Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (12 page)

“She was that good?”

“I think so.” There was hesitation in her voice. “I’m no expert. I’m just a dancer. But we both go to Trinity Laban Conservatoire. It’s a specialist college for music and dance. You have to be pretty good to go there.”

“And dedicated?”

Another pause, and then she gathered herself. “Of course. We all are.”

“Was the audition in Covent Garden?” Jenny didn’t know much about opera but she knew where the Royal Opera House was. And even though Jenny knew the answer before Kim spoke, she wanted to understand how open Kim was being.

“No. That was strange actually. It was somewhere near Paddington. We looked it up on Google Maps. Some kind of office building, which was a bit odd.”

“Did she phone the Royal Opera House to double-check?”

“No way. She didn’t want to give them any chance of changing their mind. In case they’d chosen her by accident or something. Anyway, Anna said the invitation was from an agency working on behalf of the ROH.”

Jenny was about to ask if she had a copy of the invitation when Kim abruptly asked, “Was it a car accident or something like that?”

Jenny was thrown momentarily. She glanced over at Karim, who held up his hands behind Kim, as if to say, “I told you.”

“I’m sorry, Kim, I thought DC Malik had told you already. Anna was murdered.”

“
What
?” There was sudden outrage in her voice. 

Jenny didn’t answer, sensing more was to come. 

Kim continued, her voice now shaking. “Murdered? Who? How? Not some bloke she picked up? I told her she was asking for trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

Kim turned her head, catching sight of Karim to one side of her. “Nothing. It’s not important.” 

“Kim, do you mind if DC Malik takes a look in Anna’s room?”

“Sure, go ahead. First floor, first on the left.”

Karim took the hint and left them in the kitchen.

Jenny asked Kim to explain her comment again, adding, “It could be important.”

Kim folded her arms. “It’s just that ever since me and Patrick got together — he’s my boyfriend — Anna’s been out partying a lot. Too much. We always used to go out together, before Patrick, but nowhere near as much as this. And lately there’s been a string of one-night stands. It’s so embarrassing when you come down in the morning and there’s yet another bloke there with her. Once, she introduced me to one and she couldn’t even remember his bloody name.”

“So you think she may have picked up someone who killed her?”

“I guess? A year-and-a-half ago she only ever got it together with other music and dance students, and even then only occasionally. Nothing serious. Usually when I met someone as well. And she only ever went for the good-looking ones. She can, you know. She’s gorgeous. But recently? They’ve been all sorts. Short. Ugly. And mostly older, middle-aged men. Yuck.”

“Can you remember any of their names?”

“Maybe. Let me see . . .” She listed three or four names. Jenny wrote them down and then asked, “Do you recall a William Webber? Or any William?”

“No, I don’t think so. Why, have you arrested someone already?” Hope filled her face.

“Not yet, but I’m sure we will soon.” But Jenny was starting to think the opposite. She changed tack. “If she was partying so hard, how was it affecting her studies?”

“She’s pretty much stopped going to Trinity. She’s stopped practising her cello. She used to play upstairs for hours at a time. It was so nice to hear. But nothing for the last few months. Well, except for this week, practising for her audition. She says she’ll make it up before the end of year recitals. I tried to talk to her but there was no getting through. She always turns it back to me and Patrick.”

“What did she have against Patrick?”

“I think she’s just jealous. He’s so attentive towards me. But she thinks he’s . . . what’s the word she used . . .
fawny
. She said it’s not normal for a bloke to be so slavish. And for us to have so much in common. She says that anyone who has that much in common with a girl must be gay. Well he’s not gay! I think it’s because she’s never really had that kind of relationship.” 

Jenny thought back to the crime scene and realised she’d probably gone too far off-track. There was no need to have Kim rake her friend through the muck, when the killing was obviously related to the audition. And Kim referenced Anna in the present tense, which meant she’d not fully absorbed her friend’s death yet. 

“When we were talking about the audition a few minutes ago, it felt that you were holding something back. Was it to do with Anna’s recent behaviour?”

“I guess. In a way. She was invited to the audition based on a recommendation from one of her music lecturers. But she’s hardly been to the college lately. It seemed such an unlikely recommendation.”

“Which lecturer?”

“His name’s Jake Symmonds. But he’s just Jake to us. We call all our lecturers by their first names. Not like school you know.” Kim smiled weakly. The smile revealed the girl’s attractiveness. She had shapely cheekbones and full lips, and was short and petite; a ballerina’s body with a ballerina’s poise. Almost the opposite of Jenny, who had the height of a supermodel but all the grace of a grounded albatross. “I remember, Jake Symmonds.”

“When did Jake tell Anna about the audition?”

“He didn’t. Anna got an email a week ago from someone working on behalf of the ROH, inviting her to the audition. The email said that Jake had made the recommendation.”

“Did she talk to Jake about it?”

“No, the invitation implied he’d done it off-the-record and so she didn’t want to drop him in it. Or find out that he’d recommended anyone else.”

“I see. The agency you mentioned earlier. Have you got a copy of his email?”

“It’ll be on Anna’s Mac. It’s up in her room. Why are you asking so much about the audition?”

“Because that’s where she was when . . . you know.”

“Oh. Was it horrible?”

‘Horrible’ was such an understated word for what Anna had been put through. Inwardly Jenny shuddered at the memory of her discarded body. 

“Yes.”

Kim sobbed and put her head in her hands. “Poor, poor Anna.”

Jenny put a hand on her arm.

Kim looked up suddenly, tears halted. “So this audition. Was it fake? Was she set up?”

“It’s certainly starting to look that way.”

“But that means she was targeted! Someone planned this in advance. The email proves it. You can trace it, surely? I’ll get her Mac.”

Kim ran out the door before Jenny could stop her. Footsteps ascended the stairs two at a time, noisily for someone so nimble. 

Jenny sat back down, considering what she’d learned. A promising musician turned promiscuous student. A dubious recommendation leading to a fake audition. A gruesome rape and murder. A premeditated plan that exploited Anna’s dreams. Anna must have known her murderer. Or, at the very least, her murderer must have known her.

Jenny heard a key rattle in the front door. She stood up and returned to the hallway. A young man with dark hair and round, wire-framed spectacles walked through the door, shaking out a golf umbrella. He stopped short when he saw Jenny.

Jenny held up her warrant card and said, “Detective Inspector Price, Met Police. And you are?”

The man withdrew his key from the lock and closed the door. “Patrick Harper. What’s going on?”

“Oh Patrick, you shouldn’t have come!” Kim rushed down the stairs, carrying a thin silver laptop. She shoved it into Jenny’s hands and threw her arms around Patrick. “But I’m glad you did.” She buried her head in his coat and wept forlornly.

“What’s wrong, Kim?” He stroked her hair but stared steadily at Jenny.

“It’s Anna. She’s been . . . she’s dead.”

“
What
?
Dead
? Good God. I’m so sorry, Kim.” He hugged her close, kissing the top of her head. 

Karim came down the stairs. He indicated that he needed to talk to Jenny. They returned to the kitchen and spoke in low voices. Karim closed the door.

“Look at this,” Karim said, holding up a plastic bag. Latex gloves now covered his hands. The contents of the bag were obvious.

“Drugs.”

“Yup, marijuana, and I reckon the white tablets are speed.”

“Anna’s?”

“They were under her pillow.”

“I’m not surprised, given what I’ve just been told. Seems like she was on a downward spiral.”

“Who’s the Harry Potter lookalike?”

“Kim’s boyfriend.”

“
Him
? You’ve got to be taking the piss. She’s Premiership. He’s Conference at best.”

Jenny was no football fan, but she understood the reference. They were certainly mismatched. 

“Perhaps he cast a spell over her.”

“Well his magic wand is parked right outside.” Karim pointed through the window.

A Porsche 911 Carrera GTS, sparking white exterior, red leather interior, was parked directly in front. Right in front. Not two hundred yards away through rain and wind like her car. 

Lucky. 

And rich, although Kim hadn’t come across as a gold digger. But she
had
described Anna as being jealous of Kim’s relationship with Patrick. Jenny wondered if there was more to it.

She put Anna’s laptop on the table. “Let’s get a crime scene team down here. And ask for Harry O’Reilly from Computer Crime as well. There’s an email on that computer we need to trace.”

Karim pulled out his mobile phone.

Through the rain-soaked window, Jenny looked up and down the street. No other spaces to park. He really was lucky. 

Maybe Patrick was a wizard after all.

* * *

Brody was still astonished by what he’d seen. 

Spying on a beautiful young girl masturbating in the bath had really brought home how real this was. He shouldn’t have been surprised. People got up to all sorts of stuff in the privacy of their own homes. But it had still been an eye-opener.

And, he had to admit, very enjoyable.

So much so that he’d connected a spare laptop to his wall-mounted, 56” LCD television and left it displaying the
Au Pair Affair
streams in the background. Perhaps the girl would repeat the show later on. Or maybe the wife would catch the husband and the girl at it. Or maybe there were other locations on the site that were just as interesting.

As these thoughts passed through his mind, he realised how clever the whole SWY concept was. It had the drama of a soap opera crossed with the allure of secretly spying on a stranger. The global, long-standing success of the
Big Brother
television show had amply demonstrated how voyeurism hooks the public. Each series, contestants lived together for three months, with their every move observed by cameras and broadcast live to the public, who then voted to evict contestants each week. But the contestants were all too aware of the cameras and often played up for the audience. SWY was
Big Brother
for real. No cheap games and gimmicks to spice up the activities, just intimate, real-life moments on display from hundreds of contestants all over the world.

Brody checked the television screen. Not much was happening in the
Au Pair Affair
household. The Scandinavian girl was fully dressed and leafing through a magazine in the lounge. The baby was sleeping soundly in the cot in the nursery. No sign of the baby’s parents anywhere. 

Brody restarted his randomised movie soundtrack playlist, careful to ensure it didn’t wake Leroy again. This time it picked ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ from Ennio Morricone’s
The Mission
. Perhaps a bit too gentle, but good enough for now.

Brody pressed ‘Enter’ on the
WhoIs
lookup command he had typed in earlier. It ran with the parameter of the website’s domain name: SecretlyWatchingYou.com. Every domain name on the Internet is unique and registered in a central database along with certain key information such as IP addresses and contact details for the site’s administrators. Brody read through the results, which showed that the IP addresses for SecretlyWatchingYou.com were located in Russia. The contact details were for a Russian Internet Service Provider. This did not necessarily mean that Crooner42 himself was Russian; just that he was being smart by hosting the site there. Internet Service Providers in the Eastern Bloc countries did little to help police forces. 

Armed with the IP address, Brody could begin his pentest — he corrected himself — he could begin his
attack
. Simply identifying and reporting on the site’s weaknesses was no longer his objective. He needed to break in and take control. He looked at his watch and automatically drew air in through his teeth. He had wasted too much time. Matt_The_Hatter could be way ahead of him by now.

 Brody’s standard approach was to sneak through the outer perimeter of the site, find a vulnerability within its local network and then exploit it. The first defence of any network is the firewall, which is designed to only let certain types of traffic through on certain ‘ports’. His first task was to scan the firewall to identify which ports were open. He had to be careful to ensure the firewall did not detect it was being probed. It would automatically block the originating IP address. To counter this he, like many accomplished hackers, had set up his own ‘botnet’, hundreds of remote programs on servers distributed around the globe, ready to carry out his instructions. 

On every system Brody had compromised over the last few years, he had left a small remote Trojan horse program running, known as a daemon. The daemon sat idle awaiting Brody’s bidding. The administrators of these networks had no idea the daemons were there. In his penetration test result reports that he presented to his clients, he conveniently forgot to inform them that he’d left a little piece of code behind. Brody thought of it as a tip automatically added to a bill for providing a good service. Not that he declared it or offered them an option to remove it. 

Brody coordinated the activities of his remote daemons from a program running on his computer. He kicked it off, instructing the remote daemons to cycle through all ports on the firewall protecting the SWY site. The firewall had no idea this was a coordinated probe as the individual port scans were coming from hundreds of different IP addresses all over the world. Acting as one botnet, they sent their results back to Brody’s computer.