addressed to Aleksander Dervishi.