Duplicity, p.12
Duplicity, page 12
While Lex and Matt set to on the computer, Burton and the others stood by the window and watched and waited.
‘Unusual name, Lex,’ Fielding said. ‘I’m assuming it’s Alexis or Alexandra or the like?’
At which point Hannah thought it appropriate to impart her insider knowledge. ‘No, I asked her about it before when we were sitting together; it’s Lexus.’
‘What, like the car?’ Burton was astonished. ‘Whoever names their children after cars?’
‘Well, I’ve known a couple of people called Morris, spelled M-O-R-R-I-S, and they were both named after the car of the same name.’
Burton shook his head. ‘Yes, but Morris – however you spell it – is still a regular name for a bloke. Whatever will parents think of next? Fiat, Skoda, Nissan?’
‘I think that’s taking it a bit too far!’ Fielding laughed, but she could see where he was coming from. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I quite like the name Lexus, and the shortened Lex; it sounds like a character from a science fiction book or film.’
Matt Devonshire appeared to be exactly the person for the job as it didn’t take him long to find out what he was looking for. There were a few hurried words between himself and Lex, and a fair degree of pointing at the screen and then looking down at some sheets of paper he’d brought with him, before both turned to Burton and his team.
Matt explained, ‘I knew about these but I’ve never actually been asked to try to trace one before.’
‘Knew about what?’ Burton hadn’t a clue what the man was on about, nor did anyone else present who wasn’t a tech wizard.
‘They’re self-destructing emails, designed to be viewed once then vanish completely from the mailbox. Some, like this particular one, are also designed to vanish entirely from the computer but, as you know, nothing is ever lost in cyberspace.’
‘So how couldn’t you find it, Lex?’ Fielding asked, likewise amazed by Matt’s speed in locating it and by his colleague’s inability to do so.
‘I’ve never seen one of these before. However, I knew that Matt had just attended a seminar in computer stealth and these types of emails were top of the agenda, especially as they seem to be becoming more and more popular. Isn’t that right?’
Matt nodded frantically, seemingly ecstatic to have found one so soon after the lecture he’d been to. ‘They’re called confidentiality emails, designed not to be copied or shared, and the sender can decide how long it stays visible once it’s sent to a recipient. Of course, whoever receives it can still take a screenshot, but often they won’t have the time to do so as they won’t realise that it will disappear shortly after viewed.’
‘But you’ve found it?’ Burton asked.
‘Yes, I’ve found it,’ Matt confirmed, indicating with a come-hither hand gesture that they should now all gather around the monitor. As they assembled, he pressed two keys simultaneously and the video reappeared in the centre of the screen and began to play. They all watched in silence while the one-minute recording ran its course before freezing on the last frame. ‘There’s only one thing, though,’ Matt added when all eyes were still watching the haunting image. ‘According to the tracking logs the video originated from this terminal.’
‘Well yes,’ Burton thought that he was stating the obvious, at least it was obvious to him if not to the others, ‘that’s where we viewed it. We all viewed it simultaneously on our own monitors.’ But Matt was shaking his head.
‘No, you misunderstand me,’ he continued. ‘What I mean is, the video originated from this terminal, and it appears that the time of origin was 23.51 yesterday evening.’
Now Burton understood. ‘You mean,’ he continued, ‘that whoever sent us this video actually logged in to our system and sent it from here?’
‘Exactly!’ Matt proudly declared.
‘So does the tracking log tell you who sent it and what their email address is?’ Burton was becoming excited now. Finally, they would get to the bottom of who had sent this to them.
But when Devonshire told him, it certainly wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. ‘It’s saying that you sent it, detective inspector.’
All eyes turned to Burton but all he could do was stare back in disbelief.
24
‘But you know that that’s not true!’ Burton turned to Fielding. She of all people knew exactly where he was the previous evening when the threatening video had been sent: they had been sitting talking and discussing the case until midnight in the conservatory of her mother’s house in Boldon.
‘I know it’s not,’ she reassured him, knowing that he would want validation to be heard by the two tech people. ‘Nobody is accusing you of anything; nobody ever would.’
Burton’s hand instinctively went through his hair, one of his habits whenever he felt at a loss to understand something. ‘But it’s my login–’
It was Lex who cut in and stopped him this time. ‘It’s not your fault; anyone could have come into the building and done it.’ Although he knew her words to be true it still wasn’t acceptable for whoever it was to have used his credentials.
‘Can we find out who?’ Burton’s eyes flicked from hers to her companion’s, anxious for one of them to confirm that another person was responsible for it. He didn’t like this … he didn’t like this one bit. Why implicate him, unless they were getting even closer to the person who was behind it all?
‘We could look through the personnel logs for last night, but…’ as Matt’s voice trailed off everybody knew what was coming next, ‘if they, whoever they are, are that good then I’m certain that they wouldn’t let themselves be caught out by a security log, or a security camera come to that. It’s evident to me that whoever has done this knows exactly how to cover their backs. A bit too much knowledge to my liking – professional, even. In fact, I’m pretty certain that they wanted the source of the video to be traced back to one of your terminals and your login details.’
Burton slumped down in his chair again. Fielding knew that this was torturing him. It was torturing all three of them. When this whole thing had begun, and when Hannah had told her that all was not as she and her family had been led to believe about her father’s death all those years ago, all she wanted to do was to get to the truth about what had happened to him. She hadn’t wanted to become embroiled in some cat-and-mouse game with a person or persons unknown who appeared to be able to manipulate the police IT systems.
Hannah herself must also be going through her own personal torture as well. She had seen what could have been her granddaughter in the video and she had already been threatened to stay away from the case. Fielding admired her for staying the course as, quite understandably, many others may not have reacted as she had done and taken themselves as far away from this as possible. Then there was Burton himself, brought into this of his own volition, but now so much in the thick of things that it was becoming difficult for him to know which way to turn.
‘So we’re stuck with this?’ Burton asked nobody in particular and everyone in general.
‘Yes.’ Matt’s statement was final and definitive.
At this point Fielding felt obliged to say her piece, as Burton’s face was turning greyer by the second. ‘We may well be stuck with this,’ she told him, ‘but we’re waiting for other things to come back – like fingerprints from the box delivered to Hannah’s daughter – and we need to get in touch with the chief constables in those other areas.’ She hoped that this would bring him out of the depression he appeared to have sunk into.
‘You’re right!’ he declared, leaping up out of his seat. ‘Thank you both,’ he said to Lex and Matt, ‘you’ve been very helpful. If this person wants to play a game with us then I’m sure we can at least meet him or them halfway.’
That was more like the Burton she knew so well. Never one to give up or admit defeat. Criminals always slipped up … always … and this one was not going to get away from him or his team that easily.
After Lex and Matt had packed up their things and left, Burton decided to visit Doris Mendelson and give her the heads-up regarding her family’s safety. He wasn’t exactly certain what he would say to the woman when he got there, but that was something he could spend the hour’s drive thinking about.
‘Are you sure you don’t want Hannah or myself to come along with you?’ Fielding asked after he’d notified them of his intentions.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ve got tasks to do here. Get on to those five forces about the signed-off investigations and DS Koder’s cases.’ Truth was, he also wanted time to think about what he had asked DCI Ambleton to try to find out for him.
‘Okay, we can do that,’ Fielding confirmed, eager to get started, and Hannah nodded in agreement. The video was horrible but Hannah was finding herself getting more and more immersed in this case. She realised that, perhaps, her joy at finally finding herself retired was not total. The events of the past few days seemed to support her realisation that her life as a police officer was not really over … well, not for the time being at least, and now that she had started the ball rolling on the whole Jonas Burke question she wanted to see it through to the bitter end.
On his drive up to see Doris Mendelson, Joe Burton was so absorbed in the case that he hardly noticed the beauty of the Northumberland countryside. He was still waiting to hear from his boss about the request he had made to her, and that was bothering him just as much as the case he had now found himself working on.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted the outcome of the request to go as he’d suspected, or whether he wanted it to be something he was way off the mark on. His hunches weren’t usually wrong, but whichever way it turned out to be, he would still have to tell his partner about his suspicions.
Only a couple of curtains twitched this time when Burton drove into the cul-de-sac. It appeared that once a stranger had visited the village of Acomb and been welcomed into an inhabitant’s house, they were no longer a stranger. What is it about out-of-the-way communities? Burton thought, harking back to the time Fielding had suggested that he watch the film, The Wicker Man – the Edward Woodward original version, not the Nicolas Cage remake, she’d insisted – where a police officer enters a community to solve a crime but things don’t exactly go to plan. Burton always felt that he was being sized up for something a little similar himself.
He parked up outside Doris Mendelson’s charming house, walked up the path and rang the doorbell. No response. Perhaps he should have called ahead. He was about to turn and leave, kicking himself for presuming that she would be at home, when he heard the chain being undone.
However, when he saw her standing there the relief of his journey not being for nothing turned into something else. She invited him in, and he followed her into the living room.
‘What on earth happened?’ he asked.
Doris had attempted to disguise it with make-up but she could not hide the fact that she was sporting one hell of a black eye.
‘Oh that,’ she tried to pass it off as nothing, ‘I just tripped up over one of Jemima’s toys yesterday.’
But Burton was not fooled. For one thing, he knew when someone was lying to him and he could tell by the tone of her voice that that this was indeed the case with her. ‘Now come on–’
She held up a hand for him to stop. ‘That’s the truth, detective inspector; can we please leave it.’ Before he had a chance to jump in and pursue it she added, ‘Now why have you come to see me?’
Burton had gone over what he was going to say to her during the journey, but hadn’t expected to see her in such a state as this. It momentarily distracted him from his purpose. ‘I just wanted to make sure that you and your daughter were all right,’ he told her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well… I…’ he floundered. Not one usually stuck for words, all he could see when he looked at her was the black eye staring back at him. He didn’t believe her story about falling over one of her daughter’s toys, not for one minute. Come to think of it, where was her daughter?
‘Is Jemima here with you?’ he asked, looking around for evidence of her being there, discarded toys and the like, but the room looked tidy and devoid of any child’s presence. Even the playpen was no longer in the corner.
‘My mother has taken her for a few days,’ Doris replied somewhat uneasily.
It was then that Burton decided to take a firmer stance with her. ‘Look here, Mrs Mendelson,’ his voice was perhaps firmer than intended, which only served to make the woman jump in shock, ‘I want you to tell me exactly what has happened here!’
She moved towards the sofa to sit down, almost collapsing onto it as soon as she reached it, but still managed to maintain her composure regardless. However, Burton could see her eyes filling up with tears. ‘I’d like you to leave now,’ she demanded, but it was a half-hearted attempt to dismiss him.
He sat down beside her and rested a hand on hers. ‘Please tell me what’s wrong, Doris.’ It was less of a demand this time and more of a compassionate question, but she shook her head defiantly.
‘I can’t,’ she uttered. ‘I just can’t. I’d have far too much to lose. Now will you please go before–’
‘Before what, Mrs Mendelson?’
‘Before they know that you have been here!’
25
‘She actually said that?’ Fielding asked when he got back to headquarters. ‘That she’d have too much to lose?’
He simply nodded his head in response. He’d wanted to push Doris Mendelson for further information, but could see that she was terrified of someone as she had actually told him that ‘they’ would know, meaning that there were multiple people involved.
‘Do you think someone has threatened her daughter?’ Fielding asked him. ‘I’m bearing in mind the video we received.’
Burton shook his head. ‘I just don’t know what she meant, but she’s certainly frightened by it and there have been physical threats made judging by the state of her eye. She can’t tell me she got that from tripping over a toy.’
‘And you didn’t want to bring her in?’ Hannah asked.
‘No, but I think I need to check out what she told me, about her mother looking after the child. I need to know who her mother is and find out if that is true; I didn’t want to push her any further for her name as she looked and sounded distraught, and I didn’t like to mention the video either. Plus, there was the black eye. Secondly, what about the husband; where is he in all this? I want to know where he works and have a word with him as well. Is he also being threatened; or is he the person threatening his wife?’
‘There is one thing that I’ve just realised,’ Hannah spoke up. ‘It’s the name, Mendelson. It’s German, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I believe that it is,’ Fielding confirmed. ‘Like the composer, Mendelssohn.’
‘Well, that’s another German connection. It didn’t register when the parcel arrived at my daughter’s house, but now I think that it may well be relevant. What do you two think?’
Burton had to admit that two references to Germany couldn’t just be coincidental, but what on earth did it mean? And what could the connection possibly be?
‘What if it has something to do with Jonas Burke’s real name?’ Fielding offered.
‘That’s a very good point, and one we shall have to pursue as soon as his solicitor’s court order comes through. He can’t very well object once that is all done and dusted now can he?’
‘This is outrageous,’ said Fielding banging the phone down.
‘Another no?’ asked Burton, concern creasing his forehead. Not one person could help them in the five constabularies.
‘Surely to goodness somebody worked on the cases!’ said Fielding. ‘Surely someone would have remembered being there when it happened and filing a report.’
Apparently not, according to the responses they got. Had the officers been told to say that when anyone questioned them about it? It was certainly beginning to look that way.
Burton was frustrated, and so was Fielding. This response was completely unacceptable to both of them. What on earth could they do to find this information out?
Hannah came back from the coffee machine with two mugs which she set down for Fielding and Burton. ‘Perhaps I’ll have better luck finding the two officers in charge of that boy in the pantry case,’ she said soothingly as she returned to her desk.
They had a better time locating Doris Mendelson’s mother and husband. What had initially seemed like a difficult task turned out to be quite an easy one. Hannah had suggested trying the local nursery school in Acomb in the hope that Jemima Mendelson might be attending there some days a week. She remembered that her own granddaughter had obtained a pre-nursery place when she was aged two and thought that just maybe Doris had managed to do the same thing.
The school’s head teacher was initially cautious, and quite rightly so. ‘I’ll hang up and call you back at the police headquarters if you don’t mind,’ she said. A few minutes later the control room transferred her back to Burton’s phone, and she gave them the information they required. Burton also checked that Jemima was in school at that moment, which she was.
Doris Mendelson’s mother, Claudia Simpson, was shocked when she answered the telephone. ‘Is everything all right with Doris?’ she asked with an urgency Fielding found a little disturbing. Was she aware of what was really going on?
‘Yes,’ Fielding told her, ‘nothing to worry about, this is just a courtesy call. Are you concerned that anything might not be?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m referring to her black eye. Has she told you how she got that?’
‘Why yes, she tripped over one of Jemima’s toys. Actually, I’m a little concerned about her balance of late, and suggested that she see her doctor about it.’
‘What do you mean her balance?’ Fielding tried to get more information out of her. ‘Has she had falls like this before then?’
