by Steve Reeder
“Why?” she asked. “I thought we had been through everything?”
“Yeah, I know, but there is something I still need to check.”
“Something to do with Pandora?”
“Er, yes. Listen, sorry if I was rude this morning, it was just - tense.”
“I noticed. So what is all this about Pandora then?”
“It’s something Jethro said to me the other day. We, that is Michele and I, bumped into him in Edinburgh, and I asked him about whether he had questioned your father while driving him back here, and he told me that Josh had mentioned Pandora’s Box several times.”
Julia grew quiet, thinking about her dad. “Did Jethro hurt Dad?” she asked.
“No. Hussein had drugged Josh while interrogating him about the design documents. When Jethro picked him up, Josh was still under the influence of the drugs, so Jethro used that to question him. Apparently, all he could get out of your dad was ‘Pandora’s Box’.”
“I think he hurt my dad. Something happened to Dad, something that killed him,” she said sadly.
“Julia, I don’t think so. I don’t know Jethro well, of course, but he doesn’t strike me as the type,” I said. “If he died from being mistreated, then I think it was Hussein who did it, or maybe just the stress of the whole affair.”
Julia thought about that, wanting to believe me.
“So what do you think it means?” she asked, finally.
“Pandora? I think it’s a code or password. But to what, I don’t know. I’m kind of hoping that we find something on the laptop that we missed before, you know, because we didn’t know about Pandora when we looked first time.”
Julia nodded. The master-bedroom key was in a drawer in the kitchen. She fished it out and came upstairs with me.
“I’ll help you look,” she said. “It has got to be better than the horses.”
The room was a mess. Marsha had not bothered to tidy up when she left and no one else had been in the room since. Julia shook her head at her mother’s messy habits.
“I don’t blame Dad for dumping her,” she said. “I don’t know what she was like when they first met, but ever since I can remember she has been a complete slob. I can’t recall a time when she wasn’t half pissed by lunch time.”
When I didn’t reply she shrugged and opened the large oak wardrobe doors. The laptop lay on a shelf with a pile of shirts scattered across it. Marsha had obviously been scratching through her ex’s things.
Julia pushed aside the clothes and handed me the computer.
“Let’s take it down to the kitchen; we might as well have a cup of tea while we do this.”
I opened the laptop on the kitchen table and powered it up while Julia put the kettle on. By the time the water had boiled the computer had finished its start-up procedures. I grabbed a packet of chocolate biscuits out of the cupboard, and we were ready to start.
We began with the list of e-mails sent and received by Rodber but there was no reference to anything concerning Pandora, or anyone named Pandora either. Next I checked the list of deleted items in the “trash”. If he had been really keen to get rid of any sign of a specific e-mail he would have emptied the “trash” file too but there was nothing I could do about that.
Next we searched the documents on “C” drive. The list was huge. None of the file names included the word Pandora though. It was painstaking, as we also had to look at each file for any indication that it may have something to do with oil drilling, oil exploration or oil refining.
It wasn’t until we had spent twenty minutes looking in some detail at every file that Julia suddenly thought of the search function. One after the other we opened the files and asked the computer to search for any reference to Pandora or Pandora’s’ Box, oil or Hussein. This went a lot quicker but it was still late afternoon by the time we had finished. We found nothing. I called a stop for sandwiches and more tea.
“What next?” Julia asked.
“Same thing with all his discs, I guess.” I shrugged, feeling more than a little despondent.
“Well, there are only three of them, so that shouldn’t take too long.” She sighed. “Of course he could have deleted all references to the document.”
“Don’t say that, Julia. I’m convinced your dad was working on something on this laptop just before he left that day with Bud. I can’t find any evidence of a specific e-mail, but there must be something on here, somewhere.”
The back door opened and Michele stepped inside, smiling brightly at the both of us.
“Had a good day then, sweetheart?” I laughingly asked. She had this effect on me.
“Brilliant, thank you,” she replied, kissing me on the cheek. “I feel refreshed and ready to face you lot again. What are we doing?”
“Looking for that document again or at least some reference to Pandora’s Box,” Julia informed her.
“You didn’t find anything in his list of sent e-mails?”
“No, nothing at all,” Julia replied for me. “There are literally hundreds of e-mails, but none that would interest us.”
“We were just about to start on the compact discs, so draw up a chair, pour yourself some tea and let’s get started.”
The extra help got us precisely nowhere. By nine that evening the three of us were ready to call it quits.
Julia was looking more than a little despondent now. She
stood up and announced that she’d had enough for one day.
“I’m going to take a long hot bath and then I’m going to sleep.”
“Bathroom break for me,” I said, “too much tea.”
Michele smiled and said, “I’ll take a look at Josh’s e-mails again, just in case you guys missed something.”
As I closed the bathroom door behind me the living room phone began ringing. The phone line in the living room was private, unlike the kitchen phone, which was linked to the office switchboard.
“OK, Simon, I’ve got it,” Michele called out.
Less than two minutes later I joined Michele in the living room. She had the phone to her ear. I shot her a questioning look. She shrugged.
“It’s Jethro, but - ”
“What?” I asked taking the phone from her. There was silence on the other end.
“He said hello, then asked me to hold,” Michele told me.
“Jethro!” I called into the handset. I could hear sounds on the other end, but no one answered me.
“Jethro?” I heard a car start both on the phone and outside. “Shit.”
I dropped the phone and ran through to the kitchen, Michele following quickly on behind me. There was no one in the kitchen. I looked around frantically. The laptop was gone. Tearing the back door open I dashed outside only to see taillights disappearing down the road.
“Call the police,” I yelled back at Michele. “I’m going after him.”
I was out of the gates within thirty seconds. The TVR was quick on the small twisty roads but if Jethro reached the motorway in that XJS of his I would never catch him.
I was too late. By the time I had reached the main London road he had either slipped down one of the side roads or just had too big a start on me. Jethro had vanished. I never caught sight of him once and neither did the police. Josh Rodber’s laptop vanished with him.
Breakfast the next morning was worse than the day before.
Bud had arrived back and joined us in staring morosely into our coffee cups.
“So is that it then?” he asked no one in particular.
After a moment’s hesitation Michele said, “Well, I’m not sure if this means anything, but - ” We all turned to look at her, expectantly. “Well, it’s just that yesterday,” she continued, “while you were in the bathroom, Simon, just before Jethro called, I was looking at Josh’s list of sent e-mails and I noticed something strange.” She had everyone’s attention now and it made her blush self-consciously. “On the day we arrived, fifteenth of February, wasn’t it, Simon?” I nodded. “There was not one e-mail
listed as sent, yet on average Josh was sending twelve to thirteen a day.”
“And yet I saw him sending an e-mail,” I said excitedly.
“Precisely,” Michele said. “So there must be some reason for him deleting that day’s e-mails.”
“All right, now just a second,” Bud said. “You don’t know for sure that Josh emailed anyone on the day, and even if he did, how could we possibly find out who he sent it to?”
“Maybe we could ask his service provider?” Julia asked.
“That is a possibility,” I mused. “I didn’t notice which one he used, did you?”
“Royal Essex,” she replied, promptly reaching for the phone.
The conversation with Royal Essex was brief. No way were they going to give out information from any client’s account.
“So, is that it then?” Bud asked again. This time no one answered him.
Brett and Russell returned and the business of running a race team started anew. Bud organized a meeting of the entire team and they thrashed out the shortcomings from the Knockhill race. I left them to it, unhappy at giving up on finding the design documents. Quiet apart from a natural pigheadedness, I didn’t fancy trying to explain to Hussein that I could not fulfil our agreement. Who knows what trouble he could cause us if he didn’t get what he was after? Besides, Julia may need the money: the inheritance was not finalized yet, and I was very much hoping to get some of it myself.
By late afternoon Bud and the team had made more progress than I had. The Brands Hatch meeting was less than ten days away. Hussein’s deadline for the documents was at least five days’ hence, but Bud was more assured of having the team ready to race than I was of finding the documents.
Tarryn was sitting in the spa with a skinny teenage boy when I came through.
“Hi, Simon.” Tarryn giggled and said, “This is Gary.” Gary turned bright red and refused to stand up, instead sinking lower into the water. I wondered if I had come at a bad time, or just in time. The hell with them. I needed to relax in the hot water for a while.
“I hope I’m interrupting something,” I said as stepped into the spa. Tarryn giggled again. Gary looked pissed off but I didn’t care.
“Gary was just promising to help me set up an e-mail address for myself. Weren’t you, Gary?”
“Yer,” said Gary economically.
“Really?” I asked, “You get a lot of requests for e-mails while in situations such as this?”
“Maybe I should go?” Gary said to Tarryn.
“It’s all right, kid, stay. I’m not going to be more than ten minutes. I’ve got to get dressed just now.”
“Going somewhere?” asked Tarryn.
“I am indeed. I’ve rashly promised to take Brett and the girls out for dinner.” I lay back and closed my eyes, the jets of warm water taking effect. “You guys want to come with?”
“No,” Gary said quickly. “Er, no thanks.”
“No, I guess not. Wake me in ten minutes or so, will you, Tarryn?”
“You’re going to be late,” Michele said as I dashed into our room, shedding clothes as I went.
“Yeah, honey. I know. I was down in the spa relaxing for a minute,” I replied. I dug into the wardrobe for decent clothes. “Tarryn and Gary were in too. I fell asleep, would you believe? I asked Tarryn to make sure I was awake in time, but I think they were too wrapped up in each other.” I turned to Michele. “Do I have any clean shirts that go with these trousers?”
Michele sorted through my clothes and handed me a pair of jeans and a polo shirt that she had bought for me in London.
“Actually,” I said as I dragged on the jeans, “I think I may have dozed through my very own private sex show.”
“Simon. Don’t talk like that. I’m sure Tarryn would do no such thing.”
“Yes, well - Are you ready?”
“Of course,” she replied indignantly. “I thought you said yesterday that Tarryn was done with Gary?”
“Yes, well, you know how girls are. Besides, she might just be using him for his computer skills.”
“In a spa?”
“Well, the spa and the skimpily clad young lady in it may just be payment for the e-mail account he is setting up for her,” I said scratching under the bed for shoes.
I stood up, ready to go apart from shoving a hairbrush across my scalp. Michele was standing looking at me strangely.
“What? Have I got my fly undone, or something?”
“No, dear, your fly is just fine. Gary is setting up an e-mail address for Tarryn, is that right?”
“Yeah,” I shrugged. “That’s what she told me. What’s up with that?”
“You mean she doesn’t have an e-mail address now?”
“Not unless Gary has already done it, no.” I was puzzled now. “What are you thinking, Michele?”
She sat down, her brow creased with concentration. “When I was going through Josh’s e-mails yesterday, I took a look at his address book - you know, on the e-mail site. And there was an address for Tarryn. I mean he had stored it so he could send her something quickly without having to type in the whole address. You know how it works?”
I nodded. I only had three names in my e-mail address list, but I knew how it worked. I was just not a big emailer.
“Do you remember what the address was?” I asked Michele.
She took a writing pad off her dressing table and wrote it down for me.
[email protected]
Suddenly, I knew what Rodber had done with the documents.
“I must have a quick word with Tarryn on the way out,” I said.
“I know that look you have in your eyes,” Michele said. “You know something.”
I nodded. “Come on, let’s get going, this could turn into a celebration dinner.”
I poked my head into Tarryn’s room; the door was open but no one was in. Michele waited impatiently in the living room while I dashed down the passage to the spa. Both Tarryn and Gary had already left. It would have to wait till after dinner or perhaps even till tomorrow, I thought, heading back up the passage. A car door slammed outside followed by a piercing scream. Tarryn.
I left Michele to follow as best she could and ran through the kitchen and out of the back door. A cold dread gripped me as I took in the scene that greeted me.
Gary lay bloody and beaten next to his old yellow Mini while two men dragged the screaming girl into the back of a blue van. Seeing me, one of them raised a pistol and fired two hasty shots at me. I dived behind my TVR, the bullets whipping over my head. The van door slammed closed again and dirt spat from under the rear wheels as it tore down the gravel driveway. I looked around in a panic. My car keys were still upstairs in the bedroom and there was no time to get them, the van would be long gone and Tarryn with it. Gary lay moaning in the dust next to his Mini. I could take that but I judged it to be far too slow.
“What the hell is going on?”
I turned around in surprise. “Geoff. What are you still doing here? Never mind. Where are your car keys?”
I ran over to him as he fumbled in his pockets.
“What’s happened, Simon?”
“Someone just grabbed Tarry. That dark-blue van that just left in such a hurry. Forget the keys; is that bike ready to go?” I asked, spotting one of the Kawasakis standing by the open workshop door.
“Yes. The keys are in the ignition. I’ll see to the kid and call the cops. Go.”
The bike started first time. I pulled it off the stand and shook it. There appeared to be over a half tank of fuel. Good. I crammed someone’s helmet on my head and selected first gear with difficulty, as the cast on my arm did not allow much movement.
As I accelerated down the drive I tried to picture the possible routes the van could take. I had to stop the vehicle reaching the main junction on the London road or I would be faced with too many possibilities.
Once out of the gate the road ran two hundred and fifty to three hundred metres to a T-junction. I arrived at the
junction with both tyres protesting at the treatment they were getting before being given the chance to heat up. Slow down, Simon, I thought, there’s no point in killing yourself before you catch the bastards.
I turned right, as they must have; the way left led to a farm and unused fields. The bike hit a hundred and fifty before I met traffic. I flashed past without slowing; it was only oncoming traffic at the same time that worried me. The road curved to the left and I had difficulty holding the machine on the left side of the roadway at one hundred and ninety kilometres an hour. No sight of the van yet. Three hundred metres till the next turn. There was right-hand corner leading to a major road with a fair bit of traffic. I was hoping rush hour commuters would delay the van.
I stood the bike on its nose, and braking hard down to thirty-five, I laid it over and took a gap between two homeward bound office executives. Third, fourth and fifth gears came and went as I flashed by a stream of cars, narrowly missing two oncoming vehicles. Angry hooters sounded in my wake.
Two miles to the motorway and no sign of the van yet. Bugger. What if I had picked wrong and they had turned elsewhere?
I grabbed a handful of brakes as the next turning came up. It was a slow right turn at a traffic light. The light was green as I thundered past a row of cars waiting to turn. Down through the gears to third. The back wheel was getting light, almost lifting off the roadway as all the weight was transferred to the front wheel. The light turned red when I was still twenty metres from the turn. I ignored it, dropping to second gear and taking the turn far too quickly. The bike drifted to the far side of the road as I tried to hold it. No good. The bike slid off into the long grass and dumped me on my back. Shit, my arm hurt. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the handlebars; the engine was still running. I kicked it into neutral.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I looked up. Two drivers had stopped, and one large overweight and angry man shoved me in the back. “You stupid prick, you could have killed someone,” he shouted. “I have called the police on my mobile, you just wait here.” I shook him off and climbed on the bike.