by Des Ekin
‘I don’t know what came over me,’ he muttered. ‘I’d reached the end of my tether. I can’t seem to think straight any more.’ He looked up at her. ‘At one stage I really believed I’d lost it.’
‘Because of Mags Jackson?’
‘Yes.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Because of Mags Jackson.’
‘Listen, Hunter.’ Claire leaned forward, her tone quiet and intense. ‘I was there, remember? I met that woman in our office. I witnessed her signature. She wasn’t a figment of your imagination. Whoever she was, she was as real as you or I. She existed.’
He fell silent for a moment. Claire was right. For a short, dangerous period, he had really begun to distrust the evidence of his own senses.
‘You have to get a grip on things again, Hunter,’ she urged. ‘You have to look at all this logically.’
‘That’s the trouble. There isn’t any logic. It’s about as logical as a chapter from Alice in Wonderland.’
Claire shook her head, still leaning forward, keeping eye contact.
‘There are two possibilities,’ she said. ‘Either the woman who came into our office was Mags Jackson, or the woman you met in Ardee Terrace last night was Mags Jackson. One or the other.’
‘But why –’
‘No, no. Stop. Don’t think about why just yet. Let’s just examine those two possibilities. What evidence do we have for the first hypothesis – that the woman who came to our office was Mags?’
Hunter thought about it for a moment. ‘I checked her out thoroughly,’ he said at last. ‘She had a home address, a bank account, a credit card, an electricity account …’
His voice trailed off. Claire was vehemently shaking her head.
‘No, Hunter, you’re not thinking straight. All that proved was that a woman called Mags Jackson lived in Ardee Terrace. It didn’t prove what she looked like. What evidence do we have that she was the same woman you interviewed in our office?’
He thought about it for a while. ‘None,’ he admitted at last.
‘I agree. Now, what evidence do we have that the woman you met last night was Mags Jackson?’
Hunter fell silent.
‘We have the word of friends, neighbours, police, the employers at the library where she works, all quoted in the paper.’ Claire spread out her hands. ‘Hunter, the evidence is overwhelming. Forget Mark’s wild conspiracy theories. The woman you met last night was not a plant. She was not a fake. She was the real Mags Jackson.’
Hunter said nothing.
‘There’s more evidence,’ Claire continued relentlessly. ‘Shirley, your contact in the escort business, phoned the office yesterday to say that she’d checked all over the place, and there’s no vice girl called Mags Jackson working anywhere near Passage North. Which means?’
He shrugged irritably. ‘It means the woman in our office was lying.’
‘Yes. It means she was a fraud. An impostor.’ Claire paused to let this sink in. ‘I know you’re reluctant to accept this, Hunter. And that’s why your mind is at war with itself. You want to believe that the story you were given is genuine, even though it’s flying in the face of all logic. It’s time you faced up to the truth.’
Hunter stared out the window. Starlings were massing and flocking in the dusky sky, ready to settle on the granite buildings along the quay.
‘What do you do when you walk into a swamp?’ Claire challenged. ‘You don’t plunge on further into the morass. You retreat. You go back to the last bit of firm ground. And that’s the only way you’re going to save yourself from this situation. Withdraw to firm ground. Accept the truth, examine the evidence and act on it. Then you’ll be back on familiar territory. You’re an investigative journalist, and that doesn’t sit easily with wishful thinking. Don’t dream. Investigate.’
Hunter knew in his heart that she was right. But when he thought about the hard-faced woman who’d called to his office, he couldn’t help remembering how her eyes had brimmed with tears when she’d appealed to him not to allow Valentia to get away with his crime. She had seemed so genuine, so sincere. Her cause had seemed so true and just.
‘She seemed so real,’ he said.
‘Maybe she was real. Maybe the abduction she witnessed really happened, but for some reason she gave you a false name. Or perhaps the real Mags Jackson, the librarian you met last night, witnessed the abduction and gave a statement to the police, but she was later intimidated into silence by Valentia. Or perhaps Valentia never abducted anybody. We could speculate until the cows come home.’ Claire spread her hands to illustrate the infinite possibilities. ‘But I think we need to concentrate on solid evidence.’
‘That’s the problem, Claire. I don’t have any.’ Hunter toyed with his salad. ‘Valentia says this woman never existed, and I’ve no way of contradicting him. To all practical purposes, she’s a ghost.’
Claire shook her head. ‘She existed.’
Hunter grimaced. ‘But, Claire, we can’t prove that. That’s the point. If we can’t prove it, then she might as well never have existed.’
‘What if we were able to prove it?’ Claire asked suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Two things,’ said Claire slowly. ‘Number one, we have her signature on her statement.’
Hunter gave a gesture of impatience. ‘Yes, but it says Mags Jackson, remember? That’s not her real name. It might as well say Donald Duck.’
‘It doesn’t matter what it says. It’s written in her own hand. And you might be surprised what a handwriting expert could tell from that.’
He shook his head in disappointment. If this was the best Claire could come up with, they were in big trouble. ‘And the other way? You said there were two.’
Claire seemed less certain of her ground this time. ‘If we had a photograph of her, we could try to get an ID from that,’ she said hesitantly.
Hunter sat bolt upright, electrified by the idea. ‘Of course we could. That would be a huge help. But, Claire – we don’t have a photo.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Hunter. Martin took several snatch shots of her when he was testing out that new digital camera that morning. Only …’
Hunter stared at her apprehensively. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to cope with any more bad news.
‘Only what?’
‘Only he threw them all away.’
‘IT wasn’t my fault,’ Martin Slade complained.
It was later that same evening, and the store restaurant was about to close down for the night. The view of Dublin had vanished behind thick patterned curtains, and only a few customers remained.
‘Nobody’s saying it’s your fault, Martin.’
The photographer breathed noisily out through his moustache. ‘I kept coming up to you, Hunter, and asking you to look at the pictures I’d taken with the new digital camera. Remember? But you kept saying you were too busy.’
His nasal Essex accent carried all around the room.
‘Yes, I remember. I’d other things on my mind.’
Martin glared at him in triumph. ‘Bet you wish you’d listened to me now, don’t you?’
Hunter stared back at him dispassionately. Martin Slade was a small man with a luxuriant Continental moustache, and he seemed to take a perverse pleasure in antagonising people.
‘Yes, Martin,’ he replied mildly. ‘Yes, I do wish that.’
‘I shouldn’t really be talking to you at all, Hunter,’ said the photographer, tipping back his seat and placing his ripe-smelling trainers on the chair between them. ‘It could be more than my job’s worth. You’re a pariah. An untouchworthy.’
‘Untouchable,’ muttered Claire.
‘Whatever,’ said Martin impatiently. He lit up one of his Gauloise cigarettes, in defiance of the sign above his head, and deliberately blew the smoke in her direction. ‘I wouldn’t be too uppity if I were you, Claire. You’ve always had this snooty attitude, as though you fart bloody lavender. From what I hear, girl, you’re not exac
tly flavour of the month with Addison yourself.’
Hunter placed a restraining hand on Claire’s arm before she could respond.
‘If we could just concentrate on those pictures you took,’ he said.
Martin chose Hunter’s face as the target for his next jet of smoke. ‘I already told you,’ he said. ‘I took about thirty snatch pics in low-light conditions in the office corridor that morning, just to see how the digital camera would cope. Most of them were of people in the office, walking by. I reckon I took about six pics of your bird.’
‘And what did you do with them?’
Martin frowned. ‘You don’t have to do much, really. You don’t have to develop digital pics in a darkroom, the way you do conventional negatives. All you gotta do is load them into your computer.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you can view them as small images, choose the ones you want and bring them up to full size on the screen.’ He stared with hostility at a waitress who was vacuuming around their table, until she went away again.
‘How good were they?’ Claire’s voice was urgent.
The cameraman shrugged. ‘Pretty good, considering the low light. The pics I took of your bird were okay, but only one of them showed her full face. Not that it matters. A couple of days later, nobody seemed interested in them, so I just chucked them out.’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How did you dispose of them?’
‘Usual way. Dragged them into the computer wastebasket and clicked on “empty trash”. It gave me the standard warning: “Are you sure you want to delete these permanently?” and I clicked “Yeah, sure. Hunter don’t want to know.” That was it. Gone with the wind. Zapped into the ether. Kaput.’
The waitress was back again, stacking up chairs at the table beside them. Claire turned to her and smiled reassuringly. ‘We’ll be out of your way in a minute,’ she said.
She turned back to the photographer. ‘Martin, this could be important,’ she said. ‘Can you remember what you called the photos? What title you saved them under? Did you give them a name?’
Martin shook his head impatiently. ‘Nope.’
‘Okay.’ Claire, the computer expert, was going through possibilities one by one. ‘Can you remember the time you put the images into the computer, and the time you deleted them? Even the dates?’
‘Might do.’ There was a tense silence as the photographer fished in the pocket of his canvas jacket and produced a battered diary. ‘I put them in the computer at around two o’clock that same Tuesday, 14 November. And I deleted them on payday, ’cause I remember doing it just before I went down to the bank with my cheque. So that would make it Thursday, 16 November, at around three, three-thirty.’
Claire raised two thumbs. ‘That gives us something to go on.’
‘What does it matter what time they were chucked out?’ Martin said with annoyance. ‘If they’re gone, they’re gone.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Claire turned to Hunter. ‘With a bit of hard work, and an awful lot of luck, we just might be able to summon our ghost back from the grave.’
Chapter Fifteen
HUNTER, Claire and Martin sat in the darkened room, huddled in a circle, ready to perform a sort of séance.
In front of them, on the desk, Martin’s computer whirred gently and crackled as its operating system came to life. The screen cast a pale, unearthly glow around the darkened Street Talk office, creating ghostly shadows on the walls and ceiling. It was the only source of light in the room.
Hunter, Claire and Martin had entered the office surreptitiously, using Claire’s key in the lock and punching in the secret code to deactivate the security system. Once inside, Hunter had insisted they keep the main lights off to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The office, normally an explosive hubbub of noise and activity, was eerily silent. At close to midnight on a Saturday night, they were unlikely to be interrupted.
‘People put a lot of trust in computers nowadays,’ Claire whispered. ‘In the old days, if business people wrote confidential reports, they’d make sure the paper they wrote them on was burned or thoroughly shredded afterwards. These days, they’ll just drag the files into the computer’s wastebasket and empty the trash, convinced that they’re gone for good. But they’re not.’
‘What do you mean, they’re not?’ challenged Martin, his pallid face even more sepulchral in the pale glow from the screen.
‘I mean, they don’t disappear completely,’ explained Claire, her fingers flying across the keyboard, clicking icons and opening programmes.
‘And you can get them back?’ Hunter’s voice was hopeful.
‘It depends.’ Claire was concentrating on her work. ‘Our chances of success will be higher if the deleted material is in contiguous clusters.’
‘Speak English, Claire.’
She sighed and looked up. ‘The bad news is that they get fragmented, chucked around the hard disk in bits and pieces. It depends on how badly they’ve been broken up; and that’s just a matter of luck. Some break like pottery, in big chunks you can glue together again. Others break like light-bulb glass, into fine slivers you could never reassemble in a million years.’
‘And how can you tell which way they’ve gone?’
Claire opened a locked container and produced a floppy disk. ‘With this,’ she said.
She put the disk into the machine and waited while it grunted and groaned into action. ‘I call it my zombie programme,’ she explained. ‘It brings dead files back to life.’
Hunter watched, intrigued, as she opened the programme and selected an option marked ‘Un-erase: recover files that have been accidentally deleted.’
Within a few seconds, the screen was filled with a list of names of files that had been chucked out. They were listed in alphabetical order, described, and dated. The final column gave their chances of recovery, ranging from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’. Most of them were graded as ‘poor’.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Martin suddenly. ‘Does this reveal all the files I’ve deleted?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Claire’s pale face was tense with determination as she dragged down menu options, instructing the computer to sort the files according to date instead of in alphabetical order. ‘But don’t worry, Martin. We won’t inquire about all those naughty pictures you downloaded from the Internet.’
Hunter smiled at the photographer’s obvious embarrassment. There were dozens of files with names like ‘Big Girls’, ‘Busty Babes’ and ‘Chesty Chicks’. Martin obviously liked his ladies on the large side.
‘What’s happening now?’ he whispered, more to change the subject than anything else.
‘I’m looking for unnamed files that were created on 14 November and deleted on 16 November,’ Claire replied, frowning with concentration. ‘Here we are. This could be it. A batch of JPEG pics, deleted at 3.15pm.’
Hunter nodded, back on familiar territory: JPEG was the standard technical format that the magazine used for its photographs. On the screen, the files came up in rows, numbered 00 to 30. Again, most of them were graded with a poor chance of recovery. Only a few were ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.
‘It’s going to be a long night,’ whispered Claire.
She began with one marked ‘excellent’, clicking on the ‘un-erase’ icon and waiting as the computer tried to piece it together.
‘Why does it take so long?’ hissed Martin.
‘Be patient, Martin. I don’t want it to be mixed up with other material on your hard disk. We could lose both, and we can’t afford to risk that. So we have to do this the hard way.’
It was a frustratingly slow process. The recovered pictures had to be viewed one by one. They revealed their secrets painfully slowly, producing vague images that became clearer and clearer as they scrolled downwards across the screen.
The first half-dozen attempts were bitterly disappointing: they produced either worthless fragments, or else crystal-cl
ear images of staff members. The arts editor came up with pinpoint clarity.
Hunter felt his brow grow clammy with tension. He still hadn’t had a chance to change his clothes, and he felt as though he were marinating in his own stale perspiration. He stared at the screen and hoped for a change of luck. All he needed was one break, he told himself. Just one lucky break. He deserved it.
Finally, at around 1.30am, they struck gold. JPEG picture number 09 (recoverability grade: good) was revealing itself on the screen when Claire suddenly dug her fingernails into Hunter’s arm.
At first, the scrolling screen produced only the vaguest collage of colours. Then a fuzzy image, black at the top and blue at the bottom, gradually clarified to reveal a figure in black leather jacket and blue jeans. A minute or so later, the screen displayed a picture of a skinny, angular woman walking along the office corridor, her jacket flopping open with the momentum of her stride. Protruding from her inside pocket was a sliver of something white – perhaps the top of an envelope, or a white leather wallet. The hard face framed by the dark-brown hair was sombre and resolute with determination. But above all, it was recognisable.
‘Bingo,’ breathed Claire. ‘We’ve got it.’
‘That’s her,’ whispered Hunter, hardly daring to believe it. ‘That’s our ghost.’
THE battered newspaper-delivery van had parked outside the Street Talk offices four hours ago. The driver had whistled cheerfully as he locked the doors and headed towards the nearest pub. To anyone who might have been watching, the vehicle was obviously empty.
As the night progressed, the van became covered in a thick layer of hoar-frost and it became difficult to see through the one-way glass of the viewing window. It also became very, very cold inside.
‘What the hell are they doing up there?’
Mary Smith adjusted the infra-red binoculars and peered at the upstairs office where Hunter, Claire and Martin sat working at the computer behind drawn vertical blinds. Her breath condensed in the freezing air and it took all her formidable powers of self-discipline to stop her teeth chattering as she spoke.