Five Hours Later
Stella was still with them, stretched out on the truckle bed, her arms crossed behind her head and her eyes closed, but Jess had been dispatched to bottle up, and get ready for opening.
Fang accessed the camps’ running costs. North didn’t want to know how. They saw no change from one month to the next. No “special provision”.
She accessed their power and water consumption and the three of them crawled over the figures. Some were high, some were tiny, dependent on the size and purpose of the camp and the number of troops they supported, but there was no discernible shift in the figures in the last month. The only surprise was the size of the Army. When North left, he calculated it stood around 80,000 troops. The New Army was currently closer to 300,000. Enough to go to war.
North’s fingers gripped the desk as he stared at the chalked wall. The suspicion of a headache was beginning to creep up behind his eyes. No purple pills, he reminded himself. He willed it away. What was he doing? He was up against the Board. He of all people knew what that meant.
They were nowhere.
“We start over,” he said.
Stella groaned, swearing under her breath, as he walked towards the chalk wall.
The pain in his skull came again – Bruno’s face, flames – as he picked up the chalk stump from the filing cabinet, using a grubby J-cloth to wipe away Jess’s pictures. The girl had both a filthy and creative mind, he decided. Peggy Boland, he wrote. Honor Jones. Ned Fellowes. Jimmy the Sniff. Dates. Times. The names of the missing that he could remember. Bunty Moss. He drew arrows between JP and Honor, between JP and Peggy, between JP and the New Army, Peggy and the New Army. Fang broke out a game of Fruit Ninja, cutting and slashing all-comers.
He lifted the cloth again to create more space, and a cloud of chalk dust rose from the rag.
“Don’t!”
North turned at the distress in Jess’s voice.
Her face was white under the freckles as she dumped a tray loaded with drinks down on top of a box, the door open behind her. “Ned said leave it up there.”
Leave the wall?
“I know we have to wipe it soon, and start over, but not yet. Not today. ”
North turned back to the wall. He’d already scrubbed off a good half of the obscene cartoons and graffiti. Stella had copied down a credit card number of a regular, but she’d been indifferent otherwise.
Why would Ned tell Jess to leave it?
“Ned was a barman,” said North. “He worked here?”
“He made the best White Russian I ever tasted.” Stella sat forward, her forearm resting on her bulging thigh. A tattoo of a hooded cobra ready to strike coiled around her arm.
Breasts. A hanging man. Copulating couples. Letters. What had he wiped away? And what was still left?
North moved his head one way and then the other, letting his eyes sweep over the wall. Nothing made sense. He tilted his head to stare at the column of tiny numbers, some of them with dots between them, written from top to bottom in the furthest corner. With a scrap of chalk, he copied them down in a horizontal line from left to right putting the dots between them, breaking the numbers up into four distinct groups. He stood back from the wall.
“This is an IP address. IP – Internet Protocol. It’s how computers communicate.” Behind him, he sensed Fang break off from her game. “Ned said the missing had their electronic communications shut down the same way. Accessed with the same password. Maybe the same operator on the same machine handled it all? This one.” He pointed at the numbers. “I think this is the IP address for the machine that shut down everyone’s electronic communications – including Peggy’s.”
Fang was already typing-so fast he barely had time to absorb where she was. A registry. A search box. Entering the IP number. Spooling through a form – UKTelecoms. A list of what looked to be communications companies. She pinged between the companies – apparently comparing numbers of subscribers and reviews – before plumping on U&MeMobile. Mid-sized. Poor reviews.
“What’s she doing?” Jess whispered in his ear.
“I’m guessing she’s trying to get a geographical fix on the computer.”
“Can you do that?”
“Absolutely not, but I don’t think anyone told her.”
A low hum of office calls unspooled from Fang’s laptop – a background of tapping phones calling, a gentle hum of conversation as she moved from an audio-sharing file on to a company website, sliding up and down a list of staff and their responsibilities.
Fang caught the paintbrush tip of a black plait between her blue-wired teeth, and reached for her mobile. She tapped her glass, and Jess reached over to the tray to hand her a bottle of Diet Coke complete with a striped straw topped with a pink parasol which was speared through a green cocktail cherry. Fang raised her middle finger in silent thanks.
“This is Jenny from the Met Police Liaison.” Fang swung her body away from the distraction of Jess to squint into the mid-distance. “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking to today?”
Fangfang’s voice was velvet. No Geordie accent. Middle-class. Middle-England. Optimistic and upbeat. The kind of voice anyone would want to keep listening to. Fang pressed mute, ate the cherry, stuck the parasol in her hair, put her mouth to the straw and blew a tornado of bubbles into the coke as she opened up LinkedIn and half a dozen social media sites.
She pressed unmute, and the bubbles died back to pop and drown in the caramel-coloured froth.
“Well, Jean-genie.” The voice again. Thirty-something. A quiet authority. Charming. “Could you please put me through to Law Enforcement Liaison? Remind me who it is again.”
Her small fingers danced over the keyboard and the face and details emerged of Caroline Lane. Caroline had been in the job at U&MeMobile three years. A shaggy haircut. Dark roots. Divorced. A pug dog. A fan of Wine O’Clock.
“Hey, Caroline. Jenny here from Met Police Liaison. We’ve got a problem, and there’s going to be a real stink when it gets out.”
Silence.
“Let’s just say one of our senior officers is for the broth pot. Between you and me, he’ll go down for this. I can’t go into detail, but we’re talking grave misuse of the IP request process. Grave.”
Silence.
“Yep – unbelievable. No authorisation. I shouldn’t even be telling you this Caroline, but he’s tracking his ex-wife’s every move. Cameras in the house. The phone. He’s all over her laptop. I need you to fax me through all the requests which have come in this week – all of them – so our guys can figure out which of them aren’t in the system.”
Silence.
“No, not the usual number. We can’t risk it getting back to him. Again strictly between you and me, he’s got ‘friends’ everywhere. Funny handshake brigade.
“I knew you’d understand. We take this kind of thing very seriously, Caroline. Internal affairs says this has to be by the book. Okay the fax is…” she read out a fax number on a page North hadn’t even seen her pull up. “You’re a sweetheart. I’ll let you know how it goes. His poor ex, I tell you. I feel so sorry for her.”
North opened his mouth, but Fang held up her palm to silence him. Artist at work. It took 45 seconds before the faxes came through. Fangfang rifled them – one after the other till she found what she was looking for. Something from the child exploitation team. She copied across the document. Changed the IP number at the top of the Met Police request to the IP address that Peggy’s password change came from.
New screens.
New internet service provider. UKTelecoms. Stella was standing next to him.
“I could make a serious amount of money with this kid,” she said. “Only there’s nothing to spend it on in prison except for pot noodles, and I’m watching my figure.”
Fang hissed at Stella like her granny had hissed at North the day before. This was getting serious.
The voice again. “Jenny here from Met Police Liaison. Can you put me through to Law Enforcement Liaison? Remind me who it is again. Yep that’s right. Actually would you put me through to his secretary please?”
There was a pause.
“Yes I hope so. This is Jenny from Met Police Liaison would you be good enough to put me through to Bob? That’s right Met Police Liaison. Tell him it’s urgent. Thank you so much.”
There was a pause as his secretary told him the Met was on the line.
“Hey, Bob,” The voice shifted down. Still charming. Carrying a promise for bald, chubby Bob Larson, married, a six-year-old girl and a baby on the way. At UKTelecoms for seven years. Photographs of a beaming Bob in a dinner jacket.
“Nice to talk to you again, Bob. We met at that thing last year – I’m sure you don’t remember.”
“Yep. That one. I got a lot from it. A great bunch.” Fang stuck two fingers in her throat and made as if to vomit over the desk.
She shifted into third gear. Niceties over. More authority. “I’ve a request for an IP Subscriber Identification here and I hate to put this on you, but it’s way past urgent.” She gave a laugh. Self-deprecating, but used to her own way.
North was standing behind the 14-year-old geek. He could see the chewing gum behind her ear peeping out from under the plait. The parasol in the blue-black hair. But he was hypnotized. Was she Fangfang? Was she Jenny? She sounded like she was Jenny. She also sounded like she’d done this kind of thing way too often before.
“I can’t wait that long, Bob. This guy’s filth. You don’t want to know what he’s doing to these kids and we’ve almost got him. Give us a location and he’s ours.”
“He’ll move on, Bob. That’s what he does, and these kids’ll never be the same. I’m looking at a photo here and the girl is six if that. You don’t want to see the expression on her face. We want him off the streets.”
“You are a shiny star. I’m sending in a memo to the Chief Constable saying so. I’m faxing the request as we speak. Sure I’ll hold.”
Fangfang allowed herself a glance in his direction, her hand over the mouthpiece. “God’s truth. You frighten me,” North said, and Fang’s black eyes went back to the screen, grinning at her reflection, at her own cleverness, bright blue braces making it ghastly in the green glow cast by the screen.
There was a beep and Fangfang clicked to open the fax Bob had sent. “Thanks, Bob.” For the first time, she sounded like herself.
National Defence Force: Otterton Training Camp. Proud possessor of a computer which had changed the passwords of 33 missing people including Peggy Boland. Bob had done Jenny from Met Police Liaison proud.
Fang typed the details into Google Earth to pull up a 3D satellite picture of the New Army camp. She spun the image, tilted it, magnified it then put her finger smack bang over it before she looked up at North.
“You still here, moron-person?” she said. “Go get Peggy. Or shall I do that too?”