It was just after four when Clive Abercrombie rang to tell me the buckle was ready and waiting. I worked for another hour, then collected it on the way home. Olive’s jeweler had done a good job. I was looking for the bug, and I couldn’t see it. No way would the fence spot it in the middle of a motorway service station. Back in the car, I checked if the receiver was picking it up. Loud and clear.
When I got in, there was a message from Gizmo on my machine. “Hi. I’ve got your order ready. I think you should collect it in person. I’ll expect you.” I sighed and got back in the car. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. In Gizmo’s case, I thought it was a small miracle the hacker crackers hadn’t already kicked his door in. In his shoes, I wouldn’t trust the phone lines either.
I hit the cash machine on the way, taking myself up to my daily limit. I parked round the corner from his house, just in case he really was under surveillance, and wishing I’d remembered to do the same on my earlier drop. I rang the bell and waited. Nearly a minute passed before the door cracked open on the chain. “It’s me, Giz,” I said patiently. “Alone.”
He handed me a piece of paper. I handed him the cash. “See you round,” he said and closed the door.
Back in the car, I unfolded the paper. There was a telephone number, FB7792JS (the login), and CONAN (the sysman’s password). I’d bet it was Conan the Barbarian the sysman had in mind, not the creator of the world’s first PI. Yet another wimpy computer nerd with delusions of grandeur. I drove home via Rusholme, where I picked up a selection of samosas, onion bhajis, chicken pakora and aloo saag bhajis. I had the feeling it was going to be a long night, and I didn’t know if I could rely on Richard to come home with a Chinese.
I brought the coffee machine through to my study and sat down at the computer with the Indian snacks and the coffee to hand. I booted up and loaded my comms program. Dialing the number on the paper brought me a short pause, then the monitor said, “Welcome to FB. Login?” I typed the digits Gizmo had given me. “Password?” the monitor asked. “Conan” I typed. “As in Doyle,” I said firmly.
The screen cleared and offered me a set of options. The first thing I had to do was to familiarize myself with the system. I needed to know how the different areas were arranged, how the directory trees were laid out, and how to move round to remote terminals. Somehow, I didn’t think I’d be having an early night.
By nine, I’d got the basic layout clear in my mind. My mind and a sheaf of scribbled maps and diagrams that strewed my desktop. Now all I had to do was find Sandra Bates’s terminal and start sifting her data. Doesn’t sound much, does it? Imagine trying to find a single street in Manchester with only the motorway map as a guide. I took a screen break in the shower, brewed another pot of coffee and settled down to do battle with Filbert Brown’s computer.
When the phone rang, I jumped a clear inch off my chair. I grabbed it and barked, “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Dennis’s voice announced. “Sorted.” Dennis is another one who doesn’t like confiding in the phone system.
“Great. When?”
“Tomorrow. Half past three, eastbound at Hartshead Services.”
“How will I know him?”
“He drives a metallic green Mercedes. He’s about forty, five ten, bald on top. Anyway, I told him to look for a tarty-looking little blonde.” Dennis couldn’t keep the triumph out of his voice.
“You did what?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to go looking like yourself,” he said defensively. “Kate, these are not people you want coming after you with a clear picture. Wear a blond wig, stick on the stilettos and the short skirt. And don’t drive that poncey coupe. It sticks out like a prick in a brothel.”
“Thank you very much, Dennis,” I said.
Impervious to my sarcasm, he said, “My pleasure. Be careful out there now, you hear? Let me know how you go on.”
“Okay.”
“Be lucky.”
If only it was as simple as that. With a groan, I turned back to the computer. Just after eleven, I made it into Sandra Bates’s data. Interestingly, it looked like Sandra had overall supervisory responsibility for about half of the Filbert Brown warehouses in the North West, as well as her day-to-day charge of the Ancoats cash-and-carry. She hadn’t mentioned that in our brief encounter. I decided to concentrate on Manchester for the time being. The first thing I went for was the purchase orders for Kerrchem. When I reached those files, I printed the lot out. Analysis could wait until a time when I wasn’t wandering round someone else’s system like an illegal alien. After a bit of searching, I found the till data, sorted product by product. I scrolled through till I found KerrSter and printed that lot out too. Finally, I made myself at home in the invoices section of Sandra’s files. That was the first indication I had that there was something going on. As a matter of course, I’d been checking for hidden files as I went along. When I added up the sizes of the individual files in the invoices subdirectory, it came to less than the amount of space the terminal told me the subdirectory occupied. The difference was about the size of one biggish file.
What Sandra Bates had done was clever. She could have made the file a password file, but anyone from head office trying to get into it would have become immediately suspicious. With a hidden file, there was no way of knowing it was there unless you were looking for precisely that, and nothing to trigger off suspicions in a routine trawl. I copied the hidden file onto my own hard disk, not wanting to interfere with it in Sandra’s environment, and also copied the visible Kerrchem invoice file. I couldn’t think of anything else I needed right then, so I made my way out of the system. If what I already had suggested fresh avenues of inquiry, I could always go back in. I didn’t think I’d left any footprints obvious enough for the sysman to notice and do anything panicky like change his password.
The last thing I did was to open up the hidden file and print out the contents of it and the other invoice file. Then, clutching my pile of papers, I staggered off to bed. Richard hadn’t appeared, which meant he was probably out on the razz with a bunch of musicians. When he finally came home, he’d stagger into his own bed rather than waken me. Just one of the advantages of our semidetached lifestyle.
I woke up just before eight, the light still on, the papers strewn all over the duvet and the floor. I hadn’t got past page one before sleep had overwhelmed me. I picked up the papers and shuffled them together. I showered, sliced a banana into a bowl of muesli and took breakfast and coffee out into the conservatory. As I ate, I started to read the paperwork. The purchase orders for KerrSter showed a sudden hike about two months previously, virtually tripling overnight. Interestingly, they weren’t big orders. According to this printout, Sandra hadn’t increased the amount of KerrSter on each order. It was the number of orders that had shot up. That seemed a pretty inefficient way of doing business to me.
I checked back with the till receipts to see when the sudden surge in sales of KerrSter had started. I knew then that I was on to something. If what Sandra Bates had told me was the truth, the increased orders should have been sales-led. But what I was seeing was something very different. The till receipts for KerrSter didn’t start to pick up until a few days after the orders increased dramatically. It looked as if the product had been given its starry position before the sales justified it. I was sure Trevor Kerr hadn’t been paying them a premium to improve the profile of his product; I couldn’t imagine him parting with his company’s cash in a deal like that. Trevor struck me as a man who liked his profits, and wouldn’t cede them to anyone.