Cut to the Bone

by Alex Caan

  ‘No. I think she did that, had a clear-out,’ said Laura.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  Laura shrugged.

  ‘Karl asked me not to,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’ said Stevie.

  ‘I didn’t know all of this,’ said Mike.

  ‘Yes. Now, afterwards, of course it does. At the time, though, my focus was on Ruby, getting her back. That’s all,’ said Laura.

  Stevie didn’t understand. Ruby disappears, and her ex-manager asks her mother not to call the police until he gets there. He then asks her not to tell the police about his involvement. Why would you not disclose that? Karl Rourke would probably have been their prime suspect if she had.

  ‘I need to speak to you about a company called KANGlobal,’ said Stevie.

  The Days showed no reaction at all to the name.

  ‘They are the parent company that own MINDNET,’ she explained. A vague nod; they weren’t interested. ‘KANGlobal are an international mining company. They have licences in a number of conflict areas, especially in the Congo.’

  Laura knotted her eyebrows, and Mike put his head to one side. She had their attention then.

  ‘How do you think Ruby would feel if she found out MINDNET were part of a corporate from that was involved in questionable mining practices?’

  ‘She would be appalled,’ said Laura.

  ‘Do you think she had an inkling of KANGlobal’s relationship to MINDNET?’

  ‘No, she would have said. She wouldn’t have kept that to herself,’ said Mike. ‘I agree, she would have been unhappy, to say it politely, if she found out.’

  ‘She would have felt betrayed, completely,’ said Laura. ‘More than that, she would have done something about it.’

  Stevie considered Laura’s words. It seemed too big, complicated. Then again, the last video Ruby had posted, she said she was about to reveal something to her fans.

  Was Ruby just something KNG had to deal with? Had she threatened to do something that meant she needed to be silenced? Had she confided in somebody? Somebody who was now in grave danger?

  Chapter Eighty-three

  Graveyards. Tombstones. That’s how he tried to explain it.

  It was the road they were walking down. Unlit, air sharp with the smell of rot, concealing terrors. Things were falling into place; something was emerging. A man visits the mother of a missing girl, lies to the police about it. Gets his wife to lie. A fixer man who was working on someone else’s orders. Why? What power did they have over him? A man who took a file from a missing girl’s bedroom. What was in it? Something damning him, or the company? You follow the silvery threads, and you see the underbelly of the beast.

  Zain was backtracking. They had focused on Dan. He had focused on Dan. He had obsessed over him. It was a basic rule: switch off your own distaste. Like walking through a sewage pipe. Rank, full of crap, maggots. Don’t let the stench overpower you, and he had done just that. He had let his own dislike of Dan take over.

  He felt like a dick.

  The green pills were good, but redemption was beyond them.

  Zain was going over Ruby’s hard drives again. He had done cursory examinations earlier in the investigation, pulled emails he needed. Michelle had done the rest, but they had focused on the evidence they’d thought they needed. Dan’s messages were what they’d wanted to find. The evidence that fitted the man they wanted to lock up.

  Zain was looking deeper now, running tests, algorithms and software that Forensics would take weeks to run and deliver on. It meant Michelle was sitting with her spine angled like a broad sword. He would have to visit Fortnum & Mason again.

  He had an idea. He needed her. He could have looked online – would have been easier – but this would be an offering. In binary.

  ‘Michelle,’ he said, trying to feign charm. At what point did you stop being charming and become creepy?

  She didn’t turn around, and he thought he sensed the features on her face twist.

  ‘I need some help,’ he said. ‘Can you take a look at something for me?’

  ‘You need help? I thought you were the great Oz. You can do anything?’

  ‘Oz was faking it.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing?’ she said, still with her back to him, banging her keyboard hard.

  ‘Will you take a look at something for me? I’d appreciate it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need to send you some code. It’s software that looks at deleted memory that’s been overwritten.’

  She turned around. She was a nerd at heart. They both knew it. He had just given her the equivalent of a ‘show me yours’.

  ‘Are you saying what I think you are?’ she said, arching an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m not sure. Look, I’m good at running scripts, following procedures and functions others have written. I don’t code. I’m not like you. What I do know is that you can’t delete stuff anymore, not in a basic way. Memory holds deleted files, waiting for them to be overwritten. It’s why our forensic teams have it so easy recovering data.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ There was an excitement to her voice, waiting for him to go on and reveal what she wanted him to.

  ‘Only, the criminals are becoming more sophisticated. They’ve developed a way to delete files and immediately overwrite them. Sometimes with genuine files, sometimes with background files. So you lose the ability to easily pull what was there before, because the empty placeholder is now full of something else.’

  ‘And you’re telling me you have software that pulls away the new data, and tells you that a placeholder was empty, not because it was unused, but because the data in it was deleted?’

  Zain shrugged. ‘It’s all zeroes and ones, but yes, I think that’s what it does.’

  Michelle rolled her chair across the office to his desk, her fingers going to his keyboard, her eyes roaming the code on his screen.

  ‘It’s falling over,’ said Zain. ‘I don’t think I copied it correctly?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a secondary file structure it’s calling. It’s going around in a loop; it needs input, or will keep crashing.’

  ‘Can you work out what the secondary file structure might be?’

  ‘Give me a few minutes. Where’s the rest of your software? You must have copied this from somewhere?’

  Zain hesitated. Did he want to give her an in to his secret places? He pulled a USB stick from his pocket, plugged it into his desktop base.

  ‘That’s all I have,’ he said. ‘Like I said, I can do protocol and procedure. I can hack, and I can get results. Using what others make.’

  ‘Go and get me some tea. Jasmine green tea.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, smiling at the change in her.

  An hour later, she had created what he needed. His software called her file as part of a crucial bit of code, and it ran. They watched as the secrets of Ruby’s computer opened up to them, the bits someone had purposely overwritten.

  ‘Do you think she did it herself?’ said Michelle, sitting next to him as he drove. The air still carried the fresh smell of her tea.

  ‘Possibly. She was computer savvy. But this is high-grade cyber security awareness. Why would she need something so sophisticated – unless she had something to hide?’

  They split the results between them, opening files and seeing what was inside them.

  ‘This is odd,’ said Zain.

  Michelle came to his desk, her arms folded across her, but her head bent close to his shoulder.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Tombstones,’ he said.

  ‘A graveyard of them,’ she whispered, going back to her own desk.

  He clicked through some more files, but found nothing significant. Michelle called him over.

  ‘I think this is it,’ she said.

  She clicked on a generic icon, which her computer opened up in Media Player. It was a film of Ruby, in her bedroom. She
had candles lit on either side of her, but her face was without make-up, her hair tied back. There was a silver chain around her neck, a pentagram hanging from it. Her fingers twisted it as she spoke.

  Hi, guys, how are you all? I said last time I was going through some things. I still am, but I’m getting closer now to being able to share it with you. The world is a sad place sometimes, and it broke my heart what I found out. I turned in on myself, and my depression really peaked. I got past it, though. And now, well I think I’m going to share it with you all. I think what I tell you will affect lots of you. I hope you are sensible about it, and I hope you work positively and make a difference. You will be shocked. I know you will be. Because I was shocked. In fact, it really shook me up. But I trust you, I always have. You got me through the times when my own head was against me. This is important, though. And those involved need to be exposed.

  The screen fades to black.

  Chapter Eighty-four

  Kate was parked up outside the MINDNET offices. Jed Byrne had tried to avoid her with the excuse of having an important meeting. Kate had read out two names to him, and he had agreed to meet her. After not breathing for a few seconds, she thought.

  Zain called when she was just about to leave her car.

  ‘There’s a video you need to see,’ he said.

  He emailed it to her, and she watched it on her phone.

  ‘It’s a first cut,’ he said, when she had finished. ‘The way they put their videos together, they do them in segments. So even though the ten-minute videos on YouTube run like a single shot, they’re edited like any other film on TV or the cinema. This is Ruby’s first take, and the first segment. The rest of the video has disappeared.’

  ‘How? Didn’t you say you found this by running software that found invisible files?’

  Kate hated technical explanations; her mind switched off at the early stages. She just liked to know who did it and what they had found. Harris and Michelle had done this together: great; finally, he was working successfully with someone else in her team. Ruby’s video had been found; again, brilliant: result. What she didn’t need to know about was the coding loops and file calls and syntax errors and missing algorithms.

  ‘Yes. That’s just it. Her hard drive has been double-whacked. Someone has not only deleted and overwritten memory, but they’ve then gone in and deleted it again. So what we’re left with is a series of markers.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ she said. Get the hint, please, she mentally pleaded.

  ‘OK, it’s like you’re in a graveyard. And you see all these tombstones – you know, with all that stuff about who died and who their family was. So you know someone was buried there, because of those tombstones, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. This was better. She liked analogies; they made sense to her. They made sense to a jury, too.

  ‘Imagine, then, if when you came to one of those tombstones, and you saw the grave hadn’t been messed with. You would assume that everything was OK.’

  ‘Reasonable assumption,’ she said, thinking she knew where he was heading now.

  ‘Until you start digging. And realise that someone’s taken the body, and replaced it with someone else.’

  Kate watched the shock fall over her face in the wing mirror.

  ‘Someone deleted Ruby’s files, replaced them with empty files. They then deleted those rubbish files, and replaced them with something else. So we have deleted tags which refer to files that are no longer there.’

  ‘A professional would have to have been involved,’ she said. ‘A very expensive professional, with a lot of resource and a lot of contacts in the security world.’

  ‘Remind you of anyone?’ said Zain.

  ‘And the deleted videos, they would probably tell us what Ruby was so upset about?’

  ‘It’s not just videos missing. A lot of data has been deleted twice over.’

  ‘Can we not retrieve it?’

  ‘We can’t,’ he said.

  ‘How did this video survive?’

  ‘Usual “cops catching a break” stuff.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Ruby deleted this herself, it’s the first take of a segment. Whoever went into her system wasn’t expecting that. They probably found the completed version, went to town getting rid of that.’

  ‘It might be enough,’ she said. ‘This coupled with what we know about MINDNET and Jed Byrne, it should be enough to get someone opening up to us.’

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  She needed more than luck. She needed Jed Byrne to be scared. Scared people cracked more easily. And in her head, Jed’s features, contorted, turned into those of her father. His lawyers. Her brothers. The faceless men that had ruined her mother’s life.

  Kate breathed out slowly. Battles for another day. Today she had Jed Byrne in her sights. She called Harris back.

  ‘I’m changing strategy,’ she said. ‘Prepare the interview room. I’m bringing Jed Byrne in for questioning.’

  Chapter Eighty-five

  The house was echoing its size as each empty room mocked him. Karl Rourke watched his glass fill with brown liquid, then empty, then fill again. He lost track. Did he refill it?

  Susan had gone. She had taken the kids. How could they fix this? She was supposed to back him, lie for him. Not lie about him. How had he missed this? Had it been obvious? Had she been pulling away from him, resenting him, hating him, while he’d been busy gliding images across his tablet? Or FaceTiming his clients? Didn’t she realise he did it all for her?

  ‘You fucking love Ruby more than you ever loved me.’

  Her words. Painful. Damning. True?

  He swallowed, and the glass was empty again. Where was the gun? Why had he thought that? It came to him. A subconscious whisper, dragging itself up from the sewer of his brain, where all the other shit stuff festered. Where was the gun?

  Fuck. No. He wouldn’t let it solidify, and he wouldn’t let it take over.

  Karl flipped up the lock symbol on his phone, tapped in his passcode. Dialled. Anderson picked up straight away. Anderson. The viper. He wouldn’t sleep. Not tonight.

  ‘You set me up,’ said Karl.

  Good thing about mobiles. You didn’t have to say who you were. Not when the other person had your number.

  ‘And I have no idea why anymore,’ said Karl. ‘I am not taking the fucking blame. Do you fucking well understand me?’

  Bill Anderson’s breathing was heavy in his ear. He was mulling it over. Trying to work out what to say to Karl. It’s why Jed Byrne paid him a bastard fortune.

  ‘Look around you, Karl. Look around your detached house, your expensive furniture. The whisky I can tell you’ve been drinking. The designer watch on your wrist, the clothes your arse is wrapped in. That’s why you do what we tell you.’

  ‘I don’t need your money,’ said Karl.

  ‘I think you do. I’ve seen your accounts. You pissed away all the money you sold your clients for. You have no income. And expensive tastes. So look around you, Karl, and know this. You are one call away from losing it all. Cash the cheque from MINDNET, and crawl away again. Understand?’

  Karl dropped his phone into his whisky glass. The glass was empty.

  Money. Kate was looking at it. Not the dollar bills, precious stones or status symbols. But the men. The men that embodied money, their every pore reeking of it. It was their veneer of confidence, threaded through everything they wore and smelt of.

  Jed Byrne, in his casual jeans and open shirt, a baseball cap on his head. His lawyer, Tim West, manicured nails. There wasn’t a stray piece of dandruff between them; they were so polished. Slick, like skid marks. Her father used to say that. And that’s what they were. Slick like skid marks.

  ‘No comment,’ said Byrne.

  His arms weren’t locked over his chest: one was hanging over the side of his chair, and the other was resting on the table in the interview room. He could have been in a sports bar, checking out the g
ame with one eye, the talent with the other.

  West had instructed his client to say no comment, and not directly answer Kate’s questions. She was pissed off, always was when faced with assholes with that attitude, but she kept the bile low, swallowing it back. She was damned if she’d let these walking examples of privilege faze her.

  ‘Jed, we did some investigating of MINDNET. We found that there was a registered link between MINDNET and KANGlobal. Can you confirm this is the case, that your company is a subsidiary of KNG?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘We also found some interesting names sitting on the board of KNG. In particular, we found Harry Cain, current CEO of KNG. The man who built the company.’

  ‘No comment.’

  There was no emotion. His voice had trembled slightly when she had spoken to him about it on the phone earlier.

  ‘Come on, Jed, are you going to use that line when I tell you we’ve worked out that Harry Cain is your father?’

  ‘No comment.’

  It had been Zain and his checking that had unearthed the revelation. Harry Cain was never married to Jed’s mother, Elizabeth. He had been married four times with kids from each union, so Jed got lost in all that. There were rumours, though, picked up from online gossip and an old newspaper cutting. Elizabeth was cited as potentially the reason for Cain’s second divorce. And a check on Jed’s birth certificate confirmed it.

  ‘A deliberate effort seems to have been made to hide the link between MINDNET and KNG, including your use of your mother’s maiden name in all official documentation pertaining to MINDNET.’

  ‘Conjecture, you don’t know that,’ said West, without even looking up from his laptop. He had taken it out at the start of the interview.

  ‘Was it to keep a separation between yourself and KNG? A global mining corporation, specialising in a political hotspot like the Democratic Republic of Congo, would hardly go down well with the media-savvy clients you have?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Ruby Day had made videos about ethical standards in the products she used. She also made a video, just before her disappearance, saying she was about to expose something to her audience. A video that was deleted, remotely, by hacking into the wireless network in her apartment. A sophisticated act of sabotage. Were you afraid a public link between yourself and your father’s company would be damaging to your client base?’