To Catch a Rat

by S J Grey

  It wasn’t clear who was holding the camera. It might be Caleb. Hope lurched. That would substantiate Marks assertion that he was friends with Caleb.

  Emma zoomed in, to look closer at the window pane. Definitely Joss’s kitchen. Emma recognised the old, scarred, wooden table, and the dusty glass bottles lining the window sill. No mistaking those.

  Zooming closer, she saw something new. A blurred reflection. Multiple string bracelets on a slender arm.

  It was Joss.

  Tears blurred Emma’s eyes again, and this time she let them fall.

  Why, Mark? Why the lies? So many compounded, Emma didn’t know what to believe. How much of what he’d told her was the truth?

  She wanted to call him, to tell him she knew. To ask him what the fuck he was playing at.

  Were there more pictures of him? Emma had to know. She clicked on the next image, and yes, it was Mark again, walking up to the front door, a bag of cat treats in one hand, two takeout coffees in the other. This picture was taken from upstairs, probably Caleb’s room. Mark wore a different shirt and a fleece jacket.

  He met Joss more than once.

  There were two image files left. Another pop-up screenshot, asking Joss for help and saying the sender was paying the price for her happiness. As if Caleb would ever say that. And one more shot of Mark, this time leaving Joss’s house. It was raining, and he wore a beanie, walking away, one hand raised as though waving goodbye.

  Emma sank her head in her hands. Her lies to Mark were minor in comparison, and more omission than barefaced untruths.

  Don’t you trust me, Em? he asked. She couldn’t. Not now.

  Why? Why had he done this?

  She was trembling, and it felt as though she had a rock in her throat. Her mind skittered in random directions. All the nights they slept in her bed, his arms wrapped around her, and she believed that they loved each other. Did she know him at all?

  What else was he hiding from her, and lying to her about?

  This was going to hurt, but she couldn’t think about it now. There was too much to do.

  She had to give a copy of these pictures to the police. Mark knew more than he let on. She’d bet he knew more about Joss’s death than he was saying.

  A dark thought wormed into her consciousness. How involved was he?

  Could Mark have killed Joss? Then picked up Emma and driven her there, to be his witness when they found Joss in the river?

  No. Bile rose in Emma’s throat. She couldn’t think that.

  Then why did he lie about knowing Joss? When Joss came to Emma’s door, she ran when she heard Mark’s voice.

  Her phone pinged with a text. It was Mark.

  I’ll have our house secure by tomorrow, so why don’t I pick you up after I finish work? Miss you. X

  He’d know she read the message, but she couldn’t talk to him yet. Not while her emotions were so fragile.

  Emma felt untethered, like a balloon floating high in the sky with no way back to earth, no way back to her old life. One sharp word, one more lie, and she might burst and disintegrate into a thousand tiny fragments.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Focus, Emma told herself. See what delights the spreadsheet holds.

  She opened the document. There were rows and rows of text, formed into a detailed table. She looked closer at the column headings. Date. Time. Type. Details.

  Some of the contents in the cells leapt out—the popup messages from Joss’s screen. Was this a record of when they occurred? The police would love to see this. There was more, though. Emma scrolled down the rows. In total, Joss had recorded close to five hundred events, over a six-month period.

  Each of the popup messages was listed, with the date and time they occurred, and included a reference to the file name of the corresponding screenshot. Joss was amazingly detailed with stuff like this, and Emma was assaulted by a memory of them doing homework together at high school. Joss was cataloguing results from a set of statistical challenges, and she was meticulous in her records. It wasn’t enough to capture the answer; she extrapolated what the results might be for a dozen more scenarios, as well as the tiniest of factors that could affect the answer.

  It wasn’t that she was a maths genius, and OCD was too general a description. Joss loved detail.

  She and Caleb were both introverts. Caleb was called a geek, and Joss was labelled a freak, but for a long time, they were Emma’s closest friends.

  Aware that she was procrastinating, Emma picked through the spreadsheet on a line-by-line basis.

  Hang on. Joss included the filenames of the photographs, and that meant Emma could search for the ones with Mark in them, and see what notes Joss made.

  The first picture of Mark appeared before the halfway point. The headline in the cell read, Alec, and gave the date 2 Feb 2017.

  Emma clicked in the cell for the rest of the text.

  Alec Smith again. Bootsie came home. He brought coffee to say thank you for my help. He said he was lonely in his new place and sensed a kindred spirit in me. He talked about his late wife (Ginny), and how he was trying to make a fresh start. He offered to fix the squeaky hinges on the front door, but I refused. He said he’s good with his hands and likes fixing things. If I have any jobs he’d be happy to help.

  Emma read the text again. It made no sense. If the picture wasn’t so clearly Mark, she’d think Joss was talking about someone else entirely. And who the fuck was Bootsie? Perhaps there was an earlier reference to Mark, or Alec as Joss thought of him, but without a picture.

  Emma did a search for Alec. She was correct. This entry was dated 31 January 2017.

  Alec Smith visited. Said he’d moved into the house opposite, and his cat (Bootsie) had gone missing. Asked if he could look in my outbuildings, in case she was hiding there. Bootsie is black with white paws, small and timid. He showed a picture of her with his late wife. She died of cancer, two years ago, and Bootsie was her cat. Walked the section with him, but no sign of Bootsie.

  The questions were mounting up. Why did Mark give a different name to Joss? He claimed to be allergic, so how come he now had a missing cat? And had he really moved in to the house opposite, or was that another great, fat lie?

  She searched for the next picture reference.

  Alec Smith came for coffee and brought Danish pastries from Beach Cafe. They are my favourites, but I never told him that. Lucky guess? Or is he part of the surveillance team? No records of any recent house sales in the area, so I asked him how house prices are doing. He said he’s renting. Plausible.

  The final picture reference was the image of Mark walking away. It was dated 16 April 2017, and the accompanying text was brief.

  Alec Smith. I don’t trust him.

  Didn’t that tell Emma everything she needed to know?

  This data stick was her personal Pandora’s Box, and she’d opened the lid. She could never close it again. The secrets that came flying out were toxic. She’d rather not have seen any of this. But would she prefer to be ignorant of Mark’s multiple deceptions?

  No. She needed answers.

  Emma sat back against her pillows and stared out of the window. Birds sang, insects whirred, and somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Everyone’s life continued as normal. Emma’s would never be normal again.

  How did she begin to deal with this?

  She fell back into Work Mode. When she hit a problem, she broke it down into smaller issues, gathered as much data as possible, and then made a balanced decision. She could do this.

  First, she needed backups of everything, so she copied the disk onto her laptop and onto a new data stick. Now she needed a virtual copy stashed somewhere, and that was easy enough. She renamed the copied spreadsheet Business Expenditure, and then renamed each of the copied image files with consecutive numbers, starting with Invoice #1. Finally, she mailed the copied and renamed files to her work email account. She could bury them in her project folders, and they’d escape notice for months.

&nbs
p; Next, she needed as much information on Alec Smith as she could get, and she turned to her work for that. She called Si and caught him at his desk.

  “Hi,” she said, making her voice cheery and business-like. “Did you get any further with the data-matching algorithm?”

  “Hello to you, too.” He huffed a sigh. “Afraid not. I’ve expanded the range of the test subjects, and it all checks out. It’s driving me crazy, but I can’t find an explanation other than the ones we talked about.”

  “Could you add another test subject, please? This has to be confidential, Si. For the moment, anyway.”

  “No worries. Gimme the details.”

  “I think it might be Mark’s identity, prior to becoming Mark Penney. I don’t have much, but the dates fit. Alec Smith, resident in Peka Peka between January and April 2017. He was married to Ginny, who died of cancer two years earlier. I don’t have more exact dates.”

  There was a pause. “Is that all you’ve got? Alec Smith isn’t exactly a rare name.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. I’ll do what I can. You back in the office soon?”

  “Yes. I think so. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah. All quiet. Talk soon.” He disconnected.

  So far, Emma had only scraped the surface of the spreadsheet. She needed to see what other information Joss had stored and figure out how much of it was relevant. Knowing Joss, probably all of it.

  The earliest date was a few weeks after Caleb was sent to prison. Joss recorded a series of phone calls over a month-long period. They were catalogued as being silent or being a heavy breather, a caller claiming to be from the internet provider, another from the bank, and also various cold-callers, selling insurance.

  Every time she changed her phone number, it only took a day or two before another spam call happened.

  There were countless records of Joss, hearing clicks or echoing on the line whenever she used her phone, and her assumption that this meant the calls were being monitored.

  She also noted multiple hoax or spam emails that were not picked up by her spam filters, along with dates and a summary of the contents.

  Every time Joss posted on the GoodNeighbour forum, she logged the details and captured any responses. Mark’s name was listed as a recent responder to one of her posts. Emma frowned. That was very recent. That meant Joss had stashed the data stick a maximum of a week ago.

  Then there were the records Emma didn’t understand. Joss logged almost a hundred events with two words—RAT intrusion. What did that mean? She flicked to her browser and Googled the term.

  RATs (Remote Access Trojans) are tools used in stealth hacker attacks, also called Advanced Persistent Threat or APT. This type of intrusion consists of regular visits to your network that can last over years.

  What? Emma skimmed the first article she came to, a new sense of horror descending. Joss was very internet savvy. She had access to a wide variety of tools that enabled her to detect certain RATs when they tried to access her network. According to her spreadsheet, she’d identified nearly one hundred intrusions. How many slipped past unnoticed?

  This led back to the question of who removed all the computer equipment from Joss’s house. The same person or people that trashed it, no doubt looking for Caleb’s application. Who would go to that length to find it, killing an innocent woman along the way?

  It couldn’t be Mark. Could it? He’d lied so much, from already knowing Joss to visiting her multiple times, the alternate identity, lying about knowing Caleb, and the way he arrived at Joss’s house right after they found the first camera…

  It was time to go back to the police.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Emma gazed at her phone for a long time, before making the call to DS Miller. This time he answered.

  “Hi. This is Emma Blackthorne. I have new evidence that I took from Joss’s house.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “A data stick.” She took a steadying breath. “It implicates my boyfriend. He knows more than he’s been saying.” There. She said it. She covered her eyes with her free hand. I’m sorry, Mark. This had to be the hardest thing she’d ever done. “Detective, I’d like to make a new statement, and I’d like to be interviewed by someone from the High Tech Crime Group.”

  The detective said he’d send a car for her, and that she could be interviewed at Paraparaumu Police Station, rather than going all the way into Wellington. It’d be there shortly.

  The police would have to take Mark in for questioning, after Emma shared this information.

  Christ. She needed to explain to Mum and Dad. The easiest way was with the evidence. Emma embedded the images of Mark into a Word document and copied Joss’s text as footnotes, then printed the single sheet of A4 paper in Dad’s office.

  She called her parents together. “Mark has been lying to me. I found something at Joss’s house earlier—photos of him with Joss, though he told me they’d never met. Also, he was using a different name. He’s lied over and over, and I can’t stay with him. I don’t know what’s the truth and what isn’t.”

  Her throat was too tight to let her speak, so she stood there, the printout in her hands, and tried not to fall apart.

  “Oh, lovey…” Mum closed her arms around her and held tight. “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. You wouldn’t jump to that conclusion without being sure.”

  Dad squeezed her shoulder. “Move in with us properly for a while, until this business is all over. I don’t want him anywhere near you. And if he dares to come back here, I’ll make sure he knows I have a shotgun. I’m not afraid to pepper his ass with buckshot.” Her father sounded outraged.

  Emma had to smile. It was wobbly, but a smile nonetheless. She wiped her wet eyes and sighed. The commute would be a pain in the ass, compared to where she lived now, but it was a good idea. “Thank you.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Mum still held her. “Are you going to talk to DS Miller again?”

  “Yes. I just called him. He’s sending a car for me, to take another statement. I’ll be back after that’s done.”

  “We’ll go to your house later,” said Mum. “We can pick up some more clothes and stuff, if you like?”

  “Yes, please.” She loved how her family knew exactly what to do, to help.

  Emma had to decide how much to tell the police. Specifically, how much to say about Caleb. DS Miller was thorough; she knew that. She wasn’t going to help him catch Caleb, though.

  It was like a re-run of her previous interview, except with a different officer accompanying Miller. This new guy, Peter, sat back while Miller opened the session. Emma declined legal representation. She hadn’t done anything wrong, and she didn’t want any delays to the investigation.

  “You want to make a new statement?” Miller asked.

  “Yes. I have new evidence. A data stick I found in Joss’s house.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In Caleb’s old bedroom, the attic. It was hidden in a secret place.”

  “Why didn’t you turn it over to the police?”

  “I forgot about it. We found the cameras, and that pushed everything else out of my head.”

  “You forgot about it?”

  Her cheeks burned, but she held Miller’s gaze. “Yes.”

  “Okay. It was in a secret place, so how did you know where to look?”

  Lie #2 coming up. “We went upstairs, to see how much needed tidying, and I remembered, when we were kids, they used to have a hidden safe. Caleb kept keys for his backup cabinet in there. I wondered if there was anything still inside, so I took a look and found a data stick.” She laid it on the table and nudged it towards Miller. “This stick.”

  “Did you look at the contents?”

  This was safer ground. “Yes. And when I realised what I was looking at, I called you right away. Joss kept a detailed record of everything over a three-year time period. Every visitor. Every time she thought her phone line wa
s being listened to. Every time she detected a RAT intrusion.” Emma looked directly at Peter. “She logged over a hundred intrusions during this period. She knew she was being monitored, but nobody believed her.”

  Pause. Remember to breathe. “And she recorded the times my boyfriend visited her, sometimes with photos. Only he was using a different name.”

  “Your boyfriend? That would be Mark Penney.”

  “Yes, but when he visited Joss, he called himself Alec Smith and claimed to be a widower.”

  She had to stop. The shock of seeing a wedding ring on his finger still stung like a thousand wasps.

  “This part is difficult to explain.” Emma paused, to collect her thoughts. “I’m working as a project manager on a cross-governmental project that touches on unique identifiers for members of the public. As part of my test group, my team have run cross-matching exercises, to check what data is held about our test subjects. We used Mark as one of the test cases, and it threw up an odd result. To cut a long story short, it looks as though his identity as Mark John Penney was only created two years ago. This might still be a flaw in our algorithms, but it might not be. He might be taking part in a witness-protection programme or something. Or he might have created a new identity, for reasons I don’t want to think about.”

  It looked as though Miller was about to speak, but Emma carried on before he could. “Thing is, we shouldn’t have used him as a test subject without his permission, so my test results shouldn’t exist. We’ll delete them, but it all builds into a picture you need to know.”

  Miller glanced at Peter, who nodded. “We’re going to step outside for a moment. I’ll leave the recorder running.” They left the room.

  What were they talking about? Probably trying to decide if they believed her, and which way to take their questions.

  It was almost fifteen minutes before they returned.

  Miller leaned forward, a sympathetic smile on his face. “Ms. Blackthorne, I want to ask you about your relationship with Mark Penney. How would you describe it?”