***
Derek Clegg shredded the transfer paperwork and recalled the confirmatory email. He then went back into the call log to change the text in the ‘description of call’ box. Because he had initiated the text, he had the privileges necessary for editing it. Clegg clicked on the box and placed the cursor at the beginning of the text he needed to delete. The box turned red and the text appeared unalterable. He tried again, with the same result. His heart was racing now, and sweat was beading on his forehead. He tried deleting the text three more times without success.
“Shit, shit, shit!” he muttered aloud, attracting the attention of his colleagues, who all scowled at him. He mouthed an apology and right clicked on the red box.
“Text posted, log saved to server 11:59pm 21/08/2011.”
The writing in the dialogue box confirmed that the server had backed up all telephone logs on Sunday night, which meant that there would now be a tape back-up of the log in the server room, while the server itself would contain a permanent copy of the locked text. There was nothing Clegg could do about it, and so he decided to keep his failure to himself and let Radlett believe all was well. Derek knew he wouldn’t cope well in prison.
Chapter 38
Vastrick Security Offices, No 1, Poultry, London.
Monday 22nd August 2011; 6pm.
Neither Ben nor Max could trust themselves to be reasoned in their thinking after the events of the day. They knew that, if they were hoping to find out who was responsible for the beatings, they needed to have clear minds. They needed to be analytical. In an effort to bring some clear thought to the process, they decided to visit Vastrick Security. Dee Hammond was already investigating the Rectory murders for Ben, and she had requested a meeting with Max, so she agreed to help where she could.
Operations Room 1 had paper blu-tacked to every wall. As Ben and Max waited for Dee they looked at the collated information relating to the Rectory murders. There were photos, notes, graphics with blue and red lines connecting individuals, and there was a preliminary Scene of Crimes Report marked ‘Confidential’ which should never have left the confines of Scotland Yard. “This girl has certainly got some contacts,” Max thought to himself, and then he noticed the name of the author of the report. He uttered a string of expletives under his breath, but loud enough for Ben to look at him in surprise.
Ben was about to ask what had caught Max’s attention when Dee waddled into the room, her ungainly gait being the result of swollen ankles and a hugely swollen belly.
“We meet at last,” Max said to Dee, as he pulled out a chair for her to sit in. Dee extended her hand. “We do indeed, Max. You look nothing like your picture.” Dee was referring to the photograph which usually accompanied his investigative journalism. “I don’t think I thanked you for your thorough work on the Marati corruption case earlier in the year.”
“Mrs Hammond, Vastrick dropped the story in my lap. I ran with it because it was a great story. I should be thanking you.” One way or another, the three were connected by a string of different relationships. Ben hoped that was a good omen.
“Max, lets drop the Mrs Hammond tag. I’m Dee to my friends, and to one journalist now.”
Max smiled and remembered the report on the wall. “I think we may have a mutual friend,” he said. Dee looked puzzled. “I’ve been close to Tilly Morgan for some time, although she never talks about work. It’s a kind of rule we have.”
“A sensible rule for a police officer in a relationship with an investigative journalist,” Dee suggested, without obliquely confirming that she knew Tilly Morgan through the Association of Women in Law Enforcement.
***
Dee outlined her understanding of the status of the police investigations into the Rectory murders, which was similar to Max’s analysis of Saturday morning. Hardly surprising, perhaps, as they shared at least one source, and that source was a doozy.
Ben listened with a growing sense of doom. Every piece of evidence pointed to the conclusion that there were no intruders involved in the murders, and as Ben knew he hadn’t done it, the spotlight was fixed on Ashley.
“Look, even if Ashley wasn’t my twin sister I still wouldn’t believe that she could kill three men in cold blood,” Ben commented, sadness tingeing his voice.
Max reminded Ben that Ashley had alluded to being sexually abused by Grierson in the past. It was quite possible that his twin sister recognised the fact that, once Den was ensconced in the Rectory, the abuse could become more systematic and frequent. Dee jumped in and suggested that Ashley probably resented her husband for his weakness and his failure to protect her against her sadistic father. She pointed out that Ashley may well have grown to despise them both, especially as her husband had effectively traded his wife for liquidity and to save his own reputation as a property developer. The other victim was just collateral damage, in the view of both Max and Dee.
Ben was still unsure, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
“OK. Let’s work on the premise that Ashley disposed of two scumbags who either abused her or who offered her up for abuse. I can’t excuse it, but I can understand it.”
“So can we, Ben,” Dee concurred. “But the police are ahead of us on this. Who knows what new evidence may be coming in from the forensics team and the outside labs? I think you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that your sister will be charged.”
“Do you think it’ll come to that?” Ben asked, already knowing the answer. Silence reigned in the room.
***
Dee returned to the operations room after a much needed comfort break. Her visits to the restrooms were becoming more frequent as the baby grew. Max and Ben were drinking coffee and munching on muffins when she returned. Neither man had eaten so far during the day, and hunger was gnawing at their stomachs. Once he had finished his muffin, Max gave the others a rundown of what had happened on Saturday at the flats, moving on to the meeting of residents, the call to the police and the violence of earlier in the day. When he had finished, Dee asked Ben to make a list on the whiteboard. She would normally have done it herself, but getting up and down was becoming a burden.
Ben took up a black marker pen and wrote on the whiteboard. With input from all three of them the list read:
Events:
• Operation Bilbao, flats cleared, green Jag spotted by Mary Akuta.
• New gang arrive, green jag is back.
• Gang impose new regime
• Residents meet and organise a fight back
• Residents call Operation Bilbao hotline (Sunday pm)
• Thugs turn up and beat up Mary and May (Monday am)
• One thug called other ‘Rafe’
• Car used was stolen and abandoned according to Sky News bulletin
“I think there are two assumptions we can make here. Please write them up in red, Ben.” Dee dictated, and Ben wrote:
Gavin Mapperley/ green jag is behind takeover
Beatings were carried out by Mapperley’s men
Mapperley must have been told of the call to Op. Bilbao
Mapperley has a corrupt contact at the Yard!!!
“I think we have to go to Scotland Yard with this. Ben, you and I both know DCI Coombes. We could approach him with what we know. This isn’t something we can handle ourselves.” Dee knew that her suggestion would meet with resistance.
“Who the hell is Gavin Mapperley, and where did he suddenly spring from anyway?” Ben asked angrily. Dee looked at Max, who was the only one of the three who knew anything about Mapperley.
“Mapperley is a bit of a mystery, Ben. I came across him when I was doing an expose on ‘Boiler rooms’ in 2008.”
Dee interrupted Max. “That was when fake stock broking firms were set up all over London selling worthless shares,” she clarified, for Ben’s benefit.
“Yes. Max explained that to me on Saturday. Was Mapperley caught, or not?”
Max took up the story.
“Hardly anyone was
prosecuted. They were too fleet of foot. By the time the police knew the location of a ‘boiler room’ it was closed down. Grierson was thought to be peripherally involved because an empty apartment in the Trafalgar House Flats was used for one scam, but police couldn’t prove that he was directly involved and so he was never pursued. Mapperley was suspected because he was seen with Grierson at the flat where the scammers worked, and because he’s had several jobs in the finance industry over the years, all legitimate. Anyway, he was interviewed, but the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t take him to court. They said there was insufficient evidence.
One reason I believe that Mapperley has a source in the police is that, when I was working on my story for the News of the World, I found a lad who had worked in a boiler room and who had electronic evidence to link Mapperley to the operation. Unfortunately the data was on his laptop, which had been taken when the police raided his house, along with his backup. As I wrote in my article, by the time the outside lab examined the laptop they found that the hard drive was corrupted and virtually unreadable. They got some data from a surface scan, but not enough to be of any use. Someone had got at it.”
Dee looked pensive.
“I’ve read that name recently, but I can’t remember where. Hold on.” She picked up the phone and asked a young man called Simon to come to the Ops room and bring his laptop. Moments later a gangly young man with glasses came into the room. In appearance he was close to what everyone would describe as a geek. After brief introductions, he sat down, opened his laptop and connected it with a cable that had been projecting from a data hub in the middle of the table.
“This is a Thunderbolt connection,” he explained. “It’s twelve times faster than a firewire and twenty times faster than a USB 2.0.” Dee spoke.
“Right, Simon. I’d like you to please run the name Gavin Mapperley and cross check it with the Rectory murder investigation.”
Simon queried the spelling of Mapperley and then typed away at the keyboard. After a moment he rubbed his chin and looked up from his screen.
“Nothing on the investigation, per se. Do you want me to check against all of the PDFs and outside documents related to the case?”
Dee nodded. She thought she knew what he meant. He would be scanning through all of the research her investigators had dug up on the case so far.
“This will take a few minutes, because the software will have to convert the PDFs to readable text before it can search them. You see, PDFs are essentially pictures....”
“Thank you, Simon. We don’t mind waiting,” Dee interrupted, and she didn’t have long to wait. Simon looked doubtful.
“Only one hit, and it’s a bit remote. Someone called Mapperley created a spreadsheet appended to the business plan for the property company that took over the Rectory.”
The three others in the room immediately saw the link to Dennis Grierson, and almost as one they asked if Simon could print out the evidence.
“Sorry. I said it was remote. His name doesn’t appear on the document. In the properties box of the spreadsheet, he’s named as the author. That’s the only reference. Hold on.” Simon connected a second cable to the laptop and a flat screen TV came to life. The contents of Simon’s laptop screen were now on the TV screen for all to see. Simon highlighted a document entitled ‘Rectory Cash Flow & Business Plan’. Whilst the cursor was resting on the item, he right-clicked the wireless mouse and a dialogue box appeared. “Properties” was the last entry, and Simon clicked on it. Immediately a box opened, showing the title of the document, when it was written, edited and last printed and saved. Below that information was the author’s name, G Mapperley. Below that was the name of the computer he had used to create the spreadsheet, GaBrLon10012.
“Our problem is that a spreadsheet carries that data for all of its life, unless it’s changed. He may have created the template for another project completely and someone else might have been using his template for this project.”
“What about the computer ID? Does that tell us anything?” Max asked.
“Probably not. Usually the IT department of any major company will give each computer a name so that they can track it and repair it remotely if necessary.”
“Could you access it remotely?” Max asked, his excitement rising, only for his hopes to be dashed again almost at once.
“No. The user has to consent by pressing a button, and in any event we have no idea which company it belongs to.”
“Can we find out?” Dee asked.
“I could do a search for the name G Mapperley and put in wild cards for Ga and Br. I’m guessing Lon means London.” He was already tapping away. The three spectators watched the screen as Simon typed in the data and the word London and clicked on search. The specialist search engine threw up 41,762 answers in .46 seconds, according to the script at the top of the page. Most of the results were useless. Anything which included the words Great Britain in London was showing up. Simon narrowed the search to the specific letters alone, in the order in which they had been typed.
When the results finally appeared, Ben swore loudly and dropped his head into his hands. The others looked at him with concern and then looked up at the screen, where the cause of his anguish was clear to see. The top result was:
“.......Garner-Brinkman Property Developers........ London...... new project.....”
“Oh, hell!” Dee exclaimed to a still bewildered Max and Simon. “Gavin Mapperley’s laptop is registered to Garner-Brinkman, the property developer whose MD is Ashley Garner, Ben’s twin sister.”
Chapter 39
Pitcher & Piano Pub, Cornhill, London.
Monday 22nd August 2011; 7:30pm.
“Tell me what she said,” Max demanded as the tired pair approached a stately looking establishment with stuccoed walls and a grand entrance. The impressive entrance led to the Pitcher and Piano Pub, a well established eatery frequented by those who worked in the City, as well as tourists ‘in the know’. Max knew the Maitre D’ and they were quickly ushered to a table.
The meeting at Vastrick had ended with Dee pleading with Ben to turn over the information to the police immediately. Ben stubbornly refused. He wanted to talk to his sister first, and in any case someone within the police was clearly protecting Mapperley. Ben promised that he would sleep on it and they would call the police tomorrow. Ben had called Ashley and now he was confused again. Max pushed him for details of the phone call.
“When she came on the line we exchanged small talk. I didn’t let on that I knew about May; that would have given the game away, if she was involved. She asked how the conveyance was going, and I told her I’m getting a draft contract drawn up tomorrow. I then asked her if she knew Gavin Mapperley. She was obviously puzzled, but answered without missing a beat. She said that Gavin worked three days a week for Garner-Brinkman in finance. Then she asked me why I wanted to know. I told her that his name had come up on the financial plan for the Rectory’s development, and that he appeared to have acted on behalf of Dennis Grierson. At first she said it wasn’t possible. He worked for Garner-Brinkman, and he had no connection to their father. She paused and took a sharp intake of breath before saying quietly, ‘Oh no.’ She then explained that Lawrence had hired Mapperley, presumably under pressure from Grierson, and that she had no idea he was in league with Grierson. He had seemed such a nice man, she said. Then she asked me a question. She asked me whether I thought Dennis had Mapperley brought in here to keep an eye on her and Lawrence. I told her I thought it was possible, but that in any event it might be best to consider getting rid of him. She asked me why, and....”
“And you said ‘because he was probably responsible for beating May Fogarty half to death.’ Yes, I heard that bit,” Max interjected.
“Ashley then said she was going to rip his heart out, and started crying. I tried to calm her but she just said I should complete the sale as quickly as possible and she would meet up with me so we could decide what to do about Mapperley. Then she hung up.�
�
“And you’ve gone from being a convert to being a non believer in one phone call. An hour ago you thought she was Madame Sin, and now she’s back to being poor vulnerable and exploited Ashley.”
Ben shook his head, clearly unsure of what exactly he believed. “I really don’t know, Max. I might be grabbing at straws, but she is family.” He looked Max in the eye. “You know. Maybe the only family I have.”
“Don’t forget May, Ben. She’s family, too, and she is very definitely an innocent in all of this.”
***
Both men started with the mushroom and rosemary soup. Ben followed that with a steak, mushroom and Pedigree pie with mash, the steak gravy being infused with Pedigree Beer. Max opted for fish and chips. They made short work of their main meals, preferring eating to talking, and had both ordered sticky toffee pudding for dessert when they finally broke the silence.
“Right, Ben. While you’re making your mind up about Ashley, how do you feel about taking your frustrations out on Mapperley tonight?” Max asked, with steel in his eyes.
“How are we going to do that?” Ben asked. “We don’t know where he lives.”
“I have an idea,” Max answered. He outlined a rough plan to Ben. Max wanted someone to pay for what had happened to Mary, and he wouldn’t rest until he did something, even if it was nothing more than a token gesture.
Chapter 40
Fogarty Page 20