by Graham Marks
Eddy Thomson looked up as the door to the room he and Simons were in opened and Keith Venner came in.
‘Nothing doing so far, sarge.’
Simons sat back, frowning. ‘What did the boy’s dad say?’
The DS walked round the table to look at the screen Adam Grey’s computer had been plugged into; it looked like a really ancient computer, a black screen with small typewriter writing and lots of arrows and stuff. ‘He using something really old?’
Simons shook his head as he leant forward, typed a few keystrokes and hit return. ‘No, this is DOS, what runs under all the flash stuff. Did you get anything that might help here?’
‘Oh, right. Yeah, Tony Grey, the dad, says as far as he knows Adam was a gamer, not a hacker – played a lot online.’
‘Well, someone did a number on this machine.’
Venner looked at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘The dad gave me some stuff here – girlfriend’s name: Suzy Barrett; dog: Badger; his birthday: 25/7/1987; star sign: Leo … are we clutching at straws here?’
‘Dunno … got anything else?’ Simons began writing stuff down on a pad.
‘Mother: Sarah; father: Anthony, or Tony; sister: Charlie or Charlotte; favourite musician: Jimi Hendrix; favourite food: chilli; supports Tottenham – can’t be all bad – and used to be called Adders by his mates, but that was way back in junior school …’
Simons scribbled something on his pad. ‘How old’s the dog?’
Thomson snorted and Venner made a puzzled face. ‘How the hell should I know – why?’
‘Nothing …’ Simons stopped writing and looked at the scribbled notes he’d made on a pad next to the keyboard. ‘All I need is a word, a key …’ He picked up his biro and began scribbling again, then typed something into the computer. The screen cleared and Thomson and Venner found themselves looking at a window asking them to input their password.
‘Have you got something, Simons?’ Venner pulled up a chair and sat down.
‘I’ve got an idea …’ He typed six different characters, small black dots appearing in the box in the middle of the window, then slowly put his finger on the return key and pressed it. ‘Light a candle, guv …’
The screen blanked and cleared to reveal a background picture of Jimi Hendrix, going full throttle on some stage. Two columns of Windows icons ran down the left-hand side of the screen and when Simons moved the mouse the cursor tracked across it.
Simons sat back smiling. ‘We’re in!’
‘How did you do it? Was it the girlfriend?’ Venner looked at the notes Simons had made.
‘A girlfriend’s a girlfriend, guv, but a dog is for life, right?’
‘So?’
‘So I figured it was gonna be Badger, not Suzy or anything else – but it wouldn’t be that simple.’ Simons picked up the pad, turned over to a fresh page and wrote something. ‘You know those stupid personalised number plates, the ones where they haven’t quite got the right letters and use numbers for vowels?’
Thomson and Venner both nodded and Simons turned the pad round and held it up so they could see what he’d written.
B4DG3R
‘I was lucky, it would’ve taken a hell of a lot longer without that. Where to now, guv?’
‘Log on to his email account and see what’s been going on there and print everything out. Eddy, let’s go and see if anything’s come in from Interpol. And then I’ll buy you a beer.’
‘OK, sarge.’ Thomson pushed himself off the wall he’d been leaning on to follow his boss. ‘Why d’you think he’s got all this security on his computer, Simons?’
‘Probably because he could. I reckon he knows someone who is a hacker and got him to do it. I’ll give the hard drive a good going over, but …’ he glanced at the PC tower on the desk to his left, ‘… I’ll be honest, this doesn’t look like your typical piece of hacker kit. Straight out the box from PCWorld, this is.’
Adam’s watch alarm went off at 7:00 a.m. and he spent what seemed like ages trying to find it before remembering it was on his wrist. He got out of his capsule as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake anyone else, and saw that well over half of the blinds were drawn. Obviously a lot of late nights last night.
Getting his travel bag out of his locker he went to the bathroom and by 7:45 he was standing out on the early morning street. He’d bought a chocolate bar and a soft drink from the vending machines in the hotel foyer and was having ‘breakfast’ as he walked. Looking to his right before he crossed the road to go to the Asakusa subway station, he saw a weird object on the other side of the bridge.
As he might not be coming back this way, Adam waited for a gap in the traffic and crossed diagonally to take a closer look at what appeared to be a massive gold turd that had been ever-so-carefully laid on top of a highly polished black stone plinth. It didn’t look like a building, no windows he could see. Could it be a piece of sculpture? If a cow cut in half and put in embalming fluid was art, then why not a gold turd? Maybe it was a comment – all art is crap! – you never knew. Whatever it was, it was worth a picture, which he would’ve taken if he’d remembered to bring his camera with him. Which he hadn’t. He’d noticed the night before that a lot of places sold disposable cameras, and turning to walk back towards the station he made a mental note to buy one as soon as he saw some on sale.
‘Guv?’ Simons poked his head round the door and saw DS Venner and DC Thomson looking like they were about to make an exit at the end of their shift; all packed and ready to go.
Venner looked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘Found something you might want to see before you go, guv.’
‘You printed it out?’
Simons waved a sheet of paper. ‘Ta-dah!’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Venner waved Simons into the room and reached out for the print-out.
‘What’s it say?’ Thomson walked behind his boss to read over his shoulder.
Venner read the two lines of type. ‘Hi! sorry i’ve not been in touch. bin frantic, lots to tell, will mail soon. Luv C,’ and sat back, looking up at Simons. ‘Why the fuss about this particular email?’
‘Look at the date, guv.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘What, sarge?’ Thomson leant over to take a closer look.
‘It’s yesterday, that’s what, Eddy.’
‘And it doesn’t sound like someone who’s been kidnapped, does it, guv?’
‘Not a lot.’
Thomson stood up, shaking his head. ‘All a fuss over nothing, then, right? Are you gonna call the parents and tell ’em?’
‘Hold on, Ed.’ Venner waved a ‘calm down’ hand at his DC. ‘How do we know this email actually came from the girl? The brother’s address could’ve been forced out of her and anyone could’ve sent it. I mean there’s definitely something going on, what with the other girl, Alice …’ Venner snapped his fingers, trying to remember Alice’s surname.
‘Reardon, is it, boss?’
‘Right, Ed, Alice Reardon. What is it with her going missing too?’ Venner sat back in his chair and scratched his head. ‘No, the email doesn’t mean a thing, it’s just virtual. There needs to be actual contact.’
‘Are you not telling Mr and Mrs Grey, then?’
‘Don’t think so, not immediately, not until Simons here has had a go at finding out exactly where this email was sent from.’ Venner looked up at Simons. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’
‘I can have a go, guv.’ Simons looked at his watch. ‘I probably won’t get very far tonight as I’ll need some help from the service provider, and you might have to get someone upstairs to do a bit of asking for me … but I’ll get started.’
As he turned to leave the room, Thomson moved round from behind his boss’s desk. ‘Hang on a sec – shouldn’t we reply?’
Venner frowned. ‘What?’
‘If the brother had actually got the message, he’d’ve replied, right? Sent a message straight back?’ Thomson looked from his boss to Simons and back. �
��So shouldn’t we send a reply back for him and see what happens?’
‘Good thinking, Eddy – go with Simons and check out how he’s replied to her in the past and rough out a message and then I’ll tell the parents we’re doing it.’
‘I thought –’
‘Changed my mind – DS’s prerogative. While you’re doing that I’ll see if I can get something moving upstairs. Who’s she got her email account with, Simons?’
‘Yahoo, guv.’
Venner reached for the phone, glancing at a list of extensions taped to the desk. ‘Thanks … I’ll be along in a minute.’ Before he could dial the number his phone rang. ‘DS Venner … Oh, hello, Mr Grey … right, Suzy, the girlfriend … an email from Adam … OK, thanks for letting me know, and if you could ask her father to let us have a print-out that would be a great help … right … no, nothing new … as soon as I know anything I’ll let you know, Mr Grey. Right, thanks … Goodnight.’
Venner put the phone down, wondering if he should’ve told Tony Grey right then about the email from his daughter. Getting people’s hopes up and then having to let them down was, in his opinion, worse than keeping them in the dark until you were sure of what you were talking about.
18
In travelling, a wonder resort
It was only five stops, with one change, to Minowa station, and then, said the guidebook, the hotel was a ten-minute walk. Adam had come out at ground level opposite a McDonald’s and immediately caught a whiff of burgers, fries and ketchup. A chocolate bar was not a breakfast, a small but insistent voice in his head kept on saying, and he had to admit he did still feel hungry. He was going to have to do a lot of walking today, and in the end, why not? Being both quick and cheap it ticked at least two of his boxes right now.
Adam ordered an orange juice to go with his meal, to give it at least a semblance of being healthy, and was back out on the street in no time flat. He had no idea what this hotel was going to be like, but if cheap hotels in London were anything to go by – and this place was supposedly even less expensive than the capsule hotel he’d just stayed in – then he was preparing himself for the worst. Some of the B&B hotels you saw clustered round the mainline stations in London looked like you wouldn’t even put your dog there for the night.
In his mind’s eye he saw an image of Badger, the one member of the household he could always guarantee would be glad to see him, whatever time of day or night it was. Not something he could ever say about the rest of his family. Adam had to stop himself thinking like this, as the train of thought was taking him places he did not want to go, getting him to think about things he’d prefer to keep wrapped up. Like his parents, what he’d done coming here, that he had less than a bat’s chance in hell of ever finding Charlie. And what he would feel like if anything final happened to Grangie while he was away. Negative, negative, negative.
Look on the bright side, he told himself. It wasn’t raining, the sun was shining, and this was good because he wasn’t exactly going to be spending a lot of time relaxing in his room. He looked round for some kind of signpost to give him a clue as to where he was, but it appeared that they weren’t big on street names in Tokyo, even in Japanese. This was not going to be a ten-minute walk like the book had said; make that half an hour, easy, maybe more if he really went off course, as he searched in vain for some clue as to which way he should be going.
He realised later he must’ve looked like the archetypal Lost Tourist, standing on a corner with luggage, wearing a small backpack and a puzzled expression and peering at a map. He was just wondering about going into a shop and seeing how he got on asking for directions, when a man wearing a peaked cap, some kind of uniform and pulling a cart stopped next to him and smiled, nodding. Adam nodded back.
He held up his map. ‘New Economy Hotel?’
‘Ah!’ The man – Adam now realised he was a postman – grinned even more. ‘Chikai!’ Adam watched as he pointed down the road to his right, held up three fingers and indicated he should go left. ‘Shingo …’ he said, looking back up the road and pointing at the traffic lights. ‘Shingo,’ he repeated, and made the ‘go left’ sign again.
OK, Adam thought, sounds like three roads down and go left by some traffic lights; he repeated the mimed instructions, the postman nodding as he did so and then holding up his hand, ‘stop’, making the ‘go left’ again.
‘Meiji-dori, mittsume no shingo.’ The postman held up three fingers again and made a ‘go right’ sign and said something Adam couldn’t make head nor tail of.
‘Turn left, go past three traffic lights and then take a right … is that where the New Economy is?’
‘Hai! Hoteru – Economy!’
‘Thanks, thanks very much.’ Adam did a small bow, like he’d seen people doing, and held out his hand.
The postman shook it, smiling, and bowed himself. ‘Sayonara!’
‘Sayonara, mate …’
Adam could see the third set of traffic lights just up ahead, and beyond them the right turn that should, if he’d understood the postman’s instructions correctly, be the road that the New Economy Hotel was on. He checked his watch and saw it was 9:30 – he’d been walking for almost ten minutes. He quickened his pace, wanting to see if he really was where he should be or if he was going to have to go through the whole map-and-mime process again. He wanted to get the hotel thing out of the way as quickly as possible so he could get on with trying to find the Bar Belle and Alice.
A couple of minutes later he was at the corner and, on the second block down the street, he thought he could see a black and white sign on a red brick building with a lot of bicycles outside it on the pavement; budget hotel, budget transport.
It was 10:15 and Adam was on his way back to Minowa station. He didn’t have a room yet as the hotel was fully booked, but he was fairly sure the guy at the reception, who’d really tried very hard with his English, had said that someone was leaving today. He’d managed to make Adam understand he should leave a deposit and had then let him leave his backpack, telling him to call back after midday. ‘Something for you, no probrem!’ he’d said, smiling. Well, Adam bloody well hoped so.
Walking down the street, the sun hot on the back of his neck, the feeling of almost total insecurity – nowhere to stay, no one to talk to, no real idea whether he was doing the right thing – was building knots of tension in his shoulders and his stomach. Adam stopped walking and stood for a moment, letting the rest of Tokyo carry on while he tried to get a grip, come to terms with where he was, the situation he was in. The situation he’d put himself in. No one else around to blame for anything, no one else around to look to for reassurance that he wasn’t being a complete arse. He was in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the whole world, and he might as well be in the middle of the Sahara for all the help he’d got available to him.
Out of the corner of one eye he saw a shiny, pearlescent black bird fly down off the roof of a nearby building and land untidily in the gutter a few feet away from him. It looked like a crow, a raven, a rook or something like that. Big, with a massive beak and a swaggering, cocksure walk like it owned the place, the bird stopped for a moment before pecking at something in the dust … Adam saw it was the remains of a very dead pigeon. Was that cannibalism, one bird eating another bird? Did birds do that? The crow or raven or whatever it was looked up at him, turning its polished head sideways, a glittering eye staring up at him – like, what’s your problem, and who the hell are you anyway? Above, on the rooftops, Adam could hear other birds cawing and realised he’d been hearing the sound all morning, that Tokyo had crows the way London had pigeons. He turned away, somehow not wanting to be the subject of the bird’s disdainful glance, not wanting to see the go-home-loser look on its face.
A soft fluttering noise, like someone waving a silk scarf, made Adam look back. The crow, which’d obviously found there was nothing left worth bothering with on the feathered carcass in the gutter, was going back up where it’d come from. The bird cawed loudly
as it took off, dust rising in a faint cloud, then circled and lazily flapped its way up to a balcony where it landed, raised its tail and crapped. Nice.
Adam started walking again; he’d picked up a small, pocket-sized subway map at the hotel, as well as the information that he should buy something called a Passnet card. For the equivalent of about a fiver, he’d be able to use any of the lines run by the three different train companies who operated the Tokyo subway system. This sounded a hell of a lot easier than trying to negotiate the ticket machines every time he wanted to take a ride.
Roppongi was, like any night-time place, a very pale shadow in broad daylight, bleached of all its gaudy colours. Quieter, stripped of their glamour and their dark energy, the streets had the air of a circus waking up the morning after a performance, all the props still in place but the performers either asleep or without make-up and no longer recognisable.
What had been a seamless combination of neon mayhem playing against a matt-black sky was, by day, an untidy, looping mess of wiring, strung from tall poles, lacing down the streets, criss-crossing the roads, feeding the buildings with power and light and connections. What would be hidden underground back home was out on show here, and looked like it had been put up in a hurry by someone who hadn’t got a plan, worked by rule of thumb and had done everything totally piecemeal – strangely Third World electrics in this electronic city.
Adam figured that a lot of the bars probably wouldn’t be open yet, but he felt safer walking round back streets now than he’d done the night before. All he had to do was find the Bar Belle and then come back when it was open. All he had to do. He shook his head; as if it was going to be that easy. Standing at the crossroads, with the flyover running right and left, he decided to get logical. Using the small map at the back of the guidebook he mentally divided the area up into sections, like roughly quartering a square, planning to walk as many of the streets in each ‘section’ as he could.