One Last Lesson (8 page)

‘You were saved by the seatbelt and air bags
, love,’ Phil said. ‘Without the belt, who knows where you might have ended up, maybe in the field across the road.’ He turned to Henderson. ‘I suppose you see a lot of things like that in your line of business, Angus.’

Aged around fifty with a thick crop of slightly greying, black hair and a tanned, lightly lined face that rarely changed from studied seriousness, Phil was a corporate financier with a
large Japanese bank in London and spent as much time overseas as he did at home. He was seriously well paid and probably paid more tax than he earned, which allowed his wife to indulge in the many hairdressers, manicurists and beauticians she frequented. It would be disingenuous to suggest it was a facile pursuit and she was simply wasting his money as she was six years older than her husband but could easily pass for a much younger woman.

‘
It’s been a few years since I’ve dealt directly with a traffic accident and nowadays its only if the victim was murdered first.’

‘Sorry, I
was forgetting you were in CID. What case are you working on now?’

‘A student from one of the local universities
here in Brighton was found murdered on a golf course near Horsham.’

‘
I heard about that one, wasn’t there something about it in our local newspaper, Karen?’

‘Yes there was. That
was a girl called Sarah Robson, wasn’t it?’

Henderson nodded.

‘The Robson’s live only a few streets away from us,’ Phil said, ‘and Owen’s in the same Rotary as me although I must admit, I don’t go that often so I don’t know him that well. It’s a terrible business though, to lose a daughter like that. I don’t know how we would cope if we lost Rachel,’ he said, turning to look at her and smiling. ‘How’s the investigation going? Do you have any suspects?’

He
nderson blew a frustrated sigh. ‘We didn’t get much from the crime scene and local people didn’t spot anything unusual, so we didn’t get off to a good start. At the moment, we’re piecing together her last evening in Brighton and interviewing everyone who knew her.’

Phil was about to ask something else when
Henderson’s phone rang. He apologised and moved out of the room and into the corridor and stood in front of a sign, which warned, ‘Using a Mobile Phone in the IC Unit is Prohibited.’

‘Hi boss, its Gerry. How are things going
down at the hospital?’

‘She’s awake now and slowly getting back to her old self. She’s got a broken leg, broken wrist, badly gashed arm and loads of bruises and scratches, but nothing that won’t heal in time or put her off buyin
g another two-seater sports car or driving slower. If I have anything to do with it, I’ll make her buy a Volvo estate, they’re built like tanks.’

‘
Glad to hear she’s ok, it could have been so much worse. Have they found out what happened?’

‘It seems she was overtaking on a narrow road when a people
carrier came out of a concealed driveway and Rachel ploughed straight into it. The other driver claimed she was momentarily distracted by a screaming child in the back, and didn’t look in the mirror that her husband positioned on the tree opposite their driveway to give them a better view of on-coming cars, but Traffic suspect she was on the phone and are pulling her mobile phone records.’

‘You know what I think about people using mobiles when they’re driving. I hope they throw the book at h
er for causing an accident like that.’ He paused for a few moments. ‘The other reason I called was to let you know there’s been a new development in the Robson case.’

‘
Great. What is it?’

‘Are you still up for it?’ his voice was deadpan but he had
been worked with Gerry Hobbs long enough to know when he was being serious.

‘
What do you mean?’

‘Well, the
Chief’s making noises about you not being around the office for the next few weeks and suggesting your head might be somewhere else.’

‘For God’s sake!’ he snapped. ‘She’s only been in hospital for a morning and already he’s pensioning me off.’

‘No worries boss, I know what he’s like; he’s an awkward sod when he puts his mind to it. If he was schoolteacher, he’d be in charge of taking the bloody register or supervising detention.’

‘Let’s forget about Steve Harris for a minute and concentrate on the case.
Tell me about this new development.’

‘I
’d rather not say over the phone as I need you to judge how important you think it is, but I’ve got something on CCTV you need to see.’

‘
You’re in the office?’

‘Yeah.’

He looked at his watch: two-fifteen. ‘I’ll see you at three.’

An anonymous warehouse in Hollingbury was the nerve centre for Jon Lehman’s finest creation, a website that was taking the web by storm. Out went the tired old slappers, the mainstay of other adult websites with tattooed arses, more metal rivets and pins on their flesh than an old Land Rover and as many lines on their faces as a Network Rail map, and in came nubile young things with barely a blemish on their beautiful bodies and looking as young, intelligent and sexy as many of his students, which in fact many of them were.

In the past, he
was a keen browser of this sort of material but was becoming increasingly alarmed at rocketing prices, the source of many of the models and security. He, and many others, were put off supplying credit card details to these sites as they imagined, quite rightly, it was owned by a fat, sweaty oik, operating a bank of servers from a seedy, dank basement in the back streets of Kiev or Tirana who sold their details to his friends in the Russian mafia, which they used to bombard computers in the west with spam emails for Viagra or how to make a killing from Forex trading.

Their website was
cheaper than most but not too cheap to suggest tacky. They used SSL encryption technology to scramble credit card details and this was subtly emphasised along with their UK credentials, which all served to engender feelings of stability, security and legality. In only four months of trading, the business grew from one hundred thousand hits a week and a couple of hundred subscribers, to a dizzying half a million hits a week with over one hundred thousand subscribers and growing at over twenty per cent per month.

The
main floor area of the warehouse was subdivided by partitions to create several individual room scenes where models would pose, and these could be quickly altered when the photographs became tired or were being copied too frequently by other web sites. This month, Room A was furnished to replicate the kitchen of a modern apartment with granite and chrome worktop fittings, large flat screen television and stylish appliances that would never be used to cook, iron or wash.

Room B, the largest
, was a 1950s school room with blackboards, canes and desks, while Room C looked like a real doctor’s surgery with an examination table, height measuring devices, wall charts and a screened changing area, all supplied by a medical friend of Alan Stark, left over after the health centre where he worked was refurbished. Ideas for new scenes were never in short supply although he would appreciate a return to some of his old favourites, particularly the sixteenth-century French boudoir with the luxurious four-poster bed.

He visited Ho
llingbury as little as possible as even though he liked to watch the photographic and video sessions, the permanent resident of the place, their computer operator and systems designer, DeeZee was an odd character with questionable cleanliness habits and always left his server den smelling of his body odour and the crap he was continually throwing down his gullet. He couldn’t remonstrate with the fat runt as he had been warned to tread carefully by Alan Stark since he was not only a valuable employee of the business, but also the nephew of Dominic Green, a fellow investor in the business.

To
the public at large, Green was a respectable, millionaire property developer with many landmark shopping centres and office blocks to his name, but it was no secret to those in the know that he received his leg-up in business by housing DSS claimants in seedy conditions and using violence to ensure they kept their mouths shut. Green not only supplied his nephew, DeeZee but the team that developed the software used by the site and so he was an important member of the management team, but if rumours were true and Green had been involved in at least two murders, Stark’s warning to tread carefully was a wise one.

Today, there was genuine
reason for him being there. Normally he was sent an email from DeeZee once a month with all the web stats, the numbers of people visiting the site, how many clicked on pictures, how many were joining on a weekly, monthly or annual subscription basis and how long they stayed, but this month he didn’t receive it.

It wouldn’t
be sensible to come in here all guns blazing as it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the email was in fact sent to him but deleted in a drunken haze. To save him the journey he could have called, but that would deny him the joy of seeing his ‘baby,’ and it gave him another chance to prove to Stark that he was not a useless drunk and taking his small, but important role as Finance Director seriously.

The fat slob grunted
something he couldn’t quite hear, probably talking as much to the equipment as to him, while slurping a large cup of Day-Glo coloured goo, which probably contained as many toxic chemicals as a bottle of toilet cleaner, while tapping the keys of the computer keyboard in response to his request. A few seconds later, his report began to appear in the out-tray on one of a number of laser printers that were lined up on a table at the back of the room.

Close to the printers and pinned up on the wall
was the photographic shoot schedule. The shoots usually took place whenever a new model agreed to pose for them or a popular girl returned to freshen up her portfolio. When that happened, freelance photographers Graham Roffey or Jeff Joham would come in and set-up their stuff under the watchful eye of a close associate of Dominic Green, John Lester.

If one or two weeks went by without a new shoot, either because the photographers were unavailable or
no new girls had come forward, it wasn’t a problem. The web site was stocked with thousands of pictures and several thousand more were stored on back-up servers and so no one would ever feel short-changed, although some punters were more easily satisfied than others as they didn’t browse much and came back time and again to their old favourites.

He picked up a chair and placed as close to D
eeZee as the aura of his aroma would allow. His real name was Brian Calder but he rarely used it, as life in a council estate in Worthing with a girl exhibiting severe Bulimia issues was no match for his exciting and dynamic on-line persona. He was a member of a loose computer hacking network that targeted organisations whose actions rocked the strict moral compass of their members by employing child labour in Asia, dumping toxic waste in poor African countries or raping third world countries of their natural resources. In Jon Lehman’s mind, this laudable moralist stance raised him up above something he might find at the bottom of a pond, but only just.

Lehman
was holding the recently printed email and after a cursory glance said, ‘these growth numbers look suspect to me.’

‘Eh?’ He said without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘They look too high. We’ve almost doubled the hit rate in three months. Surely that’s not right?’

‘The fuck you know? Of course it’s right
; comes straight off the web stats.’

‘Ok, ok I’ll take your word for it and look at them more closely later.’ He paused, thinking. ‘What about that request for new kit you sent me?’

‘What about it?’

‘You’ve asked for a new Apple IMac, additional hard drives for two servers and another printer. Do you really need all that? You’ve
got more computer kit here than it takes to run…I don’t know, CERN.’

‘What the fuck’s CERN?
Something you picked up in a sci-fi movie or something?’

‘It doesn’t matter but do you really need all this kit just to run a web site?’

‘You joking, man? It's not just a web site. I need to store thousands of pics and vids. They’re all in high-def so it takes huge amounts of disk space. That extra kit is needed to cope with the growth that’s there, in black and white, in your fucking mitts.’

He looked vacantly down at the paper he was holding.
‘I don’t know.’

‘Just order it man; don’t give me
grief.’

Why a boy from Worthing spoke in a pseudo-Bronx accent was beyond him and only confirmed his opinion that the prick was watching too many DVD’s when he should have been working. He was out of new cards to play, cards that would encour
age this man to open up and so he decided to show his hand, the real reason for him being there.

‘
I can see that Sarah Robson’s pictures no longer appear on the web site but have they also been removed from the servers, back up files and the off-site storage?’