Looking Good Dead

70

Grace, seated at the workstation in MIR One, hung up the phone and took a sip of the strong, sweet, white coffee he had just made himself. Since he had left the cleaners seemed to have been; the place was spotless, the smell of food replaced with the slightly metallic tang of polish, the bins emptied. Nick Nicholl, seated beside him, also hung up his phone.

‘No news from the hospital,’ the DC announced.

At this moment, Grace thought, no news was good news. No news meant that E-J was still alive. ‘OK,’ he said, nodding at the laptop that Nick Nicholl had taken from the van, which was now sitting in a plastic evidence bag in front of him. ‘I want to check out the in-box and sent mail on this machine.’

He glanced at the Vantage screen, taking a quick look through the incident log for the night so far. Other than the flurry surrounding their own activities, it was a quiet night, typical of Sunday. Come Thursday and Friday nights, there would be ten times the activity.

The Detective Constable pulled on latex gloves, removed the laptop from the bag and popped its lid. It was still powered up, but had gone to sleep. For some moments the processor went through its wake-up checks, then it opened at the Entourage email program that must have been running, Nicholl realized, when they had approached the vehicle.

Branson, sitting opposite them, asked, ‘Was Jon Rye helpful?’

‘More helpful than I’d be to most people at this hour of the morning,’ Grace retorted, blowing on the coffee to cool it.

‘Yeah, well he used to be in Traffic. Serves him right to get a bit of payback. One of them bastards done me about ten years ago; could have been him.’

Grace grinned. ‘Pissed? Breathalysed?’

‘No, just speeding. Empty bloody road – I wasn’t that much over. Bastard threw the book at me.’

‘Yeah, I got done for speeding three years ago,’ Grace said. ‘By an unmarked car just up the A23. Told him I was a cop and that just made it worse. They seem to get sadistic pleasure out of nicking their own.’

‘Know that old joke?’ Branson said. ‘About the difference between a hedgehog and a Traffic cop car?’

Grace nodded.

‘I don’t,’ Nicholl said.

‘With the cop car, the pricks are on the inside,’ Branson said.

Nicholl frowned for a moment as if his tired brain didn’t get it. Then he grinned. ‘Right! That’s funny,’ he said, moving the laptop so Grace could see the screen clearly.

‘Start with the in-box,’ Grace said. ‘Anything that’s come in since’ – he looked down at his notes to check the time of Jon Rye’s log – ‘since six thirty yesterday evening.’

There was just one email sitting in the in-box, and it had a massive attachment, marked SC5w12. A symbol showed the email and attachment had been forwarded on to someone. The address of the sender was postmaster@scarab.tisana.al. Grace felt a surge of adrenalin as he saw the word ‘scarab’. ‘We’ve hit the damn jackpot!’

‘Dot al,’ Branson wondered, now standing behind them, reading over their shoulders. ‘What country is al?’

‘Albania,’ Nick Nicholl said.

Grace looked at him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘You some kind of a closet geek, man?’ Branson asked admiringly. ‘How do you know that?’

The detective turned to Branson and grinned a little sheepishly. ‘It was the answer to one of the questions at a quiz night down at our local a few weeks ago.’

‘I’ve never been to one,’ Branson said. ‘Maybe I should go with Ari, improve our general knowledge.’ Might improve our marriage, more importantly, he thought. Try and find a few things to do together, other than argue.

Grace was looking at the address again. ‘Tisana,’ he said. ‘Did they have that one in your pub quiz too?’

Nicholl shook his head. ‘Let’s Google it.’

He keyed a search, but all that came up was an Italian website with a translator option. Nicholl clicked on that. Moments later they were staring at a long, detailed list of pathologies and plants. Acne, Grace read. Carrot, soluble Tisana vitamins, Germ of Grain, Oil of Borragine, Burdock. Then, more interesting to him at this late – or early – hour, he read, Fatigue. Ginseng, Guarana, Elueterococco, Tisana vitamins and minerals. Lecitina di Soia.

‘Maybe he’s a health nut,’ Glenn Branson wisecracked. Nicholl ignored him, too weary for jokes at the moment.

‘Go to the sent mail box,’ Grace said.

Nicholl clicked on that. It contained just one email – the same one, with the same attachment.

‘Can you see who it was sent to?’ Grace asked.

‘Strange,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘There’s no recipient showing.’

He double-clicked on it, and moments later the reason why became evident. There were hundreds and hundreds of recipients, all blind-copied. And all had email addresses that were just sequences of numbers combined with Tisana.

Grace read the first one: 110897@tisana.al. Then the next one: 244651@tisana.al.

‘The first part looks like the name – obviously coded,’ Nick Nicholl said. ‘Tisana must be the internet service provider.’

‘So why didn’t Tisana show up on the search?’ Grace queried.

‘My guess is because someone doesn’t want it to.’

‘Can you hide things from search engines like Google?’

‘I’m sure if you know what you are doing, you can conceal anything you want.’

Nodding, Grace said, ‘Let’s take a look at the attachment. See what that has to tell us.’

He stared at the screen as Nick Nicholl moved the cursor onto the attachment and double-clicked on it. Then, moments later, he was rather wishing he hadn’t suggested it be opened after all.

All three of them watched in numb silence for the next four minutes.