Driven (Leipfold Book 1)

by Dane Cobain

  “Perhaps she was trying to hide something,” Maile suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Leipfold admitted, begrudgingly. “Or perhaps she had a guilty conscience. Either way, we’ll never know. The police never saw her as a suspect. Even if there was something for forensics to find, I doubt anyone ever looked for it.”

  * * *

  When she got off the phone with Leipfold, Maile drifted into thought for a couple of minutes. Then she turned off her console and booted up her laptop. She was lying back on her bed with her head propped on her pillows, still wearing her Pokémon pyjamas. If Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, she was determined to do it properly.

  But there was no rest for the wicked, and she wasn’t the type to stay idle when there was work to be done. So she booted up her secure browser and logged on to IRC so she could communicate privately with a couple of her contacts. She checked the chat, but Krypt0 was away from his keyboard and Mayhem and Brn0ut were offline, which left only KAOS and ProfSyntax. But both of them responded to her messages, and KAOS knew a guy who knew a guy who could help her.

  Maile looped her hair absentmindedly behind her ear and then flashed her hands across the keyboard. She was calling in a favour and she knew it, but most of her friends were either anarchists or activists and they worked on a sharing economy. If they scratched her back with this favour, she’d scratch theirs in the future. Besides, she was a girl, and they liked that.

  It took their impromptu team a little over three hours to achieve its mission and they broke a half-dozen laws in the process. But it was a success, and Maile was able to get her hands on a couple of important pieces of information. Excitement built in her chest as her eyes rolled over the documents. She was absorbed by the joy of discovery, like a little kid at Christmas.

  First off, ProfSyntax had reverse engineered the login to Eleanor Thompson’s email account. He’d used a piece of software to crack the password in a brute force attack, guessing every combination of letters and numbers until it found the solution. They’d hedged their bets on the elderly woman using a simple password, and it paid off. They were inside her account and reading her mail in less than an hour.

  That was the easy part. The hard part was using her email address to access her banking records, but that’s where KAOS and his contact came in. The two of them had worked in relay, communicating sparsely with the rest of the group as they searched for weaknesses, eventually duping her mobile phone number and resetting her password via SMS. Once they were in, they pulled off as many reports as they could get their hands on and then emailed them all over to Maile.

  She thanked the guys for their help and promised to get back to them with any news, then started to pore through the documents. For the most part, there was nothing unusual. Just the usual bills that she expected from a one-woman, middle-class household. Direct debits for her mortgage and insurance, her gas, water and electric, her council tax and her monthly membership to the local spa, plus dozens of assorted payments for smaller amounts, mostly at Waitrose and Marks and Spencer. But there were a couple of anomalies, too. Three payments to Bateman’s Motors, for example, which seemed to confirm Leipfold’s assertion that Thompson and Bateman were somehow connected.

  Plus, there was a twenty-thousand-pound deposit with no name attached to it. Maile asked KAOS to keep digging.

  That was about it for the finances, but there were still several thousand emails to work through. Maile copied the archive to her portable hard drive and then started the long, repetitive process of filtering through them all and looking for something of interest.

  When she found something, she cried a little yelp of excitement and stopped typing for long enough to punch the air. She heard Kat bustling past outside and wondered whether to invite her in to tell her all about it, then realised that she’d neither care nor understand. So she called James Leipfold instead.

  * * *

  “I found something,” Maile said, once Leipfold picked up the phone. “I know you said it could wait until Monday, but I don’t work like that. Once I have an idea, I need to follow it up.”

  “Slow down,” Leipfold replied. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Looks like Eleanor Thompson took a big payment from someone,” Maile said. “A couple of days before her daughter died.”

  “How much are we talking?” Leipfold asked.

  “Twenty thousand pounds,” Maile replied. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, boss. And there’s more. I went digging through her emails and found a few documents. Get this. One of them was from Marie Rieirson. Looks like she didn’t cover her tracks as well as she should have.”

  “What are the documents about?” Leipfold asked.

  “Well, that’s just it, boss. They’re schematics.”

  “Schematics?”

  “Yeah,” Maile said. “You know, diagrams and specifications, that sort of thing. Parts of them were highlighted, and boy oh boy, you should read the comments on that thing. Looks like Marie went to town on it.”

  “Maile,” Leipfold said, “what were the schematics for?”

  He could almost hear her grinning on the other end of the line as she said, “An autonomous sedan, of course. The same make and model that was used to kill Donna Thompson.”

  Leipfold gasped, and there was silence on the line as he tried to figure out the odds of the evidence being accepted in a court of law. They were pretty slim. He was more likely to land the two of them in a cell if he put the evidence forward. But no matter how illegally it was obtained, it was as damning as a smoking gun.

  “Boss?” Maile said. “Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” Leipfold said. “Yeah, I’m here. Listen, I’ll call you back, okay? I need a second to think this over.”

  Maile agreed. Leipfold killed the call and took a moment to brush his hands through his hair as he looked vacantly around the bedsit. He wondered where he’d left his notebook, dismissed it as unimportant and started to think about the case, feeling the clues fall into place like checkpoints along a racecourse. The solution was right there, he could see it all right, and then—

  Leipfold’s phone rang, breaking his concentration and wiping his mind of the answer that had been floating there in front of him, ready for the taking. He checked the caller ID, didn’t recognise the number, and grumpily answered the call.

  “Maile,” he said, “I still need—”

  “It’s not Maile,” the caller said. “It’s Tom Townsend.” There was a pause. “Listen, I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot. Just…just don’t try to track the call, okay? I’ve seen the movies. I’m on a disposable phone, and I’m not going to tell you where I am. I’m trying to keep a low profile.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Leipfold replied. “Tom, I can’t help you. We’ve been through this.”

  “I know. I just wanted to set the record straight.”

  “I’m listening,” Leipfold said.

  “Okay,” Townsend began. “Well, first thing’s first. I was seeing all three of them, okay? Donna, Marie and Jayne. All of them and all at the same time.”

  “I know,” Leipfold replied. “Sounds complicated.”

  “It was,” Townsend said. “Honestly, you have no idea. All of the lies, all of the time. No one should spend their life playing a character, know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Leipfold said. “Is that it? I mean, you’re breaking cover here. Why risk it to talk to me?”

  “I just wanted to say that I had nothing to do with Donna’s death, Mr. Leipfold. I swear it. I told you about Marie Rieirson, so why would I lie about Donna? You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Leipfold. It wasn’t me.”

  “I believe you,” Leipfold said. “Now get off the damn phone, and go and do whatever it is you have to do. You’re supposed to be on the run, for God’s sake. Maybe you should act the part.”

  “But I—”


  “It was nice speaking to you, Mr. Townsend,” Leipfold said. “I’m going to put the phone down now, okay? I have a headache.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Favour

  IT WAS MONDAY MORNING and Leipfold’s headache hadn’t shifted. He grunted moodily at Maile as she entered the office, and then he gestured for her to keep her voice down. She flashed a smile at him and wrote something down on a scrap of paper, then held it in front of his face. It consisted of a single word: Coffee?

  Leipfold nodded and popped a couple of ibuprofen while Maile boiled the kettle and hunted for mugs. Then he began to massage his temples again, realising that he’d been doing it a lot and that he owed himself a break from it all. He had no idea when he’d last taken a holiday, but he reflected grimly that it had been before his time on the inside, before he’d quit the bottle and dedicated his life to trying to make some sort of difference. But he couldn’t go away, not with his business and his finances in the state that they were in, and so he settled for the next best thing.

  He picked up the paper and turned to the crossword. It took him twenty-seven minutes, sixteen seconds – a record low. Leipfold sighed and turned the timer off, then barked for Maile to bring him another coffee. She did as he asked and set it down in front of him. Leipfold sighed again.

  “What’s up, boss?” Maile asked. “You don’t seem like yourself today.”

  “It’s nothing,” Leipfold said. He frowned. “I had it, you know. Everything came together and I had it. And then I lost it again.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You don’t look so good, maybe you should—”

  “Tom Townsend called,” he said, interrupting her. “He said he didn’t kill Donna Thompson.”

  “Yeah, but he would say that.” Maile frowned. “Where is he, anyhow?”

  “He’s on the run,” Leipfold said. “But don’t worry. Cholmondeley will find him in the end. In fact, I have a feeling that we’ll hear from him again. Sooner rather than later.”

  “Whatever,” Maile replied. “I bet he did kill Donna Thompson. He seems the type.”

  “What type is that, then?” Leipfold stared at Maile, who shrugged but remained silent. “No, I don’t think he killed her. But enough about that. I need you to do me a favour.”

  “You do? Sure, anything to help.” Maile rushed over to her desk, ready to get back to work at her keyboard. “What do you need?”

  “I need you to make a phone call,” Leipfold said.

  “A phone call?” Maile inhaled sharply and whistled through her teeth. “I’m bad at those.”

  “So am I,” he reminded her. “Remember when I took that sales call and told the guy to shove a carrot up his—”

  “Yeah,” Maile said. “I remember. Okay, point taken. Maybe I should do it. Who am I gonna call?”

  “There’s something strange in the neighbourhood, Maile,” Leipfold said, deadpan as always. “You’re going to call Jack Cholmondeley.”

  * * *

  It felt weird to talk to Leipfold’s cop friend on the phone, but at least he remembered who she was. Leipfold, meanwhile, was humming a Mötley Crüe song and scribbling absentmindedly away at a grubby whiteboard. It was leaning against the wall, already half full of his spidery handwriting.

  Cholmondeley agreed to carve out some time to speak to them, but he insisted on doing it at the station.

  “Not as suspects, you understand,” he said. “I just can’t get away from my desk for too long. Things are getting hectic over here.”

  Maile said that was fine and arranged a time for an appointment. The two of them made their way to the station a couple of hours later. That gave Leipfold enough time to expand upon his notes and to inch ever closer to an answer. Then they made their way downstairs and into the back of a waiting taxi.

  There was a short holdup at the station’s reception when Leipfold lost his temper with Constable Cohen on the desk, but then they were led to a private room by a frazzled Constable Groves, who offered them a drink of water. Leipfold refused, but Maile took her up on it. Constable Groves disappeared for a couple of minutes before re-entering the room with a plastic cup in her hands and Detective Inspector Jack Cholmondeley stalking silently behind her.

  “Jesus, Jack,” Leipfold said. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks,” Cholmondeley replied, smiling ruefully. “You’re not looking so good yourself.”

  “I don’t get paid to look good.” Ever the pragmatist, Leipfold knew exactly how he looked, like a man who’d gone on a bender and ended up coming down from amphetamines after forty-eight hours on his feet. But he didn’t care about that, and neither did Jack Cholmondeley.

  Cholmondeley told Constable Groves to leave them, an order she obeyed on the double. Then he turned to Leipfold and said, “So, James. How can I help you?”

  “I need a favour,” Leipfold replied. “You still owe me, remember. And I have a feeling that if you help me out, I’ll be able to give you the answer to a question that’s been bugging us both for the last two weeks.”

  “Who killed Donna Thompson?” Cholmondeley murmured.

  “Precisely. Now listen, and listen closely. I think I have the solution. But I’m still going to need your help.”

  “Have you got any proof?” Cholmondeley asked.

  “No,” Leipfold admitted. “And that’s what I need you for. I’ve got it. I’m sure of it, but there isn’t a court in the land that would lock someone up because James Leipfold says he has the answers. No, that just won’t do. We need to work together on this one. I’ve figured out the answer and now I need you to help me prove it. This isn’t some scumbag robbing a purse from an old lady. This is something else, a promising young life ended early. Two promising young lives ended early.”

  “You’re talking about Marie Rieirson, too.”

  “Yeah,” Leipfold said. “I am. Will you help me?”

  Cholmondeley sighed. He walked over to the door, opened it, stuck his head around the frame and shouted, “Constable Groves!”

  Then he sat back down again, spread his hands on the table and looked Leipfold directly in the eye. “You need a favour, huh?” he said. “Better make it fast.”

  * * *

  When Leipfold and Maile got back to the office, Maile’s mood rapidly deteriorated thanks to a review of Leipfold Investigations that she found online.

  Leipfold had told her not to worry about it, saying, “No one ever reads those things.”

  “That’s not the point,” Maile argued. “It’s the principle. Look at what he said.”

  “I saw it, Maile. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But it’s lies!” Maile shouted. “All of it.”

  “Just let it go.”

  “But none of this stuff is even true,” she protested. “It’s all made up to slander the business. This could cost us clients. Don’t you want to find out who posted it?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Leipfold said. “I promise. If it makes you feel better, find out who posted it. Do a little research.”

  Maile laughed and proffered a mock salute. “Whatever you say, boss,” she said.

  * * *

  Maile gave Leipfold the reviewer’s details before knocking off work and heading home to split a bottle of wine with Kat while watching reality TV shows. They ordered a couple of pizzas with fries and jalapeño poppers and then Maile played an MMORPG while Kat doubled down on the wine and started swearing at the television. She wore herself out at around midnight and went to bed. Maile caught some sleep shortly afterwards.

  Maile woke up late on Tuesday morning, and she barely had time to brush her teeth and wash her face before wrapping the leftover pizza in aluminium foil, stashing it in her handbag and making her way to Leipfold’s office.

  When Maile arrived, Leipfold was struggling to unlock the front door. She bustled along the street towar
ds him and then saw what the problem was. Leipfold’s right hand was battered and bruised, welded into the shape of a claw and too clumsy to manipulate the key. As Maile approached, he dropped it, so she bent down to pick it up and then unlocked the door for him before making her way up the stairs to the first-floor office. She held the door open for Leipfold and then tossed his keys on to his desk.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “What do you think?” Leipfold replied. “I tracked our reviewer down. They’re not going to bother us again.”

  Maile looked distastefully at Leipfold’s hands. “You hit them?”

  Leipfold shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Just forget it.”

  Maile flinched a little as Leipfold walked around her, but he didn’t notice. He sat down at his desk and glanced at the latest set of case notes, then looked up again as he sensed her staring at him. She hadn’t moved.

  “What?” Leipfold asked.

  “Violence isn’t the answer,” Maile said. She had her arms on her hips and was glaring at Leipfold like he’d just kicked a puppy.

  “You pepper sprayed Tom Townsend in the face,” Leipfold reminded her. “And besides, sometimes there isn’t much of a choice. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You broke the law.”

  “Perhaps,” Leipfold admitted. “But I’m not a policeman. I can get away with it. But I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay,” Maile said. She looked around the office, trying to find some inspiration. It wasn’t like she could ask what he thought of the latest Babymetal album. Besides, he was difficult to talk to at the best of times. She settled on the only major thing that the two of them had in common. “The Donna Thompson case.”

  Leipfold shrugged. “What of it?”