it, no chance to run the tag on the PNC. She waited to see if it would come round from the north. But nothing else passed. Through the trees she saw the lights of the empty offices.
She rode east for half a mile, then pulled over. She took out her phone, logged on to the South Wales Police network, went into Human Resources and filled out a compassionate leave form. She copied it to Occupational Health. Then she switched off her phone. She didn’t want to have a mast signal for the location of what she was about to do.
She rode on to the Newport Road and found an internet café in a side street. Unlike in the city centre, there were no cameras outside; none inside as far as she could see. The terminals were in booths for privacy. Keeping her helmet on, she took a booth at the back.
The thought that Rhys had been so close to her, it wouldn’t quite let go yet. In her heart she wanted it to, but even if there was one per cent of doubt she knew she’d have to keep turning the stones. It was selfish of course, she’d be doing it to put her own conscience at rest. Not for him at the end of it, that’s what made her feel sick at herself.
He’d been scoring, no doubt about that from the film, none at all. But junkies scored like a car takes on fuel. He’d have needed to score just to keep moving. There were places he could’ve scored nearer the alley where he’d snagged the twenties. But he hadn’t, he’d come down to the water. Was that his destination, or had he been on his way somewhere else, up to the streets around her motel? Or was he just going nowhere?
She booted the drive, waited for the monitor to come to life. The place she was going to find an answer, if there was an answer, was in the case notes. She had no authorised access; only the SIO and the other officers assigned to the case had. She’d have to improvise a little. All the time she’d put in moling at the Hendon Data Centre had taught her how to do that without leaving footprints. She didn’t find hacks interesting in themselves, not at all, they were just a tool. A digital picklock. She was good at hacks because she was curious, and she was curious because she was one of those people who needed to know the truth about things, and in her experience the truth tended to get hidden.
Shadowing Thomas around the offices of Major Crimes, she’d noticed that South Wales Area had recently upgraded to Niche One-Sign, a single sign-on system for all applications. Previously officers might have to use ten separate passwords to access the HOLMES enquiry system, National Criminal and SPIN intelligence and all other databases on the national mainframes and back-up servers. Now, for everything, they just needed a single seven-digit password, and an ID. But any security system was only as secure as its weakest link, and in this instance that link was DS Jack Thomas. He’d told her enough times to come up close, watch what he was doing over his shoulder.
She logged in his password and within less than a minute she was into the case file. She noted the case hadn’t been rated important enough to attract the attention of a major rank as SIO. As senior officer on the scene Thomas had been responsible for uploading all the notes. And there wasn’t much to see.
She copied everything onto a Zip file, encrypted it with her PGP key, then sent it all to an anonymous account on a server in the Ukraine. That way she wouldn’t ever need to carry the data on her, could access it from anywhere. She clicked out of the Area system, back into the case notes. Looking closer, there was even less to see than at first glance.
Thomas had played it by the book. The coroner’s inquest determined only how a subject met their death, not the whys and wherefores. In the file there were no witness statements, nothing relating to Rhys turned up by searches onshore. Only the CCTV footage, the pathologist’s tox data. Exactly the same data she’d already seen. No next of kin or
She rode east for half a mile, then pulled over. She took out her phone, logged on to the South Wales Police network, went into Human Resources and filled out a compassionate leave form. She copied it to Occupational Health. Then she switched off her phone. She didn’t want to have a mast signal for the location of what she was about to do.
She rode on to the Newport Road and found an internet café in a side street. Unlike in the city centre, there were no cameras outside; none inside as far as she could see. The terminals were in booths for privacy. Keeping her helmet on, she took a booth at the back.
The thought that Rhys had been so close to her, it wouldn’t quite let go yet. In her heart she wanted it to, but even if there was one per cent of doubt she knew she’d have to keep turning the stones. It was selfish of course, she’d be doing it to put her own conscience at rest. Not for him at the end of it, that’s what made her feel sick at herself.
He’d been scoring, no doubt about that from the film, none at all. But junkies scored like a car takes on fuel. He’d have needed to score just to keep moving. There were places he could’ve scored nearer the alley where he’d snagged the twenties. But he hadn’t, he’d come down to the water. Was that his destination, or had he been on his way somewhere else, up to the streets around her motel? Or was he just going nowhere?
She booted the drive, waited for the monitor to come to life. The place she was going to find an answer, if there was an answer, was in the case notes. She had no authorised access; only the SIO and the other officers assigned to the case had. She’d have to improvise a little. All the time she’d put in moling at the Hendon Data Centre had taught her how to do that without leaving footprints. She didn’t find hacks interesting in themselves, not at all, they were just a tool. A digital picklock. She was good at hacks because she was curious, and she was curious because she was one of those people who needed to know the truth about things, and in her experience the truth tended to get hidden.
Shadowing Thomas around the offices of Major Crimes, she’d noticed that South Wales Area had recently upgraded to Niche One-Sign, a single sign-on system for all applications. Previously officers might have to use ten separate passwords to access the HOLMES enquiry system, National Criminal and SPIN intelligence and all other databases on the national mainframes and back-up servers. Now, for everything, they just needed a single seven-digit password, and an ID. But any security system was only as secure as its weakest link, and in this instance that link was DS Jack Thomas. He’d told her enough times to come up close, watch what he was doing over his shoulder.
She logged in his password and within less than a minute she was into the case file. She noted the case hadn’t been rated important enough to attract the attention of a major rank as SIO. As senior officer on the scene Thomas had been responsible for uploading all the notes. And there wasn’t much to see.
She copied everything onto a Zip file, encrypted it with her PGP key, then sent it all to an anonymous account on a server in the Ukraine. That way she wouldn’t ever need to carry the data on her, could access it from anywhere. She clicked out of the Area system, back into the case notes. Looking closer, there was even less to see than at first glance.
Thomas had played it by the book. The coroner’s inquest determined only how a subject met their death, not the whys and wherefores. In the file there were no witness statements, nothing relating to Rhys turned up by searches onshore. Only the CCTV footage, the pathologist’s tox data. Exactly the same data she’d already seen. No next of kin or
Similar Books
