In the Company of Ghosts

by Stephen A Hunt

  Doyle nodded. ‘And any of those is a real mind fuck, no-win whichever way you cut it. Right down our street.’

  ‘How was the office brought into this affair?’

  ‘The same bloke who installed the private security camera in Saucy Simon’s monitor, Luke Wilder, he called it in. He’s part of the company’s security detail. He used to be a copper and phoned an old mate of his in Special Branch after building security found Werks doing his chandelier impression. Lukey Boy reviewed the footage from the secret camera and gave his mate the nod that the suicide was a fake, told plod where to find the secret camera inside the monitor. The news bounced around the Home Office until it was cut out and flushed through to the orifice.’

  Agatha drummed her fingers on the desk. ‘Mister Wilder is under protective custody?’

  ‘He’s vanished, is what he is,’ said Doyle. ‘You can listen to the call he made for yourself. His pants must’ve had more skid marks than the Dakar Rally, the fear was really on him.’

  ‘Under his own protective custody then,’ said Agatha. ‘Always the safest kind.’

  ‘All three of your options require a very high proficiency with faking film footage,’ said Thorson.

  Spads agreed. ‘If the murder’s a prank, it’s an expensive hoax.’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ said Agatha. ‘He might have wanted to commit suicide and leave a mystery behind him, a legend. Conspiracy theories are rarely forgotten. But that’s the least likely option, all the same. I don’t think Mister Werks wanted to enter the rolls of history. The fact he had a hidden camera installed suggests he thought he was at risk and didn’t fully trust his own security team.’

  ‘Paranoid, then,’ said Thorson. ‘Wanted to see who was logging into his terminal when he wasn’t about?’

  ‘Paranoid, that’s a nasty word, Helen. Cautious, that’s how I would describe Mister Werks. You can never be too cautious. I think events have rather vindicated his decision in hindsight.’

  ‘We’re close to eliminating your third option,’ says Doyle. ‘I’ve already arranged for someone I trust to do a second autopsy on the sly and match the DNA. She’ll make sure which twin it is we’ve got on the slab, and rule out a looky-likey. Anyway, I can’t see any motive for Werks to pull a Reginald Perrin on us. Why would he want to fake his death and disappear? No money problems. Who wouldn’t want to be Saucy Simon? What man wakes up one morning and realises he’s developed an allergy to the leather on his chauffeur-driven Aston Martin?’

  ‘You would be surprised,’ said Agatha. ‘But I agree with your general premise. Occam’s razor, Lex Parsimoniae. The most straightforward option is the second. A person or persons unknown murdered Simon Werks and wanted his death to appear like an accident. Someone knew about Mister Werks proclivity for autoerotic asphyxiation inside his office, and provided for a tape to be faked showing his unfortunate death indulging his perversion. Then a hit team arranges for the fiction to become a reality. Quite ingenious, really. You make your victim’s death so excruciatingly embarrassing that the chances are the victim’s own family will cover it up for you.’

  ‘Faking the tape,’ said Thorson, ‘feeding it into the building security system and replacing the real footage of the assassination. That’s pro-work.’

  ‘Premier League shit,’ added Doyle.

  ‘It’s very important that the drug the assassination team used to sedate Mister Werks is isolated from his blood. That drug will tell us all that we’re going to find out from the scene of crime. I trust your friendly coroner is proficient in such matters?’

  Doyle tapped his watch. ‘It’s not my first time on this merry-go-round, love. We’re on the clock with this case. Home Office wants to be ahead of the game before the news of Saucy Simon’s death gets leaked to the press.’

  ‘There’s a story on the internet that Mister Werk’s twin cancelled his presence at a business event in Durban. I trust we will be able to talk to Curtis Werks?’

  ‘Already arranged. His house is in Surrey. The interview will be there,’ said Doyle.

  ‘Let me see the segment prior to the assassins releasing Mister Werks feet,’ requested Witchley.

  Spads restarted the footage and fast-forwarded to the point Witchley had asked for, freezing it for her. Witchley tapped the screen, indicating the hitmen’s assembly mechanism. ‘Custom suction attachment, weights and pulley. This machine isn’t an industrial system that was re-purposed. This was built to order with only one function in mind, lynching a man and making it appear like a suicide.’

  ‘Guess it wasn’t a home assassination kit from Amazon,’ said Doyle.

  ‘Engineering, medical knowledge, forensics expertise, leaving nary a trace inside the room or on the body. Not many people are so professional. Mossad. The SVR and a couple of the other Russian services, the MSS in China, a few other state actors. Corporations, perhaps. Where they can afford a private security force with staff that are ex-service. Motive, that’s the thing. Find the motive and the rest will follow.’

  ‘Might have been his business competitors?’ said Spads.

  ‘A possibility,’ said Witchley. ‘Although a slim one, I suspect. Even the Russians don’t act like Russians these days.’

  ‘The Chinese could have done it,’ said Doyle. ‘If they thought Saucy Simon was becoming a danger to one of their key markets. Trust me, them I know.’

  ‘An avenue to explore when we meet Curtis Werks. What developments have they got coming down their R&D pipeline? Anything that Simon Werks was personally involved in which his killing might derail. I would like that monitor with the concealed camera put into the hands of Frank Ludington in the office’s workshop, can you arrange that?’

  Doyle pointed to the billionaire’s screen sitting on the chamber’s stone floor. ‘We can walk it around. And before you ask, Lukey Boy’s details are on the grid with GCHQ. All we’ve pulled so far is a false negative flashed on his car’s plates from a speed camera over a flyover in Hull. If he cards, cash-points or pays with plastic we’ll know about it.’

  Agatha didn’t look convinced. ‘As an ex-policeman, I would be disappointed if Mister Wilder was so easy a pickup. He has experience of how our trawler casts her nets. Aside from Werks’ twin, is there anyone the victim was close to who we can talk to? Wife, girlfriend? Background information from the usual sources appeared a little sparse.’

  Doyle looked meaningfully at the old woman and waved her personnel file at her. ‘Déjà vu, on that one. Pot. Kettle. Black.’

  Witchley just smiled. ‘The less privacy the age allows, the more comfortable it feels to embrace the shadows.’ She indicated the vault around them. ‘And there are so many shadows down in the Firehall. But then, perhaps that’s the point; this is where information goes to fossilise.’

  ‘Saucy Simon didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend. We’ve traced a few payments to a high-class escort agency called Lace Flowers. Last used over twelve months ago, so not exactly a regular punter. I guess the noose and a few good bondage web site subscriptions were all he needed to keep him fluffed up.’

  ‘His residence is in London?’

  ‘Owns the penthouse in One Hyde Park.’

  ‘It will need to be searched,’ said Witchley.

  ‘Thorson, that’ll be you and Spads. Myself and Miss Marple here will go to interview the twin.’

  ‘I should see the corpse, before that,’ said Mrs Witchley.

  Doyle made a face. ‘What’s looking at Saucy Simon’s stiff going to tell you?’

  ‘Not as much as listening to the rest of the dead,’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘But, still. Give your friend a nudge, see if the sedative’s been identified yet. Helen, perhaps you could accompany me. And Spads, do deliver the monitor to the workshop and see what Frank has to say.’

  If the look on Spads’ face was anything to go by, he was dismissive of the idea. ‘Board swappers. What are they going to tell us?’

  ‘That sometimes what you run isn’t as important as where yo
u run it,’ said Witchley. ‘Don’t be so supercilious towards the physical. Take the screen around to him and you might be surprised, young man. Not every problem is a coding error.’

  ***

  The office’s workshop lay at the end of a maze of claustrophobic corridors, a doorless stone arch which gave onto a vaulted chamber. Spads poked his head in and glanced around. The room’s walls were mounted with rickety shelves, the clatter from thousands of hard disks removed from their computer casings filling the chamber. Spads realized he was looking at a battery farm for computer storage. Each drive was connected to a reading arm, feeding a slim cable that joined a snake of coaxial wiring bracket-punched into the ancient wall. The drives danced with the sound of a thousand chattering teeth, the shelves they were resting on shaking and vibrating from the spinning media. Down at the other end of the room, surrounded by crowded workbenches and plastic carts full of more hard disks, sat the man he’d been sent to find. Frank Ludington rolled between the benches on a wheeled office chair, his black fingers searching out pieces with a watchmaker’s precision from a litter of equipment scattered across the surface. Mid-fifties with Caribbean-white teeth, an arc of white in the under lit room. Ludington glanced behind as Spads hovered at the entrance, trembling with the heavy flat screen under his arm.

  ‘Come in, why don’t you.’

  ‘I will,’ said Spads. ‘I need to come in.’

  ‘You’re the software boy that Agatha was phoning me about, I reckon.’ He looked up from his reading spectacles, a string tie on the frames looped around his neck.

  ‘I’m Spads.’

  ‘So you say.’ His white stubby beard twitched in amusement, the lines of his mouth crinkling as he wiped an oily hand on his overalls, before extending a palm towards Spads. ‘You look more like a Gerald Cuthbert to me.’

  Spads hand was uncertainly reaching out to shake the proffered hand before he realized what the old man had called him. ‘How did—?’

  ‘Hell, boy. You think Frank Ludington’s my real name? Half the people down here’ve got fiction stamped on their passports. The office feels more like a witness protection scheme than a crown protectorate most days.’ He snickered.’ Maybe when people say you got to go underground, this is what they mean, eh? Firehall being around long enough for that saying to have originated down here. Well, someone call me Gerald, I’d get me a new handle too.’

  Spads swung the dead billionaire’s monitor around and landed it on the bench, not taking his eyes off the rumbling mass of hard drives. ‘The tube train brings old drives in here, too?’

  ‘Every week, regular as taxes,’ said Ludington. ‘Just like us, eh, boy? Too useful to be thrown away, just needs to be forgotten. Tucked away, until the day come again.’ He lifted up a hard disk; an aluminium case tied with tight plastic cord marked ‘Ministry of Defence S.O.D’. Secure Only Disposal. Using wire cutters to slice away the plastic, Frank tossed the tie into an open bin bag and placed the drive on a moving belt that looked as though it should be rotating sushi dishes. The belt ended up at the far end of the room, an industrial arm on a wheeled platform marked Honda Automotive picking hard disks up, slotting them into the shelves and plugging in a network connection for their contents to be sucked into the office’s system. Green recycling crates lay in front of the shelves, and every so often a network connector would disengage, another robot limb trundling across and covering the disc in a lead box – a quick whining magnetic discharge to wipe it – and then the erased drive tumbled down towards the collection boxes.

  ‘So, you’re the fool that’s been choking our pipe with Brazilian data packets? Bandwidth down here is kind of thin, in case you haven’t noticed. Sir Christopher Wren didn’t exactly design this royal hidey hole with optical cabling and wireless relays in mind, the internet not being so popular back in the seventeenth century.’

  Spads flexed his arm, working out the creaks from carrying the screen and pointed to the wall’s shelving. ‘Where does the data go that you’re mirroring?’

  ‘You really are a coder, aren’t you? All this time here, you’ve never walked down to the office’s mainframe level? Like nothing you’ve seen before. Homebrew kit, just to keep things interesting. Non-standard, to minimise leaks. Big old prehistoric cabinets, solid-state drives and a Linux fork that’s the Galapagos Islands as far as any system evolution you’d recognize. All the paper files are captured digitally too, before they’re incinerated. Quite a sight to behold. An OCR scanning line that can chop a telephone directory and read the data in less time than it takes a man to spit.’

  ‘Just like us,’ said Spads. ‘Filed but not forgotten. Not completely, anyhow.’ He had been meaning to investigate Wren’s underground palace. But physical complexity confused him sometimes. He often found it easier to ignore than explore. In the old flat in East London where Spads had lived for the first twenty years of his life, he had only ever walked the same route to the bus stop. Never explored the maze of roads that led off his street, never ventured through the parks and squares nearby. It always embarrassed Spads that when someone stopped him on the pavement to ask him the way to a road that was quite probably only a minute away, he could give the person no answer and had to pretend he was visiting the area too.

  Ludington rolled over to the monitor, lifting up a screwdriver set from the mess on the surface. ‘Sure is strange, right, the crap that sinks down this deep. Like some dead, rich, white guy with two different deaths on him. Simon Werks, too. Shit.’

  Spads glanced up at the ceiling. It was hung with model aircraft and spaceships suspended from string, left slowly spinning by the draft from the hard drives’ cooling fans; model kits carefully put together and expertly painted before decals had been applied. ‘The SDF-1 Super Dimension Fortress, from Macross Frontier.’

  ‘You know your anime. Good to see some of the kids today still getting themselves half an education. Here, hold the back of the screen for me while I pop this.’ In Ludington’s hands, the monitor was quickly stripped apart, pieces of the set spread in an arc of components in front of the man. Turning over the rear glass substrate of the screen, the engineer ran his hands over four blue cables emerging from each corner, all of them linking into a marble-sized sphere hanging from the back. ‘Now this is a piece of work. They’ve drilled a camera in next to the control system, motion activated too. See how it’s connected to the power unit? Every time someone moves, it feeds the computer with an image file.’

  ‘The footage it collected was encrypted,’ said Spads. ‘As far as we know, only Werks and a single man on his security payroll had the key to unlock the file.’

  ‘You think? Here’s the kicker, you can access the surveillance footage remotely too,’ said Ludington. ‘All the movies that this camera took were being duplicated out through the power supply, using the building’s own electricity wiring as a line. My bet, there’s a router at the other end pumping this stuff out on a private party line.’

  Spads hummed, pushing the skin of his cheek around, massaging as he mused over what the engineer had discovered.

  ‘You want to sneak a peek at what was being filmed inside Simon Werks’ office, this is the way to do it,’ added Ludington. ‘Nothing to trace on a bug sweep. No out-go broadcast inside the office. Router’s probably tucked away in the company’s accounting department, one port winking at the world.’

  ‘Werks might have wanted to access his camera remotely,’ said Spads.

  ‘Hell, you know that would be done easier on the dead boy’s computer if the extra feed was for himself; remote desktop already built-in and as hardened as it can be with hackers like you about, right? No, the remote feed wasn’t designed in for Simon Werks. He didn’t know about it. This was a concealed extra. And it sure wasn’t put in by the hit team to play Peeping Tom. They even suspected there was a concealed camera inside their target’s screen and they would have swapped a fake drive in and taken the real hard disc with them. If Agatha asks what my guess would be, I’d say that the
hidden out-go was put in by your missing corporate security manager, in cahoots with whoever built the camera for him. And that dude, they know what they’re about. Blackmail, maybe. Werks’ kind of fetish webcam action isn’t going to sit too good with the investors at Davos, eh? I reckon your man on corporate security, he figured he’d collect himself a little just-in-case traction on his boss. Never too early to protect yourself against the next downsizing.’

  ‘I can find the router,’ said Spads. ‘Then trace it back to the receiving address.’

  ‘Lots of proxy servers to hack on that journey,’ said Ludington. He picked up a pad and pencil and scribbled down a list of names. ‘Agatha said your missing corporate security officer used to be police on the Met, which means his contacts should be local. Here’re the people in town I’d finger as being good for your camera, they’re craftsmen all. Any of their bandwidth been joining the dots with the Werks Building, then you’ve found your camera designer, maybe your missing corporate security manager too if you get lucky.’

  ‘Would you help me find the router?’ Spads asked. ‘It would be quicker that way. I could try, but following wiring, it’s the wrong kind of real for me.’

  ‘A bit of fieldwork out in the clear? That’s not something I get asked to do often. Picking up hard disks to erase is as far as I usually go.’

  ‘Please?’ said Spads. ‘I’m meant to be going to Simon Werks’ flat next with Helen to help examine it for evidence.’

  ‘Miss Thorson? That’s fine work. Well, all right then. I’ll play network engineer for you just this once. Maybe in return you can get me her phone number.’

  ‘You mean hack it?’

  ‘I mean ask for it.’

  Spads shrugged apologetically. ‘I think that might be the wrong kind of real for me, too.’

  ***

  ‘Well then, Helen,’ asked Agatha as she and Thorson walked the corridor towards the morgue’s cold room. ‘I trust you’ve been prospering without me. Although not too much, I hope.’

  ‘I can’t complain,’ said Thorson. There wasn’t much irony in her tone, given that was largely all she had been doing on the way to this East London facility. ‘Actually, I could, but much good would it do for me. How anyone expects me to pay my rent on what the office pays us…’