Capital Offence

Chapter 11

“Are you going to be much longer? ‘Cos I’m off to bed now, and you know it disturbs me when I’ve gone to sleep and you start crashing about putting the light on again.”

“I’ll be as quick as poss Linda.” Jamieson Maclean answered his wife without looking up from the computer screen.

“I don’t know who you think you’re kidding. It’s just completely inconsiderate.” Linda’s voice tailed off up the stairs of their large Victorian detached house near Duddingston Loch. The building nestled under Edinburgh’s Holyrood Park, and the hill of Arthur’s Seat.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah...”

The Prime Minister’s official residence was Bute House, in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square. Jamie used it for formal entertaining, but preferred to keep his family house away from the city centre.

Jamie opened up his emails. He clicked on ‘New’.

God, how much of this stuff could be traced? He thought of Vaila, and felt the same frisson of guilt he had when he once tried doing a search on “amateur+voyeur”. The results had confirmed the worst warnings he’d been given by his Dunsapie Group of political advisors, and had immediately led, not to a spasm of guilt, but to the more serious pangs of fear of a chain of evidence. The last thing a politician needs is something embarrassing going public which can be traced back to him.

Jamie knew of an ageing rock star who’d discovered to his cost when he took his computer in for servicing that the experts can view pictures on your hard drive which you thought you’d wiped. Jamie was also aware of the fact that the hundred or so most recent images you access from the Internet are cached, or temporarily stored on your machine, to speed up their retrieval next time round. That caused him some amusement when he discovered that someone in his office was spending hours trawling for porn. He knew precisely how long, because every image cached had an access time on file. But he decided not to act, because in ten minutes over an office lunch he could have a look at all the images it had taken his colleague endless tedium to gather.

Jamie also knew that binning a file only threw away its readily accessible address - the file was still there on your hard drive, if you knew how to look, until the space was needed for something else and it was overwritten.

But email - there were a lot of unknowns there.

Did your server keep a log of all the sites you’d tried to access on the Net? He really couldn’t be sure, and couldn’t afford to take the risk from his home machine. And what about e-mail correspondence? There had to be a log, and for that matter, there might be an actual copy of the mail, despite the fact that he’d set the preferences at his end to dump mail from the server once he’d downloaded. The same rules had to apply - even if a file had been wiped from the server, it was probably still there if you were determined to find it.

So an email to Vaila was almost certainly traceable.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you.

But Vaila...

Jamie felt the old familiar jolt to his pulse. How could she have that effect? God she was almost his own age - she must be decrepit by now. Maybe it was the thought of a break in the routine. You could hardly expect sex with Linda to have the same effect, after years of marriage. Although now, with added rarity value...

Shut up, Maclean, you sad tosser. Mind back on the job in hand.

What could he say? He couldn’t gush anything which later would look bad, or compromising. I did not have a sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. Honest. Honest injun. Well only the honest-to-God time-honoured droit du seigneur custom known as the bestowing of Presidential honours. Although perhaps it was an inappropriate relationship for an intern. It was not internal, so to speak...

No, he had to build in ‘deniability’. But, in this case he couldn’t use the traditional method of cut-offs - getting a paid fall-guy to do the dirty work. In this case he was on his own. He decided to send the message from his daughter Fiona’s mail address. He knew Fiona’s password. She’d asked him to check an email for her once when she was travelling and couldn’t access the net. He wouldn’t dream of using it to snoop. But this was different. He would have to make sure that he intercepted the reply first, and could wipe it before she checked her own incoming mail.

He logged on to Fiona’s account, opened a new message and typed in Vaila’s address.

vaila@northlight.co.uk

They hadn’t had any pet names - any code that she would recognise, but which would be meaningless to others.

Vaila,

We need to speak urgently regarding a capital event at the end of this month. This involves a party known to both of us.

 

Jamie trawled the depths of his memory for some shared information by which he could identify himself. He spent ten minutes staring at the screen. Eventually, a slight smile came to his mouth, and he started to type once more.

See Eskimos, they’re the perfect people, so they are.

Discreet, mind.

Jamie re-read the message. There was nothing there that would stand out if anyone was doing a key word search. No ‘murder’, or even ‘brother’. The first part could almost read as a legitimate enquiry as a follow-up to his conversation with so-called Stuart Pearson. Better in that case if he removed the ‘Vaila’ - it was already addressed to her. And if he were to make the Eskimo bit a separate file it would be easier to argue later that it wasn’t meant to be sent with the first email - it could be seen as a typical bit of computer garble - a mistake in cut-and-paste which screwed up most of his ordinary attempts to forward files.

Jamie rattled the keyboard and started to restructure the message. He hit the button for Attach, with the paper clip symbol, failed to type in the additional message, and realised that he would have to create a new file for this before he could add it. This he called ‘authorisation’. In another minute or two, the e-mail was complete:

Attachments

Mail To: vaila@northlight.co.uk

We need to speak urgently regarding a capital event at the end of this month. This involves a party known to both of us.

 

When the Attachments file was accessed, the message read:

See Eskimos, they’re the perfect people, so they are.

They understand the value of silence.

Jamie gazed at it for a few moments, then, hit ‘Send Now’. What the hell. It felt strange, as ever, sending a message to an unknown destination. Vaila could be anywhere in the world, and the message would still reach her when she went online. And she could reply without revealing where she was. Weird.

So what now? Jamie knew that email was often far from immediate. Although the message had been sent within seconds to his local Internet server it might be a while before the server uploaded a batch of mail to the Net, then perhaps a bit longer before Vaila’s server posted the material for her to download. Then it was anyone’s guess when she would take a look at the mail, even assuming that the address was correct.

Jamie deleted his message from Fiona’s ‘Sent’ folder. Then he glanced at his watch, a waterproof sailors’ watch he’d got from Linda in the days he had more time to indulge his hobby. It was after one o’clock in the morning. He powered down, and made his way upstairs to bed, setting his alarm half an hour earlier than usual. His heart was beating faster than was healthy, and as he lay his head upon the pillow he could hear his pulse rushing in his ear.