Cold Grave (12 page)

In the first of two reception rooms facing the street, they saw photographs on the mantelpiece and both men paused to look. A man in his mid-forties looked back at them, his arm around a woman of similar age: Mr and Mrs Paton, they presumed — Laurence and Irene. He had fair hair that was greying at the temples, a tight smile that seemed to be forced onto his lips and a blush to the cheeks of his otherwise fair skin. She wore dark-rimmed glasses the colour of her hair and grinned at the camera in an altogether more carefree way than her husband could manage. Winter knew that he now had a face to put to his mental images of Paton lying fatally fractured and bleeding on the path outside. His internal camera snapped an image that would sustain his need. All the photographs above the fire were of the Patons, either together or individually, but with no evidence of any extensions to the family.

Neilson tugged at Winter’s sleeve and led him out of the room, back into the hallway and into the next room. In the light afforded by the streetlamp, they could make out walls lined with books, a low table covered in magazines and then in the corner they saw it: a wooden desk and a computer.

Tony crossed the floor, looking to see the model and age of the PC, running his gloved fingers lightly over it as he appraised it like a safecracker.

Danny raised his eyebrows at him, asking if he could do it. Winter nodded and reached into the pocket of his trousers; it was his turn to bring out a small piece of rectangular plastic and metal.

‘What’s that?’ Neilson asked in a low voice.

‘It’s a bootable USB stick,’ Winter whispered back at him. ‘You can buy one for fifty quid but I thought it better that no one knew what we were going to do so I made this one myself. It should do the job. Thankfully his PC is just a few years old so we can bypass the hard drive and use this little beauty to boot it up instead.’

Winter inserted the stick into one of the computer’s USB ports and within a minute it had grumbled into life, the noise worrying both of them, and he had access to the computer’s files. He swiftly copied everything he could see onto the stick, gobbling up every bit of information.

‘Damn,’ he muttered.

‘What is it?’ Danny asked. ‘Even I can see the files transferring across.’

‘Yeah, and that’s fine as far as it goes. We can take the stick and look at everything on here in our own time. But I can’t get into his emails this way. He’s using Web-based mail rather than something like Outlook Express or Evolution.’

‘So we’re stuck?’

Winter shook his head and produced another stick from his pocket.

‘Plan B. It’s not ideal because if someone takes the time to check the log files, then they’ll know we’ve logged in. The other way would have left no trace but the saving grace is they won’t know who we are.’

Neilson breathed heavier as he deliberated.

‘Okay. Do it.’

Winter switched the PC off again, then put the second stick into a USB port.

‘So what’s different about this stick then?’ Neilson asked as quietly as he could.

‘This is a bootable stick as well but I’ve downloaded the ophcrack ISO on to it. It’s a self-contained operating system that includes a password-cracking utility.’

‘Am I supposed to understand any of this?’

‘Not really. If you did, then everyone would do it. I’ve downloaded and installed rainbow tables for ophcrack onto the stick. They’re precomputed tables for reverse encryption.’

‘English, please, son.’

Tony switched the computer on again.

‘It’s going to tell us all his passwords.’

As the PC hummed back into life, Winter keyed into setup and amended the boot sequence so it would do a one-time boot from the USB stick rather than its hard disk. He then exited setup and let the boot continue, seeing it automatically launch ophcrack and the rainbow tables scanning the user accounts.

‘It’s brute-forcing the passwords,’ Winter explained. ‘And now… we’ll see them displayed in GUI.’

Neilson groaned softly. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. Gooey?’

‘Graphical User Interface. And… there we go…’

Words flashed up on the screen. Not words really, Winter thought: alphanumerics with numbers substituted for letters in the middle of words.

‘Looks like separate passwords for Laurence and his missus,’ Tony mused. ‘Probably didn’t have access to each other’s email accounts. Did our boy have something to hide, by any chance?’

‘We’ve all got things to hide,’ Danny muttered. ‘What now?’

‘Now I write these down… remove this magic stick… and reboot the PC the normal way. When it comes up again, I’ll log in with whichever of these passwords does the trick.’

Within a minute, Winter had Paton’s email account laid bare in front of him. It struck him that reading someone else’s emails might have left him feeling a bit dirty at the best of times but it was definitely grubby when the person was dead and barely cold in the ground. So be it.

There were twenty-odd unopened pieces of mail in Paton’s inbox, the first of them arriving late in the afternoon of the day he’d died. Winter was wary of opening any of them, as that would leave a big, muddy forensic footprint saying they had been there. But from the subject lines, he could see there was the usual share of spam mail offering chances to claim lottery wins and legacies in foreign countries, a larger penis and pills to help keep it interested. There were also a couple of emails from a teaching organisation regarding renewed membership and two notifications from Facebook on his last day on earth. None of that was worth the risk of opening them.

He started going back through the opened mail, working his way through personal messages and hoping he was invading the privacy of someone who had done something wrong. It was the only thing that would justify what he was doing. There was an invitation to a nephew’s birthday party Paton would never attend; an update on a fundraising committee raising cash for a cancer charity; a long letter from what seemed to be an aged aunt in Canada; on and on, an endless stream of undeleted banality.

Then he found something much more interesting. The sender was named as a Kyle Irving and the subject line was straight to the point: ‘Re: Help’. Winter opened it and found a few paragraphs of what seemed to be advice to Paton. The letter was all couched in jargon that screamed psychology.

Dear Laurence,

I am most concerned with your current psychological state and I fear there is a grave risk of you decompensating back into psychosis. If that happens, then much of our good work may be undone.

You know that your depression is the product of antecedent conflict. While you cannot change those original events, you can control how you react to them now. We need to return to a position of self-efficacy. Once you regain the confidence to know that you can master everything you set out to accomplish, then I’m sure you will see that what currently seem to be insurmountable psychological issues are merely V codes. They are problems of living rather than a disorder.

I urge you to continue to practise levels of processing as we have discussed previously. Your memories are your friend, not your enemy. They are the way to control your guilty feelings.

You must stay strong, Laurence. I am always just a mouse click away if you need me.

Below was Paton’s original email Irving was replying to.

Kyle,

I’m really struggling to cope with this right now. I keep thinking about her and I can’t sleep at nights. I just keep seeing the look on her face as we walked across that ice. Every time I close my eyes she is looking back at me, asking me why. Wanting to know why I left her there, all cold and alone on that island.

I keep dreaming about the skater spinning, spinning, spinning, turning round and round in my head. Sometimes I think I can feel her pink gloves tickling my bare hands. I wake up and she’s gone again.

I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. I need your help. Please.

Laurence

Winter’s heart slammed into his chest and he realised his breathing was quick and hard. He felt his skin tingle the way it did when he had a camera in his hand and a broken body to photograph. The email might as well have been drenched in blood given the effect it had on him. He pulled the compact camera from where it nestled in his back pocket and photographed the screen in front of him, making sure he’d be able to show Rachel just what he’d found.

‘Okay, paydirt,’ Danny was saying behind him. ‘Get your photos taken, then let’s get out of here. The longer we stay, the greater the risk.’

‘No, hang on. There’s more.’

Tony’s eyes had fallen on another email subject line and his pulse quickened as the adrenalin shot round his body once again. It read simply ‘November 1993’ and it was dated just a couple of days before Paton fell to his death. Winter quickly clicked on it, anxious to see what was inside. His eyes darted from the header to the content, taking it all in at once, knowing that he’d hit the jackpot even if he didn’t know what to make of it.

It had been sent by someone with the email address [email protected] and the dynamite was in the message.

You seem to think I’m kidding so I will have to prove to you that I’m deadly serious. The choice is yours. Make it quick.

‘Oh, fucking great,’ Winter could hear Danny sighing behind him.

The email was unsigned beyond the anonymous ‘justice1993’ tag and it didn’t take a detective to work out what that represented. Rachel’s dad had been right all along, Winter was sure of it. It had been Paton who’d killed the girl in the lake. What else could this email mean? But who had sent it and how the hell did he or she know what Paton had done? And did Paton’s death mean he’d ignored the threat that was implicit in the email?

Winter photographed the email, then exited it to scroll further down the inbox, quickly seeing another email from the same sender, then another further down. He went to the one that was sent first, noting the date on it and realising it was sent on the Monday after he and Rachel had spent the weekend nosing around the Lake of Menteith. That was a coincidence too far for his liking. It seemed certain that Rachel’s intentions to stir things up had had an immediate effect after all.

He opened the first email and felt the rush again as he was hit by another bombshell. This one had been sent not just to Paton but to three other addresses. None of the other recipients was named as such and were only identified by e-addresses that seemed to be a mixture of nicknames and numbers.

There was an attachment in the email and when Tony clicked on it, a.jpg opened immediately and his heart missed several beats as he saw it was a scanned copy of the advert that Rachel had placed in the Sunday papers.

Winter managed to find his camera in his hand and focused his attentions on taking a screen grab to ensure they had a note of all the email addresses. Behind him, Danny was swearing and growling under his breath.

Suddenly a noise that came through the wall made both men stop stock-still and they could hear their heart pounding. The initial noise — maybe a floorboard creaking, maybe someone on the move next door — was repeated. Neilson motioned to Winter to stand still. After what seemed like an age, they heard a toilet flush from the next house and they both began to breathe again. Neilson gestured at his watch, indicating that they should hurry and get the hell out of there. Winter shook his head and pointed at the computer screen.

He clicked into the sent folder but it was completely empty, as was the delete one. Paton was either a very organised man, keen to conserve his mailbox limit, or else he was pretty good at covering his tracks. Winter went back into the inbox, wondering how many other emails from the man calling himself Justice had been killed off, and opened the remaining email from Paton’s persecutor.

You must pay for what you have done. There are two ways for that to happen: money or cold justice.

Attached below was Paton’s reply to the original email.

Who is this? What the hell do you want? Leave me alone.

Kyle Irving’s ‘office’ turned out to be a house on the south side, just off Shields Road. The leafy drive and the year-old Saab that sat on it suggested the man did rather well out of his pseudo counselling advice. Narey parked up next to Irving’s car and rang the doorbell.

She thought she saw a curtain twitch in her peripheral vision, somewhere on the first floor, and it took a while before she heard footsteps approach the door. It swung open to reveal a man in his early fifties with sandy brown hair and a pair of silver spectacles low on the bridge of his freckled nose. A heavy cardigan was buttoned tightly over an open-necked shirt and a pair of slippers peeped out beneath faded denims. The man looked at Narey with curiosity.

‘Mr Irving?’

‘Dr Irving. Yes?’

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Rachel Narey of Strathclyde Police. May I come in?’

Irving’s eyes narrowed cautiously and Narey could see his brain working overtime.

‘May I ask what this is in connection with?’ His voice was the gravelly product of many cigarettes.

‘I’d rather explain inside, Dr Irving. It’s a delicate matter.’

The answer didn’t seem to appease Irving much but he pulled the door wide, reluctantly allowing her inside. Narey quickly stepped through the door and into a hallway that smelled vaguely damp underneath the pervasive odour of stale tobacco smoke. The hall was cluttered with books, bags and umbrellas and looked as if it could stand a lick of fresh paint.