The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (microsoft ebook reader TXT) 📗

it’s cloaked so many times it’s almost impossible to track down, and to make it worse they constantly shift things around.’

‘Was the ransom paid?’

‘Oh no, we got lucky. Cracked it wide open. No sweat. Do you want Belinda Cooper’s gear?’

‘Yeah, set it down there,’ and he plonked it on the side of Karen’s desk.

‘What’s the password?’

‘Highfive555.’

‘That didn’t sound so difficult to work out.’

‘They never do when you know the answers. Bloody difficult when you don’t.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, thinking about Highfive555.

Belinda Cooper sure seemed hung up on that number.

‘No probs, glad to be of service,’ and he smirked and scuttled off back to the tech lair, wherever that was currently located.

Bulgaria or Romania? She thought. Where was the Mirror man from again? Serbia, didn’t he say? How far was that from Bulgaria and Romania? Just a coincidence maybe, thought Karen, but like most of the members of the team, she didn’t believe in coincidences, for they often pointed the way forward. Maybe worth remembering. Sometimes whole cases fell open like a ripe sweet chestnut on such morsels. She glanced across the office at Jenny and Nick.

‘Are you busy, Jen?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Fancy a trawl through the Mirror man’s phone.’

‘Sure, glad to,’ and Jenny came over to Karen’s desk and collected the latest model mobile. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Anything at all that links him with Ellie Wright, or better still, Belinda Cooper, or anything that looks weird, calls and messages to women, and dating sites, and anything that looks like financing or organising cyber crime.’

‘Cyber crime?’

‘Yeah, the local Uni’s have all been hit, coming from Eastern Europe, played havoc with their systems, apparently, costs them a load of money in downtime and stuff.’

‘Okey-doke,’ and she took the phone away.

Karen plugged in the laptop and booted it up. The tech guys had set it up so that it overrode any existing passwords. Well done them. All the stuff about the number 5 was now redundant.

Walter came back in the office and walked past her and grunted.

‘Bel’s laptop?’

‘Sure is.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Just opened it now.’

‘Crack on, I’m going to have a word with the boss,’ and he ambled across the office and tapped on Mrs West’s open door.

Karen went straight to the emails. Sure, people texted a lot, but for the real meaty stuff, that was still to be found in the emails every time. Love letters, juicy gossip, hopes and aspirations, secrets and lies, diaries, stuff like that, that’s where you’d find it.

And they were all there too, going back over the previous three years. Firstly, the semi-gay Marcus Royce, for that was his name, and his wacky sense of humour and bawdy jokes, some of which Karen understood, and some she didn’t, moving on as their relationship developed, until the final phase when Bel finished with him after his gay revelations, and his subsequent pleadings to be given another chance, all to no avail. Begging rarely worked, didn’t everyone know that?

Ronny Speight, writing masculine filth, something he clearly thought exciting, and imagined that she would too, though it was obvious to Karen’s eye that it made Belinda most uncomfortable, as she tried to gently steer him away from such things, though he apparently didn’t see the advice tactfully written between Bel’s lines, and in the end he paid for it. And there was something else there too that caught her eye, within Ronny’s increasingly furious writings, as their relationship crashed and burned. How could it not? One Saturday night/Sunday morning at 1.28am precisely he’d written: “I could strangle you!” Maybe something there. She printed it off and circled it in red ink and set it on Walter’s desk.

And then Iain Donaldson followed, and his gentler more cerebral caring line, and maybe that came as something of a relief after Ronny’s queer pitch and violent tongue, though by the cringe, he could come across as an awful bore, could our Iain, writing overlong emails about how he’d like to go to Chile and explore the Atacama Desert, to further his knowledge of South American geography, so he said, and would she like to go along with him on the trip of a lifetime? Something she evidently did not wish to do.

And somewhere around then she began seeing Gareth Williams at the same time, and somehow Iain found out, or maybe she told Iain, or left some hints around that he was meant to find, and Iain promptly mounted his high horse and issued her with an ultimatum: It’s him or me, never a good move, as Karen’s former boyfriend Rodney once found out, and of course Belinda chose to be with him, Gareth, much to Iain’s chagrin.

And onto and into Gareth’s feisty stuff, kind of somewhere in between Iain and Ronny, definitely more exciting than Iain’s truly dull style, but not as bad as Ronny’s over the top rantings that some men seem to imagine attracts women. There were even some attachments there, on Ronny’s emails, photo attachments for God’s sake of close-ups of excited male body parts, presumably big Ron’s, as he liked to refer to himself, though he wasn’t immediately identifiable, or that big. Karen laughed aloud. No one noticed. Did men really think that such things turned women on enough to win them over? It didn’t attract Karen, not one tiny bit, and by the look of Bel’s replies it hadn’t worked on her either.

But back to Gareth, and his gentler more supporting style, but all the while including little digs along the lines of how she was far better off with him than with that loser, Iain, or as he described him, the Jogman - geography teacher, and daily jogger to boot. The Jogman could jog off into the sunset, and eventually he was forced to do precisely that. And still it came.

Details of frequent secret weekends away they’d enjoyed together, Gareth and Bel, in five star hotels, in Hereford, Lytham, Buxton, Ludlow, and others too, quite a list, and exciting as well, judging by the detailed descriptions written after the events,