Black Widow (48 page)

An executable file bearing the icon of a sword-wielding warrior decoded the abbreviation as standing for Sacred Reign 4: The Exalted, an online role-playing game.

He heard a muted ping from the headset and was alerted to an instant message from Buzzkill. It had only been a couple of minutes since Parlabane had sent the files, which seemed no time to make even a cursory analysis, but the hacker was full of surprises, and on this occasion apparently full of wonder.

Buzzkill: This is revolutionary. Seriously leading-edge stuff.

Parlabane eagerly typed a reply.

Me: What does it do?

Buzzkill: It allows you to view remotely stored information such as text and video on your computer, rendered in the form of pages.

He was confused. It sounded like Buzzkill was describing a web browser.

Me: You mean like Chrome or Firefox? What's revolutionary about that?

Buzzkill: I was being sarcastic. And it's not
like
Firefox. It
is
Firefox. He's just copy-pasted the code so that it will run in a compiler window. I'm guessing it's so that if someone was looking over his shoulder, it would give the impression he was working on something. I don't know what this guy's been doing with his time, but he's definitely not been programming.

What indeed, Parlabane asked himself, navigating back to the Sacred Reign folder.

He launched the game. It wouldn't let him log in without a username and password, but it did allow him to browse the specs and stats of existing profiles. There was only one. Elphinstone's avatar was named Necronimous and it appeared he was ranked as a demi-god. Parlabane guessed that took some serious commitment.

A sub-menu offered a highly detailed breakdown of session logs and in-game statistics. He scrolled up and down, taking a few notes and doing calculations.

Parlabane was agog.

It appeared that Elphinstone was clocking up sometimes nine hours a day in the fictional realm of Calastria, five or six days a week for the past few months, starting from the moment MTE set up operations in this office.

Parlabane quit out and opened the other folders, each of which contained launch shortcuts to games: Starfire, Age of Attrition and Death or Glory. All of these were principally multiplayer games, and their in-game stat logs showed that Elphinstone had been putting in regular, sustained play time on all of them.

Was that really what had happened here? Had Peter Elphinstone seduced a career-driven and well-salaried woman such as Diana Jager into being his wife simply so that he could sponge off her? Spending his days playing videogames at a fake job, keeping an authentic-looking work program handy in case anybody had reason to pop their head around the door?

No. Because though Elphinstone might be faking his work, MTE wasn't a fake company. Parlabane had seen the documents, and he had met one of the investors, an individual you would not want to be taking money from under false pretences. He thought of what Alan Harper had told him regarding Elphinstone's desperate final phone call, sounding scared and talking about being in over his head. Was that it, then: that he had snared Sam Finnegan with a lucrative but bafflingly techy-sounding proposal, naively credulous of the gangster's ‘legitimate businessman' front? Had he been disastrously mistaken in thinking he could string his mark along until Finnegan stopped throwing good money after bad and wrote it off as a bad investment?

In that case, what of the other investor: Courtney Jean Lang, the former girlfriend whom Jager was convinced wasn't so former? Jager claimed Finnegan had leaned on Elphinstone in a recent email by saying that what he knew about her could make things very awkward.

Parlabane opened the email client and began skimming through the contents. There were several emails from Finnegan, but not the one Jager had mentioned, and none of them engaged a tone that was anything other than businesslike. In fact all of the emails – sent and received – were dry and formal, nothing chatty or personal about any of them. Everything was project-related: sounding out availability, commissioning work, dealing with invoices.

Jager had described her husband getting agitated over missed deadlines by a developer who had been sub-contracted to design the user interface. There was nothing here to give that impression. Everything appeared to be running smoothly.

Parlabane assumed that Elphinstone's more private correspondence with Finnegan – and perhaps others – was managed from a different email account that he only accessed from his permanently secured laptop. Everything on this machine appeared to have been sterilised for public consumption, which was perhaps why it hadn't been password protected.

Parlabane clicked the MTE Admin folder, where he found a small trove of official company documents. There was presentational material, alluding to MTE's intended place in the market: polished photos of a smiling young couple, trendy but not too hip, standing at a supermarket queue, the bloke holding out his phone rather than a credit card. Clearly they were trying out different taglines. One read: ‘Bringing e-currency into everyday commerce.' Another stated: ‘Small change, big business.'

He found scans of the Companies House documents he had already seen, as well as a heads of terms agreement which he hadn't. He opened it, expecting more boilerplate and legalese. Instead it caused his jaw to hang.

Finnegan and Lang had each agreed to invest four million pounds in MTE over the next five years. There was a schedule for the staggered tranches of payment, contingent upon delivery milestones, satisfactory progress reports and the meeting of minimum targets for further fresh investment.

Eight million: that's what they had agreed to sink into Peter Elphinstone's one-man show.

In a sub-folder named Financial, Parlabane found Elphinstone's rudimentary book-keeping file. He hadn't felt the need for any fancy accountancy software, just a word-processing doc keeping track of all transactions by date. According to this, he was being paid a modest salary of two thousand per month, with office rent, utilities bills and equipment purchases also coming out of the company account. The biggest regular outgoing, by a substantial margin, was a monthly payment of ten thousand pounds for what was listed only as ‘KEI'.

Parlabane launched the browser and searched the abbreviation. The first results were a Suzuki car and the Korean Economic Institute. Further down he found a listing for Knowledge Ecology International: ‘an NGO dealing with issues related to the effects of intellectual property on public health, cyberlaw and e-commerce, and competition policy.'

Cyberlaw and e-commerce. This was promising, but why would a tiny outfit like MTE be shelling them ten grand a month?

With Firefox running, it occurred to Parlabane to check Elphinstone's browsing history.

It didn't take long. Like his emails, his surfing appeared to have been as innocuous as his usage was light. He had few bookmarks and didn't seem to have googled much either. Given the hours he was spending playing videogames, perhaps it didn't leave much time for anything else, but Parlabane suspected this was another front.

A quick scan of his hard drive revealed that he had a second browser installed: a copy of Chrome without a desktop shortcut to advertise its presence. This one had a shedload of bookmarks, mostly gaming and social media stuff. Parlabane checked its history, and found it blank. Blank meant deleted, but why would you delete your history on a secret browser?

On a hunch, Parlabane keyed in the address for Holobase and navigated to the support forum. As soon as the log-in screen appeared, the browser auto-completed the username. The password field remained blank, but that didn't matter. He had seen what he needed to.

The username was KwikSkopa.

Peter Elphinstone had posted the sex tape link himself, and Parlabane was certain that it had also been him who uploaded the file.

Why in the name of Christ would he do that? Was this a strategy for precipitating a divorce, and thus setting the stage to claim half of Diana's estate in the settlement? After all, he could point to having thrown himself headlong into his business in order to provide for her, working punishing hours and stretching his finances thin. Nobody knew the truth about how he was really spending his time, and the NDA meant nobody ever would. With the right lawyer, he could have made himself out to be the victim here. There was no shortage of evidence that Diana's behaviour had been unreasonable: he could have called upon Alan Harper as a witness; bring up her illegally accessing his medical records; and then, of course, there was the legacy of the blog.

All of which looked a lot like a motive for Diana to have gotten rid of him after all, if it turned out she'd caught wind of this.

Parlabane returned to the filing cabinet. None of this was quite adding up. He needed raw data. If there was ten grand going out every month to this KEI, whoever or whatever it was, there would have to be paperwork. He tugged the drawer fully open and trained his torch inside. There was nothing under K/L, but he knew from personal experience how easy it was to misfile on the wrong side of these dividers. He pulled open the pocket marked I/J, where he found a thick and glossy cardboard folder bearing the name Arrowflint Corporate Insurance, stating that it contained ‘Your Policy Documents'.

Parlabane opened it, scanning the print with the penlight. He had to read it twice to be sure he wasn't confusing a comma with a decimal point when he saw the figures involved.

KEI was not an organisation: it stood for key employee insurance.

Parlabane almost dropped the thing, so stunned was he by the implications.

MTE was a sham, and Peter must have every day been congratulating himself on fooling not only his wife into believing he had prospects, but also his investors into committing such substantial funds. Clearly, however, he had never read the small print on
this
thing before shoving it carelessly into a drawer. The document in Parlabane's hand demonstrated that – to joint policyholders Courtney Jean Lang and Sam Finnegan, at least – Peter Elphinstone was worth considerably more dead than alive.

Parlabane connected a portable solid-state drive to Elphinstone's main computer and set about copying as much as he could: not only the MTE folders and the email cache, but the program files and system folder too, so that he could sift through them under less straitened circumstances. Having left it to transfer, he began shooting photos of the hard-copy documents on his phone, methodically working his way through the contents of the filing cabinet.

He checked his watch, mindful of the fact that the sun would be coming up soon, and that on an industrial estate such as this, people might be showing up for work any time from seven onwards. He figured the security system would have been reset by the Cautela guards upon exit. Given how swiftly they appeared on site the first time, he knew they would be back there even quicker if there was a second alarm, and their investigation might be less cursory too,

He hauled himself up through the ceiling again and made his way slowly and carefully across the suspended lattice before dropping out into the emergency stairwell, out of range of the sensors.

Dawn was breaking as his car sped south, a dim glow silhouetting the hills beneath clear skies. Watery winter sunshine was starting to streak through gaps in the pine trees, and in Parlabane's head a lot of things were coming into focus.

The Arrowflint policy was the kind of insurance you'd be wise to take out if you were planning to sink eight million pounds into a project that essentially came down to one man executing his genius idea: an idea that, in the interests of intellectual property protection, nobody else could be told.

However, what Parlabane had worked out was that neither Finnegan nor Lang was really intending to invest four million pounds: they merely had to demonstrate that they intended to. It was all to provide the façade of authenticity that would justify them taking out a twelve-million-pound KEI policy to protect a non-existent investment in what they had sussed to be a phantom project.

Parlabane had seen the documents. Elphinstone had undergone the medical: he was fit and healthy, a non-smoker and moderate drinker on no medication. He had a clean driving licence, didn't own or drive any high-performance vehicles and didn't take part in any high-risk leisure activities. On top of that, he had no debt or criminal convictions and was the scion of land-owning aristocrats who could trace their ancestry back five centuries. Arrowflint Corporate Insurance had approved the policy, MTE commenced paying the premiums, and suddenly Peter Elphinstone was a living and breathing cheque for twelve million quid, made out to Finnegan and Lang.

The tricky part was that in order for them to cash out, he couldn't be living and breathing any more.

Parlabane understood then that Elphinstone's remains would never be found. Whatever happened to him on that final night had been long in the planning. A few hours after he walked out of Jager's garage, his BMW had gone into the river in an apparently tragic accident. Arrowflint weren't going to pay out on that, though: not without a body, and it could take seven years for Peter to be declared legally dead. However, if his wife were to be convicted of his murder, that changed everything.

As Parlabane followed the A9 on its snaking course between the rolling hills of the Elphinstone family's native Perthshire, he was struck by a shattering new possibility for what Sir Hamish had been scornfully alluding to during the telephone conversation Jager had overheard.

It didn't work the last time and it won't work now.

Parlabane had initially assumed Hamish was talking about Liz Miller, perhaps aware of Peter's abortive attempt to become engaged to her. But now he realised it was something else entirely.

Peter had been married before: to Courtney Jean Lang.