The Score

by Howard Marks

  Kyle nodded, eager. That medieval warrior look again: the zealot.

  Cat said, ‘I’m imagining this time a warrant should be easy enough.’

  ‘I’ll action it.’

  Cat was sure she didn’t want to work from an office. Not Cathays, not Camarthen, not Tregaron. Someone, not her, had leaked highly sensitive information to Della Davies. Riley had claimed he hadn’t been trying to kill her and she’d taken him at his word, but bad things were happening. Women had been tortured to death for a truth towards which, Cat felt, she was inching ever closer. It was better to fly solo awhile. No offices. Stay moving. Watch her back.

  She could see Kyle coming to the same conclusion herself. There was no reason why Kyle should even know where she was.

  ‘If you could email it through,’ Cat murmured.

  Kyle stood up, nodded, brisk. She was about to leave the room, but as she did, she made an odd gesture, putting her hand out to touch Cat’s shoulder, then withdrawing it at the last second.

  ‘Take care,’ she said, in an unnatural voice. She left too fast for Cat to respond.

  19

  IT WAS RAINING more heavily, tepid dirty summer rain, when Cat got near Victoria station. She begged a phone directory from the information desk and found a local car hire firm. Not one of the chains, a backstreet affair that wouldn’t ask too many questions. She got there, found an old Ford Fiesta with filler over the wheel arches, and paid for a week upfront, using cash.

  They asked to see her driving licence, but Cat said she didn’t have it. Just showed her warrant card instead. She gave her name as Katherine Pryce, just about close enough to her own name for the hire place to accept.

  It was a relief having a car. She drove for forty minutes, watching her tail, threading back on herself. Better safe than sorry – her granny’s way of putting it. Better paranoid than dead – her way.

  When she was sure she wasn’t being followed, she took herself south of the river. Found an internet café. She reckoned she could be the Egon Ronay of internet cafés the amount she used. Plywood cubicles were distributed around three walls, each containing a screen and keyboard. The towers were stowed on the floor beneath the desks.

  About half of the cubicles were occupied. A waiter dressed in chinos and black polo shirt stood behind a stand of sandwiches and pots of tea. A serving hatch gave a limited view of a steam-filled kitchen. Cat got her time-coded slip and chose one of the cubicles on the back wall.

  She called Thomas, who picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Price,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’ His voice was normal. He sounded busy, said he couldn’t talk.

  ‘Just had one fuck of a bollocking from Kyle.’

  ‘Naughty – bet Della underpaid you, though.’ It was hard to tell if he was joking. It was always hard to tell with him. From the noise in the background it seemed he was back at the operations room in Camarthen.

  They spoke about the case a bit. It seemed to Cat, Thomas was doing a lot, achieving not much. A big wind of work and no results to show for it.

  Riley, apparently, had no more to give. The missing girls were being intensively investigated now, but useful correlations were few and far between; they showed no sign of having known each other.

  ‘What about you?’ said Thomas

  ‘Don’t know. Kyle’s gone all disciplinary on me. Not suspended exactly, but I’m not Ms Popular either.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then.’

  She hung up.

  Cat felt like she’d cut herself off from the world. Like she was sinking.

  She checked her email account: nothing yet from Kyle.

  She clicked back into the PNC and the records of the two young males Rhiannon Powell had been with. Paul Fuller and Marcus Roberts. Neither felt that interesting to her. Neither looked like useful members of society, but there were no connections she could see to any of the other girls, or to the case in general. Fuller had been busted a couple of times on tip-offs from his electricity supplier for small grows of cannabis. Roberts’s idea of a night out seemed to be going into A&E and trying to blag some prescription painkillers. Neither exactly major league.

  Cat smiled. In the last entry on file, Roberts had got a caution for getting on a drug trial under false pretences. Under sedation Roberts had admitted only being along for the buzz, and the police had been called. Later it had emerged he’d been attracted by reports the trialled drug produced a number of weird side-effects, including out-of-body experiences.

  She knew how he felt. She noted their address was given as the same as the old address Rhiannon had given. She called up the videos of the missing girls and printed A4 stills of them. As she went to collect the last of the printouts, she got the dual-tone that signalled an incoming message.

  It was the email from Kyle, only not from her normal office address, but what looked like a hotmail address set up specially for the purpose. If there was paranoia here, at least it was shared.

  Cat clicked through to the attachment, shocked at the number of megabytes in the file. It took half a minute to load. It was one huge spreadsheet containing thousands of entries. Cat groaned inwardly; she felt like she used to before taking a school exam. Still her police training meant she was handy at crunching data, and besides, she had no other route forward.

  Best bite the bullet. And quickly.

  After all, there were ways to refine this list. Any casual browser might stumble onto a YouTube clip and watch it. A single view didn’t mean anything. On the other hand, a user who had watched multiple versions of the same song might be a different beast entirely. That might mean they had a thing about ‘Street Spirit’. She started there. It took two coffees and one cigarette break just to sort a set of addresses that had watched all the performances. Good. Closer, but far from close enough. Because this still left hundreds of addresses. The song seemed like a magnet for nerds, like some OCD Mecca. And besides, many of the addresses would surely be obsolete by now. She tried a different angle, started with the IP addresses of the site users who had left comments on the girls’ reels. But none of these had watched the reels more than a few times each. And while she couldn’t be sure, those comments felt normal. There was neither the slightly crazy air of the true obsessive nor the over-careful approach of the wannabe stalker. Some stalkers might not even risk leaving messages.

  She ditched that angle, went outside to smoke another roll-up.

  Then she went back into the internet café, collected her things, paid and left. She deleted her own email account from her email program. She didn’t know enough about her enemy to know how much they knew, how much they could trace. But if you’re going to disappear, you don’t even want your nose above water.

  She took the battery out of her phone and threw both parts into her bag. Went to an ATM, took out £400, then shoved her bank card into her bag, a zipped inside pocket, where she couldn’t reach it inadvertently.

  She drove around, watching her tail, then took herself to another part of South London. She bought a pay-as-you-go phone, without registering it. Bought it for cash.

  In another café, more or less identical to the one before, she set up a new hotmail account, creating a username that held no clues to her name or initials. Hesitating only briefly, she called Kyle’s mobile. Going through to voicemail, she left her new email address and phone number. As she hung up she felt strange, like a diver, fifty metres below the surface, looking back at the air-line that snaked upwards to safety. Cat was the diver. Kyle was the air-line. But who was the shark?

  Time to find out.

  Cat ordered more coffee although she already felt jittery, had a think. Back at the computer, she sliced up the data a different way. Scrolling down through the information, she confined her search to double and triple matches from multiple accounts. Because if you really liked the song but had nothing to hide, why not just watch performances from the same account? Or why not even download the clips, then you can watch them without going onlin
e? Multiple accounts and not downloading didn’t necessarily mean anything in itself, but it could mean somebody didn’t want the risk of a clip being pulled from their hard drive one day. Chopping things this way brought the number right down. But still there were far too many to research. So she repeated the process, looking for multiples that had accessed all five reels. This took longer, but after half an hour more she had sliced the numbers down to just thirty IP addresses. She could work with that. There was no guarantee that the address was contained in those thirty, but the probabilities seemed more favourable.

  Cat went outside, stood smoking in a patch of sunshine, cracked her knuckles.

  Remaining disciplined, she went back to the café, gathered her things, paid up, adding a sandwich for the road. She found herself a third location to work from, humming with impatience now.

  Her next step was linking her IP addresses to bricks-and-mortar addresses – a big ask. A simple online IP address locator revealed that a dozen of Cat’s thirty addresses were overseas, some as far afield as South Africa and New Zealand. There was one viewer apparently based in Russia. She removed all these addresses from her list. The Russian address bothered her a little. To hide your online activities, you need to operate via a proxy server, which acts as a cloak for your own location. Many proxy servers used by the criminal classes were based in Russia, because there’s such a low probability of Western law enforcement reaching that far. But when she looked closely she saw the origin accounts were Russian-language only, and the dates did not quite tally.

  She discounted it, ploughed on.

  Most of the UK addresses were dynamically assigned. That meant that the internet service provider assigned a new address each time a given user logged on; it was a way for the ISP to minimise costs, maximise efficiency. But there were four static addresses on her list. Three of them didn’t yield anything significant. The fourth did. There had been over five watches per day of some reels from this address. That was pretty intense, more than from any others. The geo-locator placed it within three miles of Deptford, the location of Tana’s first address, and within shouting distance of both Rhiannon’s addresses. Geo-location was an uncertain business, accurate only to a few miles. In which case, the true location could be even closer than that.

  Cat went to one of the phone boxes provided, and called Kyle, gave her the IP address and the name of the related internet service provider. Kyle didn’t need to worry about geo-location technologies, she could just go straight to the ISP with a warrant.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ said Kyle and hung up.

  Out on the street. Another roll-up. The day had been alternating sunshine and showers, but now a steady drizzle made for miserable streets. Cat smoked in a doorway, like an office refugee.

  The call back took thirty minutes. Kyle gave a name and address, then added, ‘It’s in Deptford. An internet café. Half a mile from the girl’s flat.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Deptford it was then. Kyle seemed uncharacteristically lost for words. They shared a moment’s awkward silence, then cut the call.

  Cat got her things and drove to Deptford.

  It was early rush hour now. Windscreen wipers and slow-moving traffic. Lights.

  She arrived outside. The sign above the shop was crude, cheap, old. Black lettering on a yellow background. Unpainted plywood partitions inside. A basic service at a basic price. A sign outside the café also offered low-price calls to ‘all your favourite locations’. Poland, Russia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran.

  She didn’t go inside.

  A couple of dozen yards down the road, there was a Currys standing next to an independent mobile phone shop. The two premises were surveyed by an external CCTV camera, mounted on a lamppost. The CCTV was focusing on the electronics shops, but would catch the café in its field of view. A swirling green logo on the side of the camera identified its owner as Secura-Lock. A local outfit, not a national one.

  She called Directory Enquiries to get a number for Secura-Lock, then got an address. It was so close by, she didn’t even need to drive.

  A girl with a high-pitched voice, a Middle Eastern accent and lots of make-up was behind the reception desk. Cat slapped her police credentials down on the counter. She didn’t use the words ‘immigration check’, but she didn’t have to. She had the girl’s attention.

  She explained what she needed. The file with the IP addresses gave dates and times of log-on and log-off. Cat requested video footage for an hour on either side of the most recent of those periods. If she had to go further back, she would.

  The girl was jumpy – a good sign. Once, she accidentally called Cat ‘sir’. She confirmed that Secura-Lock retained footage from all their CCTV cameras for at least six weeks, promised to have the footage made ready for her as soon as possible.

  ‘I need it now,’ said Cat.

  ‘It will take time to download. But we can email it through?’

  Yes. Even better. Cat said as much, gave her details. The girl promised to call as soon as the email was sent.

  The internet café of interest was open till ten that evening. Cat prepared by getting herself a take-out cappuccino from a nearby coffee shop and drinking it outside, while smoking in a doorway. Feeling better from the coffee and the nicotine, she browsed the biker mags in a newsagent, till she got the call from the girl at Secura-Lock.

  Back to work. She went into the café now, set up, found twelve Secura-Lock emails in her inbox. Twelve, because even zipped, the files were so large as to need chopping down into sub-segments.

  Cat unzipped the videos, opened up a player to view them. She opened the first email to set the time, noted that it covered the earliest period she had requested, moved to the sixth, which, she estimated, was the most likely to include the moment that she was looking for.

  Right at the beginning of the footage two teenage boys exited the café, one still pocketing change. They disappeared into Currys, nudging each other and laughing. Cat let the wmv. file run on. It hadn’t been a busy day. Even the traffic and passing trade seemed sparse. She went through it again but as far as she could see the café was empty, start to finish. If her man had been at the back of the shop all the time, she wouldn’t catch him. Otherwise, she guessed, she’d pick him up, even if only as a smudge of movement.

  She checked all the other files she had. Nothing. Her optimism was fading. It’s not that the café had been completely empty. It wasn’t. An elderly Afro-Caribbean man entered the shop, looking stately and dignified. A couple of teenage girls. Two women, possibly Poles or Russians, making a cheap long-distance call. No one was what she was looking for or stayed enough time.

  So perhaps this whole thing was wrong – perhaps those teenage girls, for example, were hooked on ‘Street Spirit’; perhaps the Deptford thing was pure coincidence. Or something else.

  Cat was betting on something else.

  She checked the back of the café. There was no yard, not really. You could just about jam a car in, but it would have been obvious and intrusive to the café owner. There was no side street, which left the front, or maybe an upstairs room of a neighbouring property.

  Cat went outside to check the buildings on either side, but there was nothing vacant. Nothing boarded up, or easily accessed by a fire-escape.

  She went back to the CCTV footage and checked the cars immediately outside. None of those parked had any occupants. Another car was parked opposite Currys. A white estate, nondescript. Running across the top of the windscreen a strip of green plastic doubled as a sunshield and advertising banner. Cat halted the video, leaned in to the screen, squinted. Just managed to make out some of the lettering: the word Pegasus, it looked like. There was a yellow and black rectangle on the side of the car advertising something.

  She let the footage run on for a few seconds, focused on the car’s interior, stopped it again when she saw the outline of a man appearing, sitting in the back on the opposite side to the driver, hunched over something resting on his thighs. It was not clear but f
rom that range she thought it would still be possible to piggyback the café’s wi-fi.

  She went outside with her own laptop to check how far she could go before the connection broke. Two yards, five, ten, twenty-five. She was beyond the relevant parking bay now, and her signal was one-bar but still working.

  Back to the café. The owner glared at her, like she was a weirdo, but without much malice. If you want to avoid weirdos, don’t set up an internet café.

  The white car’s registration number wasn’t visible. She viewed the fifth video, then the fourth, hoping that she could catch the moment when it arrived, getting a different angle on the plates to read them. It was in the middle of the third section of footage that the car arrived. She stopped the film there. The plate was blurred, needing sharpening and contrast enhancement in Photoshop, not the whole of it visible, but the yellow-and-black advertising section resolved as the details of a minicab firm: Pegasus Cabs.

  She exhaled slowly, feeling the cold rush of adrenalin prick through every capillary in her body. Benzos? Screw them. Her current intoxicant of choice was altogether sweeter.

  She used Google to get the company location and drove there fast, feeling pumped. The cab firm was positioned four blocks west of Deptford Bridge station. She noted how close it was to Rhiannon’s first address, only two streets away.

  She was moving in ever diminishing circles.

  The area was a mixture of social housing and small, down-at-heel businesses. The mini-cab company stood next door to a take-away kebab shop, little more than a kiosk. The two businesses occupied a property that had once been single usage, but someone along the way had put in a crude dividing wall.

  She parked, climbed out, walked straight in the front door. The cab office had little to it beyond being a place where clients’ calls could be taken and drivers directed via a two-way radio system. In one corner of the room sat three casually dressed men in their mid-twenties – cabbies, waiting for a fare to call. They were occupying chipped chairs while conducting a desultory conversation about the Premier League in heavily accented English.