Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (21 page)

“Ah yes, Mr Evans.” She remembered the lanky, whiny man now.

“Sorry to trouble you, but I thought you ought to know . . .”

“Know what?”

“There’s been another.”

“Another what?” She had no idea what he was talking about. 

“Another dead girl.”

* * *

“Audri?” called a female voice. 

A pause. 

“Audreeee!” Much louder this time. “Where is that girl?”

“No idea.” A male voice answered. “Do you want me to go up and wake her?”

“Don’t be stupid, Derek. You can’t just walk into her room. I’ll do it.”

Silence. Thank God. Brody allowed himself to drift back to sleep again.

“She’s not here!” The woman’s voice again. Annoyed.

“What do you mean, not here? Where else would she be?”

“She mustn’t have come home last night.”

“What do you mean? Did she go out?”

“Yes, with Ornetta.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Watford, I suppose.”

Watford. 

Brody was sure that was a piece of information he needed to know. Only he couldn’t recall why. 

Watford . . . Watford. A town on the north-western perimeter of London, just inside the M25 motorway. He had been there four or five years ago with Leroy and his sister, Hope, who had also moved to London from Wales. She had met a guy in a nightclub the night before who claimed to be a stand-up comedian. Leroy wanted to check out Hope’s potential new boyfriend and declared they had to see him in action. If he made Leroy laugh, then Leroy would grant his blessing to them both. Hope begged Brody to accompany them, if only to keep Leroy reined in, and the next day Brody accompanied brother and sister to the end of the Metropolitan tube line, where they tracked down the dingy comedy club in Watford. Hope’s one-night stand was the opening act of the evening's line-up and it was soon apparent why. He turned out to be excruciatingly unfunny and the small audience, sensing blood in the water, heckled him relentlessly, especially Leroy. Initially, Hope was mortified but eventually she gave in and heckled him herself. The comedian promptly exited stage left to a round of rapturous applause. Hope never saw him again.

Watford . . . why was Watford important now? 

And then Brody had it. It was an English town. It was a place, a specific location in Middle England, where
life carried on as normal
; the line of thought that had prompted his new hacking approach the previous evening. Watford was the real-world location of the Saxton household’s webcam feed inside the virtual world of SecretlyWatchingYou.com. 

Brody opened his eyes. 

He lay slumped on his desk, his arms curled into a makeshift pillow. He raised himself slowly and felt his back crack. His shoulder muscles ached. His legs had somehow entwined themselves around the wheel spokes of his chair. He disentangled himself and immediately wished he hadn’t. Blood gushed to his lower legs and, along with it, excruciating pins and needles. He held his body rigid until they wore off. Finally, able to move without pain, he stood and rubbed his beard vigorously. It needed trimming.

Lying on the desk in front of him, he noticed the disgusting, probably-covered-in-piss, yellow bottle of bleach that Leroy had placed on his desk yesterday — the clue that had helped him realise the SWY feeds were all from the UK; his Middle England line of thought. He screwed his face in disgust as he realised that, in his sleep, he’d somehow wrapped his arms around it and inadvertently used it as a makeshift pillow. 

Cursing Leroy, he rushed to the bathroom and scrubbed his face clean. He returned to the living room with some sheets of toilet paper wrapped around one hand as a substitute glove. Carefully picking up the bottle of bleach from his desk, he dropped it and the paper into the wastebasket. He’d rather buy a replacement than touch that one again. 

He looked at his watch. 8:15 a.m. He’d been there all night. Just after 1:00 a.m., Leroy had returned home with Danny, both half-cut. They tried engaging Brody in conversation, but he grunted distractedly and then donned a pair of headphones. Eventually, they took the hint and disappeared to the bedroom. A few minutes later, Brody removed them only to immediately reinstate them on hearing porn movie noises emanating from their room. An hour later he’d risked it again and found to his relief that all was quiet. He’d carried on observing the feeds and must have fallen asleep sometime after two.

The large screen in the centre of the room displayed the
Au Pair Affair
location from within SWY. The kitchen feed was selected and the audio that had awakened him originated from there. A man sat on one of three stools at a breakfast bar, crunching his way through a bowl of cereal. Brody recognised him from the day before, when he had first seen him in the same kitchen, illicitly kissing the au pair and fondling her breasts. So, his name was Derek. Hilary stood by the sink, a smartphone in her hands.

Brody added the name to his notes. He had the full cast now. The Saxtons – Derek, Hilary and their baby, Izzy – and their au pair, Audri. And now he had a location. Watford. He should have enough to track down a specific address. He fired up a browser on his computer and quickly navigated to a commercial people-finder site. Even with the limited information he had, he would be able to run a search through loads of publicly available records, all visible online to anyone who chose to look. The site made it quick and easy, centralising information from birth, marriage and death certificates, the phonebook, electoral rolls, company director registrations and the land registry. 

As he searched, he heard the Saxtons resume their conversation. 

“Have you tried ringing her?” asked Derek.

Brody paused to look at the main screen.

“What do you think I’m doing?” Hilary waved the phone in her hand at him. It looked to Brody like an iPhone. She put it to her ear and frowned. “Ringing tone, no reply . . . Audri, it’s Hilary here. It’s 8:20 a.m. Where the hell are you? I’m going to be late for work now, young lady. Ring me as soon as you get this.”

“You should probably text her, as well. And Facebook and tweet her. Young people seem to take far more notice of that stuff than voicemails.”

“Yeah, you’re an expert on young people.” She spoke with a tedious tone in her voice, not looking at him. 

Derek peered at her sharply, his spoon frozen halfway to his mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hilary ignored him and rapidly tapped out a message on the phone.

On Brody’s PC, the search results came up. Negative. Damn, that was unexpected. He tried a few variations — initials instead of forenames, different spellings of Saxton, focusing on Hilary as the primary instead of Derek, expanding the geographic search beyond Watford — but still the search came up empty.

He wondered if he’d somehow misheard Watford. After all, he had been half asleep at the time.

In the Saxton household, the debate about Audri carried on.

“I can’t believe she’s going to make me late! Can’t you look after Izzy, Derek? Surely you haven’t got anything important on this morning. Especially after that late meeting last night.”

“It’s because of that late meeting that I have to get to the office first thing. Tons to do. Sorry, darling.”

“Bloody hell. I’ve got a huge funeral order to prepare this morning. Ten different wreaths.” She looked at her wristwatch. “The funeral directors are picking up the flowers from the shop at 1:00 p.m.”

“I’m sure Amanda can handle it, darling.”

“She won’t get back from New Convent Garden Market until about 10:00 a.m. I’ll have to ask Joan to come in, even though it’s her day off.”

“There you go, darling. Problem solved.”

“I tell you what. When that girl gets home, I’m going to bloody well kill her.”

* * *

The feeling of déjà vu was sickening.

Another dreary meeting room inside another characterless office block. Another naked, lifeless young woman, used and discarded like a Barbie doll no longer in favour, the weight of her torso keeping her body on the table, her splayed legs limply hanging down almost, but not quite, kneeling on the floor. Bound arms stretched out in front. Her head lay cheek down on the table, dark hair spilling and merging with a pool of blood. And
so much
blood. Red splatters across walls and windows from the slicing action of the killer’s sharp knife, coupled with the last few desperate spurts from the body’s once powerful beating heart and then, gravity and time having done its work, blood slowly drained from the gash across her throat and the slice on one arm into a massive red slick, puddling across the oval table and overflowing the sides to the chairs and floor beneath. 

“Is it the same?” asked DI Hamid, a note of hopefulness in his voice.

Jenny forced herself to look for differences. 

The absence of a cello was one. The lack of clothes either on the body or — she checked around — anywhere in the room was another. Just a bright red coat, thrown across the other end of the table from where the victim’s body lay. 

“Yes, pretty much the same.”

“My guvnor will be really hacked off when he gets here. He’s not had a good murder case for ages.”

“Really? I’d swap places with you any day of the week if that’s true.”

Hamid shrugged. “I wouldn’t. We might not have loads of murders to deal with every day like you lot in the Met, but we still have plenty of serious crime to keep us busy as hell.”

Hamid was from the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit, a joint force set up by the two neighbouring police constabularies bordering Greater London to its north. Watford fell within their territory rather than the Met’s. Jenny had gate-crashed someone else’s party.

Clive Evans had called an hour ago. He had been alerted by the building manager from the Flexbase offices in Watford. He had no real details to tell her, only that it was a dead girl in a meeting room, just like yesterday in Paddington. He told her local police were already on the way.

“How come your colleague from Watford phoned you so quickly?” Jenny had asked Evans.

“Because all Flexbase building managers around the country were informed of what happened here yesterday, mostly so that we could reassure any clients in case they heard about it on the news. No one for a minute thought the same thing would happen again.”

A sentiment with which Jenny completely concurred. She too had assumed that Anna Parker’s murder was a one-off. The way she had been singled out, tricked and lured to her death seemed so particular to her as a target that Jenny had not considered the possibility that somehow this was part of a series. And this line of thinking had swayed the channels of enquiry that she had proposed to Da Silva for the investigation team to follow. An assumption she seriously regretted having made.

Evans gave her the address.

On the way, she had phoned Da Silva, asking him to focus on any potential territory conflict. If this was the second in a linked series, then the Holborn MIT were already one day ahead and, therefore, needed to lead this investigation, as well. Time to see if his connections with the upper ranks were as good as he boasted they were. She also phoned Alan, Karim, Fiona and Edmonds, leaving messages for the first two when she reached their voicemails, and asking Fiona and Edmonds to join her as soon as possible.

She had never been to Watford before. Driving round its own short ring road, she could see the multi-storey car parks and department stores all circling
intu
Watford, an indoor shopping mall. At the northern point, she turned left into Clarendon Road, her destination. It seemed to be the business centre of the town, with a run of large office blocks leading towards Watford Junction station. The tallest was probably only six or seven storeys high, certainly nothing to threaten the giddy heights of their cousins in the City of London or Docklands. Three double-parked patrol cars told her she’d reached the address.

Upon sight of her Met warrant card, the PC acting as guard raised an eyebrow but granted her access to the reception of the Watford Flexbase office. It was far more modest than its Paddington equivalent, more functional and with a guest seating area that actually looked comfortable. She was directed to the lifts. The second floor corridors turned out to have the same two shades of pastel green as in Paddington, as well as the same inoffensive framed prints. 

Before entering the meeting room, she put on the white plastic overshoes and gloves she had grabbed from the boot of her car. Two similarly clad men looked up, quizzical expressions on their faces. They’d introduced themselves as DI Deepak Hamid and DS Joe Selby. Jenny explained who she was and why she was here. Once Jenny had stated that she believed the crime to be related to her other case, Hamid said he’d need to inform his guvnor, DCI Jeffries, and left the room, mobile phone at his ear. 

“Look at this,” said Selby, who was kneeling on the floor, just beyond the pool of blood.

Jenny kneeled down next to him. A ripped open envelope and an unfolded single sheet of paper, with printing on one side, lay discarded on the floor underneath. Blood had reached the envelope but not the sheet. Jenny reached a gloved hand out —

“Don’t you dare interfere with my crime scene,” said a hoarse, booming voice.

Jenny looked through the legs of the table and chairs in the direction of the voice. Two pairs of legs stood by the entrance to the room. She recognised DI Hamid’s faded jeans on the left, shoes still engulfed in white plastic. The other pair of legs was covered by sharply creased grey trousers, which met black shoes also contained within elasticated covers. She raised her head above the eye-line of the table, still kneeling. The trousers were part of a sharp Italian-cut suit, with a plain white shirt open at the neck, silver cufflinks visible at the cuffs. The owner of the suit was very tanned, with deep lines etched across his forehead and in the corners of his eyes. His full head of wavy black hair counteracted his sun-damaged skin and made his age hard to determine.

“DCI Jeffries?” Jenny asked, standing up.

“Yes,” confirmed Hamid, on behalf of his boss.