The Regret

by Dan Malakin

  But what really kick-started her recovery was her friendship with Mark, and what he helped her do. They hadn’t known each other long, maybe a couple of months – less with her repeated stays at psych – but friendships in the clinic developed with a speed and intensity you didn’t get in the outside world, especially when they started on the back of the darkest shames and deepest secrets revealed during group therapy.

  He was the one who tracked down Alan Griffin.

  Now that she was in hospital, she thought that Griffin would leave her alone. Wrong. He posted updates on both her Facebook profile and the fake Twitter account he’d created in her name, things like Still locked in the nut house where I belong, and I’m going to tell you the truth for once – I’m doing all this to myself.

  He also trolled her on eating disorder forums, accusing her of faking, turning the other users against her. That was how Mark had found him. He’d taken the troll’s name, Scarlett Bishop, cross-referenced her posts with others on the same forum, and found another user called MsWild connecting from the same IP address. Deep web searches on those names threw up another: Betty Wild. They found that user harassing people on numerous websites, from teen hangouts, to conspiracy clubs, to a forum where people posted reviews of Michelin-star restaurants.

  Mark opened a spreadsheet and checked them one by one, making notes on when the user joined, the number of posts, anything suspicious on the profile. ‘You’ve got to be fastidious,’ he said. ‘Leave no digital stone unturned.’

  Finally, they got a good lead – a user called B. Wild on a Googlebot cached copy of the member’s page for a restricted Yuku forum, wearethebest.yuku.com.

  ‘It’s just another forum,’ Rachel said.

  ‘No stone unturned.’

  ‘What does it matter? It’s members only.’

  ‘They’re amateurs.’

  Mark got the website version number, 3.3.1.2, from the login page, then loaded a website called xc0r3.ws.

  ‘Public forums like Yuku are full of holes,’ he said, clicking on a link called Yuku_3.3.1.2_perl_exploit. A page of programming code that looked, to Rachel, to be entirely composed of colons, brackets and dollar signs appeared on the screen. ‘This script finds holes in the Yuku software to extract the user passwords.’

  He saved it as gotcha.perl, then opened a little black window and typed: gotcha.perl wearethebest.yuku.com

  The script returned a list of users, each followed by a plain text password. Mark chose one and logged in.

  This forum was different from the others, the chats general, about football, nights out, holidays. No trolling. Mark clicked on a page called Ski trip pics, and there he was, the man who’d stolen a year and a half of Rachel’s life. He was sitting with two other guys outside an Alpine bar, beers on the wooden table, the slopes sun-glossed behind them.

  The caption read: Mad times in Morzine with Tommy K. and B. Wild.

  ‘We still don’t know his name,’ she said. ‘Unless it’s really B. Wild.’

  ‘We’re not finished yet.’

  The page was filled with more pictures of the same man. Relaxing in a hot tub, holding a long fork dripping with fondue cheese, waving his ski poles into the clear blue sky. Mark saved the photos as jpegs, and loaded them into PicTriev.com. The first couple returned nothing, but the third brought up the same photo on Flickr.

  The name on the Flickr profile?

  Alan Griffin.

  They went outside so Mark could have a cigarette in the shelter round the side of the clinic.

  ‘We’ve found him,’ she said, pulling her cardigan tight against the chill. ‘What now? The police?’

  ‘All we’ve got is him trolling you on the ana forum – that’s if they even listen to us.’

  Rachel rubbed her eyes. She should have known not to get excited. ‘Thanks for try–’

  ‘I do have one idea.’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘Have you heard of the dark web?’

  Rachel shrugged. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s a place on the World Wide Web that’s lawless. There are kiddie porn websites, snuff films. You can buy drugs and guns.’

  ‘A gun? Thanks, but I’d rather not swap the clinic for a prison cell.’

  ‘Not that.’ He flicked his butt into the bushes. ‘I’ve a better idea.’

  He’d seen it on an American cop show, CSI: Miami, or Criminal Minds. Someone paid a hacker to plant paedophile pictures on this guy’s computer and he went to prison. They could hire a hacker on the dark web to do the same.

  A world without the spectre of Alan Griffin…

  ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ she said. ‘Not unless they’re happy to get paid in angst and diet tips.’

  Mark tapped out another cigarette. ‘I’ve got money,’ he said, cupping his mouth. The flared lighter filled his gaunt face with hollows. ‘I’m a cryptocurrency king.’

  ‘A crypto-who now?’

  ‘I’ve been into Bitcoin from the start.’

  She shook her head. ‘Bits of coins, whole coins, I can’t take your money.’

  He gave her a how droll smirk. ‘We’re friends though, aren’t we? We’re real friends, right?’

  ‘Yes, we’re friends. That’s why–’

  ‘That’s why we’re doing this.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back, I promise,’ Rachel said, throwing her arms around him.

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with his own, and held them in a wide hug around where she might be, if she were ten times the size.

  With Griffin’s real name and his photo, they found his LinkedIn profile. They couldn’t access his personal details, like his e-mail address or phone number, but they could see he was working as a Network Engineer for Credit Suisse.

  ‘Got you,’ Mark said.

  What he did next amazed her more than anything else. Pretending to be Alan Griffin, speaking with a confidence she’d never heard before in his voice, Mark rang the HR department at Credit Suisse, said he had moved house, and asked them to confirm what address they had for him on their files. And they told him! He lived at sixteen Eversdale Close in Thatcham, a town west of London.

  Rachel gawped. ‘You can’t look someone in the eye when you’re talking to them, but you can do that?’

  ‘Don’t need to look anyone in the eye on the phone.’

  ‘Getting onto the dark web is easy,’ Mark said. ‘Download the right browser, Tor’s a good one, then connect. The tricky bit is finding your way around. It’s not indexed, like the surface web. You can’t just search for sites. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going nowhere. That’s why on the seventh day, God gave us Google.’

  He typed dark web websites into the search bar and selected a link called http://deepwebsites.org. As he scrolled through the list of addresses, Rachel found her mouth slowly winding down. The addresses were long random alpha-numeric strings, each ending with .onion. Beside each was a description of the site distilled to its, usually illegal, essence.

  Drugs. PayPal passwords. Fake IDs.

  ‘This can’t be real,’ she said.

  ‘This is as real as it gets.’

  She pointed to a description – The Hitman Network. ‘This is real?’

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said, copying the address and pasting it into Tor.

  A sleek black-and-chrome website loaded, like something for an upmarket city bar. Mark opened a profile – the avatar was a man’s face in shadow, a pistol by his cheek – and read his blurb. Let me fix your problem. I’ve been in business for fifteen years, and go by a number of aliases. No police record. I guarantee anonymity. There were even ratings! He had five stars for punctuality and privacy, but four for value. Rachel fought the urge to slap the laptop shut, and instead clicked on the price list. Murder started at five thousand.

  ‘This is insane,’ she said. ‘Why isn’t someone closing this down?’

  ‘The FBI will seize the site at some point, but that won’t matter. Nothing’s permanent li
ke in the surface web. Addresses appear and disappear.’

  The FBI! Rachel pictured a SWAT team bursting into the clinic, bagging their heads and hauling them to Guantanamo. They shouldn’t be doing this – she shouldn’t be dragging Mark into her mess. But what was the other option? Hide in the clinic for the rest of her life?

  ‘Listen, Mark. Are you sure you’re happy to do this?’

  ‘We’re already doing it.’

  ‘Okay… okay. So where do we find this hacker?’

  Mark went back to the listings site. ‘Here’s one. Darknet Hacking Services.’

  He pasted the link into Tor. The returned page was blank, except for a single underlined word – a hyperlink.

  Bit Chat

  ‘What’s Bit Chat?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘A kind of chat?’

  ‘Open-source, end-to-end encrypted.’

  ‘Well? Can we click on it?’

  ‘I don’t know…’ Mark hovered the cursor over the link. He tentatively right-clicked it, but nothing happened. ‘Probably opens into a random anonymous address.’ He rocked his head. ‘You’ve got to be so careful down here… but you’ve got to click on something… I don’t–’

  Rachel stabbed the trackpad, opening the link, and shrugged. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  A Bit Chat installation program flashed on the screen. It completed in seconds, the blue progress bar at the bottom zipping to a hundred percent before they could react.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Rachel said.

  ‘That’s fine, it’s only Bit Chat. Loads of people use it. I use it.’

  A plain chat window opened. In the People panel on the right was the name Regret beside a blank placeholder image of a head. The name flashed.

  ‘He’s typing,’ Mark said.

  You’ve already screwed up, appeared on the left side of the chat window. Look at your webcam. Say hi.

  Mark rushed to close the lid. He paused as Regret’s name flashed.

  No need to do that. If I was going to wait for you to look at porn and blackmail you with the pictures of you strangling the bald guy, I wouldn’t have told you about it. Would I?

  Mark typed back, I suppose not.

  I’ve disconnected from your webcam. Clicking on a link down here is like opening the front door to your computer, and there are some pretty scary people hanging around outside. People you don’t want to invite into your life…

  ‘I knew there was something dodgy,’ Mark muttered. ‘Rookie mistake.’

  Now repeat after me. I promise to always cover my webcam, or even better, disconnect it when it is not in use.

  Mark wrote, We need your help.

  Repeat it first.

  This was not what Rachel was expecting. Mark glanced at her, but her bemused shrug was probably of little help.

  I promise to always cover my webcam, he typed. Or disconnect it when it’s not in use.

  Good. You’re learning. So, you need a hacker. Here I am.

  We want you to put pictures on someone’s computer.

  What kind of pictures?

  Were they really going to do this? It was a criminal act. If anyone found out, they would go to prison. But she had to do something – she couldn’t bear the thought of fighting through recovery with Griffin still in her life.

  Rachel nodded at Mark, and he wrote, Children.

  Nothing happened. Rachel waited, squeezing one hand with the other.

  Regret’s name flashed. Lolz

  ‘Lolz?’ she said. ‘Is he messing with us?’

  Mark typed, Are you wasting our time?

  You got his deets? Name, address.

  Yes.

  No doubt he’s running Windows. Most of the sheeple do. I can’t see it being a problem…

  They agreed on a fee of a thousand pounds, to be paid in Dash, an anonymous cryptocurrency. Give him three days.

  Mark typed, How do I know you won’t rip us off?

  What happened to trust in this world?

  I don’t know you

  And I don’t know you…

  How can I trust you?

  You came to me.

  Rachel looked at Mark – well? His face was helpless and apologetic, like they were sinking and she’d reminded him that he was the one looking after the life jackets.

  She turned the keyboard towards herself. Tell me something about yourself, she typed.

  What was she doing? What was he going to tell her? Where he lived? His bloody national insurance number? He wasn’t replying. She had to write something.

  Why are you called Regret?

  A long pause, then his name flashed. There’s nothing worse than knowing what you had, but lost forever.

  She smiled. That could be the tagline for her life. What if we regret doing this?

  No refunds :-)

  It was this, or spending the rest of her life in fear.

  His name’s Alan Griffin, she wrote. He lives…

  For the next few days, Rachel veered between excitement that this nightmare may soon be over, and fear they’d been tricked by some twelve-year-old kid in his parents’ basement. At night Rachel woke to every sound, scared the police were coming to question her. Of all the things she’d put her gran through, being sent to prison would top the lot.

  On the fourth day, right when she was ready to give up, Rachel went to sit in the rec room after breakfast. The news was on in the background. She caught the headline and froze – Thatcham paedophile arrested.

  Griffin lived in Thatcham.

  The newsreader explained the haul of images found on his computer was one of the largest ever found, some five million pictures. A live feed showed a man being led out of a front door, his hands cuffed behind his back, his doughy sleep-creased face swinging around in bewilderment.

  It was a face she’d recognise anywhere.

  As well as the images, the police found Word documents detailing the ways he’d like to torture young girls. He pleaded his innocence, but the timestamps on the pictures showed a gradual accumulation.

  An online petition, signed by over a million people, demanded the strictest punishment.

  Months later, on the day of his sentence, Rachel signed the forms for her release at the clinic. He got twelve years, with the possibility of indefinite incarceration if they thought he was a threat after that time.

  Take that, you bastard, she thought. Who’s ruining whose life now?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Konrad

  Despite the Clonazepam, Rachel couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts scrabbled around her brain like desperate fingers trying to grip a glassy surface. How could she have been so stupid? Of course it was Konrad! Give him credit though, it was pretty amazing what he’d done. Genius even. Sending that photo from her Snapchat account made her look unstable – it destroyed her credibility. He could even say she was a stalker, that she wouldn’t leave him alone. Wouldn’t that be ironic? And that’s why he changed his phone number!

  All the drama – the injuries, the drinking, barging in and pushing her down – had been just that, a performance.

  Meanwhile he’d shagged her, stolen her money, and disappeared.

  Clearly, he had some kind of personality disorder. No-one normal could do this to her, not while being so charming, funny, and, well, nice. It reminded her of a twelve-year-old boy she’d met during her brief stint as a nurse at Northside, who was diagnosed as a psychopath. Everyone had thought he was a normal kid, until they’d found the abandoned air raid shelter where he stored his collection of disembowelled woodland creatures. They’d been crudely stuffed, sewn back up, and positioned in military rows, facing the opening to the shelter, like an army of the dead ready to protect their master. When asked about it, his reaction had been, My dad used to collect stamps when he was young. What’s the difference?

  Rachel had liked chatting with the boy in the canteen. He seemed to be a sweet kid, sharp, intelligent, self-aware in a way she couldn’t imagine
being at his age, so friendly she’d sometimes thought they must have got the diagnosis wrong. Weren’t psychopaths supposed to be dead-eyed monsters? One of the resident psychiatrists had explained the opposite was true – psychopaths were often the most amiable and charismatic people you were likely to meet. But don’t be fooled. It was a mask. Of course, this didn’t mean they were necessarily evil, or murderous. Most wanted to have a normal life. But that was the key word: most.

  A month after arriving at the hospital, the boy had stabbed another kid in the throat with a penknife because this other kid was sitting in his space in the TV room. He’d never even asked him to move.

  It felt impossible for Konrad to be like that, for him to have fooled her for almost a year, but that was what had surely happened.

  She got out of bed. Was there any more depressing a time to be alone with your thoughts? No wonder suicides spiked in the dead of night. She unfolded the step by the airing cupboard and brought down the money box. She needed to put it somewhere further away, harder to reach, less of an immediate temptation, but that was a discussion for another day. She couldn’t live with her head like this. The sleeping pills hadn’t worked. Happy bloody birthday to me.

  She took an OxyContin – Lily wasn’t there, so it was fine – and drifted downstairs. May as well get comfortable. Rachel flicked on the television and sifted through the usual twilight rubbish bin of repeats, terrible films, and bad sitcoms that should’ve been euthanised after the first season. Fortunately, Good Eats UK was showing an old episode of Bake Off. She stretched out and pulled the crochet blanket they kept on the sofa over herself. At the sight of the cakes, her stomach made a sound like a sick dog. As the pill kicked in, softening the sharp edges of her mind and sending a rush of warmth down her spine, she imagined the soft sponge in her mouth, the taste of the sweet sticky caramel on her tongue.

  By seven, Rachel couldn’t lie on the sofa any longer. She’d dozed for an hour, but her dreams had been fraught and frantic – lots of explaining and sorting, ending in inevitable failure – and it felt better to be up. She went to the kitchen to make a coffee. No more pills. She barely remembered the hours spent zoned out to the TV. She half filled her coffee with cold water, slugged it, prepared another and took it to the shower.