Second Intention (13 page)

I nodded. I was actually beginning to like Derek.

‘So,’ he said brightly, ‘let’s start by seeing what it was he wanted to say to you, shall we?’

He keyed in a few commands, and a truly bizarre image began to present itself.

A black screen, with red letters tumbling onto it from different directions. They bounced around a bit, then finally began to slow down to form a coherent message:
Greetings from Doktor Chuckles.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Derek pressed the return key, and the message was immediately replaced by an animation. A cartoon of a demonic, grinning face, shaking with laughter, accompanied by a maniacal cackling. At the bottom of the screen, in the same red lettering as the first message was a caption:
Are you enjoying the game, Richard?

Now I was really spooked

I had seen that face before. It was the clown which had been spray-painted on the wall near our house.

Fourteen

On Sunday I had to endure one of the more frustrating episodes of this whole business, as I spent hours explaining the whole thing to the local police.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I spent hours waiting to speak to the police, sitting in the cold and drafty reception area of the local station, before finally being seen by some young lad who looked like he was fresh out of training. The interview itself, when it finally happened, can’t have taken more than about thirty minutes.

I don’t really know what I had been expecting. Somebody from CID perhaps, or, at the very least, somebody a bit more senior. You can imagine my disappointment, therefore, when I realised my concerns weren’t being taken too seriously.

I gave him the full story, including the tyres, the body wires, the phone calls, the e-mails and Sue’s phone, and he painstakingly wrote it all down on a sheet of paper. When I’d finished he re-read what he’d written, then scratched his nose a bit, sniffed, and gave me the official response.

The trouble was, he explained, that these incidents, although doubtless annoying for me and my wife, were not sufficiently serious for them to be able to devote any manpower to following them up. No act of criminal damage had been committed, since the tyres and the body wires had not actually been damaged, as such. Sue’s car hadn’t been damaged either, and the only evidence we had that anything had been taken was that part of the mobile phone had been replaced with an identical part. Now, if the mobile had been
stolen
, on the other hand, then that might be a slightly different matter ….

The most serious issue was the sending of the pornographic e-mails, and I had, by my own admission, already got a highly paid professional consultant working on that one. There really wasn’t much the Cambridgeshire Police could do to help at this stage.

‘So what can I do?’ I asked him, aware that I had wasted a large part of my morning on a fruitless exercise.

‘Well, sir,’ he said, adopting the sort of official voice used by constables in bad TV sitcoms, ‘I will, of course, be keeping this on file, and if any further evidence of a serious crime presents itself you can always get back to me.’

‘I see,’ I said, flatly. ‘And if, in the meantime, I figure out who it is who’s doing this …?’

‘Well, you could always try and get them to sign a confession. That would give us something to go on.’

Thanks a whole lot, I thought. Why do I pay my bloody taxes?

*                  *                  *                  *

I got home to find a message from Douglas on the answering machine, telling me that he had had a long chat with Derek, who had explained what was going on. There was absolutely no doubt that I had had nothing to do with what had happened on Friday, but it might be a good idea, all the same, if I didn’t go in on Monday, just to allow a bit of time for things to settle back to normal at Medicom.

He was sure I’d understand, given the sensitivity of the situation, and looked forward to seeing me on Tuesday when we could start getting things ready for the stock run.

Yeah, whoopee, I thought.

I was missing Sue, and really wanted to speak to her. I didn’t have anything much to say, of any great importance, I just wanted to hear her voice. I knew she didn’t have her mobile with her, as it was still with Derek, and she had said, in any case, that she never wanted to touch the thing again after what had happened.

I found my address book and looked up Amy’s number. There was no answer when I called, so I left a message, saying I was just phoning to see if Sue was okay, and asking if she’d ring when she had a moment.

I replaced the receiver and looked around the living room. It seemed like a very big house with just me in it. I needed to find something to do so I went through to the kitchen to begin investigating the possibilities for dinner.

The phone rang while I was rummaging in the freezer. I snatched it up, thinking it was her, but was disappointed to hear Derek’s cheerful greeting at the other end.

‘Any news?’ I asked, wondering if this was the moment where I would hear about the big breakthrough.

‘Nothing major, I’m afraid,’ he said. I was pretty sure I could hear him typing away at one of his keyboards as he spoke, so I figured he had a hands-free headset on. ‘But I’ve come up with one or two interesting bits. As I said yesterday, this is how it tends to go. Little clues, which eventually build up a sort of collage. The more I see, the more I begin to understand Doktor Chuckles and how he works.’

‘Mmmm. So what have you got?’ I wanted, no
needed
, to hear that we were getting somewhere with this. Just that name -
Doktor Chuckles -
was so bizarre that hearing it mentioned put me on edge again.

‘Well, I can now be fairly sure that the e-mails originated from a site somewhere here in Britain. He used a series of cut-outs when setting up the fake addresses for McAllister and Medicom, and eventually the trail just stops, but I’m certain they didn’t originate overseas.’

‘Any idea where?’

‘No, not yet.’

That wasn’t really of much use to us. We both knew that Doktor Chuckles was nearby. He must have been to do all the things he had done.

‘Will you be able to?’ I asked.

‘Mmmm … possibly, but I can’t promise anything.’

‘Ah, okay then. Anything else?’

‘Yes. It seems likely that the pornographic photographs came from Eastern Europe. In the background of a couple of pictures you can see a bookshelf, and if you enlarge it enough to read the titles you can see they’re all written in a Slavic script, possibly Russian or one of the Baltic states. It takes a bit of cleaning up, and I had to use an image enhancer to get rid of the clutter, but there’s no mistaking it.’             

‘Yes, but does that tell us anything about the person who sent them?’ I really hoped he hadn’t spent the whole night just going over the pictures. ‘Surely he could have picked them up off the internet?’

‘Yes, it’s possible, I suppose, but if you get a suspect and find he has a stash of filthy magazines from Moscow it may count as additional evidence.’

Hmmm. Somehow I didn’t hold out much hope on that score.

‘There’s just one other thing,’ he went on. ‘It was strange, the software he used to put together that animation with the clown. Normally you’d use something like Powerpoint or whatever the latest thing from Microsoft is.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No, he used Alchemedia.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Not many people have. It was part of a package of educational software that Synovax put out a couple of years back, but they dropped because nobody wanted it.’

‘Synovax?’

‘Mmmm. Quite a successful little company. Part of one of the big publishing groups. Must have been a bit of a shock to them, having a failure like that.’

‘Er …yeah, I suppose so. All the same, does this tell us anything about the person who did it?’

‘Actually, yes it does,’ he said, with an authority which told me he knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘Our friend the doktor did this for a reason. There are much better programs out there with which to do a presentation like that, yet he chose to use Alchemedia. Now, we know he’s not stupid when it comes to computers, so it’s not as if he didn’t have a choice. If you ask me, I’d say he did it out of loyalty.’

‘Loyalty?’

‘Sure. Cyber geeks like him, and me for that matter, have our own unique way of doing things. We find something that works for us and we tend to stick with it. We tend to be very loyal to the tools of our trade.’

‘Just like fencers,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. I started using Uhlmann blades in 2007, and I’ve never touched any other make since.’

‘Well, there you are then,’ he said. ‘It’s exactly the same kind of thing. In the doktor’s case, he chose to use something very distinctive, and that tells us a lot more about him.’

He finished the conversation by telling me about some of the things he was going to try next. I can’t pretend to having understood half o
f what he said, but the fact that he sounded like he knew what he was doing was reassuring. I was really grateful for all his help, and I told him as much.

‘Hey,’ he said, brightly, ‘you’re very welcome. This is what I do, and it’s good to have a challenge for once which I can really get my teeth into. Besides, your company
are
paying me very handsomely for this.’

Good, I thought. I was glad that somebody was benefiting from all this.

*                  *                  *                  *

I got the call from Sue just as I was half way th
rough a late lunch of microwaved chilli con carne. It was so good to hear her voice.

The conversation was a little strained, all the same. I could tell she felt bad about not being there with me, but I knew she meant it when she said she really needed to get some rest, and it wasn’t going to happen while she was at home. She was at a low ebb, which just happens sometimes, and since the business on Friday night, when Doktor Chuckles had actually brought the conflict to our doorstep, she just wanted a little distance. I figured the exhibition had also taken quite a lot out of her too, and I said so.

As we finished the conversation and hung up, I felt terribly lonely.

It’s funny, but with Sue’s condition meaning she went to bed early a lot of the time, you’d think I would be used to it, but this was different. If she had had a heavy day and left me to my own devices I always seemed to be able to find something to occupy me, but on that afternoon I couldn’t settle to anything. It was as though just having her in close pr
oximity was enough to relax me.

All the same, I knew that her staying with Amy was the right thing. I didn’t want Doktor Chuckles to be able to do anything which might upset her any more, and if the opportunity presented itself for me to take any sort of direct action against him, whatever that might be, I didn’t need the
distraction of worrying whether she was okay.

No,
Amy would look after her, and she could safely recharge the batteries and come back in a couple of days when she was feeling stronger.

As it was getting dark I poured myself another drink and switched the computer on. I wasn’t going near the e-mails. It had been agreed that I’d leave all that to Derek, but logged on and found the BFA website instead. The results from the Oxford Open had been posted, and the rankings updated, and I was pleased to see that I was still doing okay in spite of missing
Cheltenham.

I spent a while finding out about what there was to do in Copenhagen, and felt a bit more upbeat about things. Whilst I was nervous about doing my first ever overseas international, I was excited too, like a kid waiting for Christmas day. It was going to be a good weekend.

Again, I got sucked into the internet trap of just surfing through sites as the fancy took me, and looking things up for the sake of it. When I realised I had been on for nearly two hours I decided enough was enough. Before logging off a final thought   occurred to me. I don’t know why, but I looked up Synomax on Google and found myself steered towards the site for the small, but seemingly very successful, educational publishing company.

It seemed, if what the site said was to be believed, that there were very few school libraries in English speaking countries where you wouldn’t find a full set of their extremely colourful and well-packaged reference books. They also produced an exciting range of posters and wall charts and a very user-friendly
suite of educational software.

There was absolutely no mention of Alchemedia, though, but I suppose if it hadn’t been a big success then there wouldn’t be.

What interested me most, however, was the link to Synomax’s parent company, Paradigm Europa. There I saw listed the names of the directors, one of whom was Leon Rutherford.

Toby
Rutherford’s father.

*                  *                  *                  *

I don’t know if you have ever felt the same, but whenever I revisit an important place from my past, somewhere I haven’t seen for a while, I’m surprised by the strange mix of feelings I get. Things seem familiar, but somehow different.

That’s just how it was on that rainy Monday morning as I walked through the campus of the university. It was all, I don’t know, somehow
smaller
than I remembered. Sure, they had built a few new bits, but most of the grey concrete was exactly the same. I could recall happy times sitting on the steps in blazing sunshine, and drunken moments spent splashing around in the fountain, now long dried up, before being hauled out by the porters, who must have seen all of this a thousand times before. I could remember snogging a second year history student outside the JCR after the fresher’s disco, and feeling like I was definitely a man of the world now. Memories of hard work and hard play came flooding back, but it was all in a setting which seemed somehow slightly out of touch with the cold reality which now faced me.