By All Means (Fiske and MacNee Mysteries Book 2) (13 page)

‘Come in, gentlemen, please.’

‘This is Detective Sergeant Donaldson, Mr Donovan…’

‘Just call me Dongle,’ Donaldson interrupted, ‘Everybody else does.’

Williamson had hoped to avoid having to explain Dongle’s nickname, but it was now inevitable, so he did.

‘Not much about computers and databases that Dongle doesn’t know.’

‘OK’, Donovan said, ‘So what has he come up with?’

Dongle sat forward on the seat he had taken facing Donovan, who had sat down behind his desk.

‘Well, Mr Donovan, most HR databases are, in fact, two databases that can be related to each other.  They’re called relational databases.  Have you heard the term?’

Donovan nodded, and said, ‘Go on.’

‘Commonly, one database is composed of the photographs, usually in jpg format, and one holds all the other, more personal and confidential information.  In normal usage they appear to be one database – if I called up your file, I’d see all your personal details and your picture – but they can be detached from each other and interrogated separately.   So, if your HR records are set up that way, we can do the exercise that Duncan described to you earlier today.’

‘Would you have to go through everything?’

‘No. We would search for all male employees in a particular age range, in this case, between thirty and fifty and download the pictures to a single file.  We would then run it through our facial recognition software to see if we have a match.’

‘And no other information would be accessed?

‘Absolutely none.’

‘I’ll ask our IT manager to come up.  She’ll be able to confirm if our records are arranged in the way you describe.’

*

Janet MacNee and Shelley Mehring, the MacNees’ new
au pair
, were sitting at the MacNees’ kitchen table drinking coffee.  Shelley had phoned Janet on the previous evening, Monday, to accept the job and Janet had asked if she would like to come round early on Tuesday so that they could both take the girls to school.

‘I’ve taken a couple of days off to show you the ropes.  I’ll have to introduce you to the head teacher and to the girls’ teachers.  And we’ll have to fill in all sorts of forms to make it possible for you to pick them up from school.  So if we took them to school together we might be able to sort all that out in one go.’

When they got back from the school, Janet had shown Shelley her room, usually a guest bedroom.   It was perfectly clean and tidy, with a supply of towels laid out on the bed.   Then they had viewed Emma and Cat’s room, which was a mess, with toys and books all over the place, and duvets, Emma’s with pictures from
Anne of Green Gables
and Cat’s showcasing
Spongebob Squarepants
, hanging off both of the bunk beds.

Janet didn’t apologise. ‘Please don’t be tempted to tidy up for them.  They’re supposed to do it themselves, but Colin’s the only one who can persuade them to do it.  I think he bribes them, but he denies it, says he relies solely on charm.’

‘If I get involved, it’ll be as a joint operation with Emma and Cat’, Shelley said.

‘You’d think you’d already started, Shelley.  That sounded a bit like the police-speak Colin sometimes brings home.  Which reminds me of something I have to emphasise, and I hope you won’t mind that I do.’

Shelley looked apprehensive.

‘Nothing to worry about.  It’s just that both Colin and I do jobs where confidentiality is really important.  We want you to be part of the family, so it’s likely that you’ll hear us talking about work. I think that asking you to sign a confidentiality agreement or something would be over the top, but I need to tell you that anything you hear shouldn’t be repeated outside the house.’

‘That’s absolutely fine, Janet’, Shelley said, ‘I understand’.

‘Good.  So now let’s go through a typical week in the lives of Emma and Catriona MacNee.’

*

Vanessa and Fiona took a taxi from Paddington Station to Whitehall and walked through the ornamental arch into King Charles Street and the Classical splendour of George Gilbert Scott’s main Foreign Office building.  They identified themselves at the entrance. Vanessa showed her warrant card and introduced Fiona as her colleague.  The porter on reception asked them to wait while he made a phone call. A couple of minutes later, a young man in shirtsleeves and a college tie came down to meet them and conducted them up the spectacular Grand Staircase.

They were taken to a small but elegant room, furnished as a board room and with pictures from the government art collection on the walls.   They were not the kind of old masters that command millions at auction, but they were high quality English landscapes, completely in keeping with the opulence of the Scott interiors they had seen as they made their way up from reception.  The room was already occupied.  Four men rose from their seats as Vanessa and Fiona entered.

'Good morning, Detective Chief Inspector Fiske, Ms Marchmont.  Welcome to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I'm Gerald St Clair, Assistant Secretary with responsibility for relations with the United States.  Let me introduce my colleagues.  David Horner is one of our lawyers and he served for some time as legal attaché in Washington. Nigel Inchholm is here representing the Advocate General.  And Commander Kenneth Bancroft is from Special Branch, attending at the request of the Permanent Secretary and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.'

Vanessa and Fiona shook hands all round, and then Vanessa turned to St Clair. 'I recognise that it's your meeting, Mr St Clair, but may I ask what interest Special Branch has in this case?'

St Clair looked at Bancroft, who took off his half-moon spectacles and polished them.  He prepared himself to speak, much like a ham actor in a 1950s provincial repertory theatre.

'There are
aspects
' - the emphasis was partly declaratory and partly conspiratorial - 'to this case that are of interest to HMG.  Sir Justin, the Permanent Secretary, asked us to observe this meeting because he takes the view that the ownership of the facilities in which the murders took place is both largely irrelevant and, having consulted the Commissioner, likely to lead to a waste of police time, both here and, if the FCO does what you want, Chief Inspector, in the United States.'

Vanessa remembered what Neil had told her about the membership of the Burtonhall board. Sir Justin has been got at, she thought, almost certainly by James Roskill.

‘I’m not sure on what evidence Sir Justin has taken that view, Commander Bancroft, but I strongly disagree with him.   I am leading an investigation into two murders that occurred within hours of each other, in establishments owned or managed by two separate American companies that are subsidiaries of the same holding company.  I have been unable to establish motive and I believe that access to the emails sent back to the United States, in encrypted form, by the murdered men, may help me to do so.’

‘What makes you say that, Chief Inspector?’  This was St Clair, and the note of scepticism in his question was unmistakeable.

‘First of all, both men were doing similar jobs, auditing the performance of systems in the hospital and on the oil platform. Second, Ebright tried to prevent me from taking as evidence Harvey Jamieson’s laptop computer, which was among his effects on Vermont One, and Hedelco, who run the hospital, have refused to release copies of Peter Keller’s emails to them.  Third, the emails recovered from Jamieson’s laptop and decrypted by our experts, contain evidence that he had discovered practices that might adversely affect the profitability of Vermont One.  Fourth, circumstantial evidence about Keller’s movements in the hospital also suggests a concern with the performance of processes that might affect the bottom line.  At the very least, I have to investigate whether commercial concerns may have played a part in these murders.  To do that effectively, I need to see the emails.’

‘But there are other lines of enquiry?’, Bancroft asked.

‘Of course.  We have CCTV images of possible suspects for both murders and we are actively pursuing these avenues.  As we speak, one of my team is attempting to persuade Hedelco in Aberdeen to allow us to compare one of these images with pictures held on the hospital’s HR database.   I don’t know at this point if they are being any more co-operative than they’ve been so far.  But these are parallel enquiries to those concerning the commercial issues.  They are not a substitute for them. The various strands of the enquiry are inseparable.’

‘So, exactly what would you like the FCO to do?’, St Clair asked.

Vanessa sensed the beginning of a runaround.  ‘I am advised by Fiona that if we attempt to get access to these emails by purely legal means, by going to court, the process could take a very long time.  I need help to persuade these companies, Hedelco in particular, to hand them over “voluntarily”.  That would be a political and diplomatic route to the same end.  So I am asking the FCO to use its connections in Washington, possibly via the legal attaché, to exert some pressure.’

David Horner, the former legal attaché, spoke for the first time. ‘It’s not unheard of for us to help in this way, but it’s not common practice.  The difficulty here is that it would involve both federal and state authorities, so we would have to persuade our American friends, in the Justice Department and the FBI, to act on our behalf with the state authorities in Massachusetts and Delaware, possibly also in Rhode Island.  That’s very complicated and would take some time, though not as long as going to court, I grant you.’

‘What if we limited our efforts to Hedelco?  The Keller emails are in their ownership and any court action would be against them rather than their parent company.  We have most of Jamieson’s emails, so we could put Ebright to one side for the purposes of this exercise and so limit the state level intervention to Massachusetts.’

‘Administratively, that would simplify matters, certainly,’ St Clair said, ‘But Sir Justin would still need to be convinced that your need was great enough to justify any action by us.  David?’

‘Yes. If a request like this had come to me I would have been more hopeful if it had involved only one company and, in particular, only one state.  In this case, too, the process might be assisted a little by the fact that the administrations in Washington and in Massachusetts are of the same party.’

Vanessa thought that of the four men she was trying to persuade – in effect, only three, because Inchholm from the Advocate General’s office was carrying no more than a watching brief – Horner was the only one who was trying to be helpful.

‘So,’ Vanessa said, reaching for a glass of water and suppressing a belch, ‘Can we go after Hedelco?’

St Clair signalled the end of the meeting by closing his folder. ‘I shall put it to Sir Justin and get back to you as soon as I can.’

‘Thank you, Mr St Clair. Now, I wonder if you could direct me to the nearest ladies’ room.’

*

'I think we may have a match.' Dongle Donaldson and Detective Sergeant Anil Jasthi of the Video Analysis Section had been watching as Anil's video recognition software compared the enhanced CCTV image with the file of photographs from the GRH HR database.  There were more than eighty male employees in the 30-50 age range and it took an hour to do the comparison.

'How sure are you, Anil?' Dongle asked. 'I need to be able to tell MacNee how confident we are that we can identify this guy.'

'Pretty sure.'

'How sure?'

'Well over 90 per cent.'

'I'll phone MacNee.'

 *

Williamson and MacNee gave the picture of the employee matched with the CCTV image to the senior HR manager and went for a coffee in the hospital canteen.  She would go through the files related to the employees whose photos had been compared until she identified the match. It wouldn't take long, and she agreed to text Williamson as soon as their suspect had been identified.

'His name is Andrew MacIlwraith and he worked here for less than a year as a porter.'