by Carl Goodman
Eva threw on a tracksuit and did what she could with her clothes. Most of her possessions were still in boxes because she had only moved into the flat the previous Saturday. Renting the flat itself had been a lucky break. It was on the fifth floor of a new apartment block, and like any moderately tall building in Kingston had a view of the Thames, albeit from a few hundred metres away. A swathe of green land edged by oak trees lay between her building and the river. She imagined it would be pleasant to sit on the bank and watch the water roll by, but knew once the investigation got properly started there’d be little chance of that.
She went back into her living area and opened the box Leticia North had sent her. She had already set up a battered-looking laptop on a small table by the window. It was not her work computer. That was still in a cardboard box. The system was also on loan from MPCCU, although the fact they did not know they had lent it to her seemed like an unimportant detail to Eva.
Raj had been right of course. The box was an external GPU chassis and it was stuffed with graphics cards. Its main function was to make games and 3D graphics run blazingly fast, but Raj had also been correct in guessing that that was not what Eva was going to use it for. He had almost worked that out too. The difference between the graphics processors and the central processor of the computer was like the difference between ‘reduced instruction set’ and ‘complete instruction set’ computing. It sounded complicated. Eva had tried to explain it many times before, but the simplest analogy she had found was like the difference between multiplying 7x5 and adding 7+7+7+7+7. The answer would be the same, but the simple nature of addition meant that the dumb-but-quick graphics card could do the calculation blindingly fast. These types of devices were also great for other jobs that needed brute-force number crunching, like calculating the prime numbers required for generating crypto-currencies. And, Eva thought as she powered it up and connected it to the laptop, for hacking passwords.
Tisha understood. The eGPU would have come from a bust, a recoverable asset seized from a drug dealer most likely, but Tisha would have added to it. On the laptop there was a disk image, one that Eva had taken from another laptop that still sat in an evidence locker in the Vauxhall technical hub. The image was like a photocopy of the hard drive of that computer, accurate down to the last byte. It could run all the same software, open all the same files, except for the fact that it was password protected.
The duplicate of the encrypted password database was constantly being copied and overwritten as the brute-force algorithm Eva had set on it churned its way through permutations. She had no idea how many there might be. The number of possible combinations increased exponentially as the number of characters in the password grew. Nine might take a month, ten a year, eleven might take a decade. The eGPU would help a lot, accelerating the process by more than a hundred-fold. As she watched, the device connected itself to the laptop, and she saw the number of permutations it crunched through per second accelerate. The counter became a blur, but it could still take years if the owner of the original laptop had used a complex, random password. She did not think they had.
I knew you, you bastard, Eva thought. You just weren’t that smart.
She had planned on an early night. Someone else had another idea. Around half-past nine her phoned buzzed. A text, Eva noticed. When she saw who it was from her frown turned into a scowl.
I’m changing trains at 9.55, the message told her. I’ll be on the platform for seven or eight minutes. Meet me.
No please or thank you. Just an order. She almost threw her phone at the wall. She wanted to scream back, to tell him to go to hell, but she knew she could not. Fuck him, Eva thought. Fucking bastard.
She went to find some clothes.
* * *
Twenty-five minutes later Eva crossed the pedestrian walkway that led to Kingston railway station. Only a short walk from her flat, the walkway bridged an underpass that swept beneath the railway line. The station entrance was a couple of hundred metres further down the walkway, but she didn’t need to go that far. Before the station buildings began there was a stretch of some forty metres, divided from the walkway by a fence topped with razor wire that ran next to the platform. The longer trains stopped here. The eight- and twelve-carriage commuter specials that trundled into London in the morning and dragged exhausted passengers home in the evening. A length of tarmac faced the opposite platform interrupted by a few metal benches, some lights on poles, a sign that held the name of the station, an overflowing bin with crisp packets and cardboard coffee cups scattered around its base, and nothing else. Nothing, except for him.
She hated him on sight, even his silhouette. A tall man in a long coat, thin face, narrow features, gloved hands, carrying absolutely nothing. He waited by the fence. There were no other commuters on the platform. Watched as Eva walked up to him. She could feel his eyes, even though in the darkness and with the light behind him she couldn’t see his face. Felt the bile rise in her throat as she said the one word he expected, but which more than anything else she did not want to speak. She forced her mouth to form the single syllable, even though it tasted of poison.
‘Sir,’ Eva said.
Alastair Hadley waited, just because he could. ‘Harris,’ he said eventually. No DI, no honorific, voice as flat as a funeral dirge. ‘How was your first day?’
As if you fucking care, Eva thought. She wanted to spit in his face. Instead she said, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard, sir.’
She wondered if he would slap her down. He chose not to, but the choice seemed almost indolent. ‘Of course I have.’ She wondered if he would comment about the fact that she had worked out that the suspect would still be on site, but she doubted it. He did not disappoint her. ‘So now you’ve met five of them,’ Hadley said. ‘First impressions?’
There was no point in arguing. ‘Moresby seems like a good cop,’ Eva said, ‘thorough and efficient. I wasn’t aware Sutton had been injured.’
‘It’s irrelevant,’ Hadley told her.
‘She’s a possibility,’ Eva conceded. ‘I don’t have enough to go on yet. I’ll get more,’ she added hastily, before he could admonish her.
Hadley still did not react. ‘The others?’
‘Flynn, Newton and Chakrabati. From what I can see the timings don’t work. That’s not to say one of them isn’t taking over from someone else, but there’s nothing to suggest that yet. I’ll keep digging of course.’
Hadley snapped then. ‘Make sure you do. And the contact I gave you?’
For fuck’s sake, she thought, I’ve been a bit fucking tied up. ‘It’s been a busy day,’ Eva said.
Hadley snarled. ‘I don’t care how fucking busy it’s been. I expect you to make contact. If I give you a fucking instruction then I expect you to follow it, I don’t care how busy you think you are.’ She stood in silence, waiting for the rest of the tirade. Hadley didn’t disappoint.
‘Remember this, Harris,’ he hissed. ‘I own you. I own your career, I own your life. You don’t fucking breathe without permission from me. You work for me, you work for my squad. I’ll use you like a fucking Kleenex and do what the fuck I want with you. If I give you an instruction, you fucking well follow it. Is that understood?’
She wanted to kill him. She wanted to climb the fence, even if she sliced her hands open on the razor wire, drop onto the platform, punch him in the throat and shove him onto the third rail. She despised him. She wanted him dead. Instead she made her face into a mask and told him: ‘Absolutely, sir.’
He walked away from her then. Interview terminated, Eva assumed. She watched his back as a train trundled into the station and Hadley boarded it. Bile stung the back of her throat. She had to spit. The doors bleeped and closed. Then the train left the station.
‘Absolutely, sir,’ Eva whispered to herself. ‘Like absolutely I’m going to see you in your fucking grave too, one day very soon.’
* * *
That night Eva lay awake, stared at the ceiling and wondered how she ha
d come to be twenty-seven years old and sleeping with stolen computer hardware for company.
The truth was she had never wanted to be a police officer. Perhaps that was not strictly correct, she thought as she listened to the distant cries of an urban fox. The simple fact was she had never even considered the possibility.
University felt like another existence. That first year away from the confines of a claustrophobic home life, making new friends, learning new things, and for a while running more than a little wild. Drunken parties, drunken sex and serious, non-trivial hangovers. Like most students she had buckled down in the second year and started to take her degree seriously. She worked hard, but then Southampton’s BSc Mathematics with Computer Science was tough but enjoyable. Eva had loved it and had not wanted it to end. That was why, when it did, she had taken out another student loan and went straight on to do her Master’s.
Another house came to mind, the house she had lived in for three years with half a dozen other students. Her window had faced west. From it she could see the funnels of ships in the harbour and watch the sun set over the sea. She had worked at her computer for months in that room, whitewashed walls and white-painted floorboards, listening to gulls screech overhead.
Eva had contemplated doing a PhD next, but money was tight and she was worried about becoming a perpetual student. It was not as though there was anything to keep her at Southampton. There had been a few relationships, but none that she had especially wanted to continue with. The deciding factor had been when her professor, an intimidatingly clever Romanian woman, had decided to return to her home country. When she had confided her reason for wanting to leave, Eva had felt outraged. The racial abuse had become more strident, snide comments about her name and accent less subtle and more brutal. Time to go, she had told Eva. Eva found she felt the same way.
Where though? She’d had four years of freedom and could not face going home. She needed a job. The problem resolved itself for her at a career fair. The representative from the Metropolitan Police’s Cyber Crime Unit had taken one look at her CV and done everything but physically grab her. Eva had never even considered the idea of working for the police before, but the more they talked the more the possibilities seemed to grow. Barely a month later she had found herself living in a subsidised flat in London, working as a trainee analyst in MPCCU.
Eva had lapped up the work. There had been plenty of technical challenges and a range of tasks that had taken her by surprise. She had rotated through everything, from financial crime to counter-terrorism. She fitted in easily enough and enjoyed the freedom that living in the capital brought. It was not until she went to work with CEOP that reality finally hit her.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre had stopped her in her tracks. Bent bankers and fanatical Jihadists, somehow they had not touched her. Everybody expected bankers to be bent and Jihadists to be fanatical, so discovering that perception broadly matched reality came as little surprise. The cops who worked at CEOP though; she saw something else in their eyes. Paedophile rings and child traffickers, organised crime and lone wolves, the work took its toll. Somehow the CEOP officers were even more professional, even more guarded in their words and actions. Eva came to understand why. The consequence of error was the stuff of nightmares, and she did have nightmares during that rotation.
It hit her hard one evening, as she watched a raid on a building where a server pumped child porn onto a darknet. Men with batons and battering rams had gone in, men in handcuffs had come out. Eva watched from the sidelines, nothing much to see. She had stripped away the onionskin on their TOR router and nailed the server. But as the men in handcuffs were led away a detective sergeant had turned to her and said: you did that. You got those bastards. We couldn’t have tracked them without your work. It had shaken her, not least because later she had seen the material the darknet had been spewing out. It went so far beyond her nightmares that she’d had to leave. That night, crying her eyes out in the silence of her room, Eva did something she had never done before and which she vowed she would never do again. She had drunk herself into a stupor on neat vodka. In the morning she called in sick. Nobody had seemed surprised. In the afternoon, hangover slowly abating, Eva had stared at herself in the mirror and come to an awful, terrifying, exhilarating realisation. That what she had done had actually made a difference.
And so when she had been offered the opportunity to fast-track, to become a detective inspector in cybercrime within just a few years, Eva had said yes. She had considered it in a cool, measured fashion. She thought she understood the risks. You’ll need to do two years’ rotation in roles other than cyber, the superintendent who interviewed her had told her. Firearms training, involvement with undercover units, regular police work. It did not sound like a problem. And it hadn’t been; until one night, a little over two years ago, when somebody had picked Eva Harris’s life and career up and ripped them completely to shreds.
Chapter Five
Raj Chakrabati stood in front of the whiteboard with a sheath of notes clutched in his hand. He looked as tidy as ever, Eva thought, except for his hair. It was jet black and quite long, and Raj had clearly just run his fingers through it before he stood to speak. ‘Seven suspects,’ Raj told them. ‘None of them is especially promising.’
She had not expected they would be, although she knew she had to do her best to hide her scepticism. When she had looked at the details of the earlier victims, what she was now beginning to think of as the original case, the contrast with Irina Stepanov had seemed too extreme. Kelly Gibson had been nineteen years old, Olivia Russell twenty-one and Grace Lloyd twenty. All had been university students, although studying different subjects. All young and attractive women, who had been left with markings on their bodies, which Eva did not yet understand. To be sure, their eyes had also been removed. Hence Sutton’s conviction that the killer was the same individual, but even the method of dissection had felt different. Kelly Gibson had been fair-haired and moderately tall, green-eyed, a slender woman with what Eva would have described as a willowy build. Olivia Russell had been a little shorter and darker, blue-eyed and with short hair, she looked as though she had been into sports. Indeed, when Eva checked she had found that Russell swam competitively. Her preferred distance and stroke had been the hundred-metre butterfly. In the photographs Eva could see a slight broadness to her shoulders, which reflected that. Grace Lloyd had been auburn with a tangled mane that seemed distinctive in its own right, but quite different from the other two girls. As tall as Gibson, Lloyd had become involved with amateur dramatics and had small parts in several university productions. She had a fuller figure, but not unusually so. Three young women, all very attractive but all very different. There had not been any suggestion of dangerous habits, drink, drugs or promiscuity, or at least nothing exceptional for university students. Eva could not see an obvious connection.
Which, she had to concede, introduced another problem from the perspective of trying to create logical sets to place the victims in. If anything, their physical differences lent support to Sutton’s theory, Eva thought as she looked at the whiteboard. Irina Stepanov was considerably older, but she too had been a strikingly attractive woman. In one sense, age was the only differentiator. Suppose that single factor had seemed less of a distinction to the perpetrator than it did to her? And yet personal circumstances also divided them, as did the exact nature of the attacks. A rich older woman and poor younger students. Despite the question marks that hung over the diagrams she was drawing in her head, she still felt convinced the DCI’s assertion was not correct.
Raj waited patiently. His comment about them not being promising still hung in the air like an unanswered request for permission. ‘Let’s hear about them anyway,’ Eva said.
He referred to his notes as he pointed to the photos, taped in a horizontal line across one of the whiteboards. ‘Daniel Cox, now twenty-six years old, then a product design student at the university. It seems like he knew all three wo
men. Although there was some evidence to put him near the locations of the first two murders he has a pretty solid alibi for the third.’
‘So just circumstantial?’
‘Pretty much,’ Raj told her. ‘Next is Thomas Wells, a local cab driver at the time. Wells is thirty now. We think he may be in Spain.’
‘Which presumably rules him out of Irina Stepanov’s murder?’
‘Probably, ma’am,’ Jamie Newton confirmed. Newton might have been lounging in his chair but he was clearly paying full attention. Newton’s problem was that he was just a bit too good-looking. Crisp white shirt with sleeves rolled up, tie just loose and not quite concealing the fact that his top button was undone, Newton looked more as though he were on the set of a fashion shoot than in a police incident room. And yet none of his gestures or poses seemed especially studied, Eva thought. Newton was just distractingly handsome, and there was little he could do about that. ‘I’m checking with border control but we don’t think he’s been back in the UK in the last eight months.’
‘Okay. Kevin Mason?’
‘Now married with two kids and living in Hampshire,’ Raj told her. ‘He worked in a sandwich bar that a lot of the students frequented. Now he has a bar of his own in Basingstoke.’
‘This isn’t sounding great so far,’ Eva told him.
‘It gets a bit better. Martin Ward is a local low-life, definitely dealing and definitely a hard case. Ward is thirty-six by now. You could maybe see Ward as a killer if you squinted a bit. Don’t know about eye-slicing nut-job, though.’
Eva stepped closer to the board. ‘Mathew Harred?’
‘An odd one,’ Raj said, ‘in that it’s a bit unclear as to why he’s on the list in the first place. He’s a painter. Not as in the “and decorator” sort – Harred is an artist, allegedly.’ He frowned. ‘Actually, that’s not fair. I saw a couple of shots of his stuff. He seems pretty good.’