The Last Straw (21 page)

Hunched in front of the laptop was the tallest person Warren had ever seen. As he looked at the man Warren decided that if he were ever asked to describe this individual in one word, that word would have to be ‘long’. From his impossibly lengthy legs, somehow folded under the desk, to his spindly fingers and oval face, it was as if the man had been stretched vertically.

Without standing up — he had no need to: his arms could easily reach Warren standing near the door — the man put out a huge hand. “Pete Robertson, Forensic IT,” he announced, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. Warren returned the courtesy, marvelling at how his hand was swallowed up by the giant sitting in front of him. Robertson was a civilian worker, Warren noted from his badge. That wasn’t unusual — most of the force’s computer specialists were recruited from outside the police. Nevertheless, Warren found himself wondering if the police still had height limits for new recruits. He strongly suspected that Robertson would not have been within those limits.

“What have you found then, Pete?”

“A couple of things, some of which I think you probably already know, others which I imagine will be a surprise.” Robertson turned to face Warren, who had perched himself on the end of the table.

“First, Professor Tunbridge probably wasn’t the most confident of computer users. It seems that he learnt exactly what he needed to complete a particular task. He could run basic Office programs fairly competently — you don’t have much choice these days — and he used email and web browsers, but, with the exception of a couple of surprising skills, which he had clearly taken the trouble to work out, he was a generally unimaginative user.”

Jeremiah their guide, nodded his agreement. Not for the first time, Warren felt a touch of paranoia when sitting in the presence of IT specialists. He regarded himself as a fairly practised computer user; nevertheless he always imagined that the moment he left IT Support and the door closed behind him, all of the technicians fell about laughing at his incompetence.

Pushing the thoughts to one side, Warren gestured for them to continue. Jeremiah took up the story. “Professor Tunbridge used the university’s standard email client, Microsoft Outlook, on his work laptop, but hadn’t gone to the trouble of configuring his smartphone or his home laptop to pick up his email as well. If he wanted to check his email in the evening from home, he’d log into our remote client, then access it as if he was on campus. Bit of a faff if you ask me. Instructions and help are available for any staff or students who want to pick up their email without having to log on, but he never used them, it seems.”

Warren raised a hand. “Back up a second. You mentioned remote access. Does this mean that he could get access to his computer files and email from home?”

Jeremiah nodded. “Of course. We have full remote access to our systems from home via a thin client server system. Staff and students simply follow a link on our website, download a piece of client software and then it’s as if they are sitting at their desk in their office, or a public access terminal in the library.”

That was an interesting wrinkle, thought Warren. If Tunbridge could work from home just as easily as he could from campus, then why was he sitting in his office at ten p.m. on a Friday, when he could have been enjoying the comforts of his own living room? And had his killer had anything to do with that decision?

Jeremiah continued, “Going back to Tunbridge’s usage of computers, a lot of our staff use electronic calendars. Everyone has smartphones these days and so they can use an electronic calendar, rather than a traditional paper diary. We even run a server application to let users share appointments and documents more easily. According to our records, Tunbridge has never even logged on to the system.” He glanced at Robertson, who took over.

“When he was found, a smartphone was in his pocket. A look at its contents showed that, despite owning it over six months, he had only ever used it to make and receive calls and send the odd text message. He’d never even used the calendar function, let alone synchronised it with his work account. The only photo in the gallery is a blurry self-portrait, taken at arm’s length on Christmas Day. If I had to guess, he came across the camera function when he was playing with his new toy and never used it again.”

Warren felt slightly deflated. So it seemed that Tunbridge’s laptop was unlikely to help shed a light on why he was working so late on a Friday night, nor was it likely to help explain how or why his killer targeted him that night. He said as much.

“Don’t be so sure, DCI Jones.” Robertson’s grin was slightly disturbing, given his distorted features. He turned back to the laptop. “The interesting stuff is what’s in his Internet browsing history — or, rather, not, in his case. His entire history was deleted some time in the twenty-four hours preceding his death.”

Warren shot forward off his perch. “Say that again?”

“His entire Internet browsing history was deleted some time in the preceding twenty-four hours before he was found. Actually, twenty-two hours if we’re being pedantic, as the whole history was there when his computer’s profile was backed up automatically at midnight, the previous day.”

“Who did it? And why?”

“As to the first, we can only speculate. Tunbridge may have done it himself, or his killer may have done it immediately after killing him — we can’t be sure. If his killer did do it, it was sloppy and silly. There are loads of ways to find a person’s browsing history, especially on a private network like the university. Deleting your Internet history just raises a bright red flag saying, ‘Hi, look at me. I’ve been browsing where I shouldn’t!’”

Robertson emphasised his point by waving his arms, almost taking Jeremiah’s eye out in the process.

“As to the why, that’s your call, Chief Inspector, but a look at the sites he’s been visiting might be useful.” Robertson’s grin broadened. Warren could hardly blame him. Let him have his moment of glory, he decided magnanimously; poor bugger probably never gets the recognition he deserves.

“Here we have a list of all of the sites that Tunbridge visited in the last three months, including the day he died. I’ll email it to you, but here are the highlights.” Robertson called up a lengthy list of website addresses. The site’s specific address was highlighted in blue as a clickable link. Next to it a one-line sentence described the link. “Most of the stuff is crap and fairly innocuous. He generally started his day with a trawl of the BBC News website followed by a browse of some select journal articles — he received a daily email alert to help him do that. Most of the rest of the sites are ones that Jeremiah tells me are fairly run-of-the-mill sites of interest to the biological research community.

“However, there are two sites that may be of interest to you. First, his university email account wasn’t his only account.”

“He had a Hotmail account?” guessed Jones.

Robertson shook his head, smiling. “Better than that. He had his own domain name.” Seeing Warren’s uncomprehending expression, he expanded, “With the aid of a help tutorial from the online version of
What PC
, a couple of months ago he bought the domain name ‘TridentAntibacterials.com’ on his credit card. Bundled in with that came a couple of gigabytes of web storage and an email client. He could set up as many email addresses ending ‘@TridentAntibacterials.com’ as he wished. He only set up one, ‘CEO@ TridentAntibacterials.com’, but it is active.”

“Trident was the name that Professor Tompkinson mentioned in connection with Tunbridge’s research,” recalled Jones. “It sounds as if he was setting the groundwork for starting up his own company. Having his own email address sounds a lot more professional than using Hotmail or even his university account. Have you had a look at his emails yet?”

Robertson nodded. “Bloody easy to get in — would you believe he uses the same password for his university and personal accounts?”

Warren smiled. “Let me guess — ‘Password’?”

Robertson frowned, the wind briefly taken out of his sails. “Yes, well, anyway, I’ll leave it to you to decide upon the importance of his correspondence, but almost all of the emails he exchanged were with a single address: ‘[email protected]’. The last email that he received was at nine p.m. on the day he was killed.”

Warren felt his face flush with excitement. It could all be a coincidence, he cautioned himself, but nevertheless his gut tightened. “Do we know who this person is?”

“Here’s where it gets really interesting. I decided to look up this person.” His long fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard and a new browser window opened. Typing rapidly, he entered the email address into the browser’s search bar. Instantly the familiar Google results page appeared, with a single entry ‘California Biotechnology Investment Ltd’. Without being asked, he clicked on the blue link. Immediately, the page turned to the familiar white ‘404 not found’ page.

“Shit,” swore Warren.

“That’s what I thought, but then I remembered — in cyberspace nothing is ever really deleted.” Robertson clicked the ‘back’ button on the browser, returning to the search results page. Moving the mouse pointer, he highlighted the results again.

“It may no longer be active, but it was up long enough for Google to cache it.” Without being asked, he explained, “In order to speed up searches, search engines take a snapshot of webpages that they index. It allows them to extract keywords and whatever other information that they need. Google stores these in a cache and allows users to actually access the snapshot and see what the page looked like at the time that it was indexed. It can be several days out of date, but that doesn’t always matter if the page doesn’t change very often.”

Sure enough, a light blue link next to the entry read ‘cached’. Warren remembered seeing that link plenty of times in the past as he’d conducted web searches, but couldn’t ever remember clicking it. Robertson did so.

Immediately the page changed to a photograph of a shiny, metal and glass fronted building. Superimposed over the bottom left of the picture, an ethnically diverse group of lab-coated young people with impressively good teeth — some with clipboards, others holding what appeared to be laboratory equipment — stared earnestly at the camera. Across the top of the page ‘California Biotechnology Investment Ltd’ was emblazoned.

To the right, the company mission statement proclaimed that CBI Ltd was a privately funded venture capitalist firm specialising in ‘funding today’s ideas to solve tomorrow’s problems’.

At the bottom of the page a small disclaimer read ‘Enquiries by invitation only’ with a mail icon next to it. Robertson hovered the mouse pointer over it revealing the mysterious contact’s email address.

“Is that it? I don’t see any other links.”

“That’s it. Either this is the holding page for a very selective venture capitalist firm — ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’, or it’s a scam. Either way, it appears to have become unavailable some time during the past seventy-two hours since Google last indexed it.”

Warren digested the implications for a few moments. It was too much to take in all at once, he decided; he needed time to think. “I think we’re starting to build a picture here, but I’m not sure what of. Pete, can you send me copies of all of the correspondence sent and received from this email account? Further can we try and track down this company and maybe this J Priest?” Robertson nodded. “Oh, and can you keep a monitor on this account, in case we get another email? I think we need to get back to the station and try and piece this together,”

Robertson agreed but held up a cautionary hand. “Just one more thing I think you might be interested in.”

“Oh, what might that be?” Warren paused, wondering what was coming next.

“Jeremiah?” Robertson nodded to the young university staff member to take over.

“At 21:55 hours on Friday evening, somebody copied all of Professor Tunbridge’s files onto a USB memory stick.”

Chapter 22

Back at the station, Warren called for a meeting at five p.m., to pull together the day’s findings. That gave him a half-hour or so to go through the email correspondence between Tunbridge and the mysterious J Priest.

The ten emails had been archived into a single document, in chronological order, and Warren was able to print them out and read them like a transcript of a conversation.

The first, sent by Priest to Tunbridge, hinted at the way the two had met.

Dear Prof Tunbridge,

Thanks a lot for taking the time out to chat about your work at yesterday’s break-out session. Your work is fascinating and, as I said at the time, is something that CBI Ltd might be interested to know more about.

Unfortunately, I have to fly back to Los Angeles tonight and so can’t take you up on your offer to tour your laboratory at the moment. Nevertheless, I will be speaking to colleagues about your work. To that end, I wonder if you would be kind enough to send me a copy of the PowerPoint presentation you gave.

Yours,

Dr J Priest,

Senior Investment Scout, California Biotechnology Investment Ltd.