by L. A. Larkin
She momentarily considers Eric Lowe, the reporter. He’s phone-hacked before, and blackmailed. But why target her if he wants gossip on the Lake Ellsworth story? Wolfe takes another gulp of vodka, as her mind returns to Davy.
She hadn’t seen the fight with Coleman. She’d dropped by the nightclub on her way home because Davy said he needed to talk. When Wolfe got there, another bouncer nodded towards the alley, where Davy was sorting out some trouble. When she rounded the corner, it took her a few moments to spot them in the dimly lit passage, but she did see Davy draw his arm back and lay an almighty punch at Coleman’s face. Coleman dropped, she found out later, dead almost instantly. Davy sunk to his knees, then collapsed on his side. As Wolfe cradled her brother, he had a seizure. When the paramedics arrived in the dark alley, they used the ambulance’s headlights to light up the scene. The police found a small bag of cocaine in Davy’s pocket. Later, he begged her to say Coleman had thrown the first punch. Wolfe did everything possible to help him, even paying for a top QC to take his case, but she couldn’t commit perjury.
Pouring another glass, Wolfe heads unsteadily for the bedroom. She puts the heavy torch under the bed and her mobile on the bedside table. As she slides her sheathed knife under her pillow, she smells something sour, like morning breath. It can’t be. The pillowcase was clean when she left for Antarctica.
Doubting herself, Wolfe places her nose near the pillow again. She gags. Pulling back her duvet cover, she sniffs the top edge. Sweat. Not hers. Stumbling backwards, she races to the toilet, heaving up the contents of her stomach.
28
Her Majesty’s Naval Base, Portsmouth
At five in the morning, the HMS Queen Elizabeth is a floating city of lights. It is the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, and is only three days away from full ‘operational military capability’, due to depart for the Arabian Sea, mission unknown. The 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier has taken ten years to build, is as long as twenty-eight London buses parked end-to-end, and will carry thirty F35B joint strike fighters and four Merlin helicopters. As the rest of Portsmouth sleeps, the vessel is a hive of activity as carpenters, electricians, plumbers, technicians, engineers, painters and two hundred of the thousand-strong naval crew dart along the decks and up and down gangplanks, illuminated like an ant colony for a David Attenborough documentary.
But there is one man within the security perimeter of the base who shouldn’t be there. He leans against someone’s Volkswagen Transporter, pretending to smoke. To calm his nerves he recites in his head everything he knows about the warship.
Made of 17 million parts, features 250,000 kilometres of electrical cables, and 8,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cables. Around 250,000 litres of battleship-grey paint.
He checks his pocket for the hundredth time, and finds the glass vials there: four of them, each encased in bubble wrap. His backpack is in his car, parked a few blocks away.
Security surrounding the naval base is tight, but the sentry on duty is tired and cold and the Royal Navy credentials he presented are real, if a little out of date. He is not in uniform, just civvies, as if off duty. His Royal Fleet Auxiliary ID has got him this far, but it’s unlikely to get him on to the ship, so he’ll need to rely on others who do have access.
The quay is a car park of tradesmen’s trucks and vans, most unlocked, some with doors flung open, the assumption being that nothing is going to get nicked on a well-guarded naval base. The noise level is astounding: the slap of waves against the quay is drowned out by the shouting, hammering, drilling, clanking, and roar of engines. Above his head, a seagull screeches from atop a lamp-post, head jutted forwards, as if furious at the racket. Through bloodshot eyes he peers through the drizzle, searching for his first ‘carrier’.
The intruder pulls his jacket collar up high and tucks in his chin, his woollen hat pulled down low. There is not much time, so he moves on, weaving in and out of the parked cars and vans until he finds what he’s looking for: the fibre-optics contractor’s truck. Three men push a mechanised spool of blue cabling on to the truck’s electronically controlled ramp. The spool is taller than the men and as wide as a family car. Once the ramp has reached ground level, the spool - on wheels - is rolled into position. The leader of the group, a rotund man in blue coveralls, talks into a two-way radio, liaising directly with one of the many crane operators in a cabin suspended from the crane’s trolley. The scratchy voice of the operator crackles through the radio.
‘Get in line, mate. There’s six ahead of you.’
‘How long?’
‘Half-hour.’
‘Right you are then.’
The rotund man shrugs his shoulders and suggests a tea break. Two of them get back in the truck, switch on the engine, and enjoy the warmth from the heater as they sip tea from a flask. The third man wanders off for a fag break.
The observer checks the truck’s wing mirrors. If he stays directly behind the vehicle, it’s unlikely the driver will see him approach the cabling. He walks up to the spool, removes a vial from his pocket, empties its contents over the exterior of the cabling and walks away, without anyone noticing. One vial down, three to go.
His breath is ragged and he trembles from the adrenalin rush, but his initial success spurs him on. He searches for his next carrier as he lists what he knows about the warship.
The on-board bakery can bake a thousand loaves of bread per day. Rations can last forty-five days. They include 66,000 sausages, 64,800 eggs, and 12,000 cans of baked beans. That’s a lot of hot air, he thinks, smiling.
There is a whole army of painters on board. Truck-loads of paint cans have just been delivered to the quay. One of the crates is open and there’s an argument over some missing cans. The two men race over to another with a clipboard, clearly expecting him to resolve the issue. While they are distracted, the trespasser pours the contents of a vial over the lids, and moves on.
Two down, two to go.
From the keel to the top of the tower is the height of Nelson’s Column.
He’s much closer to HMS Queen Elizabeth now, and looks up, almost overwhelmed by its massive bulk, a tsunami of steel. It’s equipped with the latest Phalanx CIWS radar-guided Gatling guns mounted on a swivelling base, used for defence against anti-ship missiles. He frowns, but refuses to get distracted. A man, also in the obligatory blue coveralls, carrying a welder’s helmet, heads his way. He steps into the man’s path, deliberately colliding with him. The welder drops his helmet and the intruder apologises, picking it up and handing it to him. The man grumpily tells him to look where he’s going and strides off, unaware that his helmet is now covered in the contents of the third vial.
It takes him a while to find the recipient of the fourth and final vial. Crates of food, including large cans of oil, are being loaded on board. He approaches the latter container, but a navy officer spots him and heads his way.
‘Sir! Can I see your security pass?’ the officer shouts.
Before the man reaches him, the vial’s airtight seal is unscrewed and its contents poured over the crate containing hundreds of baked-bean tins.
‘Hey, you! Stop!’
He runs, weaving in and out of parked vehicles, passing the giant spool of fibre-optic cable as it’s lifted into the sky at the end of a crane’s hook.
In three days the warship will be escorted from Portsmouth Harbour by a flotilla of navy vessels and spectator boats, seen off by well-wishers and the crews’ families. But it will not return. He is certain of that.
29
The Met’s Cyber Crime expert looks no more than eighteen, but Wolfe has been told that Jwala Ponnappa is, in fact, twenty-five, and worked with Butcher on his last case. Ponnappa’s delicate frame and child-like fingers make even Wolfe seem big-boned. Bangle-sized gold hoop earrings, long black hair that reaches the seat of her chair, spangly pink T-shirt and torn designer jeans only serve to make her look younger than she is. Butcher has asked her to help out unofficially because Wolfe is adamant she do
esn’t want to make an official complaint. The officer’s fingers dance across Wolfe’s laptop as she sits at Wolfe’s desk.
‘Yup, you’ve been hacked.’ Ponnappa holds up the laptop and places her eye right in front of the inbuilt webcam. ‘Hey, you! Pervert! I’m going to track you down and lock you up.’
Ponnappa grins at Wolfe and continues tapping away.
‘There, the fucker can’t see you any more. I’ve killed the RAT.’ She explains a Remote Access Trojan and how it enables the voyeur to switch on and off her webcam whenever he wants. Her eyes remain on the monitor. ‘These creeps collect what they call “slaves”, then sell the viewing rights to other weirdos.’ Ponnappa looks up at Wolfe. ‘Do you ever walk about in the nude?’
Wolfe is taken aback by the question. Then the penny drops. ‘Yes.’ She can’t help shuddering at the thought of being seen naked. ‘Can you find him?’
‘I’ll do my best. Depends how clever he is.’
Butcher wears latex gloves and is up a stepladder, unscrewing the smoke detector on her sitting room ceiling. He’s searching for bugs and hidden cameras and has already checked her table lamps, behind her framed photos and beneath chairs and tables.
‘Ah-ha!’ says Butcher, peering up into the guts of the smoke detector. ‘There’s a tiny camera in here. Whoever did this is pretty savvy.’
Wolfe hugs herself.
‘He knew I’d get my laptop checked out once I got home,’ says Wolfe, ‘so he installs that spy camera. You remember we talked about it on Skype?’
‘I do, and he must’ve been watching us,’ says Butcher, bringing the whole smoke detector with him down the steps and handing it to Ponnappa. ‘The camera was pointing at Olivia’s desk but I’m guessing it had a pretty wide field of vision.’
‘What do you mean “had”?’ says Ponnappa. ‘It’s still on. Probably connected to his computer or smartphone via Wi-Fi.’
‘Christ!’ says Wolfe. ‘Switch it off!’
‘There you go,’ Ponappa says, flicking a tiny switch. ‘Nice bit of gear. Quality.’ She removes an SD memory card. ‘It’s all recorded on here, which means we know what he’s seen. Let me take a look. It’ll tell us the time and date of the footage.’
‘So we’ll know when it started recording?’
‘Yup.’ Ponappa scrutinises the device’s innards. ‘Heat sensing, passive infrared motion activated, the hidden camera not only records movement during the day, but has night-vision capabilities. Impressive.’
Wolfe feels light-headed with lack of sleep and too much caffeine.
‘You really shouldn’t have washed your bedding,’ says Butcher.
Last night, she’d stripped the bed and thrown the bedding in the washing machine.
‘I couldn’t bear it. I had to get rid of it.’
‘He wants to dominate you. To show you he can get to you. His next move may be more direct.’
‘You mean a physical attack?’
‘Possibly. You have to make this official, Liv.’
Ponnappa nods.
Wolfe plonks down on the sofa. She looks around at the one place she had always felt safe. But now she sees a threat around every corner.
‘Your safety is more important than your job, Liv,’ Butcher urges.
‘Okay, but I have to go to Cambridge today. I’m already behind schedule.’
‘I’ll phone DI Overington,’ says Butcher. ‘Women’s Crime Unit. I’ll ask her to come round.’
Wolfe nods. Butcher makes the call.
‘She’ll be here within an hour.’
Ponnappa raises her arms and has a big stretch. ‘This is going to take time. I’ll need to keep your laptop, go through your emails, everything.’
‘But all my work stuff is on there. Confidential data. I don’t want strangers trawling through it.’
Ponnappa glances at Butcher, her eyes encouraging him to say something.
‘Can work provide you with another? At least temporarily?’ asks Butcher. ‘You’ve backed everything up, right?’
Wolfe reluctantly agrees.
‘Any other smoke detectors?’ Butcher asks.
Her hand flies up to her mouth.
‘What?’
‘In my bedroom.’
Butcher picks up the stepladder and quickly disconnects the bedroom spy camera.
‘Who is doing this?’ says Wolfe. She feels sick.
‘You already know who’s top of my suspect list,’ says Butcher.
Wolfe snaps. ‘Why the hell would Davy watch me in bed, for Christ’s sake?’
‘It’s not about that, Liv. It’s about keeping tabs on you. Where you are. Who you talk to. Come with me.’
He leads her to the hallway where he’s dumped his holdall.
‘Let’s take a walk.’ Butcher picks up his bag, then calls out to Ponnappa. ‘Will be back in a tick.’
He leads Wolfe across the road to a park bench facing her flat. They sit. Butcher pulls from his holdall a manila folder, concealed beneath his gym towel, and gives it to her.
She opens it. Inside is a six-month-old medical report on David George Wolfe. Clipped to the front is a photo of her brother, unconscious, propped up in a hospital bed, one eye closed, the other swollen shut, slack mouth, a tube in his nose and a myriad of tubes in his arm and beneath his hospital gown. Stitches hold livid skin together from the middle of the left eyebrow, around the left side of his head and into his hairline. She hardly recognises him.
‘My God!’
Wolfe reads the description of his injuries. Someone cracked his skull, gave him a couple of broken ribs and a smashed foot, breaking some of the bones in his toes.
‘Who . . . ’ Her voice trails away. There are tears in her eyes. ‘Who did this?’
‘Good question. As usual, in prison, nobody saw anything.’
‘Then why?’
‘Another good question. He must’ve pissed off somebody important. From the report, he was found like that in the showers.’
‘How is he now? Do you know?’
‘Medical report the day before he was released is at the back.’
She finds the printout and reads it aloud.
‘Multiple minor closed head injuries. As a result has moderate frontal lobe impairment . . . David is impulsive, unaware of the consequences of his behaviour, has anger management problems, and will find it difficult to integrate back into society . . . His drug addiction has exacerbated his condition.’
Wolfe’s jaw drops. ‘Drug addiction? In prison?’
‘It’s how many cope.’
She looks at the photo again.
‘I had no idea. I feel terrible.’
‘It is terrible, I agree. But this is not your fault, Liv.’
‘I should go and see him.’
‘I’d think very carefully about that. You won’t be welcome and you most certainly won’t be safe. And, if he’s not your stalker, you’ll land him in a whole load of shit. Any contact with you is in breach of his conditions of release.’
She is quiet for a moment, thinking about her brother. How has it come to this? They were so close as kids. She’d looked up to him, four years her senior. When her dad left home and her mother had a mental breakdown, Davy was her rock, her best friend.
‘There’s no way he’s my stalker.’
‘I’m not so sure about that. Traumatic events can trigger stalking behaviour.’
She stares at him, incredulous.
‘Read the rest of it. The bit about job prospects.’
She skim-reads fast, something as a journalist she’s learnt to do by necessity.
‘He did a course in computer programming. So what?’
‘Okay, there’s a piece of this puzzle you don’t know, so let me fill you in. His cell mate was Freddie Glenn. In for murder - his ex-girlfriend. But that’s not the important bit. This guy stalked the poor woman for over a year. He stole her mail, killed her cat, hacked her computer. Then he breaks in, rapes her and slits her throat.’ Butcher
pauses, so it sinks in. ‘Davy could’ve learnt to hack from Glenn.’
30
My pills are in a Perspex box with a transparent lid, delivered to my door every month by the local pharmacy. There are sixty-two little square receptacles and each one is labelled with the days of the week, a.m. and p.m. As long as I take them every morning and evening, my life just about holds together.
‘No!’ I scream at my blank monitor, the camera feeds cut. ‘Fucking cunt!’
That Indian bitch thinks she’s better than me. Mocking me.
My arm sweeps the open pill box off my desk. It flies through the air and lands on the carpet, spewing white, yellow and blue pills all over the floor. I pick up my water glass and hurl it at the wall. The glass shatters and water drips down the pages of Dr Sharma’s report, as if the typed words are weeping.
I am blubbing like a baby. I can’t be without you. If you go to Cambridge, I can’t follow. I daren’t travel that far. This city is familiar, Cambridge isn’t. I’ll get lost and then have to explain what I’m doing there. Panic grips me. I can’t breathe.
I charge at the door and I turn my shoulder so it’ll take the force of the impact. I want pain. I need pain. I turn my face away as I slam into the door with an almighty thud. I hear the faint crack of wood splitting. I take two steps back. My shoulder aches. I pull back a clenched fist and smash it into the top right door panel. The impact reverberates up my arm, through my shoulder, and I cry out. My knuckles burn and I stare at the torn skin, fascinated. I try flexing my fingers. They are stiff and blood oozes from my knuckles. Taking deep breaths, I wait for the throbbing pain to override my fury, for the moment I’m calm enough to think clearly. It doesn’t happen.
I look down at the sodden carpet and the shards of glass, some large, some no bigger than a pin head. I home in on a triangular piece, about as long as my thumb. I pick it up then pull up the loose sleeve of my long-sleeved T-shirt and I dig the point into the pale flesh of my inner arm. The glass bites. I exhale. Ah, that’s better. Keeping the pressure up, I drag the makeshift blade from the crease of my arm towards my wrist. Blood blooms along the gash and I wonder if the quacks of the Middle Ages might have been on to something when they used bloodletting to balance the humours and cure apoplexy. I breathe deeply and relax. I stop before I reach my wrist. This is not a suicide. As long as you live, I have a purpose. I bring the jagged glass close to my eye and marvel at the vibrant red of my blood.