Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

‘Hey, I’m on TV,’ I said, pointing to one of the cameras.

The man behind the till was a gruff middle-aged Asian who was used to nutters. This was Camden, after all. ‘A movie star,’ he said to humour me.

‘Do those things work?’ I asked.

‘Of course they do.’

‘Have you caught any criminals yet?’

‘Someone held up the shop a year ago with a gun. Took three hundred quid. We got his face on the camera. But the police didn’t do anything. Never found him. No bloody good, innit?’

‘Do the police ever ask you about people that come in here? You know, like people they’ve spied on?’

‘Oh, yes. There was a murder a few weeks ago. One of the suspects said he was here when it was committed. The coppers wanted to look through the tapes to check his story.’

‘And was he lying?’ I said, with what I hoped looked like innocent curiosity.

‘No. The videotape is timed, so they knew exactly when he came in.’

I made a face at the camera, slipping into my harmless nutter role again.

The shopkeeper had had enough. ‘Yes, please?’ he said to the old woman patiently waiting behind me.

I left the shop and checked my watch. It was half past twelve. So far everything Guy had said he had told the police had stacked up. Was there any point in checking out Hydra? I had piles of stuff to do back at the office. I dithered, but the bar was pretty close to Britton Street, so I decided to stick with my plan.

Hydra was quite crowded at lunchtime, but nowhere near as crowded as it would be at ten o’clock. Bathed in a blue neon glow, it was one of the coolest bars in the area and I had been there a couple of times with Guy. Not often enough to be remembered, though. Was there any chance that the barmen would recognize one solitary drinker a month after the event? I wouldn’t know until I asked.

I caught the attention of one of them. ‘I wonder if you could help me? I’m trying to find out whether a friend of mine was in this bar one night a couple of months ago. The twenty-first of September?’

‘Hold on. I’ll get the manager,’ the barman said and disappeared through the door. A moment later a purposeful man in a black T-shirt and jacket emerged.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, with the strong suggestion that the correct answer to that question was no.

‘Yes, I was wondering whether the police have been asking about someone drinking in your bar.’

‘If they have, why would I talk to you about it?’

‘He’s a friend of mine. He’s gone missing. We think the last place he was seen was here.’ I pulled out a photo of Guy. I had used the same source for the photograph as Owen, the corporate section of our website.

The manager barely glanced at it. ‘Have you any idea how busy this place gets in the evenings?’

‘I know it’s difficult. But I’d be very grateful if you’d try to remember. This would have been about six weeks ago. The twenty-first of September.’

‘Sorry, sir. I can’t help you.’ The manager returned the photo.

‘Can you even tell me whether the police have been asking about him?’

‘No, I couldn’t do that.’

He didn’t want to tell me and his look challenged me to try to talk him into it. He was used to defying stroppy customers. I was pretty sure my twenty-pound notes would be wasted on him.

‘Thanks for your time,’ I said and turned on my heel.

Just as I was reaching the exit, I was stopped by a shout. ‘Oi! Hold on a minute!’

I returned to the bar.

‘You said the twenty-first of September?’

‘That’s right.’

‘We were closed that week. Refurbishment. So unless your friend is a decorator, I doubt he was seen here.’

Bingo.

I walked back to the office. So Guy had lied to me. I now knew that he hadn’t gone to Hydra at nine o’clock that night, as he had told me and, presumably, the police.

So where had he gone?

Had he driven to Knightsbridge and lurked outside his father’s flat, waiting for his moment to run him down? Or perhaps it wasn’t premeditated. Perhaps he had decided to go and talk to his father about the situation at Ninetyminutes, seen him in the street and put his foot on the accelerator in a flash of half-drunken anger? That was more likely. Uncomfortably likely.

The idea appalled me. My brief euphoria at finally getting somewhere with my investigation quickly disappeared. My friend had lied to me. Lied to me about something vitally important.

He may even have killed someone.

As soon as I got back to the office I phoned Donnelly and asked him whether he had seen an electric-blue Porsche in the street outside Tony’s flat. Guy’s car was noticeable enough that he might have spotted it.

He prevaricated for a moment, fishing for a further fee, but I refused. Then he answered my question.

No.

Of course, that didn’t mean that Guy wasn’t there in some other car. And it was possible that Donnelly might have missed a Porsche, even an electric-blue one, in a part of London that was littered with them.

The trouble was, I just didn’t know.

I sat at my desk considering what to do. It was difficult. I could confront Guy again, but there didn’t seem much point. If he was guilty, he would deny it convincingly. If he was innocent, he would be seriously offended that I had been prowling around checking up on him. He would explode. And an explosion at that moment was the last tiling Ninetyminutes needed.

Things were getting tense. The number of site visitors was still growing strongly, but the planned launch of on-line retailing was drawing uncomfortably near. I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.

At some point I would have to face up to the problem of Guy’s guilt or innocence, I knew, but I decided I would have to put that point off. There was just too much else to do.

Amy had done a phenomenal job of putting together a range of products for us to sell. There were the classic club and national strips and then our own line of clothing, sporting the logo that Mandrill had come up with five months before. She had lined up designers, manufacturers, warehousing and distribution. Everything was ready to go.

The technology was, of course, the biggest worry. Running a website that actually sells things requires much more technology than a site that people only look at. Separate computers, or ‘servers’, are needed to hold product information and prices, customer and transaction information, financial and accounting records and credit-card verification. Between these and the customer is a web server, which communicates with the customer’s computer over the Internet and makes sure that each inquiry is integrated with all the other systems in real time. Firewalls, proxy servers and routers are needed to protect the whole system, provide backup and control the web traffic efficiently.

Originally a company that wanted to sell over the web had to set all this up from scratch. The problem then was getting the different systems to talk to each other. Fortunately, by the time we wanted to install Ninetyminutes’ e-commerce system it was possible to buy it all off the shelf. This saved time and was worth the expense, but it did limit some of the features of the site.

This bothered Owen. In California he had been working on on-line catalogues for a big retailer and he had made some interesting breakthroughs in the technology. He showed them to us and we were all impressed. Naturally, he wanted to incorporate these into Ninetyminutes’ site. Naturally, they didn’t fit.

At first Owen suggested that we delay the launch of the site for a month so he could make them fit. A month was after Christmas. Guy said no. So, without really telling anyone, Owen set out to write an application programming interface to bolt his ideas on to our off-the-shelf system.