The Ardmore Inheritance, Rob Wyllie [best novels for students TXT] 📗

her a smile. 'I'd lose more than my pension if Barker ever found out about this. But seriously, I think I'm seeing how this Geordie goes about his business.' He wasn't sure if he did, but he wasn't going to admit that to Eleanor. Luckily she was ready with an explanation.

'Yeah, so immediately after he steals their phone he goes on to their cloud account and diverts the authentication phone number to one of his own phones. That means that even if the mark reports their phone missing and blocks it, he's got as long as he wants to take whatever he needs from their cloud drives. I mean, nobody checks their cloud drives, or at least hardly ever. So he could have access for weeks and weeks before his marks realise they've been hacked.'

A thought came to Frank, and even although he knew it would make him look stupid, he asked the question anyway.

'But what about that password stuff? How does Geordie get round that? Because I don't suppose he has Zak's wee app, does he?'

She gave him a pitying look. 'Old-school hacking. It's not as clever as Zak's but it uses the same sort of techniques. And also, there's mega-tons of hacked personal data for sale on the dark web and people often use the same passwords across all their sites. Which is a mistake. That's why two-factor authentication was invented.'

'Because it's now so easy to crack a usercode and password?'

'Exactly,' she said, her expression betraying disappointment that Frank had worked it out for himself. 'As I said, that's why he has to steal their phones.'

It was all completely fascinating, but he wasn't sure if it actually helped at all with the main objective, which was uncovering the identity of the slippery artist-hacker.

'So how do we set about catching this guy?' he asked. 'Any ideas?'

She gave a grimace. 'He's one capable dude, so I don't think we could track down his IP. That'll be cloaked behind some weapons-grade firewalls on the dark web.'

'This dark web again?'

'Yeah, it's standard for these hacker guys.' She made it sound as if everyone should know that.

'So what's the answer?'

'Difficult,' she said, giving a perplexed frown. 'There might be something around the triangulation of his mobile phones, but I'd need to think about that.'

He nodded slowly. 'Aye well that's fair enough Eleanor. Take as much time as you like. You've been an amazing help, you really have.' He was just about to get up to leave when she gave him a pained look.

'So aren't we going to look at Barker's iDrive? Now that we're like in?'

His face broke into a wicked smile. 'Of course. It'd be rude not to. Now that we're like in.'

Which is how they came to know of Barker's big secret, something that might help to explain his inexplicable rise through the ranks and also explain how he'd inexplicably held onto his job for so long, despite his demonstrable and abject uselessness.

And it also explained that dodgy handshake too.

◆◆◆

Now there was some movement on the Geordie case, Frank could turn his attention to the other matter that had come into the department as a direct result of its new-found fame. A matter that was showing every prospect of being an absolute belter. A gory double murder, a prisoner who had hanged himself in his cell and the subsequent revelation of a massive miscarriage of justice. No wonder Police Scotland had sent the case scuttling down the M74 faster than a hot potato on a hot tin roof, if that wasn't too much of a mixed metaphor.

Now he was looking forward to his regular Thursday evening couple of pints with his brother in the Old King's Head. And another encounter with the vision of forty-two-year-old loveliness that was Maggie Bainbridge.

Chapter 4

For a while it had been touch and go in his mind but on balance he was glad he'd gone through with it in the end. Pulling on one of these old jackets and grabbing a pair of the walking boots, that had been a smart idea, but then he was full of smart ideas, wasn't he? The old labrador hadn't batted an eyelid bless him, when he'd slipped back into the boot-room to collect them, and for a moment he'd considered taking the mutt with him when he left. It got a bit lonely living on your own, and he had a notion a dog would be an amiable companion, not that he'd had any experience of them to judge that. But on second thoughts, they could be a bit of a tie, so he'd quickly expunged the idea from his head.

As he'd sprinted up the stairs, he'd tried to prepare himself for what he might find. He'd not expected it to be pretty, but the scene of carnage that awaited him in Roderick Macallan's bedroom was like something from a horror movie. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up and that would have been a frigging disaster, spraying a shed-load of his DNA about the place. But he just about held it together, long enough to take some photographs, not that he saw himself looking at them any time soon. No way.

It was the son Peter who was the real puke-inducing mess, the side of his face having being blown off by the sawn-off shotgun that now lay cradled in his father's arms, finger still on the trigger from when he had shot his own brains out. There had been blood all over the floor but he had been super-careful not to have trodden on any of it, not that it mattered since he'd already figured out that these boots and jacket were going into the middle of the loch as soon as he was finished here. And he'd rapidly resolved not to hang about a second longer than was absolutely necessary.

But then just as he'd been about to disappear, he'd made a spur-of-the moment decision. Now that he was there, it would