Cyber Cinderella (10 page)

“Wild.” I felt a need to prove to Ivan how far removed my life was from the presumed tediousness of his. “Yeah. Went to an amazing party on Saturday night, actually. Got a lot of launches this week too. Never stop. Work all day, work all night, really. Don’t know when work stops and play begins. Exhausted.”

“If you’ve got any space in your schedule, I’ll have some free time this week to help you with that site you were interested in. Do you want to show me your site then?”

“My site? What do you mean, my site?”

“Nothing. The one you were talking about on Friday, the one you want to find out more about. I’ll see what I can do. And you’d probably see a lot better if you took those glasses off.”

I was too tired to think and at the moment agreed that Ivan, a stranger to me, should become my de-tech-tive. He couldn’t be any worse than Maggie or George, could he?

“Thank you, it’s kind of you.”

“Pleasure.”

He disappeared and as if in a revolving door a pair of vaguely familiar figures appeared in the gloom soon after.

“Hello, Izobel,” said Becksy and Alice with one voice. I wondered what the lesser Camillas were doing in my office. Through my dark glasses they seemed even dimmer than at my first meeting with them. I could barely recognise them without the presence of their leader.

“Hello, what are you doing here?”

“We just wanted to know whether you had any cool ideas for the PR yet,” said Becksy. “We both work nearby.”

“Right. Well, no, I only saw you on Friday. Is there a hurry?”

“Kind of.”

“We need to raise more capital,” said Alice.

“That’s not the fun bit. But the PR bit is such fun,” said Becksy.

Both Becksy and Alice were barely looking at me, but were glancing round the reception of the building where I worked. Behind the shades, my eyes were narrowing. Strange. “Fine, fine. I’ll e-mail a plan over to you pronto. Things are a bit hectic here at the moment. I’ve got a couple of launches this week alone and some pretty high-profile clients being very demanding. You wouldn’t believe how completely frantic things can be in my line of work.”

“I’m sure it is. It’s amazing that you find time for your charity work on top of it all,” said Alice.

“It’s exhausting,” I said. Sarky cow, I thought.

“Is it political stuff? You were very political at school.”

“A bit.” Leave, please, I thought, but they continued to look surreptitiously around reception, with Becksy going so far as to start looking down the hallway into the open-plan area in which I sat. Becksy in particular seemed to be wearing more makeup than she had done on Friday.

I got it. “And if you’re looking for systems man, he’s just left. And his name is Ivan, not Dan. I got it wrong.”

They giggled in unison, like a pair of schoolgirls being faced with a sculpture of a male nude in a gallery. I sighed and left them to it.

*

Ivan the Elusive successfully evaded me for the next three days. I felt that I could not proceed with my own line of inquiry until I had discovered whether he could solve my mystery in one stroke.

I checked my site, fearful that it might disappear before I had a chance to show him. Every time the same old site. I was bored with the photos and bored with the ticker that promised so much and yet never delivered.

Then one morning, a change: a third photo and a rearrangement of the other two. The ticker explained: “the past… partying… PR… the many faces of Izobel.”

I looked at the new addition. “This cracking photo of Izobel shows her in professional mode.” I stared at it. I was wearing an extremely expensive trouser suit. I didn’t carry it with ease, but rather as if I was attending a fancy dress party sporting the costume of “modern businesswoman.” The photo had been taken at a pitch that we gave at a conference of UK gaming companies. We were trying to win new business. We didn’t, as I recall. “We’re sure,” the text continued, “that her presentation skills are every bit as slick as her appearance.”

There had been captions added to the other photos, too, in the form of cyber-Post-its scattered across the scrapbook-like page. They were written in the site’s customary gush. “Izobel’s not only about work. She has fun too!” was its interpretation of Hot Bob’s party, while it judged that “Izobel’s school photo shows a fashion icon in the making.”

The site perp seemed to have entry points into every aspect of my life. I looked around my office, wondering if the perp could be among my colleagues, all of whom were disinterested females whose idea of techno involved Dutch hard-house DJs. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of being watched.

There was another addition. There, in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, the bit that’s obscured when looked at on a small monitor, was a tiny
contact us
link.

I clicked on it. Up popped an empty e-mail message, a new mail ready to be written. In the “To” box, the address mail@izobel brannigan.com presented itself. No clues there. What had I hoped? That the name of the site-maker would appear spelled out in the address?

I filled in the subject box.

Question

And then in the message box beneath it:

Who are you?

I stared at the screen for a while and then pressed “send.” I had made contact. There was someone who would read that message and maybe reply to it. I could imagine their fingers typing but not the arms and body that they were attached to.

I waited, all day, checking my in-box with even more frequency than normal. I’d stare at the bottom of my screen, at the tool bar, willing the little envelope icon to appear.

The next day, still nothing. I clicked on the link again.

Another question—urgent

Then I wrote my second message.

Who are you and why have you created this site about me? I demand to know. It’s my right to know. Tell me.

Send. It was gone.

*

When Ivan eventually deigned to visit PR O’Create, I grabbed him and bundled him into a meeting room with a PC and steeled myself to show a third person the site. Please let it work, I thought, please let it work. I typed in the URL and as I did so I could see him blinking as he realized the words that I was spelling out.

Carriage return, enter, site.

“This is great,” he said, smiling. “You didn’t strike me as a blogger.”

“A what?”

“Someone who keeps their own Web log, an online diary. Well done, it’s not bad. I think blogging’s great, such a democratic voice for those who usually go unheard. Good for you. Did you design it yourself?”

“I didn’t do this. God no, I don’t know anything about the Internet. Why on earth would I keep an online diary? In the third person? What sort of a person do you think I am? This”—I pointed at the screen—“is my problem. I don’t know who made it, who created it. Who owns izobelbrannigan dot com.”

“I see, someone else made it,” he said, with some disappointment. “Then that is weird. Who on earth? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long has it been up?”

“A couple of weeks. Three, now, maybe. They’d bought the domain name before that, I guess. I Googled myself and this came up.”

“More than you bargained for.”

“Exactly. I’ve always thought myself too anonymous, but now I’m too high-profile. Well, not anonymous exactly, I do quite interesting things a lot of the time, but I’m not a celebrity. Though I do know some.”

He sat down and read the home page. “So you’re ‘cutting a swath,’ are you? Given that you’re in PR, you’re certainly not cutting the crap.”

“Ha, ha.” Cheeky. I was going to tell him to stick it up his modem, but remembered that he was here to help and so put my head to one side. “I’m a bit scared actually.”

“I’m not surprised. This is odd.”

“That’s why I need help.”

“Whoever created this site needs help.”

“Not design-wise. It’s quite good, isn’t it?” I said, as ever rather entranced by the blue of the background and the contrast that it made with the almost bleached-out colors of the photographs and the yellow of their captions. My site would make a rather beautiful commemorative tea towel.

He smiled ruefully. “Yes it is. Oh well, that’s all right then, as long as your cyber-weirdo gives good design then we needn’t worry.”

“If I am going to have a cyber-paean, it might as well look quite nice.”

He continued to run the mouse over the site, the small arrow of the cursor stroking its page, caressing the curves of my Izobel logo. He then clicked and a white box filled with chevrons and gibberish popped up in the middle of the page.

“What are you doing? What have you done to my site?”

“It’s the source code.”

If we’d been in a cartoon, his thought bubble would have been filled with “

“And source code is?”

“The language used to make up Web pages.” I couldn’t decide whether he was patient or patronizing. “Imagine a page of the Internet being like a painted and plastered house. Looks pretty enough. The programming language is like the bricks underneath the plaster. Without the bricks the house wouldn’t exist. Same with the code. What they’ve used here is HTML, which is not particularly exciting but it’s the most commonly used mark-up language.”

“Why?”

“It’s fairly sensible, logical. The Esperanto of authoring languages.”

“I see.” I understood all I needed to.

He sucked air through his teeth. Techies really were the plumbers of the office world. Next he was going to tell me that someone had made a real mess of my wiring.

“It’s good, it’s all right,” was what he said.

“What is?”

“The coding. Although a page may look the same, the way that it’s coded can be badly done or well done. Sometimes you see some really messy code.”

“To use your house analogy, that would be like bad brick-pointing or something. Might look OK, but could make the whole edifice crumble.”

“Exactly. Whoever’s made this up is either a reasonably proficient page developer or has hired a proficient page developer.”

“My site’s pretty advanced stuff?”

He laughed dismissively. “Hardly. It’s just a basic one-pager. It’s not database-driven or using advanced scripting. Your bog-standard teenager can produce something like this.” He sneered again. “All I’m saying is that it’s not been badly executed.”

“How long would it take someone to do?”

“No time at all. Half a day to create once they’d got all the assets.”

“Photos of me, you mean. Half a day. That’s not long.” I didn’t know whether to be reassured or offended by this fact.

It seemed a bit autistic to be staring at a page of squiggly code instead of a page containing pictures of me, so I clicked on the background again in order to tuck away his little white box of “source code” and reveal my schoolgirl self once more.

He did that tooth-air-sucking thing again. “Who could have these photos of you?”

“I don’t know. One was taken at a party in a club, the other’s from school. Then this one”—I moved the cursor to the new one—“appeared the day before yesterday. It’s from a big conference, so lots of people could have it.”

“And you haven’t thought to check whether they could have been copied off the Net?”

“I’ve been very busy investigating possible suspects by other means, actually.”

He opened up another window on the Net and started searching for sites, clicking on them and dismissing them with fevered pianist’s fingers. “Where’s this St. Teresa’s school anyway?” he asked and then punched the name and town into a search engine. “Bingo.”

God, he was annoying. He acted like he was top Pentagon programmer hitting upon the evil villain’s password rather than a saddo who was quite good at surfing.

“Look. It’s your old school site. When did you go there, when were you eleven?”

“September nineteen eighty-four.” He didn’t respond to my tacit admission of age.

“And here”—he clicked on a link—“is a photo of your year.” I could see his eyes scanning across the class of 1984. “Does this look like your lot?”

“There I am,” I said, tapping the screen with a pencil.

He flicked between the school page and my Web page. “See, it’s the same picture, but they’ve cut it and blown it up so that it’s just of you.”

“Is that difficult?”

It was as if I had asked whether the sky was green.

“No, it’s very easy.” He clicked on the photo and then copied and pasted it into another document. “There, then I’d use a basic photo-editing program to crop it and maybe enhance the colors a bit. A doddle for anyone with even the most cursory computer skills.”

“Cursor-y. Ha, ha.”

He shook his head. “What it means is that whoever created this site wouldn’t have to go far to find photos of you. If they knew where you went to school then they’d be able to do the whole thing in less than a day. I don’t know where they’d find the party photo, so why don’t you have a think about that.”

“Right. But what about technical ways of finding out who they are?”

He continued tapping away at the keyboard and scanning the page. “I’ll see whether I can source the owner of the domain name for you. That would help, wouldn’t it? A company name or some sort of address maybe.”

“That would be great. Thank you.” We looked at each other for a second. His mobile went. It was the very latest model sporting a full polyphonic ringtone of the soundtrack to
Gladiator.
He dismissed himself. He was dismissed. He was dissed.

*

I had five incoming e-mails when I got back to my desk, shouting their newness with bold text. One appeared bolder than the others.

From: mail@izobelbrannigan.com. Subject: Re: Question.

My throat was dry and my mouth felt full as if I was playing that challenge when you try to eat five cream crackers in a minute. I attempted to swallow but could not. I typed as though wearing woolen mittens.

Open it, open it. Read the text, just two short sentences.

Don’t worry, Izobel. I’m your friend.

Chapter Eight

W
e were all meeting up for Mick’s birthday drinks in the West End. I was early. Others would be coming straight from their offices, but I could never manage to plug that work–play gap between six and seven. I should be the sort who goes to the gym or studies a foreign language in that window of opportunity, but instead I mooch around the shops, not buying, not even really looking.