Looking Good Dead

76

After the eight thirty briefing, Jon Rye had spent two and three-quarter hours working on the laptop that had been taken from the wrecked Ford Transit. But it was defeating him.

At twenty past eleven, feeling drained and frustrated, he went out of the department to get himself a coffee from the vending machine, then returned, deep in thought. With any computer he could normally find a way around any password protection by using forensic software to go in via a back door and then through the computer’s entire internet history. But on this machine he was drawing a blank.

He held his security card to the door panel of the High Tech Crime Unit, then entered and crossed what he had jokingly christened the hamster’s cage, the caged area housing the child pornography investigation, Operation Glasgow, nodding to a couple of the six people poring over their screens who glanced up at him, and walked through into the main part of his department.

Andy Gidney and the rest of his team were at their desks, well stuck into their day’s work. He sat back down at his desk, the laptop itself secure in the Evidence Room, its cloned hard disk loaded into his computer.

Although he had been head of this unit for the past three years, Rye was smart enough to know his own limitations. He had been retrained from Traffic. Several of the younger members of his team were techies from the ground up, university graduates who had lived and breathed computers from their cradles. Andy Gidney was the best of the lot. If there was one person in here who could persuade this laptop to yield its secrets, it was Gidney.

He ejected the cloned hard drive from his processor tower, stood up and walked across to Gidney’s workstation. Gidney was still working on cracking the pass code on an online banking scam. ‘Andy, I need you to drop everything for the next few hours and help me out on this. We have two lives at stake.’

‘Ummm,’ Gidney said. ‘The thing is, I’m quite close now.’

‘Andy, I don’t care how close you are.’

‘But if I stop, I could lose this whole sequence! Here’s the thing!’ Gidney swivelled his chair to face Rye, his eyes burning with excitement. ‘I think I’m just one digit away!’

‘How long will it take you?’

‘Ummm, right, ummm,’ he said pensively. Then he closed his eyes and nodded furiously. ‘Ummm. Ummm.’ He opened his eyes again and looked down at the floor. ‘I would hope by the end of this week.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jon Rye said. ‘You’re going to have to park it. I need you on this right now.’

‘Ummm, the thing is, there’s nine of us in this department, Jon, right?’

Hesitantly Rye said, ‘Yes?’

Concentrating hard on the carpet, Gidney asked, ‘Why exactly me?’

Rye wondered if flattery would help. ‘Because you’re the best. OK?’

Gidney petulantly swivelled his chair, and, with his back now to DS Rye, raised his hand, sounding supremely irritated. ‘All right, gimme.’

‘The forensic image files are on the server under job number 340.’

‘So what exactly am I looking for?’

Rye did not like talking to his junior’s back, but he had learned from experience that there was no point trying to change this weirdo; it was best to humour him, if he wanted the best out of him. ‘Postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses. Anything that could give us a clue where a couple called Mr and Mrs Bryce might be – Tom and Kellie Bryce.’ He spelled out their names.

‘Do what I can.’

‘Thanks, Andy.’

Rye returned to his desk, then was almost immediately called over to the far end of the room by another colleague, DC John Shaw, a tall, good-looking young man of thirty who he liked a lot. Shaw was extremely bright, also from a university background like Gidney, but the complete opposite of the other man in every way.

Shaw was working on a particularly harrowing photograph album on a hard drive seized in a raid on a suspected paedophile’s house. He had noticed a pattern in the man’s taste – bashing small children around before photographing himself having sex with them. It seemed similar to another case they’d handled recently and he wanted Rye’s view.

Ten minutes later Jon Rye returned to his desk, deep in thought. He had become hardened to most kinds of vile stuff that he saw on computers, but hurting kids still got to him. Every time. He barely noticed, as he passed Gidney’s workstation, that he wasn’t there.

A short while later, taking a brief respite from his emails, Rye looked over his shoulder and was surprised – and irritated, considering the urgency – to see that Gidney still had not returned.

He stood up and walked over to the geek’s workstation. On the screen he saw:

THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET OFFICE, ON BEHALF OF THE MARITIME AND COASTGUARD AGENCY, AT 0555 ON MONDAY 6 JUNE 2005 THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT 0000

LOW WESTERN FRANCE 1014 EXPECTED SOUTHEAST ENGLAND 1010 BY 1300. LOW ROCKALL 1010 MOVING STEADILY SOUTHEAST. HIGH FASTNET 1010. DISSIPATING.

What on earth was the man doing looking at the shipping forecast when they were in the middle of an emergency? And where the hell was he? He’d been gone a good twenty minutes – if not more.

After a further twenty minutes had passed, it became evident to Rye that Andy Gidney had vanished.

And, he was about to discover, Gidney had securely deleted everything from the server and taken the laptop and the cloned hard drive with him.