Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (32 page)

“It doesn’t drop you into a piranha tank below then,” quipped Brody.

“No, that feature comes with the version above this one,” retorted Stone. “But if Magnus here doesn’t stop losing weight on his new fitness regime, I reckon it’ll only be a couple of weeks before he goes under the weight tolerance built into the system.”

“Actually Ray, there’s a self-updating algorithm built into the system to avoid exactly that,” said Peggler. 

His voice was high-pitched. So much so that Brody raised his eyebrows at Jenny and smirked. She almost laughed herself, but instead introduced herself and Brody and told Peggler that they needed to ask him some questions. He glanced at his watch and told them he had exactly twenty minutes before his next meeting.

A few moments later, the four of them stood in the CCTV control room.

Stone introduced the CCTV operator. “Ron here is our
senior
eye-in-the-sky. He never misses a thing. We’ve installed the same CCTV system as the Bellagio in Las Vegas and Ron here used to work for them. Were lucky to have him.”

Jenny wondered if Stone’s emphasis of the word senior was meant to be some kind of an in-joke.

Ron nodded, embarrassed and, with one hand tapping on his black keyboard and the other guiding a black joystick, a garish gold band of multi-coloured gems on his ring finger incongruous against the room full of dark electronic equipment, began searching through video footage. Ron brought up the Paddington footage from Friday evening on the large screen at the centre of the room. Jenny guided him to the correct time point. They watched the cyclist enter the building, talk to the receptionist and head towards the lift. Ron rewound the footage and paused on the cyclist.

“This is our suspect,” she told the group. “As you can see, he’s used a cycling helmet, sunglasses and mask to cover most of his face. He arrives about forty minutes before the first victim. And then the same cyclist shows up at Watford on the Monday evening, again not long before the victim. Now that we’re on the original footage, is there anything you can do to get us a better image? Maybe do something about the sunglasses — if we could see his eyes properly I’m sure it would help.”

“Nothing we can do here that you can’t do with the copy we gave you. It’s an exact copy,” explained Stone. “It’s not like video tape that degrades the image with each copy made.”

“What file format is it recorded in?” asked Brody.

Stone shrugged. “Standard video file format.”

Peggler shook his head. “Single CIF resolution recorded at twelve-point-five frames per second using MPEG-4 compression.” 

Jenny made a mental note not to make assumptions based on Peggler’s unusually high-pitched voice. Anyone who could put that much geek-speak into one sentence certainly knew his stuff. 

“That explains the average image quality then,” said Brody. “But even if you had four-CIF, there’d be little you could do about the sunglasses.” He turned to Jenny. “It’s not like in the movies where you’d see someone apply some magic colour filter correction gizmo and reveal what’s behind the glasses.”

“Fair enough.” Jenny turned back to Stone. “What about the fact that the cyclist wasn’t caught on camera when he left the building?”

Stone shrugged again. “Could be loads of reasons. Maybe he did but not dressed in the cyclist gear. Or maybe he stayed in the building all night.”

“Perhaps. Although on both recordings, we’ve studied everyone who left after the cyclist arrives. We’re pretty sure he doesn’t leave. Are there any other exits?”

“I’d need to check. It’s been a while since I’ve been to either of those offices.”

Jenny wasn’t sure whether Stone was being deliberately evasive or not. “Let me help you,’ she said, “as I have been to both offices recently. Paddington has a fire exit at the back of the building. And Watford has a fire exit to the side. Both are accessible from the internal staircase.”

“Well DI Price, it looks like you already had your answer.”

Jenny glared at him. Brody spoke up. “What I think DI Price is asking is whether your building control systems track whether the door was opened.”

“Well,” said Stone, imitating cheerfulness. “Why didn’t you just ask that in the first place?”

Sensing the growing tension, Ron spoke up, pointing to the main screen. “I’ve brought up the logs. You’re right, external fire exits were opened afterwards. The Paddington one at 6:33 p.m. and the Watford one at 7.45 p.m.”

“And does opening these doors set off any alarms?” asked Brody.

“Well, yes actually. We get an alert here. And so we would have phoned local security to make sure it was all good.” Ron looked through some logs on his screen. “Yup, we followed the process. The tickets are here. Security reported everything was fine. False alarm.”

Stone sounded relieved. “There you go; all is in order.”

Jenny jotted the times in her notebook. This narrowed down the time periods for the squad to work on, especially on CCTV footage in the surrounding area. She also knew that the SOCO team had already swept both fire exits on the presumption that the killer had exited the building that way. Any fingerprints and trace evidence found there would become a priority.

“The meeting rooms. Can you confirm who booked them?”

Stone shrugged again. Jenny was becoming annoyed with him. Ron offered that he didn’t have access to that system. They turned to face Peggler, who had been absently swiping away at his tablet in the background. Sensing their eyes on him, he looked up. “Yes?”

Jenny repeated the question. He confirmed he had the required access and began more finger swipes and typing on his tablet. 

“What is that thing?” asked Brody. “It’s not an iPad.”

“No, I’d never use one of those. Useless in a corporate environment like this. No, this is a Dell Venue Pro. Full Windows PC environment but in tablet form. Best of both worlds, you see. And with proper integrated security. IPads and Androids are far too easy to hack.”

“Really? I wouldn’t know,” said Brody.

A few minutes later, Peggler confirmed what Jenny already knew. That the Paddington room had been booked by someone called William Webber, using the account number from WMA. And Watford had been booked by Derek Saxton, using an account number from Colnbrook Services Ltd. Both were booked using the public website.

“According to the two companies, both reservations were made using fake email addresses,” said Jenny.

“Let me guess . . .” said Brody. “The booking system just sends a confirmation out into the ether, not bothering to record or alert on the bounce email received back from their mail server.”

Jenny remembered Fiona figuring this out on Monday. Brody was certainly quick to catch on.

“Er, well . . .” Peggler squirmed, his voice becoming even squeakier. “I’ve already submitted an enhancement request into the vendor for that as a new feature.”

“Do you record the IP address of the device used to make the booking?”

Jenny remembered Fiona also talking about the IP address as being important. She understood that if they had that, they might be able to pinpoint from where in the real world the booking originated.

“Not to my knowledge. But I can check with the booking system vendor.”

“Can’t you just see on there?” Brody pointed at Peggler’s tablet PC.

“No. I can access the application, but the booking interface and reports are fairly basic. Certainly no IP address.”

“But what about doing a query direct to the database? What is it, Oracle, SQL Server? Just because you can’t see it on the reports doesn’t mean it wasn’t logged in the database.”

“But going direct would invalidate our license. Don’t worry, I’ll contact the vendor.”

Brody turned to Jenny, “If I had access, it would only take me two minutes.”

“But you don’t have access, Mr Taylor,” retorted Peggler. “So no, it can’t be done in two minutes.”

“If you just give me your PC for a moment . . .”

“That would be unethical and against our security policy. I’ll talk to the vendor later on today, okay?”

“No, not okay.” Brody changed tack. “How about looking at the firewall logs for the times the bookings were made?”

Peggler nodded, hesitantly.

Brody continued. “I’m sure we could work out which sessions relate to the booking system and then get the IP address from there.”

“Our firewalls are managed by a third party company. I can put a request in to them if the booking systems vendor doesn’t store the IP address.”

“Call yourself an IT Director?” said Brody, his frustration growing. 

Stone jumped in. “There’s no need for that tone, Mr Taylor.” He turned to Jenny. “Please control your lapdog, DI Price.”

Jenny placated them both. “I apologise for my colleague’s persistence, but we are trying to make sure we follow up on every lead with as much urgency as possible.” She handed them both her business card. “Mr Stone, please send over the employee and customer databases to this email address. Mr Peggler, I’ll expect a call later with an update on the IP addresses used to make the bookings.”

Jenny’s phone buzzed. She checked the caller display. Da Silva. She excused herself and stepped away from the group.

“Sir?”

“Where are you? I need you back here.” His voice sounded desperate.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve had to let Saxton go.”

“What! Why?”

“First of all, his alibi turned up at the station earlier.”

“Eh?” Jenny took a moment to process this. “He must have put someone up to it.”

“But this is Stacey Goodwin.”

“Who?”

“British Paralympic rower. Bronze medallist in the London games. She says that she met with him on Monday night in his real office. Right at the time of the murder.”

“That’s a bit convenient. Why didn’t Saxton tell us this yesterday? Was he screwing her too?”

Brody, Stone and Peggler all looked up at this. She turned her back and listened to Da Silva’s response.

“He says that he didn’t want to involve her in his problems. That he’s just about to sign her up as a new client. Apparently, she’s written an autobiography and Saxton was going to be her agent. But dragging her into this might make her change her mind about him.”

“I hope it bloody well has —”

“That’s not all, DI Price — I mean, Jenny. We’ve just got the DNA comparisons back from the semen recovered from both victims. They’re both from the same person.”

“But that’s what we expected. Evidential proof that both crimes were committed by Saxton.”

“But neither are from Derek Saxton.”

CHAPTER 11

“Mr Patel, this is Sarah McNeil from
Commercial Aviation News
. If you had been in your office to take my call, this is what you would have heard. Eight out of ten of the top aircraft catering companies are increasing the number of new contracts won every month while at the same time halving their customer acquisition costs. Mr Patel, are you looking for improvements in these two sales performance areas in your organisation within the next three months? Oh, wait a minute, this is your voicemail and you can’t answer that. However, you can reach me directly with your answer anytime this afternoon.” Sarah completed the message by adding her phone number and a cheery finish. She disconnected the call.

On the computer screen, she marked the task against Mr Patel’s record complete and scheduled a follow-up call for a week’s time. Another name automatically appeared in her cold-calling queue. She decided she needed a couple of minutes break and, with a deep sigh, removed her headset.

Enviously, she looked around the open-plan office. Most of her colleagues were engaged in animated telephone conversations with customers, some walking around freely; hand gestures amplifying their sales patter. If only she could find someone who would actually talk to her. So far this morning she’d hit eight voicemails, three secretaries in full gatekeeper mode either pretending to take a message or taking one and throwing it in the bin, and two abrupt disconnects after only getting a few words into her script.

Commercial Aviation News
was one of a handful of magazines and industry websites that new sales staff at Maiden Media were assigned to in order to prove they had what it took to sell advertising space. If they could miraculously achieve their monthly targets three months in a row, then they would be promoted onto one of the company’s more prestigious titles where the targets were higher but where there was plenty of run-rate business to make it less stressful, allowing you to focus on hunting high-impact clients. 

Sarah was in month three with a week to go. She’d scraped through the first two months, but so far she was only at twelve per cent of April’s target. If she didn’t strike gold in the next few days, she would be in serious trouble.

Her phone rang. Surprised, she quickly threw her headset back on and pressed the button to accept the call. Perhaps it was Mr Patel actually returning her voicemail.

“Sarah McNeil,
Commercial Aviation News
,” she greeted, over-exuberantly.

Before even hearing a voice, she realised that it couldn’t be Mr Patel, because his name would have been automatically displayed on her computer screen. Instead it was a phone number she didn’t recognise, although from the 01628 area code she knew the caller was from the local Maidenhead area.

“Ah, Miss McNeil, glad I’ve caught you. It’s Janice Walker from Sunnyside Care Homes here.”

“Is my Dad okay?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Walker. “I’m from the finance team. I’m calling you about your account. It seems that you’ve not paid the last two months’ invoices yet, despite our reminder letters.”

Sarah’s heart sank.

“Oh, I see.”

She had been dreading this call. Avoiding it, just as her prospects seemed to avoid her calls. The final notice letter from Sunnyside had arrived on Monday, strongly demanding that she paid them the six thousand pounds she owed. 

“Miss McNeil, many people confuse commercial care homes like Sunnyside with state or charity-funded homes. I must stress that we are a business and incur costs in the provision of our care service. Your account has now been escalated to me. When were you planning on paying the outstanding amount?”