Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  “So they could intercept messages sent to me – that kind of thing?”

  “Probably, yes. But this is a bit of a bodged job. You shouldn’t be able to see the iframe really – unless it’s meant to look like an advert or something. Otherwise it’s a clue that something’s wrong.”

  “Well let’s not be sorry that they’re bodgers.”

  He gave an ironic laugh. “True enough.”

  “So can you put it right?”

  “Yeah, no problem. It might take a while, though. I’ll need to go through everything to see how much damage has been done, and then change the username and password. I’ll have to get back to you.”

  It was clear from his tone that he rather resented the work involved, but couldn’t think of a way to duck out of it. I thought it was probably time to end the conversation, but he now commented, “That’s strange.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, these iframe attacks can be quite automated. Once there’s a security breach, the injection process just kicks in.” He paused, perhaps peering at his screen. “This looks like more of a manual attack.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well …” He drew breath to answer, then seemed to think the better of it. “It’s complicated to explain. It’s just my gut feeling.”

  “OK, so what does it mean?”

  “I suppose it suggests that someone was specifically targeting you – trying to capture your passwords and other stuff about you, that kind of thing.”

  “Charming.”

  “I can improve the site’s security and use stronger passwords. I can tighten things up generally. But if you use the same passwords for other things, I would definitely consider changing them. You never know what else these people might get up to.”

  I put the phone down reflectively. Web sites got hacked all the time. I shouldn’t read any special significance into this. Yet it had never happened to me before in all the years that I’d had a basic web site and blog, and the thought that I’d been targeted intentionally was unsettling. It felt like an intrusion into my personal space, and I didn't like it.

  Chapter 5

  An unexpected phone call put thoughts of my web site out of my mind.

  “Mr Michael Stanhope?” The accent was foreign, the voice distantly familiar.

  “That’s me.”

  The speaker seemed uncertain how to continue. He said nothing for a moment, then, “This is Tommy Noble.”

  Of course. It was three or four years since we’d spoken, but the occasion was hard to forget. I’d written an investigative article for the magazine I was then working for – an exposé about international people trafficking and its impact on the haulage industry – and Tommy Noble was the key to it: Tommy, the brother of Janni Noble, the man I’d met in the restaurant with Rick Ashton.

  The article came long before the subsequent international crisis over migrants from the Middle East and Africa. My piece was much more specific. It was about the trickle of people who had been entering Britain for many years, aided by a small band of specialist smugglers. They targeted individuals or small groups of people from eastern Europe and beyond, bringing them all the way from the source country to Britain in customised freight containers. The haulage industry was nervous, and my article focused on how these schemes actually worked.

  I’d amazed myself by arranging an interview with Tommy Noble, a whistle-blower who was actually involved in this trade himself. That said, I couldn’t exactly claim the credit for making the contact. Originally it was he who had approached me. Seemingly he’d asked around discreetly, on the lookout for a writer who would keep his identity secret, and eventually he’d obtained my name from a driver I’d once written about – a man who was being exploited by his employer.

  All the same, at the time it felt like a coup. I had vivid memories of the shivering transport café outside Luton where I’d met Tommy, and the drab yard where he’d nervously taken me to show me the custom container: empty, but still bearing clear evidence of recent occupants. All this seemed very much in keeping with the reputation I seemed to have created for myself among the fellow-journalists on my magazine.

  However, I’d never spoken to Tommy since the article was published; so how come he was telephoning me two days after I’d bumped into his brother? Surely this had to be more than a coincidence?

  I said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Ah, well, you will remember that you took some photographs. Pictures of me …”

  I did remember. When I’d interviewed him, I’d persuaded him to let me photograph him and his container on the promise that his face would be concealed. It had seemed to me that including him in the pictures, even disguised, would make the whole article seem more real, more credible. Remarkably enough he’d agreed – on condition that I would email the images to him to prove he couldn’t be recognised.

  However, in the event I’d never used the pictures. Tommy had rung me from a call-box a few days later and begged me not to. He thought – no doubt rightly – that his co-offenders would be able to identify him from the actual container, whether he himself was concealed or not.

  In a way I’d been relieved. I’d already come to the conclusion that using the pictures would be pushing things too far. I didn’t want to risk his anonymity. Or perhaps more likely, I’d had a failure of nerve about the whole thing. Pictures made it all seem that bit too real.

  I now said, “I do remember.”

  “Good. So, what I wondered …” He hesitated again. “I had the impression that there were more pictures. Pictures that you did not show me at the time. Is that correct?”

  Were there? I thought not. I only took a few, and I was pretty sure I’d sent him all of them. “No, you saw everything there was.”

  “Surely there were alternative shots, different angles, this kind of thing?” A pause. “I should very much like to see these other pictures.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think so.”

  “This is unfortunate.” The disappointment was evident in his voice.

  “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Very well.” There was a long pause, then a click as he disconnected.

  * * *

  What did this mean? Had Janni Noble asked Tommy to phone me? If so, why? And if not, what was Tommy after?

  I’d never fully understood Tommy’s motivation for talking to me in the first place. From what he’d told me, his brother Janni was the moving force behind the smuggling operation, so it was hard to make out why Tommy wanted to undermine it.

  In the end I’d concluded that his attitude stemmed not from principled opposition to the smuggling, rather from simple sibling rivalry. Janni actually ran the company, whereas Tommy seemed to have a relatively insignificant role in it. I suspected that he was aggrieved at being sidelined, and had decided to demonstrate how vulnerable the smuggling operation made it. In effect it was an act of rather reckless vengefulness.

  At the time, his reasons for speaking out hadn’t mattered to me. Nor, it now struck me, had the surprising fact that his brother – the head of an apparently thriving company – would want to be involved in this kind of activity in the first place. What mattered to me at the time was that I was able to write an interesting and topical inside story based on Tommy’s revelations.

  Looking back, I could see that my shallow attitude and failure to ask obvious questions didn’t do me much credit. And to make matters worse, I’d never followed up from a journalistic point of view. I’d been side-tracked by other stories, and by events in my own life.

  So what in fact did happen to the brothers after my article was published? I vaguely remembered that the whole smuggling enterprise had come to an abrupt end, but I was no longer sure of the chronology.

  I opened a browser window on my laptop and flicked through press reports from the time I wrote the article. As I thought, soon afterwards the police had raided the company’s headquarters outside Oldham, near Manche
ster. They had arrested some of its staff, including Tommy himself, though Janni had been released without charge.

  In theory, Tommy might have formed the view that I’d had something to do with this turn of events. So might Janni, though only if Tommy had revealed his own part in the article, which seemed unlikely. But logically speaking, one or both of them might consider that I’d betrayed them.

  Yet I knew I’d been careful. I hadn’t named anyone in my article; hadn’t revealed where in Britain they were working from; hadn’t said which eastern European countries they were targeting. In short, I’d made the article as bland as I dared without robbing the whole thing of any substance. And no police had ever come calling on me, demanding the names of my informants. I felt sure the article had played no role in their investigation.

  In any case, the whole thing had quickly died a death. Within days of the police moving in, it had been announced that the case had been dropped. I couldn’t remember now why this had happened, but browsing further, I saw that it was basically down to lack of hard evidence. Clearly the container that I’d photographed had never been found, and there had been a resolute silence among peripheral participants who had been expected to blow the whistle. Whether Janni had achieved this by cajoling or coercion wasn’t clear. The fact was that apparently no one involved wanted to see the prime suspects going down.

  In theory, this meant that neither of the brothers had any real reason to be harbouring a grudge against me. Yet I couldn’t altogether dismiss the thought that one of them might be. Such concerns came with the territory.

  * * *

  The irony was that I’d never written any further articles in this vein, and these days I wondered if I even could. I knew that some of my colleagues from that period still regarded me as a relentless investigative terrier, but in my own mind that image had never seemed to fit. I’d had to wind myself up to researching every probing piece, and eventually it had all seemed like too much effort. Other writers were being paid the same as me for turning in predictable ring-around articles or routine interviews like the one I’d conducted with Rick Ashton, so why was I putting myself through such stress?

  It was around this time that my wife Sandy informed me she’d had enough of our marriage. I was never at home, I was always too serious, I wouldn’t relax, I didn’t know how to have a good time, it was all a mistake, bla bla.

  I hadn’t been able to decide at the time whether my behaviour was the result of work-induced stress, or was just my natural state. Either way, her departure seemed to kick away my resolution to do battle for every article. Six months later I was writing anodyne feature articles about cryogenic chemical tankers and airfield crash tenders, and within a year I was out of a full-time job.

  Somehow, I doubted that Sandy would have found me much more congenial now than before.

  Chapter 6

  I stared at the nearly-blank page of my notebook. Two days had passed since Tommy Noble’s call, and I was trying to force myself to catch up with neglected work. I wasn’t getting very far.

  My self-imposed task this morning was to construct an article about trends in refrigerated transport. In a determined burst of activity I’d looked up and written down the telephone numbers of five companies that built truck and van bodies, but that was the sum total of my progress so far. My plan was to telephone them all, find someone at each of them who was willing to talk to me, and ask them about their latest product developments.

  I tossed my pen down. “What’s new? What’s bleeding new?” I swivelled round in my office chair and stared out of the window. “Nothing’s bleeding new sir. Fuck all is new. We are building the same old same old. Kindly sod off and leave us to do it in peace.”

  They wouldn’t take that line, of course; they would be polite and would try to be helpful. At the end of the day, they knew they would get publicity out of it. But I felt sure they’d like to.

  What could I do instead? Eighteen months ago I would have been breaking off at this point to write a bit more of my novel, which had provided an ever-available distraction from proper work. Even when it was finished, I’d spent hours fine-tuning it and then preparing extracts for potential agents. It had seemed like a project with no end, yet inevitably the end had come when I’d uploaded it to the web. It had left a void.

  Should I be working on a follow-up? No, not at this precise point in time. I had no ideas for one, and anyway I wanted to see how the first one fared before committing myself to a second. I needed something else, and playing games on my PC or phone wasn’t going to do it for me.

  So what else? I swivelled back to my desk and sat up straighter. Well, I could get on with promoting my book online – uploading extracts to reading groups, submitting the title to review sites, tweeting about it, blogging about it. This was, after all, what I’d planned. I no longer had the excuse that my web site had been compromised. Kevin had emailed me a couple of days ago to confirm that it was now secure again and working normally.

  Perversely, though, all this activity seemed too much like “real” work. What I craved was some single-minded project, whether writing a book or investigating someone or something. Even though I was fed up with doing this kind of thing for my job, it seemed I didn’t mind doing it for myself.

  And that’s when I knew what I would do. That girl I’d known in Falmouth – I really would try to find out what had happened to her. For my book I’d built a mystery around the character I based on her; but what had happened to the real girl and her parents? Was it anything like the outcome I’d conjectured?

  I stared out of the window again into a grey suburban morning. I hadn’t thought properly about the real girl for years – not even when I was writing the book. I’d simply grabbed the memory and translated it into a new character who fitted my plot. She immediately took on a separate, objective existence, insulating me from thoughts of the actual person I had in mind.

  Now I found myself drawn back to those distant days from my childhood, and I allowed myself to remember the yearning that the real girl had aroused in me: to be part of the adult world, to have a proper relationship with another person – an attractive, exuberant person like her. My trouble was that I didn’t know how to make it happen. In my imagination it had seemed incredibly simple, but in the real world I felt invisible. I simply lacked the wherewithal to break through some impenetrable barrier between us.

  Finally, incredibly, when it had seemed all hope was lost, we’d actually spoken, and she’d told me she would write to me when we both got home. But she never did. It was the first genuine relationship trauma of my life.

  Objectively I wasn’t surprised when I heard nothing from her. I was already adult enough not to invest high expectations in such a promise, especially when given so lightly. Yet subjectively, the disappointment had festered. For maybe six weeks I’d clung to the hope that a letter might still arrive. Daily I’d watched for the postman, hoping against hope to see her missive drop through the letterbox. Nothing came.

  Eventually I’d reconciled myself to the fact that it never would. The episode had turned into an object lesson in the way life can sometimes let you down. And although at the time I would have considered myself above such sensitivities, I knew that for years afterwards the disappointment had blighted my subsequent attempts at adolescent relationships. Either I’d approached them too intensely and frightened them away, or I’d avoided any kind of commitment from the outset, convinced that it wouldn’t work. My sense of isolation had grown from year to year.

  So was I now finally seeking closure, half a lifetime later? Hardly. It had all happened so long ago. But thinking back, I found it impossible not to wonder what had become of the girl herself. Presumably she was alive at this moment, about my own age and living her adult life somewhere. Where? Under what circumstances? Were her parents still around?

  And I couldn’t deny it – I wondered if she’d ever thought about me. Had she meant to write, but been distracted? Had she had second thoughts? Or
had she never intended to keep her promise in the first place? Realistically, I could see that even if I actually found her, it was years too late now for me to be asking her any of these questions. But if I did find her, maybe the answers would be self-evident.

  I glanced back at my computer screen. An entirely separate question was whether her life could possibly have followed a similar pattern to that of her counterpart in my story. The thought seemed extremely far-fetched; yet I now felt a sudden urge to find out.

  And even if you discounted all the above, could she be that woman I saw at Euston? This idea seemed about as unlikely as any other, but I couldn’t entirely discount it. My emotional reaction to that woman had been too intense to dismiss; she really had drawn me back to those distant days, and I could now see that in a corner of my mind it still mattered.

  * * *

  I opened a browser window on my laptop. Was this it then – the start of my search? No, for a moment I held back. I felt that if I was to conduct a search, it also required some more practical imperative. I needed to be able to tell myself there was a tangible objective, not just a will o’ the wisp ambition to resolve some issue from my childhood.

  Well, it was undeniably intriguing that the hotel in Falmouth had closed down soon after we were there. It was a ready-made scenario for a mystery. Two years ago, when I’d started work on my book, I’d done a perfunctory web search on the place, but come up with very few results, and nothing to identify the girl or her family. So I would be starting with a blank canvas.

  I thought about this for a moment. I didn’t know these people’s surname, so their subsequent lives were bound to be a mystery to me. That didn’t mean they were a mystery to the world at large. I simply didn’t know where to look for them.

  But if I followed up and still had difficulty tracking them down, that would validate the endeavour, wouldn’t it? The harder they proved to find, the more profound would be the mystery behind their disappearance, and the more worthwhile it would seem to look for them. I could feel my latent journalistic instincts stirring.