“Did I say anything weird to you last night?” Fletcher asked as we closed in on our destination. “I remember everything pretty well except for that last bit after I got back to the hotel. I know you helped me into my room, and I’m pretty sure I kept talking at you, but I don’t remember what about.”
I wondered how much of the truth to tell her. Most people preferred not to be reminded what their drunken selves had talked about. “Nothing embarrassing, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said.
“That’s good.” Fletcher didn’t sound like she fully believed me. “Sorry about all that.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ve all been there.”
I found parking on the street and we made our way towards the building. Far Reach Industries had incorporated itself into an existing structure, rather than building a whole new glass and metal monstrosity like New Wave Industries had. The company had taken over a historic brick building after the last residents had vacated, blending seamlessly in with the rest of the city centre’s old stone architecture.
I’d been in the office a couple of times as a child. Eleanor liked to bring Sam and me in to surprise Alasdair at the end of the week, and we’d once spent the entire day at his desk, pretending to be tiny professionals while we busied ourselves stealing all the sweets out of the jar by his computer.
The building seemed smaller than I remembered. The wide double doors trimmed in brass had once seemed like they belonged on a palace, leading into some great hall. The brass no longer gleamed like lost treasure. Instead, it was dull and pitted, the entire structure rather squat instead of towering into the air like it used to.
The entrance was mostly lit by the sun streaming in through the windows, and that left the back half of the room rather dim and shadowy. We probably should have called ahead, but I like to simply show up in places. I thought it best not to give people time to prepare. There was no receptionist, just a directory of the building telling us that Far Reach Industries was on the top floor. My boots echoed on the dark tiles as we crossed the room, and we had to wait a long time for the lift to creak its way down to us.
The spider web of cracks in the mirror on the back wall was still there. Sam and I used to play in it, moving around so that our faces would distort in different ways in the fragmented glass. I stooped so I could play the game again, the largest crack running right over my eye and making it disappear.
“What are you doing?” Fletcher asked, but the doors slid open before I had to answer.
Far Reach Industries took up the entire top floor of the building. It was laid out similarly to New Wave Industries, cubicles and computers crowding every inch of space, but there was something much friendlier and more accessible about the security company. The cubicle walls were shorter, allowing employees to more easily lean across the way and chat with their co-workers, and the founder and CEO, Lewis Walsh, had his own little box rather than an office, incorporating himself into the daily grind of the company in a way that my father had always admired.
I spotted Walsh at his desk, chatting away on the phone with his leather shoes propped up on the edge. He laughed at something the person on the other line said, his shoulders shaking as the sound boomed around the large room. A few of his employees glanced up from their work, but most of the others were unbothered, clacking away at their keyboards or murmuring into headsets.
Someone else sat at my father’s cubicle halfway between the lift and Walsh’s own desk. The spot had been filled for a long time of course, but I’d only seen it without my father there a couple of times, and I still found it jarring, my mind overlaying the present scene with his jumper clad form and the overgrown houseplant he insisted on keeping beside his computer.
I blinked the image away. Walsh hung up the phone, so Fletcher and I approached him, badges already in hand. But I didn’t have to introduce myself. Walsh grinned when he spotted me, recognizing me from the times I’d spoken with him about my father’s disappearance. “Callum MacBain,” he boomed, announcing me to the rest of the office as well as he stood and skirted around his desk to shake my hand. “I haven’t seen that face in a long time. You’re a spitting image of your father when he was your age. How are you?”
I wasn’t sure what I thought of being told that I looked like Alasdair MacBain, but I ignored that train of thought and smiled back at Walsh. “Fine, Mr Walsh. Thank you. And yourself?”
“Well, you know. I’m fairly sure I need a knee replacement, and I think I’m coming down with a cold, not to mention we’re having trouble picking up new contracts, so I guess I would say that all in all, not great.”
Oh right. Walsh was a gregarious oversharer.
Fletcher stared at him with a mildly horrified look on her face as if she was afraid he would turn that fountain of words on her.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, hoping that was the right answer. I decided to jump right into the matter at hand before he had a chance to go off on a long tangent about his dog’s breakfast or something. “I’m here on a professional matter. You employ Skye Arnott, yes?”
Walsh perched on the front of us desk as he answered. “Yes. Great kid. We hired her about a year ago I think. She’s working to become a data analyst just like your father was. Wildly smart. She’ll go far I think. She might even take my job one day.” He laughed, his smile sitting easy on his face between the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes. The expression fell slightly, and he rubbed at his chin. “I don’t think she made it in today, though. I tried calling her, but I didn’t get an answer…” All the mirth dropped off his face as he put two and two together, Skye’s lack of response and my presence here, asking about her. “Oh. What’s happened?”
“It looks like a suicide. Does that sound like Skye to you?” If Skye had been depressed, she’d probably have done a decent job at hiding it at work, but Walsh was one of those rare bosses who not only actively but aggressively paid attention to his employees. Maybe he had noticed something.
“No,” he said. He had lowered his voice dramatically and was barely keeping the pieces of his face together, not wanting to distress the others in the office. “Not that I saw, at least. She had a new boyfriend that she was very excited about. She had plans to bring him home to the parents in a fortnight. She always talked about how much she wanted to visit America. Suicide doesn’t sound at all like her.”
Following the cue of his voice, Fletcher and I had drawn in closer, our bodies forming a blockade to keep the conversation contained between the three of us. I unlocked my phone and flipped through images until I found the one I was looking for. “Do you recognize this man?” I showed Walsh a photo of Jacob.
“I do, actually.” Walsh sounded surprised. “He came to visit Skye last Friday. They looked at something on her computer for a bit and then left rather abruptly. Does he have something to do with this?”
“He’s dead, too,” I said, and Walsh’s hands clenched around the edge of his desk. “He worked at New Wave Industries. He wanted to speak with Skye about something he’d found on the Active Eye project. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Active Eye project,” Walsh repeated as he sucked his teeth and thought about it. “It doesn't sound familiar. We tried to get New Wave Industries to contract with us, but they wanted in house security instead. They’re very hush-hush over there. I’ve heard tell of an impressive new program they’ve been working on and are hoping to launch in autumn, but they’ve kept a tight lid on any leaks. I don’t know much more than that.”
It was worth digging into, though I doubted we’d be able to pry any information out of the company without one hell of a warrant. It was hard to get past patents and non-disclosure agreements even with a murder to investigate.
“Thanks, Mr Walsh,” I said. “Do you mind if we look at her computer?”
“Not at all.” Walsh clapped his hands together, hoping that would banish some of the darkness from his thoughts. He leaned over and wrote on the back of a business card.
“Here. This is my log-in. It will get you into any of the computers here.”
Fletcher took it from him, and Walsh pointed us towards Skye’s desk, the only empty one in the entire office. “Callum, a word before you go?” Walsh said just as I turned to walk away. I paused, motioning for Fletcher to get started without me. “Are you still looking into your father’s disappearance?”
Walsh had been as helpful as he could when Eleanor and later, I tried to find Alasdair MacBain. Eleanor had been and still was suspicious of him because she believed her husband had stumbled on something dangerous in his work here, and she thought Walsh knew and was covering it up. I didn’t agree with her. I was pretty sure that Walsh was literally incapable of lying, given how incredibly open he was about every single thing in his life.
I sighed. I wished people would simply leave this alone, but they kept trying to pull me back into it. “I wasn’t until my sister found an old photograph of his. We met this old man who was no doubt just screwing with us.” I rolled my eyes as I thought about Kane. I should have seen through him sooner, what with him just happening to appear by the loch at the same time as us, not to mention his absolutely ridiculous theory. “He tried to convince us that Dad was supposed to meet with someone called ‘the Kraken’ before he disappeared.” I made air quotes around the codename and rolled my eyes. “Stupid, right?”
But Walsh had gone rather pale, his mouth slack as he stared at me.
“What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
When Walsh finally answered, he spoke slowly, carefully as if the wrong word would shatter the tense air between us. “We were hacked once. A few years before your father… you know. They left behind the image of a kraken.”
“That’s not funny,” I said. I instantly disbelieved him because what kind of person living in the real world was known only as some weird mythological creature?
“I’m serious,” Walsh said and sketched an X over his heart. “They got into all the data we had on a company called Experience Tech. They went under not two weeks later. The hacker deleted all our records and details, but I still have the file on the attack if you want to look at it.”
“Did you ever track the hacker down?” I asked. I refused to call them the Kraken. That was just stupid.
Walsh grimaced. It obviously still bugged him even after all these years. “No. Whoever they were, they were top-notch, better than us.”
Though it would have been way before my time, I tried to think if I remembered Eleanor ever mentioning some kind of hacking case. “Did you report it?”
“God, no,” Walsh scoffed. “What kind of security company lets itself get hacked? We would have been sunk.”
I nodded. That made sense. “Alright, thanks. I’ll let you know if we need anything else.”
“Please do. Anything I can do to help.”
Walsh and I shook hands again, and I walked away to join Fletcher at Skye’s old desk. She was busy rooting through all the drawers on the desk. I pulled up an extra chair, bumping into Fletcher’s as I sat down and rolled the last foot up to the desk. “Resisting the urge to play dodgems right now,” she said, fighting with her face to remain serious.
“Maybe later,” I agreed.
“I’m smelling something funny in this case,” Fletcher said. She spun to face me as she spoke, her back to the computer. “We’ve got two people and a clandestine meeting, and both of them wound up dead not long later, their murders designed to look like something else.”
“You think they were both hits,” I said.
“Jacob found something sketchy in that Active Eye project, came to Skye for confirmation, and someone with a lot to lose found out and decided to kill them rather than let their discovery get out.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. “But who?”
“Who stood to lose the most if this got out?”
“New Wave Industries,” I suggested. The company was the most obvious choice. “We’ll need to get a hold of the CEO. What are you looking for?”
Fletcher slammed the last drawer shut and fell back in her chair, making it rock. “The laptop. It’s not here.”
I dragged a hand down my face, holding back a frustrated groan. “You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I were.”
“Mr Walsh,” I called out to the CEO and beckoned him over. He glanced up from the paper he was reading and raised an eyebrow but got out of his chair and walked over to us.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Skye’s laptop isn’t here.” I waved my hand over the empty desk for emphasis. “Do you have any idea where it might be? Do employees usually take their work home with them?”
Walsh rubbed at his temple, confusion plainly written across his face. “Not really. Security precautions and all that. It’s possible she took it with her without me noticing when she left with that man, but she should know better than that.”
Fletcher’s face said, ‘Unless she didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands,’ but she didn’t suggest that with Walsh standing right there.
“Maybe it’s at her house,” I said, though if there really was some kind of nefarious plot behind this, the laptop would be the first thing our killer would look for. “Her roommate is coming by the station later today to give a statement. We can get the keys and permission to search the place then. Fletcher, did you find anything else in the desk?”
“Nope. It’s been cleared out.” Fletcher opened up a random drawer, showing off the empty interior. It reminded me a lot of the scene we found at Jacob’s flat, of a person getting ready to run.
Fletcher and I stood, and I put the extra chair back where I found it. Walsh and I shook hands again, and he walked us to the lift to see us out. “If there’s anything else I can do to help, either with this or your father, please, let me know,” he said as the doors opened.
“I will.” I nodded in farewell, and he raised a hand before the lift closed on the office.
The button for the ground floor lit up as Fletcher pushed it. “What did he mean? Does he know something about your father?”
“Turns out the Kraken might actually be real,” I admitted with a sigh. “This place was hacked by someone with that moniker.”
“That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Fletcher said, and though she tried to remain completely serious, she couldn’t keep a flicker of excitement from her eyes. “Does that mean you’re back on the case?”
“I don’t know what it means.” Fletcher followed me out of the lift, and we started across the foyer, footsteps ringing dully. “Walsh couldn’t even get a trace on this person. How the hell do you find a master hacker?”
Fletcher shrugged, shook her head. “I guess they find you.”
True, but not terribly helpful.
I unlocked the car but didn’t climb inside right away. Instead, I just stared at the street for a moment. I wanted someone else to take over my father’s case, if it really was a case. I was reluctant to call it that because that would make it more real, more potent. I wanted to hand it all over to my mother so that she could make the decisions on what was real, what was fake, and what was just another hopeful delusion. But I also knew that I had to be the one to bear this weight. Eleanor and Sam believed too fully that there was a conspiracy behind Alasdair’s disappearance. If I got to the end and it turned out he simply had walked away, I was the one most likely to survive the crushed hope.
“Do you mind if we make a pit stop before we head back to the station?” Fletcher asked as I finally eased into the driver’s seat. “I’ve maybe got a lead on nailing Townsend for corruption as well as murder.”
“Sure. Where are we headed?”
“I’ve been looking over one of Townsend’s old cases where he busted a drug dealer named John Santan,” Fletcher began. I revved the engine and pulled out into traffic, following the directions she had pulled up on her phone. “But for the entire investigation up until the final arrest, he’d been looking into Ariel
Arktell, who is a much bigger deal.”
“I’m familiar,” I said. Ariel Arktell was a pretty big heroin dealer, moving product all over the U.K., importing mostly from America. She was careful, good at covering her tracks, and had enough money to buy the best lawyers, so we’d never been able to pin anything on her.
“Right. Then bam, he arrests Santan who dealt weed, not heroin, and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the case at all. But now that we know Townsend’s been accepting bribes…”
“You think Arktell paid him off to arrest Santan rather than go after her,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
I downshifted as I slowed, waiting for a line of cars to pass by the turn I wanted, balancing the clutch until the way was clear. “So where are we going? Please tell me we’re not on our way to speak with Arktell.”
“God, no, I’m not stupid,” Fletcher said quickly. “We’re going to speak with John Santan’s wife. I reached out to her the other day, and she agreed to meet with me.”
The GPS took us to one of the parks near the Highland Archive Centre. The place was buzzing now that the weather was warming up, couples walking their dogs or wheeling pushchairs along the narrow path, joggers huffing and puffing their way up the gently swelling hill, swerving into the grass to avoid people moving more slowly. The River Ness sliced through the city just behind the Archive Centre, the normally dark water glittering blue in the sunlight.
I had to backtrack a couple of streets to find a place to park and that made us a few minutes later to Fletcher’s meeting, though we walked as quickly as we could back towards the park. “Bell asked if we could go somewhere public,” Fletcher said. She shaded her eyes with one hand, searching the area for Bell Santan. “She was nervous on the phone, hesitant even.”
“A sergeant has already thrown her husband under the bus. She’s right to be wary.”
“I think that’s her.” Fletcher nodded towards a woman seated alone on a bench, a red clutch perched on her lap. A few strands of grey shot through her dark curls, and the collar of her yellow blouse stood out against her brown skin like a flower on a branch. We made sure to approach her from the front so that she would see us coming and wouldn’t startle. “Excuse me,” Fletcher said once we were within earshot, raising a hand in hello. “Bell Santan?”
The Hidden Eye Page 14