Revenge (10 page)

He said that Henry returned to England and
soon contacted him. He rang while Mark was in France and seemed quite irate. Henry said that his apartment had been broken into and among the things stolen was his laptop. Mark said that Henry warned him that all the emails they'd sent each ot
her were stored on the laptop. “
I didn't
think any more about it really,” Mark said. “
Not until I started receiving bizarre junk mail which began to worry me. I deleted the first few emails without reading them but then one arrived with Henry's name at the top. The email said that I co
uld be set for life
but it wasn't very specific about what that entailed. The phone calls started shortly afterwards, growing increasingly threatening. I
can't remember if the calls
came from the same person. Maybe it was Henry's girlfriend. The
caller claimed that she had
Henry's emails, including a particularly nasty email which
Mark had written about Rebecca.”

“
What do you think this mystery woman or women were p
lanning to do with the emails?”
Detective Leary asked sceptically.

“They threatened to send
the incriminating emails to Rebecca. I was worried because I knew how much it would hu
rt her if she found out the sort
of things I'd been telling other people about her, so I
agreed to pay the blackmailers.”

“
Why were t
he blackmailers using Savannah Kingston's address?”

“
I don't know. I just follow
ed instructions.”

Mark refused to acknowledge that he was being treated like a common criminal and insisted on treating the interviews like a rather awkward social situation. He resolutely addressed the officers by their first names, making firm eye contact and grinning at the absurdity of the situation. He kept a white handkerchief clutched in his hands which he kept patting smooth on his knee before folding it over and over on itself as he thought furiously for a way out. As the interviews slowly progressed the handkerchief was folded and unfolded countless times but Mark never stopped talking.
The officers struggled to keep up with him and had great difficulty keeping notes of the rapid-fire
s
tream of stories that Mark was
providing them.

Later, he even had the audacity to complain that the officers
hadn't managed to capture his tone of voice
in their notes and had missed out swathe
s of what he was telling them. “
How can your paraphras
ing put across the whole truth?” he demanded in irritation. “
I want it written word for word
otherwi
se it isn't truly what I said, only a mere interpretation.”
He frowned as the police notes were read out to him at t
he end of each interview and insisted
that it really didn't sound like him.

Over many hours of interviews he fleshed
out his intricate story. Henry Whitington-Smyt
h became a living, breathing person whose aim in l
ife was to ruin everything which
Mark had built up over the years. Mark insisted that he was the v
ictim; himself and his family. “
I would never do anything to
hurt the mother of my children.”
Over the course of three days he denied and denied. He wept and laughed and tried to make the detectives understand that it was all some sort of terrible mistake. For their part, the police only had Savannah's word that there had been a link between her and Mark and she was hardly the most reliable s
ource! They hadn't had time
to forensically examine the computer
s
which had been stolen.
At that stage the police hadn't yet discovered the emails or the fact that Mark's computer profile had been wiped two weeks later than he had claimed
.

Chapter 8

Back in England, Daniel Williams
was helping Scotland Yard with their investigation and was being very forthcoming about events in Ireland. Irish detectives had travelled to and from England and the case against Savannah was shaping up nicely. However the evidence against Mark wasn't showing much movement unti
l they received information which
could provide the proof they were looking for.

Reminiscing about their stay in Ireland, Daniel told officers how he and Savannah had dumped the computer in a wooded area at the back of the hotel. Scotland Yard promptly informed the Irish police where the
hardware might be found and a team was
dispatched to recover it from the bushes. Detective Leary prayed fervently that the Irish weather hadn't reduced the hard drive to useless junk and
that
they could find the vital proof against Mark.

If the desktop had remained in its
original
hiding place it would certainly have been damaged by the rain an
d the incriminating emails from “
devils-revenge
” would
have been
lost
forever. Luckily, it was r
escued long before
the weather took
its hold. Ollie Mangan had been
the caretaker at
the
h
otel for many years
. It was his job to oversee
g
eneral maintenance
and ensure that
any technical hitches the guests encountered were resolved
. When he wasn't need
ed
he spent most of his time in his work
-
room deep in the bowels of the building. He was a solid man who didn't waste his words and didn't see the point of mention
i
ng things that weren't asked about.

One of his duties was to check around the outside of the hotel to see if gu
ests had left anything behind. “
It'
s amazing the things I’ve found
abandon
ed in the bushes,”
Ollie told the police at his interview.

Anyway, Ollie
had
set off on h
is usual tour of the gardens, ex
pecting
to find cumbersome rubbish which
would need to be collected and put in a sk
ip for disposal. It had
been a mild s
pring but the weather hadn't become warmer quite
yet.
Th
e heady heat of summer still seemed
a long way off.
The computer was wrapped up in a black canvas bag which had successfully protected it from the worst of the weather and the hard drive l
ooked exactly
as it had in the offices of M&R Photography.

Ollie took the computer into his workshop and stowed it away. He made enquiries to make sure none of the hotel computers had found their way into the bushes for whatever reason but none were missing. It wasn't until all his research had drawn a complete and utter blank that he began to loo
k on the computer as his own. “I
decided to check if it was
working and so I plugged it in,” he told the detectives. “
The hard drive whirred into action but without the monitor it was no use so I unplugged it and zipped it back up into its bag. I left it stored in my workshop for safekeeping, just in c
ase the owner ever did show up”
It was st
ill sitting in the corner of his
workroom
when Detective Leary came searching
for it. Ollie
handed it over without complaint. He was more than happy to help and the crucial hard drive was rushed off for further examination.

Meanwhile, Mark was refusing to accept the accusations w
hich were being made against him
. He was the type of man who was used to being able to talk his way out of anything and he firmly believed that this situation would not be an exception to his charms. Once again, he turned to the internet to find a way out. He researched the legal procedure and learnt that he had the right to make a personal appeal to the Director of Public Prosecutions. If anyone could persuade the Director not to press
charges he believed he could. However, t
his proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking on Mark's part and displayed his arrogance in the belief that he could achieve things which nobody else could.

Aga
inst the advice of his barrister
, who knew that the letters would be read out in court if he were charged, he wrote his first letter to the Director. He begged him to be released, casting himself as the tragic hero
in a story of his own telling. Needless to say, h
e never received a response from the Director but luckily he hadn't been cast co
mpletely adrift
. Rebecca was standing by him and since his arrest she had been his rock. She knew her husband was
capable of many things and knew
they would never share the same intimacy again but she refused to believe
that he would ever
physically
hurt her. He loved his children dearly and there was no way that he would want them to be without the
ir mother.
S
he believed the story of Henry Whitington-Smy
th as recounted by Mark because she s
imply could not accept that he
would betray her to that extent. Somewhere deep down she still felt he loved her
just as a little part of her would always love him
.

Henry Whitington-Smy
th was a welcome scapegoat behind whom Mark
could hide.  If they could find him he w
ould be their star witness, Rebecca insisted. Of course, Mark didn't have any contact details for him. He blamed a virus for deleting any contact information and Rebecca didn't have the heart or the energy to argue with
him.

Mark mentioned
that Henry may have had a connection to Savannah so he bought a return ticket to
London
, at Rebecca's insistence, where he spent about ten day
s “investigating” the mythical figure of Mr. Whitington-Smy
th. He seemed determined to find the man whom the police h
ad failed to find. By the time Mark returned home Rebecca
had
hired
private investigator
Graham Scott who
s
he
asked to find the elusive
Henry Whitingto
n-Smy
th.
Rebecca
had no doubt
he
would prove her husband’s
innocence.

T
he police were busy analysing the computer which they'd seized from the hotel grounds. The extraordinary correspond
ence between “
devils-revenge
” and “assassin_hire”
was revealed piece by piece. The emails were peppered throughout t
he hard dr
ive of the computer. T
he c
orrespondence was scattered
and it was
painstaking
to put back together. The hard drive revealed searches for hitmen and assassins, contract killers and inheritance rights.
A reference to money being transferred from Dublin to
London
, via
courier
, in one of the many email exchanges, prompted this latest development to be followed up. This resulted in Mark admitting that he had sent money via
courier
to stop a blackmailer. Police knew that the
courier
element would play a significant part in their case when considered in conjunction with the crucial emails.

Mark had worried that there might be a possibility that the computer would be analysed by the police
and had insisted that it be removed and dumped somewhere irretrievable but the bumbling scam artists he'd hired hadn't bothered. They'd only gotten as far as the back of the ho
t
el and thanks to Ollie
Mangan's work
-
room the hard drive was still in pe
rfect condition to reveal their sickening
secrets. Mark was correct to be worried about the searches which had taken place but in the e
nd it was not the searches which “
devils-revenge
”
had conducted for a hitman that made the most significant impact on the police, it was searches of a more mundane n
ature which sparked their curio
sity.

Secure in the anonymity of a web based pseudonym,
Mark had emailed “assassin_hire”
far more freely than he should have
done
. He
had used his own name to open his “
devils-revenge
”
email address an
d repeatedly signed his emails “Mark.”
He also used an internet search engine which provided an email address that stayed logged in when the user returned to the home page.
The search history showed that “
devils-revenge
”
was researching camera lenses and astrological predictions for Mark's date of
birth.