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Tom let himself out and Charlie went upstairs buzzing with… something. Happiness? Anticipation? Desire? Certainly desire. There was no future in it, he knew that, they were from different worlds, but he’d enjoy a bit more time listening to Tom talk about his work. He’d also enjoy seeing how far the tattoos extended … He couldn’t hold the thought for long, he was too tired.
But he woke up in the night with something Tom had said nagging at him. It was the painting, he realised, the one with the people on the raft. He propped himself up on his pillows and fumbled for his phone, struggling to remember the name of the picture. He got there in the end and read the whole Wikipedia entry. Turned out that artist had made a scale model of the actual raft after talking to two of the survivors. He’d also spent time in hospitals and mortuaries to accurately represent the dead and dying in paint. The people on the raft died of starvation and dehydration after the food ran out and the only two barrels of water were lost to the sea. But that was in eighteen hundred and something in France.
That wouldn’t happen today. A painter who wanted to copy dehydrated corpses?
Would it?
23
Jared
Wednesday 7.30am
Charlie walked to the police station determined to clear away all the detritus so that he could focus on Rico’s death and the attack on Mags. In his mind, he ranked the different problems in order of importance, and those two were at the top of his list. He would go to see Mags later, and if she stuck to her story, and it held up with the physical evidence, and Dylan made an identification, they would be making an arrest. When they made it, Charlie was confident that the links between the police and the college management would be revealed. But right now, the fog of distraction stopped them seeing the connection. This morning, Charlie intended to get rid of the distractions in the same way that a gardener would clear brambles. First up, a call to Ravensbourne to get the forensic evidence collected and sent off to the lab, and then Jared Brody’s computer hacking. He called Ravensbourne as he walked.
“We’ve got your flasher safely in the cells eating a police-special soggy bacon sandwich breakfast, and the custody officer says he’s had a good night’s sleep,” Ravensbourne told Charlie. “If he tells us the same things that he told you last night, then the CPS will go for a charge on the assaults. Dunno about the arson, but I’ll give it my best shot.”
They arranged for the knife, balaclava, gloves and fingerprints to be sent to the lab.
“I’ll put a rush on it,” Ravensbourne told Charlie. “It’s an attack on a police officer, so no argument that it’s urgent.”
The kettle in the break room was still warm, so Charlie wasn’t surprised to see Patsy at her desk.
“I know how he sent the dick pics, and the pop ups about your court case,” she said, as if reading Charlie’s mind.
“Jared Brody?” Charlie said.
“Bring your coffee,” Patsy said, pulling out a chair beside her. He sat where she indicated.
“I thought these computers had stopped working?” Charlie asked.
“I called in a favour from a guy in IT Support,” she said, and blushed. Charlie had never seen Patsy blush but decided to say nothing. “He’s a stay up all-night kind of person, so I came in early, and he was still at work. He had a good look round our system and found a little piece of software called notey notey. That’s what Brody used. My mate says Brody must have by-passed the firewall and installed the software on all our computers. Once he’d done that, he could send pop-ups to his heart’s content. My mate’s cleaned it all up, and we now have regular, Clwyd Police-issue computers.
“By-passing the firewall sounds like something that shouldn’t happen,” Charlie said.
“Let’s just say that my mate is taking that up with their boss.”
Charlie sat back in his chair. The room was as dark as ever, so he could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling. Dust motes swirled in the air in the few rays of early morning sun that found their way through the grubby glass of the window. He thought about Tom getting anonymous pop-ups on his computer. Did that mean Brody had installed the software on those computers too? He asked Patsy.
“If the sender doesn’t have the computer’s actual address,” she shrugged, “whatever that is, the pop-up arrives as an email. Once it’s opened, it appears as a pop-up on the screen. My mate says a good hacker could install the software via such an email.”
“What about the disappearing files at the college?”
“Completely different thing. And anyway, Sarge, Brody focussed on us, the Llanfair police. He wanted to embarrass women officers and to embarrass you in front of people you have to work with. That seems different to hiding a bunch of files at the college.”
“Maybe,” Charlie said. If the fraud was big enough, and it looked big, then Brody could be on the fraudsters payroll.
“We need to talk to Brody,” he said. “Let’s bring him in for a chat.”
“He won’t listen to either of us.” Charlie wasn’t sure about that. He might be the cop with his name in the papers, but he was sick of people assuming that because he was a not-very-tall gay bloke he was also a wimp. And Patsy was a whistle-blower FFS. Hardly the behaviour of a scaredy-cat. Which being so, he thought there must be something very unpleasant about Jared Brody.
“Patsy. Don’t be daft. We’re police officers. Get your coat. We might need Ravensbourne to give him an order, but we can ask him to talk.” Brody had a large terraced house in the centre of Llanfair, only a five-minute walk from the station. It was still early, and Charlie liked the idea of disturbing their persecutor at his breakfast. Except they arrived at an obviously empty house. Peering through the front windows showed them a clean and tidy living room, without a mug on the coffee table or a TV remote control on the sofa to indicate that anyone had been there since it had been put straight.
Charlie and Patsy started knocking on doors. According to the next-door neighbour, the Brodys had left two days ago, and they had no idea when to expect their return. “Took the kids out of school and everything,” the neighbour said.
The neighbour on the other side said the family had relatives in Australia, and he thought that was where they’d gone.
Charlie and Patsy walked back to the police station Patsy insisting on taking a detour via the bakery for a bag of cookies.
