Screen Savers

Chapter 24

As it happened, I didn’t hear from Mike until next morning, and rather earlier than I had hoped, at that. I had a one-day voice-over in Edinburgh on the Tuesday of that week, then two days’ filming on Deeside on the Wednesday and Thursday, before heading off to Dublin with the GWA on the Friday, so I had decided, reasonably, I thought, that Monday would be a day off.

That’s why I was in bed when the front doorbell sounded at five past nine: not the buzzer from the street entrance, but the doorbell itself. It rang three times before I was fully awake, and twice more as I stomped downstairs, tying the belt of my dressing gown and wondering which of my effing neighbours had been foolish enough to interrupt my rest.

‘Jesus, Oz,’ said Dylan, grinning and resplendent in a tan Dannimac raincoat, as I swung the door open. ‘I’ve seen people in Casualty on a Friday night looking in better nick than you, son.’

‘And I’ve seen better dressed postmen,’ I growled back at him. ‘How’d you get in?’

‘I bumped into Prim on her way out just as I was arriving; she let me in. Have you decided to retire, then?’

‘Bloody hell, Michael,’ I barked. ‘In the last few days, I’ve acted in a major movie, done two international television shows, found a naked lady in my bath, been shot at — or nearly — by a helmeted motorcycle assassin, and set upon by two second-division heavies with instructions to break both my arms. I think I’m entitled to a wee lie-in, don’t you?’

I stood aside to let him come in. ‘You know where the coffee and stuff is. Make us some, while I get dressed.’

It took me just under ten minutes to shower and throw on some clothes. By the time I ambled barefoot into the kitchen, still running my electric shaver over my chin, Mike had made not just coffee but two bacon rolls for each of us. ‘HQ canteen shut, is it?’ I asked. ‘I’m not sure I want any of those.’

‘Come on, pal,’ he grinned, ‘you want to play at being a polis, you have to act like one. Hope you like brown sauce on your bacon, by the way.’

‘I’ll slum it with you,’ I grunted, finishing my shave. I glanced out of the window; it was a grey, damp morning, a reminder that winter was only a couple of months away.

‘This is elevenses for me, you realise,’ said Dylan. ‘I’ve been in the office since just after seven checking up on Mrs Donn. She didn’t have a call from Stephen on Friday; that I know for sure. Nor did she phone him.’

‘Dammit.’

‘Ah, but. . your wee flash of intuition worked out. The woman is on e-mail. When did Prim visit her?’

‘Just after five.’

‘Thought so. That got me excited, because about two hours after that, Mrs D connected to her internet server and sent a message down the line.’

‘Can you read it off the server?’

‘In theory we could. What we have is a burst of digital information, that could be decoded, but that would take cleverer people than we have. But anyhow, we don’t need to do that. I had a word with the service provider and persuaded him to give me the name of the addressee. The message went to S Donn at Hotmail.’

‘Hotmail?’

‘Yes, it’s an international e-mail clearing house that anyone can subscribe to. You tap into it through the Web, and you can access it from anywhere. So, I went on line and I accessed the boy’s mailbox.’

‘But doesn’t he have a password? I thought everyone had.’

Dylan nodded. ‘Sure, but that’s not much of a barrier. Have you any idea how many people use someone’s Christian name? Have you any idea how many use their partner’s or their mother’s? I just keyed in M. I. R. A. and, open sesame, I was right in there. Stephen picked up his mother’s message less than two hours after she sent it.’

‘Have you got the message?’

‘No, he’ll have stored that on his own terminal; it’s been wiped from Hotmail. His log’s there, though, and it shows the time of transmission and collection. You don’t have to be a computer genius to work out what it said, though. “Dear son, Why is this man Blackstone and his girlfriend asking after you, and why did you nick all your photos from my house and from your Uncle Joe’s?” Or words to that effect.’

‘Do we know where he was when he collected it?’

‘No, it couldn’t tell me that.’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘now you can monitor his e-mail traffic, wherever he is.’

Dylan shook his head, even as he ripped a chunk off one of his rolls. ‘Not exactly,’ he replied, when he could. ‘I’ll have left a trace on the log this morning myself. If I go in regularly, he’ll twig for sure. Even doing it just once, there’s a chance he’ll notice the entry and know from the time that it wasn’t him. If he does that, then straight away he’ll change the password to something we’ll never guess.’

I had to agree with this. Finding the mailbox was a bonus, but it wasn’t going to unlock the secrets of Stephen Donn’s world, or even tell us where he was.

‘So, Oz,’ Mike asked, once we had finished breakfast, ‘what’s your interest in all this?’

He was so chuffed with himself over his computer trickery that he’d missed the bloody obvious.

‘Remember the naked lady I mentioned earlier? The one I found in my bath? As the Sunday tabloids say, I declined her offer and left — well actually I told her to bugger off. When those two hard men showed up twenty-four hours later I assumed straight away that she or her husband was connected to it.

‘But suppose, just suppose, Stephen Donn was sufficiently annoyed by his mother’s message to want to put me out of business for a while. Even if he was in Amsterdam he’d have had time to get over to London, source some hired muscle and put it on my trail.’

‘Why should he even know about you?’ Mike protested.

‘For openers, my surname must be familiar to him; Jan worked at Gantry’s before him, remember. Also he blew up Susie’s motor in my car park. If he’s been stalking her, there’s every chance he knows me and how I relate to her.’

‘But how would he know where to find you?’

‘Anyone who’s watched the GWA in the last couple of years knows I’m part of their set-up. Anyone who’s watched satellite sports promotions in the last month would have known I was due in London last weekend. Anyone who can read a newspaper could have known I’m in Miles’s movie, as did the person who hired those gorillas. They said that my pulling out of the film was to be the trigger for the second half of the payment for the job.

‘I tell you, mate, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Stephen Donn put me on the spot, rather than Richard Barowitz or his wife.’

‘So where are these heavies now? Have the police got them?’

‘No, they were a bit damaged, so we let them go. The GWA doesn’t need that sort of publicity.’

‘Great! That’s another possible lead to Donn gone down the pan. This guy’s trying to kill my girlfriend, Oz. You have a couple of guys who might have met him and you let them swan off into the bloody night!’

His sudden show of irritation took me by surprise, but I had to admit that it was justified. ‘I’m sorry man,’ I said. ‘The Donn connection didn’t occur to me at the time.’ Then I had an afterthought. ‘You could always check the hospitals. One of them had damage to his throat and a lacerated tongue, and the other had a broken forearm, or wrist.

‘Even if you do find them, though, you won’t get much of a description out of them. All they could tell us was that the bloke who paid them was ordinary looking and that he wore Raybans.’

‘Fuck the description. The next time Donn sees you on telly and realises that you’re in one piece, he might go looking for his money back. If he does that I’d like to have some people of my own there to meet him, as well as your two damaged Cockney pals.’