Looking Good Dead

54

Shortly before five o’clock, Sergeant Jon Rye was sitting at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, still working on Tom Bryce’s computer, when his direct line rang. He picked up the receiver. ‘Jon Rye,’ he said.

‘Hello. It’s Tom Bryce. I’m actually in your building, up in the CCTV room… Just wondered if – if my computer was ready. I – could pop down… collect. I – I need to do some work tonight. I – I have – have to prepare for a very big meeting tomorrow. How are you doing?’

You sound terrible. You need to do some work, and I need to go home and salvage my marriage, Jon Rye thought. There was only himself and Andy Gidney, a short distance across the room from him, still there in the department late on this Sunday afternoon. Were the two of them sad or what?

Gidney, his iPod plugged as ever into his ears, was hunched over his keyboard, his desk littered with empty Coke cans and plastic coffee cups from the vending machines, clicking relentlessly away, working on cracking the code he had been trying to crack all week.

Rye worried about the geek – he seemed a lost soul. At least when Rye left the building, he had a home to go to. Maybe Nadine was sour sometimes, but there would be a meal on the table, the kids to talk to. Some kind of normality. What was Gidney’s normality?

Mind you, he wondered, what was anyone’s normality in here? Including his own? Most of their working weeks consisted of looking at porn on seized computers. And the vast majority of it was not your average titillating-but-cosy Playboy centrefold stuff; it was middle-aged men with children as young as two years old. Something he would never, not in a trillion years, really comprehend. How did that stuff turn people on? How could people do that with innocent children? How could a forty-year-old man sodomize a small child? And then live with the knowledge of what he had done?

The answer, sadly, was too easily and too often.

He knew exactly what he would have done if he’d caught someone meddling with his children when they had been young. It would have involved a razor blade and a blowtorch.

There was a sudden jangle of weird electronic noises which was becoming irritatingly familiar to Rye. Gidney’s mobile phone. The geek removed an iPod earpiece and answered the phone in a flat tone, devoid of any emotion. ‘Oh hi,’ he said.

Rye knew roughly where Gidney lived – up off The Level, somewhere towards the racecourse, in a bedsit. It was an area of densely packed Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, originally built as artisan dwellings, now largely monopolized by students and young singles. What did the geek go home to – if and when he ever did go home? A tin of beans on a single hob? Another computer screen? The Guardian newspaper – which he always carried under his arm into work but never seemed to read – and a pile of techie magazines?

‘I need about another half-hour,’ Rye said to Tom Bryce. ‘You could wait, or would you like me to drop it back to you on my way home?’

‘Yes. I – I have the children – I need to get back. Thank you,’ Bryce said. ‘If you could drop it back I’d appreciate that.’

‘OK, I have your address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ He checked his watch, wanting to make sure he left enough time to get home for the one television programme of the week he was addicted to, the motoring programme, Top Gear. Although it was some years since he had been a traffic cop he was still an unreconstructed petrol-head.

As he replaced the receiver, he saw Gidney, wearing his anorak and carrying his small rucksack, heading out of the door. No goodbye. God, he was always the same – no social graces at all!

It took Rye longer than he had planned to finish his examination, and he realized, just a little guiltily, that it was now over an hour and a half since he had spoken to Tom Bryce. He finally closed the man’s laptop and was about to stand up when the phone rang.

It was an operator from the call handling centre in a building at Malling House, the police headquarters, where non-emergency calls from the general public were handled. ‘Is that the High Tech Crime Unit?’ the operator said.

Rye took a deep breath, resisting the temptation to tell the man he had the wrong number. ‘Sergeant Rye speaking.’

‘I have a caller who’s complaining that someone is using his wireless internet connection without his permission.’

‘Oh perrrlease?’ Rye said, nearly exploding – he really didn’t have the time for this. ‘If he has a wireless internet connection, all he has to do is activate the encryption to protect it!’

‘Would you mind talking to him, sir?’ the operator said. ‘It’s the third call we’ve logged from him in the past month. He’s a bit agitated.’

Join the club, Rye thought. Reluctantly he said, ‘Put him on.’

Moments later he heard an elderly-sounding male voice, with a guttural Germanic accent. ‘Oh yes. Hello there, my name is Andreas Seiler. I am an engineer; I am retired now but I was building bridges.’ Then there was just the hiss of static. Rye waited a while.

Then to break the silence – and to see if the man was still on the line – he said, ‘You are speaking to Sergeant Rye in the High Tech Crime Unit. How can I help you?’ I’m not hugely in need of a bridge, he was tempted to add.

‘Yes, thank you. Someone is stealing my internet.’

Rye looked at the clock on his computer screen. Twenty-five to seven. He just wanted to end this call and go home. And the operator might have mentioned the bloody man sounded as if he barely spoke English. ‘Stealing your internet. I’m not quite sure what you mean. Sir?’

‘I am downloading a blueprint from a colleague from my old company, for a bridge they are designing in Kuala Lumpur Harbour. Then my internet slows down so much that the blueprint does not download. This is happening before.’

‘I think you have a problem either with your internet service provider or with your computer, sir,’ Rye said. ‘You should start by contacting your ISP’s technical support.’

‘Well, I’ve done this, of course. And checked my computer. There are no problems. It is outside. I am thinking it is a man in a white van.’

Now Rye was just a little bit puzzled. And increasingly irritated by this bozo wasting his time. ‘A man in a white van slowing down your internet connection?’

‘Yah, that is right.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr…’ Rye glanced down at his notes. ‘Mr Seiler. I’m a little confused. Where exactly are you?’

‘I’m from Switzerland, but I am here working in Brighton.’

‘Whereabouts in Brighton, sir?’

‘Freshfield Road.’

‘OK.’ Rye knew that area well. An exceptionally wide street, on a hill, with two- and three-storey red-brick houses, many of the larger ones converted into flats. ‘Your internet connection – you’re on broadband?’

‘Broadband, yes.’

‘Do you have a wireless connection?’

‘You are meaning Airport? Wi-Fi?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yah, I have that.’

Rye grinned to himself, realizing what the man’s problem probably was. ‘Is your wireless network encrypted?’

Hesitantly, the man replied, ‘Encrypted? I don’t think so. I am staying in my son’s flat, you see – this is his computer I am using.’

‘You don’t have to enter a password to use the wireless broadband?’

‘No password, no.’

Without a password, any passer-by with a wireless internet card in their laptop could log on to the internet using someone else’s wireless broadband. Rye had done it himself a couple of times, by accident, sitting in a patrol car with his laptop open. And, he thought a little guiltily, he had never bothered to password-protect his own wireless broadband connection at home. ‘Is the van still outside?’

‘Yes, that is right.’

‘Can you read the registration number?’

The elderly Swiss engineer read it out to him. Rye wrote it down on his pad for no particular reason. ‘My best advice is for you to activate the encryption, and that will lock him out.’

‘I will speak to my son.’

‘Good idea, sir.’

Rye finished the call and hung up. Then, because he was feeling fed up, he decided the rest of the force could know he was still in the office at twenty to seven on a bloody Sunday evening, and he decided to log the call as an official incident on the Vantage screen.

He typed his own name and department, entered the registration and description of the van, vague as it was, and logged the incident as ‘War Driving. Sergeant Rye dealt with by phone.’

Childish, he knew, but it put him in one hell of a better mood.