A Kind Of Wild Justice (36 page)

‘Do you have the authority to offer me twenty grand, girl, just like that?’ he asked astutely.

‘Shifter, I’m married to the editor. You know that. We’re a team. Of course I have the authority. You said you trusted me, didn’t you?’

She was lying through her teeth. But if the story was good enough she reckoned she’d get away with this one. She certainly didn’t want another broken
deal. The Phillips fiasco had stretched her credibility to its limit. Shifter might be a villain, but if she made a deal with him she had to ensure it was adhered to or she would have no credibility left at all.

He stared at her for a moment or two. ‘Right, then, it’s a deal,’ he said and he stretched one of his big, ham-fisted hands across the table. She reached out her own, which was promptly enclosed within his impressive grip. She felt her fingers scrunch together and heard one of her knuckles crack. It occurred to her fleetingly that there could be reasons other than her journalistic reputation why she really had to ensure that this deal was not broken.

Shifter did not let her down. His story was every bit as much of a corker as he had promised it would be. It was quite sensational. ‘I don’t know who paid me to do O’Donnell,’ he told her. ‘I got an e-mail, didn’t I?’

Joanna stared at him. ‘You got a what?’ She’d heard him all right. It was a pretty banal response. But she was absolutely staggered.

‘I got an e-mail,’ Shifter repeated very precisely, as if she were a bit on the slow side. ‘I got the contract by e-mail.’

‘And you don’t know who from?’

‘Not a clue. I tried to e-mail back after I was lifted the first time, do a bit of digging, like, but I never got any more answers.’

‘So you got an e-mail from an unknown source asking you to top Jimbo O’Donnell and you just did it?’

‘Only after I’d been paid half the readies.’ He spoke indignantly, as if she were taking him for a fool.

Oh, that’s all right then, thought Joanna. ‘So you’re really into the Net, then, are you?’

‘Gotta be nowadays, you know that, Joey doll. I’m a businessman, see? Same as anybody else trying to make a crust. I just move in a different kind of world, that’s all. The Net’s the future, isn’t it?’

And you’ve not got one any more thanks to it, then,
she thought. ‘So how often have you been hired to do a job on the Net then?’

‘Oh, now and then, doll. I had my own website you see.’ Shifter spoke with considerable pride.

‘Did you, indeed? And what form did this take?’

‘Oh, you know, just offering my services, like.’

‘Like what, Shifter?’

‘“Got problems, get Shifter, he’ll shift them.” That sort of thing.’

She couldn’t help smiling. This was extraordinary. ‘And so anonymous people just got in touch and asked you to …’ she paused ‘… shift their problems?’

‘Yeah. That was the idea, see. They didn’t necessarily have to let me know who they were, like. People seemed to find that’ – he stopped as if thinking of the right word – ‘sort of reassuring.’

‘So how did these anonymous folk pay you, then?’

Shifter grinned conspiratorially. ‘Ways and means, girl, ways and means.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

‘All right, how about the O’Donnell job? How’d you get paid for that?’

Shifter grinned even more broadly. ‘That got put into a Swiss bank account for me,’ he said. And the pride in his voice was even more evident. Never mind that he was a convicted murderer doing twenty-two years, Shifter patently thought of himself as a thoroughly modern businessman.

Joanna was momentarily speechless. An East End heavy who got hired to kill someone by e-mail and was then paid via a Swiss bank account. Well, it was certainly original, she thought.

‘Didn’t the police check out your computer?’ she asked.

‘Always killed my e-mails straight after I read them. And I never kept any files to do with the business. Kept it all in my head, see.’

‘Unless you’re a lot cleverer than me, Shifter, it would all still be there somewhere on your hard drive.’

Shifter shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, depends how hard you look, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t reckon the filth even realised I had a computer. I’m just a dumb villain to them, aren’t I?’

‘Isn’t it in your home? The police would have searched the place when they arrested you the first time. That’s standard procedure.’

‘Oh, yeah, all over my gaff like a rash, they were. And it was there all right. Looking depends on what you think you’re going to find sometimes, though, doesn’t it? The only computer in my house was in my kids’ room.’ He chuckled. ‘Kids have all got computers, haven’t they? Switch my girls’ rig on and all you’ll see is a stack of Disney games, a load of girlie stuff and their homework.’

Jo felt her jaw drop. What Shifter was saying was crazily simple. It made total sense. She could see quite clearly how that computer in his children’s bedroom would have been overlooked.

The big man began to talk again. ‘The Simms, that’s my two’s favourite, you know, it’s the game about this family; you get them jobs and houses and stuff, even marry them off. What’s your girl’s favourite game, Joey? I bet she’s a bright one, your kid.’

Jo nodded. Emily was bright all right. Jo also realised that she did not have a clue what computer games her daughter liked best. Paul would know. He
often surfed the Net with Emily and said that playing computer games with her relaxed him. But somehow Joanna never seemed to get involved. She was ashamed of herself and experienced another sharp stab of guilt. Could Shifter Brown really be a better father than she was a mother? Surely not. He had got himself banged up for twenty-two years, hadn’t he? But she really did not want to explore that area of her life with him. ‘E-mails can be traced back, Shifter. We could still do that.’

‘Nope,’ said Shifter. ‘Excite address, wasn’t it? I had a Hotmail one. And all the real hooky stuff I just went down the cyber caff for. You pay cash, get online, make up a user name, put any old rubbish on the sign-on. I can’t swear to it, doll, but I’d have a fair old bet that whoever hired me to do Jimbo would have used a cyber caff too. He’d be a mug not to have done.’

‘Look, Shifter, I could get an expert to check out your computer. Maybe your punter wasn’t that careful. Remember the love-bug hackers? Even they didn’t know that Microsoft software has a hidden flag. It’s all traceable.’

‘Not if you buy second hand at a street fair, doll,’ said Shifter, proudly displaying his knowledge again. ‘That’s what I did. You get your rig from a dodgy market and pay cash. The trail ends with the last authorised user.’ He grinned. ‘Anyway, after I was arrested the first time I trashed the lot. Put a hammer through the hard drive and took it down the tip. Then I went down the market again and bought another one.’

Amazingly simple and almost certainly foolproof, thought Jo, reflecting yet again what a pity it was that
Shifter hadn’t used his brain for better purposes over the years. She set about prising all the information she could out of him. ‘OK, so how much did you get paid?’ she asked.

‘Fifteen grand. Ten before and five after.’

A fair amount of money for what Shifter would regard as little more than a day’s work, Jo supposed. But a cheap price for a life. Even the life of Jimbo O’Donnell. ‘And where’s that money now, still in your Swiss bank account?’ Even as she mentioned that Swiss bank account Jo had to fight an urge to laugh aloud.

‘’Course not, doll,’ said Shifter predictably. ‘Spent it already, haven’t I?’

Well, he wasn’t going to admit that he still had his ill-gotten gains, was he – even though Jo couldn’t imagine there would ever, in any circumstances, be much chance of British authorities retrieving it from the gnomes of Zurich. ‘How was the money paid into your account?’ she asked.

‘It was transferred from another Swiss account.’

All clever stuff. ‘And I don’t suppose you’ll be revealing the number of your account, or the other account, or authorising anybody to look into it, will you, Shifter?’

‘C’mon, doll. I don’t grass. Do I?’

There was something else that Jo was intrigued to know. But she wondered if Shifter, still operating under his own peculiar moral code, would refuse to tell her. ‘What e-mail address did your …’ she hesitated and continued with a small smile ‘… client use, Shifter?’

‘
[email protected]
.’

Well, that was straightforward enough. Shifter was
obviously quite confident that his ‘client’ could not be traced. ‘And your address?’

Shifter grinned. ‘
[email protected]
.’

Dear God, thought Joanna. There was nothing like being blatant. Shifter had used the most modern technology but his e-mail address was the stuff of gangster legend. Enforcers were traditionally the heavies who did the dirty work for the big gang bosses. Everybody knew that Shifter had always been an enforcer of some kind and she had already experienced his sense of humour. Even now, his amusement at his own wit and daring in labelling himself in such a way was abundantly apparent. ‘And your password?’

Shifter’s grin faded. He looked suddenly sheepish. Perhaps he was not prepared to reveal his password, even now, in spite of his apparent confidence that all tracks were effectively covered. But no, that was not what was causing his hesitation, it seemed. ‘It’s Sinatra,’ he said eventually, adding with solemn reverence, ‘well, Frank was the guv’nor, wasn’t he, doll?’

The drive back to London seemed endless, particularly the last bit across the city. Jo didn’t call Fielding. For once didn’t even think about him for some hours. Not after what she had just learned. She decided to drive straight to Canary Wharf. Only ‘straight’, of course, was hardly the way to describe the journey.

It took her three hours to drive the 200 miles or so from Exeter prison to the Hogarth roundabout at Chiswick, then another hour and a half to crawl across town to the heart of dockland, just fifteen or
sixteen miles further. She didn’t have a parking space, like most of the journalistic staff, and Paul was certainly not inclined to arrange anything special for his wife. So she had to find a meter.

It was almost 7 p.m. before she stepped into the lift which would carry her to the twenty-first floor and she was exhausted. She half wished she had simply driven home to Richmond, waited for Paul to return that night and told him all about it then. But it wouldn’t have been a good time to try to discuss something new and controversial with him. And she certainly couldn’t wait until the next day.

She checked her watch and decided to give her husband an hour or so before she went along to his office. She wanted to catch him during that usually quiet period right after the first edition had gone to bed.

Meanwhile there were things she wanted to try to do, although she suspected she would probably be wasting her time. She switched on her computer, logged on to the Net and called up Shifter’s website. It was blank – except for a message telling her the page was no longer available on that site. Shifter had told her he’d killed his web page. Nonetheless she thought she’d check. It might not in any case have taken her much further, but she would have liked to have seen it.

Next came the big one. She called up Hotmail and tapped in Shifter’s user name and his password: ‘enforcer’, ‘Sinatra’. It really was hilarious stuff.

Both user name and password still worked. But as Jo had suspected when Shifter had so freely supplied her with them, all his e-mails, in and out, had been deleted. The only place they could possibly be
retained would be on the computer he had used to keep in contact with ‘contractor’. The one in his home had been trashed and Shifter refused to tell her which cyber café he had used for what he referred to as ‘the really hooky stuff’. There weren’t that many cyber cafés around, it would be most likely that Shifter had used one in his own manor, certainly in London, but that sort of detective work was almost certainly one for the pros – a police matter. In any case Jo reckoned she already had all she needed for a major ground-breaking crime scoop, which would be the envy of all the
Comet
’s rivals.

When she finally decided the moment was right to approach her husband and editor she found him, as she had expected to, alone in his office, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk. The door was always open. There was no culture for anyone to knock – which didn’t mean that everybody, including her, wasn’t inclined to be cautious about entering. Only the angle-light on Paul’s desk was switched on, its narrow beam palely illuminating just a part of the room. Mozart played softly on his CD player. Paul’s eyes were closed. She knew he wouldn’t be asleep, but he had a knack of relaxing completely for just a few minutes whenever the opportunity arose. It helped him greatly in getting through the extraordinarily long hours Fleet Street editors worked.

‘Hi, Jo,’ he murmured. His eyes were still closed and she had not seen him open them. It didn’t surprise her, though, that he knew she was there. Maybe he’d peeped, or possibly he really did have that sixth sense his staff sometimes attributed to him.

She sat down opposite him, rehearsing her approach in her head, waiting for him to appear ready to talk.

‘What are you doing here tonight anyway?’ he asked eventually. It wasn’t one of her days in, after all.

‘I’ve got this extraordinary story,’ she began. And she told him all of it.

Paul listened very carefully. He had always been a good listener. By the time Joanna had finished speaking he was almost as excited as she was.

Paul Potter was a newspaperman, through and through. His reaction to news was involuntary, instinctive and overwhelming, just like his wife’s. When something big and special broke he experienced the same burst of adrenalin rushing through his system as she did. As did all the best ones. But he didn’t show it, of course, it wasn’t his style. And in any case it was his job to think the thing through, to be clear on the legal aspects and to work out how to make the most of what they had.

‘Just e-mail a killer.’ It was wonderful. ‘
[email protected]
.’ – magic. Pure magic. And so was the idea of a hit man being paid through a Swiss bank account. But the source was a convicted murderer and Joanna had agreed to pay him for the story, albeit indirectly. Jo had jumped the gun and had, of course, had absolutely no authority to pledge the
Comet
for that sort of money. But this time Paul didn’t blame her. He would have done the same himself. Make the promises. Get the story. Sort the rest out later.