‘That’s ridiculous! Heck, for Christ’s sake, what are we doing?’
They were still twenty feet from the ground, a sufficient distance to break them both in half if they fell, but Heck stopped and turned so sharply that she almost crashed into him and sent them both tumbling.
‘This is not just about the investigation anymore, Lauren … this is about our lives!’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Someone has set us up. We’ve been green-lit. And when you’ve been green-lit, the last place you want to be is in prison or a detention centre!’
She shook her head. ‘You’re a cop, we’ll be protected.’
‘I don’t want to be protected! I want to catch the bastard who’s doing this!’
He continued down almost recklessly fast. She followed, more carefully.
They at last reached the bottom, and exited Gallows Hill via the hole the escape door had made in the fence. They scrambled down the embankment until they were on the motorway hard-shoulder. It was narrow, and juggernauts rocketed past them with only two or three feet’s clearance. The noise of this, exacerbated by the cutting’s canyon-like geometry, was deafening.
‘Alright!’ Lauren shouted. ‘But if my life’s on the line as well, that means you’ve got to take me along. Right to the end.’
‘I’ve no bloody choice now.’ Heck beat the dirt from his hands as they headed east.
Several hundred yards along, when they were well away from the derelict estate, they cut back uphill, climbed under some barbed wire and found themselves amid sheds and allotments. Beyond these, now watching out for police cars, they threaded their way back through the dismal streets to the alley where they’d left Heck’s Fiat.
‘Who’s supposed to have set us up, anyway?’ Lauren asked. ‘You think this guy Deke?’
‘Who else?’
‘I don’t get it. If Deke doesn’t want us around, why didn’t he just let those dickheads in the pub beat us up?’
Heck didn’t reply until he’d climbed behind the wheel, where he stopped to regain his breath. ‘Because getting us beaten up wasn’t enough. Whoever Deke is, he saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: O’Hoorigan – who for some reason we don’t know about yet, may have been in his sights all along. And us.’
‘But he didn’t try to kill us.’
‘No,’ Heck agreed, ‘but like you say, I’m a copper. Killing me would have caused a big stink. This way was better. It would have covered his back, and put us out of the game permanently.’
‘But who the hell is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ Heck switched the engine on. ‘But one thing’s sure … he knows who we are.’
He’d thought it was called a ‘beta site’. Blenkinsop had no technical understanding of that term, if it was a real term. As far as he was aware, ‘beta site’ referred to a website without a name, just a string of randomly chosen numbers and letters – mainly because it wanted to remain beneath most people’s notice. There could be any number of reasons for this, but none of the ones Blenkinsop could think of were particularly edifying.
He scrubbed a hand through his uncombed hair.
This was the second day running that he’d come to work so untidy that fellow employees had commented. Sally had asked him if he was feeling no better and if he wanted a paracetamol. He’d grunted a curt reply before closing himself in his office.
Beyond the window, radiant mid-morning sunshine bathed the dome of St Paul’s. Directly below, Cornhill and Threadneedle Street were packed with cars, the pavements thronging with City types. It was the throb of business, the pulse of commerce, the arterial flow of the world famous Square Mile. As yesterday, however, the vibrant scene did little to uplift his spirits. In fact now it was even worse, because now he wasn’t just riddled with guilt, now he was touched by fear.
A ‘beta site’.
That was what he believed it was called. There were probably hundreds of them, thousands, millions. Yet he doubted any could be as abhorrent as the one that had so quickly come to occupy his every waking thought.
What a two-edged sword the internet could be.
On its first arrival back in the 1990s, he’d considered it a porn explorer’s godsend. Online, you could get anything you wanted – literally anything. Talk about a refreshing change after the days of his youth, when in straight-laced, buttoned-up Britain you’d had to content yourselves with girlie mags containing nothing more than tits, bums and snatch. It didn’t matter what your kink, the net could cater for it. Nothing was too extreme or bizarre, and of course it was all completely clean and non-judgmental. There was no stern-faced shop lady to stare after you as you scuttled out of the newsagents, your new purchase stowed in your briefcase; no visit was required to a dingy back alley and seedy shop, where the odious old men in raincoats and the stains on the video tape covers made you feel soiled simply for being there.
But in recent years, after some of his trips abroad and with his developing interest in getting ‘hands-on’ in such matters, these frolics in cyberspace had come to seem tame. The worst thing about this blasted summer had not been that his wife, Yvonne, and his daughter, Carly’s annual two-month pilgrimage to the Med would leave him on his own, but that his scheduled trip to the Gulf in early September had been cancelled. The next one was only due in February – six months away. Until then he’d have to make do with the sanitised fantasies of the internet.
At least, this was what he’d thought – but then, two days after Yvonne and Carly had embarked for the family villa in Italy, the card had arrived.
That was all it was: just a square piece of white card inside a brown envelope, delivered with the morning post. Blenkinsop’s name and address were printed on the front in a basic typeface. Not surprisingly, there’d been no return address. Junk mail, he’d presumed, and when he’d ripped it open, intending to throw it away after a single glance, he’d been right – in a way.
‘Dear Ian,’ it had said in that same standard type, ‘here is something that will interest you.’ And underneath it was that fateful line of letters and digits – which he’d identified as a web address, as a beta site.
It was a mark of how enthralled he was to the ‘thrill-seeker’ side of his personality that he’d immediately gone online to check it out. He’d known instinctively that it would be a sex site of some sort, but instead of feeling alarm that these people, whoever they were, had made contact with him at his home (he’d written that off as an inevitability of having used his credit card to join so many sites in the past), he’d been excited and rather absurdly, he now realised, he’d regarded it as the commencement of a summer of online adult adventuring that might be a little bit more interesting than usual.
Despite all that had happened since, it seemed incredible to Ian Blenkinsop that a man at his station in life could ever be described as credulous, gullible, naive. And yet … he glanced across the office to his desk, where his laptop was sitting open, its screen blank. Again, fear gnawed at his innards. There was no reason at all to assume that the person who’d been eavesdropping on his conversation in Mad Jack’s last night had been …
But of course there was reason.
There was every reason.
And there was even more reason to be afraid because of it.
He took a diary from his overcoat pocket and thumbed through its pages until he reached the back. There, sandwiched between two of his many legitimate contacts, was that string of digits; he’d destroyed