Twenty
They ate in the car in transit to Portishead, stopping off in a service station for something on the go. Anna had almost finished her beetroot and feta wrap before they hit the motorway, popping in the last mouthful as Dawes pulled out into traffic. He, meanwhile, proceeded to munch his way through a small tub of sausage rolls, his shirt and trousers slowly accumulating a crumb mountain.
Dawes talked as he ate. ‘I know you and Shaw have got history, ma’am, but he’s a creepy bastard all the same.’
‘A creepy bastard who knows an awful lot about this stuff.’
Dawes munched for a while and then said, ‘Couldn’t have been easy to lose a daughter like that, though. Got a boy and a girl coming up to that age myself. Kelly’ll be moving up to the comp next year. She thinks she’s eighteen now. God knows what she’ll be like in a year’s time.’
Anna inclined her head. Sometimes empathy chose awkward moments to bloom. ‘It’s not an excuse for what he did, but it is a big part of the reason.’
Dawes signalled and pulled out into the fast lane. ‘Don’t mind me asking, ma’am, and you don’t have to answer, but why did he want to see you on his own?’
Anna knew Dawes wasn’t prying. She might have taken offence. She knew a lot of fellow female officers who would. But Anna knew concern when she saw it.
‘He wants to seal our deal,’ Anna explained. ‘He’ll tell me what he knows about Krastev so long as I promise to tell him who is really behind the Black Squid killings.’
‘And you don’t have a problem with that?’
‘I didn’t say I’d do it.’
Dawes sent her a swift, appraising glance, wanting to see what sort of expression she wore as she delivered the line. He seemed satisfied with her neutrality and flipped his gaze back to the road without comment. It was a fleeting moment but one that left Anna again questioning her relationship with Shaw. She was a police officer and that gave her ways and means of dealing with criminals. You could be frugal with the truth when circumstances demanded and there didn’t always need to be a code of honesty on your part. After all, most criminals lied through their teeth. But Shaw was different. He hadn’t lied to her once. Yes, he’d been manipulative in the extreme, but she couldn’t remember him ever telling her a frank lie. And that put her own integrity on the line.
Szandra Varga was waiting for Anna and Dawes in the office at Portishead when they got back. Her great strength was understanding that not everyone was as IT-literate as the digital forensic bods she worked with day to day. Varga wore her dark hair cut short and had an accent from somewhere east of Germany. She was sitting at Khosa’s desk, with Khosa sitting next to her and Holder watching the screen from behind.
Dawes had never met her, so Anna made the introductions. Khosa filled them in on how she’d asked Varga to explain how Jamie Carson and Abbie Shaw might have accessed chat rooms.
‘Szandra was just showing us how things have changed online since the noughties.’
‘These are archived web pages from the millennium,’ Varga said.
On the screen were garish, simple screenshots of sites, often with white backgrounds and line by line comments from users with anonymised usernames. No video, no flash colours, no images.
Varga said, ‘MSN tended to supervise their chat rooms, but other live messenger services did not. Microsoft had Internet Relay Chat extensions before MSN. But ICQ, a play on the words “I seek you”, required no registration. By 2001 there were 100 million users.’
Dawes said, ‘So what you’re saying is it isn’t going to be easy finding what these kids were doing online back in 2001?’
Varga said, ‘It will be very difficult. We have contacted the owners of the Internet cafés your victims frequented. These are very old ISP records and, as you will imagine, thousands of hours of searches and contacts. We don’t have usernames. We don’t have URLs.’
‘OK.’ Anna bit back her disappointment. ‘What about today? The new Black Squid stuff. Surely there’s some technical way of finding out who and where this game is coming from and who’s behind it now? I mean it’s 2018, for God’s sake.’
Varga swung around to face them. ‘I have looked through all the digital evidence provided by DS Cresci from Kimberley Williams. They have been thorough. As already explained, the WhatsApp user known as Humboldt who gave instructions did not have an ID. There are several verification sites he could have used to do this.’ She turned back to the screen and her fingers typed. Up came a site. She pressed return and a list of six numbers appeared: two next to a Canadian flag, two next to a US flag and two next to a Union Jack. In a blue box next to the number it read, ‘Read SMS.’ Varga used the capped end of a ballpoint to indicate one UK number. ‘This is the number you use for your WhatsApp application. Verification is by text message. The verification is received on the site. You punch this code into your mobile and that’s it. You can now use the messenger service on your phone without revealing your own number. My guess is the user would also use a different or disposable SIM and even a separate phone. Possibly stolen.’
‘So how do we find him?’ Dawes asked.
Varga shrugged. ‘Not through digital forensics, I am afraid.’
Rainsford was away and so Anna decided there’d be no vespers that afternoon. She let the team get on with their tasks while she wrote up her interview with Shaw. Krastev seemed to be at the heart of everything and yet they knew very little about him. While he was masquerading as Petran, he’d been on the watch list of three force areas for sexual harassment, theft and petty crime. She asked Trisha to pull up his record, nursing a vague frustration that Varga had not been able to help. What with that and the visit to Shaw, it was shaping up into a maddening day.
But at 4.45 p.m., Khosa stuck her head around the door looking animated.
‘Monica Easterby’s rung. She’s dug out the personnel report on Alison Johnson. I think something happened on the day she went missing, ma’am.’