by Joe McNally
‘A long day for you sergeant?’ Mister Sherrick asked.
‘Always seems longer in winter,’ he replied, resting the mug on a ledge on his stab vest.
‘Must be a relief to get that off at night?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Positively float up the stairs to bed.’
‘What does it weigh?’ I asked.
He looked down at it as though a label held the information. ‘About three kilos, I think.’
I thought about carrying my saddle and weight-cloth loaded with lead plates. ‘Can’t help when you’re chasing villains.’ I said. He smiled, ‘The utility belt and the boots and the hi vis jacket don’t either. Not to mention the spare tyre and forty five birthdays.’
‘You should have joined the mounted section,’ I said.
‘Not for me. Those big buggers kick at one end and bite at the other. Best left to nimble sorts like you.’
‘Well I’ll be glad to be back riding when the thaw finally comes.’
He turned to Mister Sherrick. ‘Mister Malloy was saying on the phone that you have some concerns about the formal verdict on your son, Mister Sherrick?’
‘Well somebody swapped his computer by the look of things, and Eddie said they did a big clean-up in the cellar.’
I told the sergeant what had happened. He asked about other keyholders, cleaners, window locks, and came up blank.
‘Did you take the chain as evidence?’ I asked.
‘What chain is that?’
I glanced at Jimmy’s dad then said. ‘When you got Jimmy down, did you take the chain down at the same time?’
‘I didn’t, personally, but another officer would have. The ligature is seized in all suicides.’
‘What about Jimmy’s PC?’ I asked.
‘That is a strange one,’ he said. ‘We definitely took that but I returned it to Mister Sherrick. Well, I tried to. You wanted it put back in your son’s house, didn’t, you Mister Sherrick? I don’t think you were quite ready at the time to, well, deal with things.’
‘I wasn’t. I wanted to get everything planned for one day. See Jimmy’s solicitor, sort out the will, go to his house and do a final check there. That’s when I saw the computer on his desk and dropped it. Or thought I did.’
‘I’ve got it here,’ I said. ‘Are you happy for us to try and get it working?’
‘You’ve already handled it, obviously?’
I nodded. He turned to Jimmy’s dad, ‘Mister Sherrick, have you touched that PC today?’
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever touched it unless it is Jimmy’s and somebody came and fixed it or unless I’ve lost the plot altogether and cleaned up broken glass that was never there. I’m beginning to wonder myself now.’
The sergeant said to me, ‘Let’s see if we can get it booted up.’ We plugged it in above the breakfast bar and hit the power button. The disk whirred. The screen glowed. We waited through the startup routine which seemed to take forever. A dozen icons dotted the desktop; one was for the Racing Post site. I clicked on it: no Internet connection.
‘Have you got Internet here, Mister Sherrick?’ I asked.
‘I don’t. It is in the complex, I’m sure, with some wireless thing. ‘
‘Wi-Fi?’
‘That’s it. I don’t need it. I read, mostly.’
I tethered my phone and got a connection. I clicked again on the Racing Post icon and the home screen requested a login. The panel came up with JSherrick in the username box and the password already saved. The sergeant said, ‘Try the email.’
Jimmy’s dad took a soft glasses case from his cardigan pocket and put on gold-rimmed specs.
I clicked the icon. Jimmy’s Hotmail feed appeared. His Inbox had a line of unopened mails. The sergeant said, ‘Put cyanide in the search box.’
I did and Jimmy’s online order for cyanide capsules came up. Jimmy’s dad stared at the screen. I watched him, the bright rectangular PC panel reflected in his glasses. He began blinking as though trying to wipe the confusion from his eyes. Slowly he reached out a hand and ran his fingers over the screen, back and forth, back and forth, lost in another world.
11
On my way home I eased off the gas as I passed Rooksnest, the Manor house that marked the edge of Lambourn civilization and the end of tarmac below the Subaru’s wheels. Moving on to the rough road, the car trundled down the rutted track, headlight beams bouncing on the sparkling snow which lay hard and clean on the woodland border.
I held Jimmy’s laptop for fear of it hitting the floor. Mister Sherrick had handed it over to me with a finality that said he’d no wish to see it again. He’d been subdued, almost shocked as he had closed the unbroken screen and looked at Sergeant Middleton. ‘You okay with me taking this and having a look through the stuff on it?’ I’d asked the sergeant.
‘It’s Mister Sherrick’s property. I’ve got no problem with it.’ I’d felt sorry for Jimmy’s dad. We’d spent much of the day together and I had learned more about Jimmy than I knew when he was alive.
I was sure Jimmy hadn’t made that recording. And I was certain he hadn’t bought cyanide, or anything else, online; pigheadedly certain. But Mister Sherrick’s story had thrown me. Had grief somehow confused him when he was at Jimmy’s place? His insistence the screen had been broken, that he’d swept up glass didn’t hold out. So had he cleaned that strip in the cellar too?
I gripped the steering wheel tighter with one hand as we bumped over the worst section of the track, headlights showing glimpses of the white walls of my bungalow and glinting on the glass of the sun house.
The security light flooded the garden catching millions of frost motes. I carried the laptop inside and locked up.
Over a thin mushroom omelette and a mug of tea, I searched the files on Jimmy’s laptop. Compared with him, I was an expert, but compared with a friend of mine who called herself Maven Judge, I knew nothing.
I’d first met Mave in early summer at Bangor races in North Wales. I was to learn that this was a rare outing in daylight for her. She usually came to life at dusk and stayed up all night.
That day, she had been waiting in the car park for me after racing, sitting on the roof of my car in the late afternoon sun, her chestnut ponytail healthy looking against her pasty complexion. She had a big nose and small eyes and her ears stuck out. At first I wasn’t sure if she was male or female. She was slight as a child though I judged her to be in her thirties as I approached, trying to look as cool as she did about the fact she was sitting on the roof of my car, knees to her flat chest, hands round the shins of her blue jeans, her face expressionless and brown eyes intense as she watched me.
I stopped and looked up. ‘Did you fall out of a plane or did you just climb up there the old fashioned way?’
‘I’m an angel.’
‘Where did you leave your wings?’
‘They’re retractable. You’re thinking of the old angels. They went out with the ark.’
‘Retractable wings, eh? That’ll be handy when they come with the straitjacket.’
‘You’re a funny man, Eddie.’
‘I’m a funny man with a long drive in front of me. What are you, animal rights?’
‘I couldn’t give a toss about animals. I don’t even like humans.’
‘I bet you didn’t put that on your CV when you were applying for the angel job.’
She smiled. Her teeth were crooked. ‘You’re a cool dude,’ she said.
‘Thanks. Now get off my car.’
‘You want to be rich?’
‘Nope. I want to go home.’
‘I can make you rich.’
Maven had been working for years to develop software for betting on horses. She spent half an hour that day trying to persuade me to team up with her to help complete her programme. ‘Why me?’ I’d asked.
‘You’re straight.’
‘How do you know I’m straight?’
‘Because it’s my job to know things.’
‘In that case you�
�ll know it’s against the rules of racing for me to offer information for financial benefit.’
‘I worked that out. You won’t get anything until you retire.’
Mave had kept chipping away at me since then and I fended her off with ‘maybe someday’. I could have ignored her calls and emails but I enjoyed the banter. I had no close friends, nor had Mave. We were loners with no sexual interest in each other but with something in common - a sense of the ridiculous, of how crazy the world was.
I finished eating and switched on my own PC then hit the Skype video connection against Mave’s name. She accepted. All I could see were her fingers working the keyboard by the light from her PC screen.
‘The Man from La Rancha,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘How’s it going on that sprawling ranch of yours?’
‘Mave, it’s not a ranch. It’s a bungalow on an acre of land.’
‘That’s forty four thousand square feet of prime real estate Mister Malloy.’
‘That big?’
‘That big. What can I do for you this winter’s night?’
‘You heard about Jimmy Sherrick?’
‘I did.’
‘I’ve got his laptop. I wanted you to take a look at it.’
‘In search of what?’
‘Clues. You’ll find a recording on it, of his suicide message. I don’t think he made the recording.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll mail it to you tomorrow.’
‘No need. You got it on just now?’
‘It’s right beside me.’
‘Type this into the address bar.’
Five minutes later, I watched the mouse move around on the screen. Mave was controlling it from her tiny cottage on the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales, almost two hundred miles north west of where I sat.
‘You seeing that?’ Mave asked.
‘The wonders of technology. Can you get into the guts of it with this remote access?’
‘I can do anything I could do if it was sitting in front of me but I’m busy until about midnight. I’ll take a look at it after that.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
‘Want me to wake you if there’s any scary shit on there?’
‘No. I need my sleep. It’s not as if I’ll be able to do much anyway. I want to see if you can work out how that recording was done.’
‘Okay.’
‘Thanks Mave. I’ll ping you in the morning.’
‘Am I correct in saying there’s nothing in this for you?’
‘In what?’
‘In finding what you’re looking for.’
‘It lets me scratch my itch.’
She sighed. ‘I offer you a million to do stuff for me in your spare time and you’d rather ferret around a dead guy’s PC. For nothing. Can you feel my frustration?’
‘Remotely.’
‘Piss off.’
‘Good night, Maven.’
I ended it smiling, as I almost always did after speaking to Mave. I called Mister Sherrick and it rang half a dozen times. I checked my watch, in case I’d misjudged and might be getting him out of bed. Then he answered.
‘Jim, it’s Eddie.’
‘Hello. Hello Eddie.’ He cleared his throat.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. It’s been a long day.’
‘Thanks. I don’t know if I’m okay, to be honest with you. That carry on with Jimmy’s computer earlier knocked me back on my heels a bit. Do you think I could have dementia?’
My instinct was to say no, to reassure him, but if I did, he might delay a visit to the doctor. ‘Are you asking because of the stuff with Jimmy’s laptop?’
‘Mostly, I suppose. But I was thinking there might be other things. Maybe I’ve been forgetting more than that and not realized it. When you live on your own you’ve got nobody to tell you that you already did something three times, or that you keep telling the same story over and over. Know what I mean?’
‘I suppose I do. It could be stress over Jimmy’s death. You’d be amazed how stress can affect you.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Why don’t you call your doctor tomorrow?’
‘I will.’
‘You’ll get some reassurance then.’
‘You’re right. Thank you. I enjoyed your company today. Jimmy always spoke highly of you.’
‘He was a good man. And it was a good day today…in its way. You know what I mean.’
‘I do. Yes.’
‘I’ll let you get settled.’
‘All right, Eddie. Nice of you to call, to check. Thank you.’
‘No trouble. Good night.’
‘Good night.’
12
I was up before six. Early rising was a habit in the racing business, where horses are seldom more than a tongue-click away from wakefulness. Within a ten mile radius of my house, two thousand thoroughbreds would be stirring, awaiting breakfast, grooming, dawn, exercise. None would be travelling to a racecourse on this day, although the radio brought news of a coming thaw.
I showered, dressed and headed for the kitchen and the coffee pot, pressing the power switch on my PC as I passed the table. Sunrise was still two hours away when I sat down and opened Skype to see if Mave was still awake. She was. I clicked. She accepted, then immediately ended the call and typed a message telling me to call her landline number. I scrolled through my contacts and found it.
Mave answered on the third ring, ‘Eddie.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Maybe nothing but don’t Skype me for now. I’ll give you a link. Download the software on it and install it then ping me through that. It’s secure.’
It took me five minutes to do it and connect with Mave. ‘You found something on Jimmy’s PC?’
‘Everything there is a copy, a mirrored image of a hard drive. The image was installed on December twentieth.’
That was three days before Jimmy’s death. ‘Tell me what this means in layman’s terms.’
‘All the files on the laptop have been copied from another PC and pasted onto that one you’ve got, which is eighteen months old and has had all its previous content deleted before the current stuff was put on it.’
‘What about the recording, the suicide note?’
‘It was recorded with a programme called Audacity, which is pretty common. The files were imported to the PC, extracted from an email which came from an account which was closed on Christmas day.’
‘So no recording was made directly onto the PC?’
‘No.’
‘Not even on the original PC the files were copied from?’
‘Nope. It was recorded elsewhere and edited elsewhere and I’m pretty sure it isn’t a contiguous piece of speech.’
‘Contiguous?’
‘Well, it’s contiguous now since somebody put it together. Each part connects logically with the previous one, but those are sections of speech from different conversations.’
I dragged my notepad and pen across. Doodling helped me organize my thoughts. I said, ‘Would you say it’s the same person who made the recording?’
‘The same person in that it’s the same guy speaking?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s the same guy. But the variations in the sound wave patterns suggest that sections were spoken at different times. If you listen really closely to the pitch and the tone you can hear the tiny variances. You are not talking to me now in the same pitch as you were last night. Time of day will change the tone and pitch, the person you’re talking to, the subject matter, how tired you are, what your emotions are like.’
‘Okay. Could you break it down into sections for me, tell me which you think were recorded at another time?’
‘How big a hurry are you in?’
‘As soon as?’
‘I need to sleep, Eddie’
‘Sleep’s for wimps.’
‘People whose brains actually work need sleep. Knuckle-draggers lik
e you don’t.’
I smiled. ‘Midnight tonight?’
‘Cool.’
‘One more question; the cops said they had a language expert verify this. Should he have spotted what you spotted?’
‘You’re assuming language experts are male, why?’
‘All right, he or she.’
‘Not necessarily, I suppose. Was the sample being compared with a known recording?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, concentration would be on the comparison rather than this individual one. Also, the content scores high on emotional pull so whoever is listening will be distracted by the message rather than how it was being delivered. You heard it?’
‘The cops played it back to me.’
‘What did you think as you listened?’
‘I was concentrating on trying to prove it wasn’t Jimmy’s voice. ‘
‘Listen to it again. Forget what he’s saying and concentrate on how he says it.’
‘Okay. Thanks, Mave. If something comes up during the day can I disturb your beauty sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Thank you for your cooperation.’
‘You’re welcome. Goodbye.’
‘Mave!’
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you set me up with this secure link before?’
‘Because I thought all you were doing was riding horses for a living.’
‘I was.’
‘Well, whatever you’re into here, your opponent is pretty smart on the tech side. You ought to review your security, online and off.’
‘My opponent?’
‘Adversary, enemy, whatever.’
‘Let’s call him, or her, "this guy" or our conversations are going to end up like Batman comics.’
‘Fine. I’m going to bed. Good luck. I’ll speak to you tonight on this link … If you’re still alive!’ She cackled theatrically and closed the connection.
I drew a smiley face on the notepad. Jimmy Sherrick hadn’t made that recording. It seemed less likely that he’d committed suicide.
My first thought was to call Jimmy’s dad and reassure him that he wasn’t suffering from dementia. The laptop he’d dropped was not the one that sat in front of me. This had been doctored on Christmas day when Jimmy’s was locked up in Newbury police station.