The Dirty Game

by Solomon Carter

  “Dan hates him too - another rival to his ego. You boys, eh? But I do wonder, Gary. If I had said there was a killer loose on a motorcycle, could you have stopped the assassin before the attempts on my life in Rendon and London? If you’d sent your resources after the right person the long arm of the law could have saved me a long time ago.”

  Rowntree stopped chewing his food. Eva took her first sip of the steaming French onion soup.

  “Come on, Eva. Our boys are good, but not that good. That assassin was world class, from what I hear. She got away because she was always going to get away. There were no traces of another person at Galvans when we arrived at the scene. But there was plenty of you, Dan and that vigilante. It stands to reason we would suspect him. What did you want, me to arrest you and Dan instead?”

  “No, Gary. I wanted you to be the copper you always said you were. You could have helped.”

  “No, I couldn’t. And you, Eva, you could have stopped lying to me a long time ago. But you didn’t do that either.”

  Eva froze. How far did she want to dig? Did she want revenge for his slap-dash cover-up? Yes, but not at any price. Peace was better than war on all fronts. Gary smiled as she silently backed down.

  “This isn’t my best ever lunch date, Gary. What do you actually want?”

  “To come to a new understanding with you, Eva.”

  Eva laid her spoon down and picked up her drink. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Stop blaming me for not going after the vigilante. I had no choice. The assassin was a ghost to us. She didn’t exist.”

  “You chose not to see her.”

  “Leave it. I had plenty of ammunition I could have used on you instead. I could have charged you and Dan ten times over… but I didn’t. I have priorities.”

  Eva waited. She hoped what she would hear would not be unpleasant.

  “My proposal is this. You and Dan leave Vic Norton alone. You also stop sniffing around John Balfour before you start on that, okay? Balfour is a loose cannon, but he is trying to turn over a new leaf. I don’t want that bloody psycho settling around here, but what can I do? He’s here on my turf, so I don’t want you stirring him up to do anything rash. Leave him to me. In fact, leave the whole Laura Gosling case to us. There’s no business there for you, and no dosh and I know that’s what you need right now or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into serious shit with that mad old dyke, would you?”

  Eva blushed again.

  “It’s okay, Eva. Money is a real life problem. It makes the world go round. I’m a realist. So leave John Balfour and the prostitute murder to me. That’s my business. Dealing with cheating husbands and missing persons, that’s yours, right?”

  Eva stared at Rowntree and sipped her wine some more.

  “What?” said Gary, under the weight of Eva’s stare.

  “You’re telling me what to do Gary and I don’t like it. Not only that, but I’m wondering why.”

  “Eva, you’ve crossed the line so many times in the last couple of months you must have forgotten which way is up and which way is down. That’s okay. I’ve been there too. I can help you back up again. All you’ve got to do is listen to me and take my help. I like the fact you’ve toughened up these days. You had even more balls than I ever thought. But know when to cut your losses, Eva. Stay out of the Laura Gosling case, and leave John Balfour alone.”

  “Is this how it is between us these days?”

  “Real Politik as they say.”

  “Why should we leave the case, Gary? You know how much Dan liked Laura.”

  “A little too much, don’t you think? But you can keep Dan Bradley at bay, Eva. If anyone can, a good looking lady like you surely can.”

  Eva cringed with anger rising inside her.

  “Don’t you ever invite me out to one of your lunches again.”

  Eva stood up and swigged her glass empty. Gary stood up too.

  “Don’t part like this, Eva. I’m saying I understand where you’re coming from. And I think you know where I am coming from too. We’re closer than you think.”

  “How can you possibly think that?”

  His eyes deadened. “Because I know more than you’d like me to, Eva. Remember that. And one last thing. Now we know each other better, now we’re clearer on a few things, I’d like it if you were a little nicer to me...”

  Her eyes flicked between his as she read his insinuation. Could he mean…? She waited. Nothing changed in his flinty eyes. Yes, he meant exactly that, though she knew he’d never say so outright. The big man leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, but Eva turned away and left him hanging across the table, looking like a spurned and cumbersome oaf.

  “This was wrong, Gary, from start to finish this whole meeting has been wrong.” Eva walked away indignantly with her bag under her arm.

  “Right and wrong is all about perspective, Eva. You know that now. Now remember what I said. Play nice.”

  Gary Rowntree sat down and watched Eva leave. As she passed the window outside he supped his pint. His eyes followed the curved lines of her slender figure and the swing of her hips as she walked away towards the town car park. Rowntree smiled and when she had disappeared, he returned his attention back toward his lunch.

  ***

  Eva was shaking. She gasped for air and looked up to the sky. She tried to use logic, but her mind was failing. He couldn’t know everything, could he? He was bluffing. And anyway, surely if he’d covered it up, it was now only hearsay and inadmissible in court? No. He was bluffing. But she wasn’t sure of it, and that was the worst thing. Be nice to him? How disgusting. It turned out that she had been wrong about Rowntree all along. How could she have been such a bad judge of character, and Dan been so on the money? She’d been so naïve. But Dan didn’t need any more wars, not right now. He needed peace. Eva had a choice to make – would she try to steer Dan away from John Balfour and the Laura case? Or would she stick her fingers up at Rowntree and pursue it anyway. But though it would have repercussions the decision was easy enough. Dan would not be turned away from finding Laura’s killer. Dan was always loyal to his friends. No, there was no chance of that. All Eva could do was help Dan and hope that Rowntree was full of bluster. And until these matters were settled, she would not mention Gary’s sinister proposition to Dan, not yet. Now Eva had to put Gary Rowntree out of her mind and focus on the Alabaster mystery. It was time to talk to a man about some numbers.

  Four

  Adam Ferguson. Eva had not used him often, and for that Eva was grateful. But Adam knew his stuff, and when it came to crunching numbers and dealing with tech, Adam was the man. He was a tall man and always wore a green fleece jacket which bore the name of his own firm AFTech. Apart from being on call to assist with networks, servers, Wi-Fi, and all kinds of other computer related guff, Adam was a mathematician. Numbers ruled the world of computers, and Adam had a lightning fast calculator for a brain. Without asking Greer she’d sent Ferguson a copy of the spreadsheets with anomalies on them. Rowntree’s words echoed in her mind. “You’ve crossed the line so many times…” Yes she had. And in a small way she had just done it again.

  She sat in Ferguson’s kitchen on a breakfast bar stool. Ferguson sat across from her, his laptop angled so both of them could see the screen. Two cups of steaming instant coffee sat beside them. Eva felt hungry and hoped the coffee would stifle her appetite for another half hour yet.

  “There’s no way these changes were done remotely. Whoever was playing with these accounts knew what they were doing and they spent plenty of time doing it.”

  “How did you come to that conclusion, Adam?”

  The man rubbed his stubbly chin. Adam looked like he hadn’t been outside in a week and had forgotten the art of washing and shaving.

  “It’s pretty easy to tell. Remote access would need permission and would leave traces on the hard drive like footprints. Every activity gets logged somewhere, especially access and permissions. And there’s no sign that this file was accessed remotely. N
o sign at all. But there are some other signs which are interesting. The changed number entries, have been kind of swapped across without much intellect. It’s kind of an arbitrary thing on the part of whoever is doing this,” he said.

  “Can you explain?”

  “Sure. If you get to know these spreadsheets, and I don’t know them well, but I do a little bit now, you can decipher where the anomalous number originated from. For instance, in the aggregates column there is a figure of £9,800, where most of the other numbers are much larger. You’re generally talking tens or scores of thousands for each sum. But you go to Office Supplies, and there is a ridiculous figure of £72,400 in the column for equipment rental. Photocopiers don’t cost £72,400 a year, not even if you have thirty of them. These figures have been swapped, and during the swap process, they were lowered. The person working this con nips a couple of grand from each number as he swaps the figures over. That’s the crudest example I’ve got, but it’s true. Usually there are two or three changes in a row, like the magic trick with one ball under three cups. You’re trying to work out which column the magic number comes from. After a while, you can read it. As a cover for theft this little scheme is counter-intuitive, but it does kind of work. If the bottom line matches the bank figure, the theft is temporarily disguised by the accounting spreadsheet. Maybe the culprit is trying to throw the blame onto the accountant… or maybe they actually want the theft to be seen… it’s hard to tell because I’ve never seen this before… and if it was me, I would never have done it. It’s kind of zany way to steal, don’t you think?”

  “Now that you put it like that, yeah. The file is not even connected to their bank account… presumably they could have just stolen from the bank and left the numbers alone.”

  “The accountant would have noticed the theft much sooner than he has. In fact, if not for this little numbers game, your Mr Greer should have spotted the theft instantly. In terms of delaying discovery of the theft, this seems to have worked a little. Greer was probably looking at this like a Sudoku puzzle for a while. Then he got it. I wonder who was quicker at identifying the issue, your Mr Greer or me…?”

  “Since we’ll never know, Adam, let’s say you were the fastest.”

  “Why, thank you,” said Adam, grinning. “I’d back me too. My guess is that your culprit on the spreadsheets is coming into the office at night. The entries vary from 9.50pm all the way to 3.57 am. They are happening on site. It sounds like an inside job to me.”

  “And it’s not Jim Greer?”

  “The accountant? No way. He would have been much too smart to run a scam like this. At least, I hope he would be.”

  Eva nodded. “I agree. Then could it be an administrator?”

  “Depends on their skill and access level. Every database has a level of permissions on a need-to-know and need-to-use basis in order to prevent abuses like this. It could be anyone who has been given access.”

  “Can’t you tell who it is?”

  “No. All the entries come up under the user ‘dataadmin1’. That particular username was created during the day time at 4pm six weeks ago. But this software isn’t high tech or secure. It’s old hat. If it was any good the database would have told me who created the username, and then, wham, you have your culprit. But there’s another consideration.”

  “What?”

  “The person doing these accounting shenanigans could be an entirely different person to the one making the withdrawals.”

  Eva had never considered that possibility and she liked it. She tapped a note on it onto her phone notepad.

  But she didn’t like much else of Adam’s theory. As much as she didn’t like Susan, pitied red faced David, and felt patronised by Brylcreemed Bruno, Eva was not convinced any one of them was guilty. She didn’t have enough evidence as yet. And she suspected that if there was CCTV available from the building management – none of those people would be the people she saw entering at night. Her judgement was based on a few observations. None of them had been too fidgety around her, although she saw their irritation at her questions and took them as signs of suspicion. None of them had given her spurious information, which she had seen was often a trait in the guilty. Guilty suspects would often go over and above the call of duty in their attempts to appear helpful. At that point Eva would be circling their names as suspects. But here none had made such a move and they had all repeated the same line that none of the others could have done it. It was still possible (but unlikely) that they could have all done it, hiring a PI as cover for their crime, while teaming up to throw her right off the scent. But for a measly seventeen thousand pounds? That didn’t stretch far between four professional types. It didn’t wash. But then none of it did. Now she had to ask building management about CCTV, because right now Eva didn’t believe the numbers were swapped in Alabaster’s office. Sure, she knew Adam was telling the truth, but it didn’t make sense to her. The people she had interviewed appeared to be innocent, yet some kind of intruder with database permissions and a door code was getting in to play games with their accounts. But what happened if you decided that the access log that Adam Ferguson was looking at was also faked - just like the numbers in the accounts columns? In that scenario, everyone was still in the frame and none were yet ruled out. It kept her options open. Someone was trying to pull the wool over her eyes, and she was determined not to let them get away with it. Her reputation and her livelihood depended on it.

  “Question, Adam: the time and location entries you are looking at for the database changes. Can they be faked?”

  “That would be difficult, but not impossible. But you’d have to have some skill for that. You’d have to be technically smart with computers for hacking into the coding behind the database.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Anything’s possible. In your line of work, you of all people should know that.”

  Maybe that was the best piece of advice she’d heard all day. It was a handy reminder that everyone she’d met at those offices was still a suspect until proven innocent. In most respects Adam Ferguson’s advice had led her into a confusion of possibilities, and yet also provided new lines to investigate. So far the culprit was still winning, still getting away with the theft. The culprit was clear and Greer wanted the case dealt with immediately. Eva had to turn it round before Greer got too impatient and shut the case down. He had cut her some slack before but she couldn’t rely on that for long. Now Eva had to be good. She had to be better than the person who stole the money. It was time to turn up the heat…

  Five

  Three men were working in a churchyard. It was a cold wintry day, and the men were well wrapped in orange high visibility jackets and trousers. They were busy and not happy about it. Dan and Eva strolled into the churchyard, the pathway gravel crunching under their feet. They watched the three men as they finished raking a section of lawn which was free of the ancient gravestones that dominated the yard. One of the men was shovelling up sweepings of rotten leaf-fall and faded crisp packets into a wheel-barrow. He had a lumpy head and a long ago broken nose that had not been properly reset. He looked tough without being muscly, his big jacket hung off him loosely and gathered around the bulk of his stomach. Dan and Eva had seen the man’s photograph and neither of them expected to see him with a bulging gut, but here he was. The man with the big broom was unmistakably John Balfour, the six foot shaven headed building site labourer who had killed a local prostitute in 1998, when Eva had been leaving school and Dan had been punching his way up the ABA youth boxing rankings. It was a long time ago. The man didn’t look like a murderer, but by now Eva knew there was no killer type. Killers were just people who had taken things too far. Some were even nice people, though not many. John Balfour didn’t look like one of the nice kind.

  “John? John Balfour?”

  The man groaned and the other two leaned on their rakes and looked up. The wind started pulling at the sweepings Balfour had collected, and teased it across the path where it had
started.

  “Are you John Balfour?”

  “You want my autograph?” said the man with a dumb sneer.

  “No, I’m all good for toilet paper, thanks,” said Dan.

  “You’re a hoot,” said Balfour. “And you’re not coppers,” he said, giving them both the once over. “So now. Who the fuck are you?”

  “We want a word away from your buddies. Is that okay?”

  “No. What for?”

  “Because we want to talk about prostitute murdering. You want to discuss this here and now?” asked Dan.

  The man’s face flushed and he looked at the other boys. “Okay. Let’s take a walk over here. I’ll be two ticks boys, so don’t grass me for slacking.”

  The others didn’t say a word. One was looking at Eva like she was a nice slice of cake. The other got back to work.

  John Balfour steamed across the grass to the edge of the churchyard where the old grey stone wall would shield them from the wind.

  “I don’t know who you bastards are, but don’t ever do that to me again. You see those two slags I’m working with? I don’t know those two dickheads from Adam. They’re just ex-cons like me. The rehab scheme has thrown us together. You start saying stuff like that in front of strangers and you’ll make my life too bloody difficult, do you understand? I’ll have to leave town already.” Balfour was serious and sweaty from his temper.

  “Aaaahhhh. I’d like to feel sorry for you Balfour, but we all know you’re a sick piece of shit who killed an innocent woman. Anyone could google your name and know what you’d done inside fifteen seconds. And whose fault is that? Ours or yours?”

  The man looked at Dan. He wasn’t any happier.

  “That woman wasn’t innocent. She was trying to rob me.”

  “Of the drugs you promised her as part payment for the extras you’d asked for. Disturbing extras, at that. And then you almost took her head clean off her body because of it. No, you were clearly the wronged party,” said Dan, warming to his theme. Eva stepped in.