She thought he was just trying to keep her out of his way, but she didn’t care. She was just grateful for something to do. Carol couldn’t cope with inactivity. It was that quality, rather than her inability to deal with her parents’ grief and blame, that had brought her to Worcester in the first place. Now, left with time on her hands, she wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking about Michael. And that would lead straight to the bottle. This time, she really didn’t want to go down that route. She didn’t want to become the disaster in her own life. She didn’t know whether she’d be able to find her way back a second time.
So she started on the list. She soon realised it could be broken down into three separate trips to London and one to Manchester. The first London visit consisted of three appointments. There were phone numbers, addresses and initials for all three. Patterson had reluctantly set her up with a phone and a computer and she started with a visit to Google, which led her to a company that provided a directory of office tenants throughout London. Two of the addresses appeared on the site, with full lists of the buildings’ tenants, but the third drew a blank.
Both of the companies she’d tracked immediately also had websites. They specialised in providing off-the-shelf companies in countries whose financial regulatory systems were less than transparent. Carol printed out the scant information on each and put them to one side.
She rang the number attached to the third appointment of the day and found herself listening to the recorded message of the City of Westminster Archives Centre. Curious now, she accessed their website. Halfway down the list of site contents, she saw what she thought might have been a likely target for Gates – General Register Office Indexes. If Vance was building new identities, he’d need ID. In the bad old days, a criminal looking to construct a new identity only had to go to St Catherine’s House or, later, the Family History Centre in Islington, where the records of births, marriages and deaths were kept. There, they could find the death certificate of someone around the same age as them, preferably one who had died as a baby or a young child. From there, they could backtrack to the birth certificate and then order a copy of it.
Armed with a birth certificate, other layers of genuine ID could be built up. Driver’s licence. Passport. Utility bills. Bank accounts. Credit cards. And there was a whole new identity that would pass muster in an airport or a ferry terminal.
But terrorism had closed many of those doors, making it all a lot harder. The certificates were kept away from public gaze. All that was available were skeleton details, attached to an index number that you had to have before you could order the certificate itself. It took a lot more time and patience to set the scam in motion, and it left a paper trail. Carol quickly typed out a suggested action for Monday morning and forwarded it to Ambrose. Some lucky sod was going to have to get on to the General Register and find out whether Terry Gates had commissioned any birth, marriage or death certificates. That would at least provide a starting point for possible aliases for Vance.
Of course, these days nobody bothered with the slow patient layering of a real ID. Forgery had become so sophisticated that providing the forger with a name, a date of birth and a photograph was enough for them to come up with a whole suite of documents that looked entirely authentic. But you still had to have a genuine starting place in case anyone checked. Carol would have bet a month’s salary that Terry Gates had gone to the Westminster index to find a plausible ID for Jacko Vance. Maybe even more than one.
Checking details like the ones on Terry Gates’s SIM card was infinitely quicker and easier, thanks to the resources of the Internet and the databases the police could access. A few years back, what Carol achieved inside a couple of hours would have taken several detectives days of footslogging and questioning people who operated on the fringes of the law. Even though the only human being she’d managed to talk to was an old mate on the Fraud squad, she had a pretty clear idea of what Terry Gates had been doing. Company formation, ID documents, private banks, a private investigations firm that was definitely dodgy and an ex-solicitor who specialised in crawling through the Land Registry to sell property information to scummy tabloid hacks. It pointed to two distinct operations. The first was to create new IDs and set up conduits for Vance to be reconnected with his money. The second goal was clearly directed at tracing and tracking other individuals. Presumably Vance’s vengeance targets. A bunch of detectives were going to be very busy indeed come Monday morning if they hadn’t found Vance by then. At least by that time they would have a clearer idea of the extent of the payback Vance had planned.
She’d almost finished a detailed note for Patterson when Stacey Chen walked in. She looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of a weekend supplement with her perfectly coordinated designer leisurewear and a Henk case. Carol knew, because she’d googled it, that the sleek black carbon-fibre carry-on cost more than ten grand. There was a time when she’d wondered whether Stacey was on the take. Then she’d done a bit more digging and discovered that just one of the software applications Stacey had developed in her spare time had made her over a million a year for the past five years.
Carol had once asked Stacey why she bothered with the day job. ‘What I do at work – if I did it as a private citizen, I’d be arrested. I like having a licence to dig around in other people’s data,’ she’d said. She’d also thrown a quick expressionless glance at Sam Evans, which was an answer of a different kind.
Stacey spotted her and headed over. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Carol said.
‘It sounds a lot more interesting than the Bradfield cases,’ Stacey said. ‘So far, that’s just been routine processing. Though Paula has come up with something that definitely has data-mining prospects.’
‘Really?’ Bradfield had slipped off Carol’s radar completely in the past twenty-four hours. Stacey’s comment reminded her that she had responsibilities elsewhere. ‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’
Stacey’s face gave nothing away. ‘We all thought you had enough on your plate. And it’s such a weird idea, Paula wanted to check it out before she made a big deal out of it.’
‘So what is it?’ Anything to distract her, even if it was a case that felt a million miles away.
‘There’s been another body, did you know about that?’
Carol shook her head. ‘Someone should have told me that, at least.’
Stacey gave Carol a quick run-down on the case. ‘Because this was so distinctive, so bizarre, the connection was indisputable,’ she concluded. ‘There was an obscure American TV series in the late nineties called
‘Very interesting. And Paula came up with this all by herself?’
Stacey busied herself with the Henk, hefting it on to a desk and opening it. ‘Apparently.’
With anyone else, Carol would have written this off as displacement activity. With Stacey, it was hard to be
