Deadlight (14 page)

Imber was no stranger to cybertalk but Michaels was as fascinated as Faraday.

‘And?’ he said.

‘Lots of stuff.’ He patted the pile of print-outs in front of him. ‘Keep you going for weeks.’

Faraday nodded. Duplicating data like this was standard procedure. Coughlin’s original hard disk had itself become vital evidence, its preservation for court purposes as important as the state of the room where he’d met his death. A virtual crime scene, Faraday thought, full of hidden pointers.

Imber wanted to know about Coughlin’s manners on the internet. There were protocols here, many of them unspoken, but a very definite code to which you were expected to conform. Had Coughlin behaved himself? Or did the print-outs tell a different story?

‘He was an animal,’ Stockley said at once. ‘The guest from hell. Threw his weight around wherever he went. If you’re after a list of guys he’s offended, I can give you thousands.’

‘Great.’ Faraday glanced at his watch. Despite the messages he’d left, Corbett still hadn’t been in touch.

Stockley was passing round examples of Coughlin’s contribution to newsgroups. The groups themselves were categorised under headings. ‘Rec.’, for instance, catered for hobbies and pastimes while ‘sci.’ was reserved for scientific exchanges. Traditionally, all the oddballs, misfits and hippie refugees headed for the cyber-hills, getting together in newsgroups under the ‘alt.’ heading, and this had been Coughlin’s favourite destination. Here, at least, he stood some chance of bumping into like-minded folk, the cyber equivalent of a dodgy bar, yet even in these newsgroups he seemed determined to bust every rule.

Faraday was looking at an exchange from a couple of years back. A guy calling himself Dozer had told a joke
about three priests on a 747. The joke was far too involved and not very funny but had nevertheless attracted a small round of applause from others logged on. Then, abruptly, in steamed Freckler. He hated fucking priests. The only good priest was a dead priest. He’d seen enough of the cunts to last him a lifetime and a half. When the chips were down, and you really needed someone to talk to, away they went with their Bibles and prayer books and you’d find them days later screwing some poor fucking choirboy to death. This outburst, totally out of keeping with everything else that had happened in the group, earned a mild rebuke from a couple of fellow contributors. ‘Hey, fella,’ one of them had typed, ‘if that’s what you do for openers, hate to be around later in the day.’

Indeed. Reading on through more of the print-outs, Faraday began to wonder whether Coughlin had been drunk during these tirades, or whether the privacy of 7a Niton Road had simply offered him the chance to get one or two things off his chest.

Whatever the drift of the newsgroup conversation he encountered, he seized the smallest opportunity to blaze off at a tangent, attacking a series of seemingly random targets. A couple of minutes with stuff like this and there was absolutely no doubt about the length of his personal hit list.

Leaving the priesthood to one side, Coughlin had hated Jews, blacks, Hispanics, every Home Secretary who’d ever lived, politicians in general, football fans, social workers, smart bastards who drove BMWs and thought they owned the fucking world, girlie weather forecasters, people who ponced around in Waitrose, and the dozy old bitch at the school round the corner who saw the kids across the road and kept grinning at everyone like she was some kind of idiot.

In judicial terms, this stuff was of zero evidential value – there was no law against spoiling someone’s evening in
a newsgroup – but Faraday sensed it was priceless in terms of what it told him about the inner Coughlin. There was a madness about this man that you’d want to avoid, an inner darkness that enveloped every single one of his conversations. Not once did anything amuse or gladden him. Not once did he offer anyone a compliment or even a greeting. In a real-life bar, this was a voice that would empty the place in minutes. No wonder Davidson, banged up with no prospect of escape, had hated the man.

Faraday asked Stockley what he thought. Coughlin, on this evidence, was a monster. No?

Stockley counselled caution.

‘You have to be careful with all this stuff,’ he said. ‘The internet’s a strange place. It’s not face to face, and that’s the point. Lots of people pretend. They adopt a persona. They change their age, change their sex. Sometimes they become what they’ve wanted to be all along. A lot of it’s straight fantasy.’

‘But Coughlin
was
horrible. Everyone we’ve talked to says so.’

‘I know. Dave told me on the phone.’ He shot Michaels a look. ‘Mr Nasty? Am I right?’

‘Spot on,’ Dave Michaels confirmed. ‘You read those statements from his fellow screws and no one had a good word for him. Tell me something, Frank’ – he had his finger anchored in one of the print-outs – ‘what’s this?’

He passed the print-out around the table. In July last year, after someone in the States had taken violent exception to Coughlin’s views on the US navy, Coughlin had told him to get down on all fours and do himself a favour. This invitation had been followed by a strange footnote. Faraday gazed at it. OX? What did that mean?

Stockley obliged with a translation.

‘It’s like a smiley.’ He reached for a pen. ‘This’ – he drew :-) – ‘means you’re happy, someone’s made you
laugh. This’ :–( ‘means the reverse. People use it all the time in newsgroups and chat rooms.’

‘And OX?’

‘I’m guessing but I think it means kiss my arse. That’s one of the things about Coughlin. He seemed to make these things up. Here. He used to type this sometimes, too.’

Stockley drew another series of characters and passed it across. Faraday frowned. What did O’’’’’’’’’’’’’\: mean?

Stockley laughed.

‘Work it out. In conversation, he’d probably say “Fuck you”.’

Faraday peered at it again: the big ‘O’, the eager line of apostrophes, the erect little backslash.

‘Nice,’ he said at last.

Brian Imber wanted to know about Stockley’s time-frame. This stuff was very interesting but it didn’t really get them any further. They’d all assumed that Coughlin was a monster and now they knew it for sure. When might they expect hard leads?

‘Like what?’

‘Like people he might have pissed off recently.’ Imber picked up a handful of print-outs and let them fall through his fingers. ‘I don’t know how personal this stuff gets but I suppose it’s possible that someone might have come looking. No?’

It certainly happened, Stockley said. There came moments when individuals crossed the cyber-divide, heading back into real life. Some of these newsgroup encounters ended in bed. There was no reason to suppose that others shouldn’t lead to the mortuary.

‘And Coughlin? You’ll be checking that out?’

‘Of course. The next stage is for us to go through his recent conversations. The newsgroups should all be archived and accessible. Chat rooms are dodgier. Depending on the server, these conversations often fall off the end and disappear within hours. Then there’s the
problem of tracing particular subscribers. If it’s a foreign-based ISP, it could take for ever.’

Faraday was lost again. Like Imber, he wanted a name, an address, hard data, a door he could knock on, not a bunch of fantasists in la-la land.

Dave Michaels held up a hand.

‘Why Freckler?’ he said.

Stockley admitted he didn’t know. He’d never heard the nickname before. Was Coughlin a ginger by any chance?

‘No way.’ Michaels had seen the SOC photos, full colour. ‘Not a freckle on him.’

Michaels glanced down the table. They’d all heard the trill of Faraday’s mobile. Faraday dug it out of his jacket pocket, then frowned and glanced at his watch.

‘So how come it’s taken you so long?’ he muttered.

He bent to the phone again, the frown deepening. At length he nodded.

‘Make it half seven. My office.’ He snapped the phone shut and looked at Michaels. ‘Corbett,’ he said briefly.

Winter, helping himself to another chocolate biscuit, couldn’t believe his ears.

‘Tell me that again.’

The woman readily obliged. She’d taken the Audi to the car wash at the Jet station in Green Road. She’d gone for the once-a-month shampoo and wax, buying a couple of pounds’ worth of tokens from the cashier in the garage. She’d given the car a good hosing with the foamy brush and followed up with a high-pressure rinse but the token had run out halfway through and she’d had to go back inside to buy another one. There’d been a bit of a queue at the counter but she hadn’t given the car a second thought. Yes, it had been unlocked, and yes, the keys were still in the ignition, but the last thing she’d expected was to go back round the corner and find the bloody thing gone.

‘And the dog? Charlie?’

‘Inside on the back seat. He loved it when I used the car wash, especially the soap cycle.’

‘And you reported the car missing?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘What about the dog?’

‘I mentioned it, certainly.’ She frowned. ‘Maybe it never got written down.’

Mrs Czinski lived around the corner from the Camber Dock, in Old Portsmouth, a newish house with a red door and a now-empty garage. She worked as a part-time teacher in the local grammar school, a job for which she was eternally grateful because her Polish-born architect husband had lost a battle against alcoholism and was currently hospitalised with suspected cirrhosis. Losing the car had been a real bind but what she most wanted in the world was her dog back.

Winter, who had Charlie in his Subaru outside, wanted to know more about the car.

‘Audi, you say?’

‘That’s right. Audi A4. It used to belong to my husband but it’s not much use to him these days. I was wondering whether to tell him about it but there’s no point at the moment, is there? Not if you’re going to get it back?’

Winter was asking himself why all this had come as a surprise. The details of the theft would have been input on to the force automatic crime recording system, presumably under this woman’s name. A simple search on the ACR database through his own PC would have highlighted the Audi’s disappearance. Shame he hadn’t done it.

‘What colour was the car?’

‘Red.’

‘Registration?’

‘XBK 386 …’ She half-closed her eyes. ‘W.’

‘Any identifying marks?’

‘Not when I last saw it.’ She paused. ‘You will get it back, won’t you?’

Winter assured her they’d be doing their best. Charlie ending up with Darren Geech wasn’t proof that the boy had nicked it in the first place but Winter, given Geech’s track record, didn’t need much convincing that this was probably the case. His mum’s flat was barely a quarter of a mile away from the Jet station in Green Road, and if you had the right connections there were countless places where you could stash a motor like that. No wonder the boy had disappeared. He was probably squatting in some lock-up, keeping an eye on Mrs Czinski’s precious Audi.

‘This dog of yours, Charlie,’ Winter began, ‘we’ve definitely retrieved him.’

‘You have?’ She clapped her hands and for a moment Winter thought he was in for a hug. ‘Where? Where is he?’

‘At the station,’ Winter said. ‘Good as gold, he is.’

‘My Charlie? You’re sure it’s my Charlie? Little pink bows on his collar?’

Winter smiled. The thought of Darren Geech out and about in Somerstown with a dog sporting pink bows was irresistible.

‘The bows have gone, I’m afraid. But he’s a champion eater.’

‘He is? Thank God for that. Wonderful. You’ve made my day.’

Winter helped himself to another cup of tea from the pot on the low table between them. He’d be bringing Charlie round a bit later but first he had a favour to ask. The police were forever on the look-out for good-news stories. Charlie’s return was a natural. If he talked to a contact on the
News
, might Mrs Czinski be willing to pose for a photo? Charlie makes it home again? Something like that?

‘Of course I would, of course I would. Only too pleased.’

‘They might name you in the paper. Is that a problem?’

‘Absolutely not. Why should it be?’

‘No reason at all, Mrs Czinski.’ Winter smiled. ‘Just asking.’

Corbett was late for his appointment with Faraday. Nearly eight o’clock, the Major Crimes suite was emptying fast. One of the indexers in the incident room was still inputting data into HOLMES, and Paul Ingham was reprioritising his undischarged list of actions for tomorrow morning, but the offices either side of the long central corridor were largely empty.

Faraday hooked the spare chair towards him with his foot and told Corbett to sit down. They could do this quietly, get it over with, or Corbett could throw his toys out of the pram. His choice.

‘I’m not with you.’ Corbett’s eyes were the colour of slate. ‘Sir.’

‘You went to the Detective Superintendent behind my back. That was pretty silly.’

‘Was it?’

Corbett held Faraday’s gaze. The motorcycling leathers looked brand new. The white full-face helmet in his lap was decorated with a long, scarlet lightning flash, and when he shifted position in the chair Faraday caught sight of the neatly stencilled medical details on the back. This man, thought Faraday, belongs in a kids’ cartoon. The Warrior King. Blood group O.

‘Why didn’t you come to me? Why go to Mr Willard?’

‘Because you weren’t here.’

‘I was away for a couple of hours. You could have written me a note if it was that important. Rung me on my mobile. Left me a number to get back on.’

‘You could have been anywhere. How was I to know you’d be back so soon?’

‘Did you bother to check with DS Michaels?’

‘No.’

‘Shame, he’d have told you where I was.’ Faraday let the silence grow between them. It didn’t bother Corbett in the least. ‘So tell me, what makes you think you’ve got the right to go straight to the top like that?’

‘I had some intelligence. I thought it was materially important.’

‘Thought?’

‘Think. The reason I phoned Mr Willard was simple. Stuff gets lost in the system. That’s no surprise. Happens everywhere. Get yourself plugged in the way I’ve done, keep your ear to the ground, and you don’t want that kind of intelligence just dribbling away …’