Then both rear doors of the Espace opened simultaneously. A hand, like a vice, gripped his throat.

Something was pressed over his mouth and nose, a damp cloth with a sharp, sour reek. He felt an instant, blinding headache, like a cheese-wire slicing through his brain.

Behind his eyes it was as if a television had been switched off: one small diminishing pinprick of light, rapidly fading to black.

69

The next Sussex police officer to get an early-morning call was Detective Sergeant Jon Rye of the High Tech Crime Unit. His alarm clock showed 2.43 a.m. as his mobile began to ring, and he cursed not having turned the damned thing off.

His wife stirred but didn’t say anything as he snapped on the bedside light, waking up fast, looked at the caller display and saw only Private number calling. Almost certainly to do with work, he thought.

It was the SIO of the Janie Stretton case on the line. Rye glanced at his wife, asked Roy Grace to hold for a moment, then pulled on a dressing gown and hurried downstairs into the kitchen and closed the door.

‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ the Detective Superintendent said. ‘I need to ask you something urgently. Last night you logged an incident on the system – a “War Driving”.’

Oh shite, Jon Rye thought blearily. He’d only logged that bloody phone call from that Swiss engineer out of cussedness. More as a joke than anything, really. Talk about something coming back to bite you!

‘You put down the registration details of a white Ford Transit van. That van was outside a crime scene the previous night, and it has been involved in an accident following a high-speed pursuit tonight.’

‘I see,’ the head of the High Tech Crime Unit said.

‘I’ve never heard of this expression, “War Driving”, before. What did you mean by it?’

Rye explained.

When he had finished, Grace said, ‘OK, if I understand correctly, you are saying that people with Wi-Fi – a wireless internet connection – can log onto any system that is not password-protected?’

‘Correct, sir. The wireless router – a small bit of hardware that costs about fifty quid – puts out a signal, and anyone with Wi-Fi who’s within range can log on to the internet through it, if they are not locked out by a password request.’

‘So they can get a free high-speed internet connection doing this?’

‘Exactly, sir.’

‘Why would they bother?’

‘If you are out and about, wanting to pick up or send emails, it can be just out of convenience. I’ve done it myself.’ Rye, wide awake now, stepped over to the kettle, checked it had water and switched it on, deciding to have a cup of tea.

‘You’ve done it yourself? How do you mean?’

‘I’ve been a passenger in a car in Brighton, stopped at lights, with my laptop open, and suddenly I’ve realized I’m online – my Wi-Fi’s picked up a signal from a wireless router. In a few seconds you can download and pick up a lot of emails – and web pages.’

Grace was quiet for a moment, digesting this. ‘So Mr Seiler, who made the complaint, was angry about a man in a white van outside his house, connected to his wireless router by his Wi-Fi.’

‘That’s what it sounded like to me, sir.’

‘But why would Mr Seiler have been angry? Would it have mattered?’

‘Yes. If he’d been trying to send or download email, in particular large files, it would have slowed his connection speed down.’ Rye searched for an analogy. ‘If you imagine in your house you turn on every tap at the same time, water’s going to come more slowly out of each of them than if you had just one running. It’s not a perfect analogy.’

‘So this man in the van realized he had found a good spot to surf the net from?’

‘Yes, sounds like it; it’s a way to use the net without paying.’

The Detective Superintendent was quiet for some moments. ‘But the charges are pretty small now. Could there be another reason?’

The kettle was hissing, coming to the boil. It was pitch dark outside. On the fridge door was a crayoned drawing of a spindly man in a cap, in a boxy little car with four uneven wheels, and the word DADDY beneath it. It had been drawn by his daughter Becky a good ten years back, when he had been in Traffic; she must have been about nine. Strange what tiredness did to you, he thought. He probably hadn’t looked at that drawing for the best part of a decade.

‘Another reason?’ Jon Rye said. ‘Yes, if you had emails you wanted to send or receive that you wanted to make as hard as possible for anyone to track.’

‘Thank you,’ Grace said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

‘No problem. That information about the routings from the laptop I was given – from your Mr Bryce – was it helpful?’

‘Incredibly, yes.’

‘Good, we’re still working on it.’

‘Maybe talk later in the day.’

‘I’ll call you if we find anything more.’ He sensed an anxiety in the Detective Superintendent’s tone, as if the SIO was anxious to end the call – that it was now keeping him from something else he wanted to be doing. Something even more urgent than this call, which had woken his entire household up in the middle of the sodding night.

70

Grace, seated at the workstation in MIR One, hung up the phone and took a sip of the strong, sweet, white coffee he had just made himself. Since he had left the cleaners seemed to have been; the place was spotless, the smell of food replaced with the slightly metallic tang of polish, the bins emptied. Nick Nicholl, seated beside him, also hung up his phone.

‘No news from the hospital,’ the DC announced.

At this moment, Grace thought, no news was good news. No news meant that E-J was still alive. ‘OK,’ he said, nodding at the laptop that Nick Nicholl had taken from the van, which was now sitting in a plastic evidence bag in front of him. ‘I want to check out the in-box and sent mail on this machine.’

He glanced at the Vantage screen, taking a quick look through the incident log for the night so far. Other than the flurry surrounding their own activities, it was a quiet night, typical of Sunday. Come Thursday and Friday nights, there would be ten times the activity.

The Detective Constable pulled on latex gloves, removed the laptop from the bag and popped its lid. It was still powered up, but had gone to sleep. For some moments the processor went through its wake-up checks, then it opened at the Entourage email program that must have been running, Nicholl realized, when they had approached the vehicle.

Branson, sitting opposite them, asked, ‘Was Jon Rye helpful?’

‘More helpful than I’d be to most people at this hour of the morning,’ Grace retorted, blowing on the coffee to cool it.

‘Yeah, well he used to be in Traffic. Serves him right to get a bit of payback. One of them bastards done me about ten years ago; could have been him.’

Grace grinned. ‘Pissed? Breathalysed?’

‘No, just speeding. Empty bloody road – I wasn’t that much over. Bastard threw the book at me.’

‘Yeah, I got done for speeding three years ago,’ Grace said. ‘By an unmarked car just up the A23. Told him I was a cop and that just made it worse. They seem to get sadistic pleasure out of nicking their own.’

‘Know that old joke?’ Branson said. ‘About the difference between a hedgehog and a Traffic cop car?’

Grace nodded.

‘I don’t,’ Nicholl said.

‘With the cop car, the pricks are on the inside,’ Branson said.

Nicholl frowned for a moment as if his tired brain didn’t get it. Then he grinned. ‘Right! That’s funny,’ he said, moving the laptop so Grace could see the screen clearly.

‘Start with the in-box,’ Grace said. ‘Anything that’s come in since’ – he looked down at his notes to check the time of Jon Rye’s log – ‘since six thirty yesterday evening.’