27

The chemical stench is beginning to fade from the red scarf now. It’s there if I bury my face in it, but then so are the crusty spots of Maddy’s blood. I keep it close as a reminder of her, a focus for my rage. It sits on the table, partially covering a mobile phone I don’t remember owning. Must have found it lying around and picked it up, just can’t remember when. No charge in the thing, and it’s password-protected. Maybe I’ll find a charger for it, hack my way in and return it to its owner sometime. I’ve more important things to be getting on with right now.

You’d probably call me a hacker, or maybe a hacktivist if you’re prone to that kind of thing. Probably got some romantic idea of a techno-warrior for justice, bringing advanced coding skills to bear in the war against the man. Sometimes I might even agree with you, but mostly it’s just long hours staring at blurry screens for very little reward. Still, it gives me something to do, a way of fighting back.

I think it was something Gordon the policeman said that set me off initially, or it might just have been his doggedness, his determination to put someone behind bars for the things that went on in that house in Essex. He never succeeded, and I learned early on that the sort of people who did that kind of thing were very good at covering their tracks.

I just needed to be better than them.

And that’s what I do. I sit at my computer like a spider at the centre of its web, feeling the strands as they twist and vibrate. Partly it’s carrying on Gordon’s work, looking for the people who abused me, but partly it’s just me against the man. You’d be surprised how close to a perfect circle that Venn diagram is, mind you. There’s way too much shit in this world, and most of it’s done by the sort of people who get their kicks in places like that big old house in Essex where I grew up.

I guess it makes a certain kind of sense. If you’re amoral enough to hoard cash in secret offshore bank accounts and avoid tax when normal folk can barely scrape enough together to eat, then using children for your own sick pleasure’s hardly going to keep you awake at night, is it? And it’s not as if these people don’t know what they’re doing is wrong, either. Otherwise they wouldn’t be half so good at hiding it.

Spotting the patterns is what I’m good at. Gathering information and sifting through it until the truth emerges from the fog of lies. That’s how I knew about Finlay McGregor long before I went out to that compound near Broxburn. Long before the crash tore Maddy from me just when we’d been reunited. The name had popped up in another search, a different target, a bigger scam that goes a long way towards explaining why that truck was carrying highly toxic waste through the city centre in the first place. It ties into so many other things, links them all together in a way that might not satisfy a judge and jury but is good enough for me.

The problem is, I’m not the only one who’s found it. Someone else has been following the same threads as me, pulling on them so delicately I doubt anyone would notice if they weren’t looking. They might be after the same thing I am, but it looks more like they’re systematically erasing the connections I’ve spent months tracing. And not only that, they’ve been constructing a slightly different narrative, setting up various links that weren’t there before. Almost as if they know this operation’s been rumbled and they want to throw the suspicion on someone else.

I’m careful, always, but now I’m scared, too. What if they traced things back to me? What if they found out what I was doing, and this is their idea of damage limitation? What if that truck didn’t crash by accident? Could this whole thing be my fault?