Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

Joanna had the grace to feel ashamed of herself. Not only was she pumping her daughter for information about her father, but she was also playing on Emily’s special relationship with him. She thought there was a fair chance that Emily would not be able to resist demonstrating that Paul confided more in her than in his wife. And she was right.

‘Once he let me watch him hack into the Daily Mirror ,’ Emily blurted out.

Jo tried not to let her surprise show. ‘Ah,’ she said non-committally.

‘It took him a long time and he said he couldn’t get into the whole system but he was actually able to look at some of their stories for the next day. It was awesome.’ Emily’s eyes shone with pride.

‘Awesome,’ agreed Jo absently, foreboding growing with everything her daughter told her.

After Emily had eventually gone to bed, Jo decided, in spite of her resolution, that she needed another drink. She poured herself her usual half-tumbler or so of Scotch and then, thinking better of it, emptied two-thirds of it back into the bottle. She carried her glass into the living room, dimmed the lights and sat very still on the big, squashy black sofa, waiting for Paul to come home. She needed to think.

She had never before talked much about computer skills with either her husband or her child. Jo was able enough, but her interest in computers was strictly limited to their use as a tool of her trade. She’d had no idea Paul was as adept as Emily had suggested. It had never occurred to her before to ask. And she had only done so now because of her chance meeting with Frank Manners earlier in the day, what she felt she had learned from it and the thoughts to which that revelation had led her.

Frank’s reaction had convinced her totally that he had not been responsible for those poisonous phone calls and her suspicions had somehow switched instantly to Paul. But could he really have made those awful calls to Chris, deliberately setting out to wreck her first marriage, later even pretending that he had received an anonymous call himself? Was he that manipulative, that wicked? If so, could he also be responsible for much more than that?

After a while she heard Paul’s chauffeur-driven car pull up outside and a few seconds later his key turned in the lock. He didn’t seem surprised to see her sitting in near-darkness. He glanced pointedly at her drink. She guessed he thought she was drunk again. Actually, she had barely touched her glass and, in spite of all the champagne at the wake that afternoon, she had never felt more sober.

‘Emily all right?’ he enquired casually, as he too poured himself a whisky. A small one with lots of water.

She nodded. ‘Went to bed an hour or so ago. She was telling me what a whizz-kid you are with computers. I had no idea.’

He sat down in an armchair opposite her, putting the whisky bottle on the low table between them, and shot her a quizzical look.

Oh, God, she hadn’t meant to blurt out anything like that. She’d no intention of confronting him. Not yet, anyway. The last time she had allowed her behaviour to be governed by crazy suspicions it had led to the awful hotel room confrontation with Mike Fielding, the very thought of which still made her cringe.

‘You’ve never shown any interest,’ he told her reasonably. ‘In any case, no doubt Emily was exaggerating.’

‘She said you can hack into the Daily Mirror ?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ He grinned easily. ‘I got lucky one night. Impressed Em no end. But I couldn’t get to any of the important stuff, of course, that was far too well protected, just the pre-print.’

That meant non-newsy features and service pages like travel and motoring. She had no idea whether or not he was playing it down, but even what he was admitting to impressed Joanna just as much as it had her daughter.

She let it pass.

‘How was the memorial service?’ he enquired after a bit. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t get away today. McKane could be a pain in the arse but he was a fine newspaperman.’

Joanna nodded. ‘It went well enough. Good turnout. I saw Frank Manners there.’

Off she went again. She hadn’t really meant to start on that either, but now that she had she knew she was not going to be able to stop. ‘He accused me of getting him sacked.’

Paul laughed lightly. ‘Well, to coin a famous phrase, he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘The subject of those moody phone calls came up. He denied all knowledge.’

‘And he would do that, too, wouldn’t he?’ Paul repeated.

‘I suppose so,’ she agreed meekly.

He studied her thoughtfully. ‘Don’t let that old bastard get to you after all these years,’ he told her. ‘I think you’d better have another drink.’ He picked up the whisky bottle and poured a hefty measure into her glass, filling it almost to the brim. Well, she supposed that was the way she had been drinking lately, but he didn’t usually encourage her like this.

She thought she had better back off before she talked herself into a corner. After all, she didn’t really know what to believe about anything any more. ‘I’m tired, I think I’ll go on up,’ she said eventually.

Paul watched Joanna leave the room and head for the stairs, taking the nearly full glass of whisky with her. He was uneasy. Those remarks about his computer skills and the moody phone calls had been distinctly pointed. What was going on in her head, he wondered anxiously.

She was drinking too much, of course, but usually she didn’t let it show. He believed that she would pull herself together sooner or later. She was that sort of woman. The important thing was that she was back in line.

He would have preferred just to have been able to wave a magic wand and make Joanna love him so much she wouldn’t even have wanted to rekindle her old affair with Fielding. He would have settled just for being able to make her see how very much he loved her. He had no idea why he had never been able to do even that, but he knew that he hadn’t.

At least she understood now that he was not prepared to lose her. Men like him didn’t take kindly to losing what they had won with hard work and diligent application. For Paul, the same went for his marriage and his wife as for his job. His world, both at home and at work, would carry on, now, just as it had always done. That was all he had ever wanted, that and to ensure that his prospect of being knighted, almost certainly in the new year’s honours list the following January he had been led to believe, would not be affected by some unseemly scandal.

He didn’t believe that he would face any further problems from Joanna, even though Fielding had been freed. Or at least, he hadn’t until this evening.

Paul had never been remotely under suspicion of organising the e-mail frame-up, as he had known he would not be. For a start nobody, not even Joanna, understood the strength of his motivation. And, of course, no one had ever realised quite how adept he was with computers and with working the Net. It was one of the secrets of his success in newspapers. He could hack into the memories of other people’s computers and hence into their lives, and even into other newspapers, with surprising frequency. His only mistake had been to show off to his daughter. He basked in her pride in him. How he wished his wife would love him half as much and as unconditionally as he was sure his daughter did. He shouldn’t ever have revealed so much of his skill to Emily, of course. He just hoped that Joanna had believed him when he had played down his abilities and achievements. He couldn’t be sure whether she had or not, but even Emily had no idea just how good he really was.

What he had done was complex but certainly not impossible, particularly if you had a leaning in that direction. All the software you needed, and the instructions, were available to anybody, free on the Net. It was called LINUX — a robust, fully featured operating system with a mind-blowing hacking capacity. All you had to do was download it and understand it — then you could make it do pretty much anything you wanted. Even Paul didn’t understand the half of it. He wondered if anybody did except the brilliant software technicians who had written the programme. But he had managed to decipher and understand enough for his purposes.