Bright City Deep Shadows Read online

  “Impostor syndrome,” she said. “Believe me, I feel like a complete fraud sitting in this office every day.”

  But it wasn’t that. It was like buying raffle tickets to help a charity, then winning the prize you didn’t want or need, knowing so many people who entered would have been so grateful to have won.

  I would have left then, but Kazima kept me there, asking about Anning and how he had died. She even wanted detailed descriptions of the two men who killed him. It seemed overly morbid but I assumed she too wanted to understand everything about what had led to Chelsea’s death. After a while, something made me ask, “Are you OK?” Maybe she wasn’t coping with all this as well as I’d thought.

  “Of course.” She actually pulled back, as if I’d offended her.

  “The police are hunting those guys down,” I said. “They had some connection to Anning. Some reason to shoot him. It’s not like they’re randomly killing IT company CEOs.”

  “Or owners,” she said, darkly.

  “Right.” Her response left me confused. “Look,” I said, tentatively. “If you know something about the people who killed Anning, you should go to the police. At the very least you should tell me.”

  She put on a big smile and stood up. “Of course. Look, I really need to get to a meeting. Thank you for all that.” She nodded at the pile of signed copies on the table in front of me. “I promise you I will take good care of Chelsea’s baby.”

  It didn’t occur to me that she might have meant me until I was in the car and on my way home.

  I lugged the whiteboard, the easel and the bin bag full of stationery back up to my unit and set it all up again. I pulled the photos out of the waste bin, cleaned the board with a handful of tissues and started again. At the far left, I put up Chelsea’s photo. To the right of that I put a photo of Anning which I took from an online magazine article. Between them I drew a line and wrote “murdered by” above it. To the right of that, I put two boxes, one above the other. In each, I drew an egg-shape. On one of the eggs I drew a beard and long hair. The other I left as it was. I labelled them “Hairy” and “Baldy”. Then I added the line between them and Anning and wrote “murdered by” on that one too. To the right of them, I drew another box and another egg shape. On this I drew a big, curly moustache, like a Victorian stage villain, and labelled it “Mr. Big”. The line between Mr. Big and the two thugs, I labelled “works for”. Finally, I put Kazima’s photo above the two thugs and wrote a big question mark next to it.

  This was good. I was on the trail again. And, this time, I was going to do it better. I wrote “dead” under Chelsea’s picture and Anning’s. I didn’t even consider putting Stacey’s picture back up. I was hunting Mr. Big, and that was definitely not some bitter, middle-aged lady with a toy poodle and a liking for celebrity chef TV shows. The idea that Stacey could have hired two professional assassins over the phone from Sydney was ludicrous. Not because she wouldn’t have it in her, but because she wouldn’t have had a clue who to kill and even less idea than me about how to arrange it.

  I put Stacey’s photo back in the rubbish bin.

  What would Ronnie do? Well, last time, he’d focused in hard on the unknown quantity – Mr. X. Just like a mathematician, I realised. Except now there were two unknowns – the thugs and Mr. Big. Solving an equation for two unknowns was much harder than for one. I tried to remember my high school algebra and ended up wasting about ten minutes considering substitution, elimination and graphing methods before I angrily made myself stop. As intriguing as the metaphor might be, it was getting me nowhere.

  So I started again thinking about what Ronnie had done. He’d gone back to the crime scene to gather evidence and seek insights. He’d interrogated witnesses for the same reasons. He’d developed lists of suspects by considering motivations. But what could I do? I’d seen the crime scene. I was the main witness. I’d seen the killers. The police had asked me whether I had a dash cam but I didn’t. That would have helped. I could maybe go to the police station to look at mugshots and provide artist’s impressions. I checked the time. It was already half-past four. I was pretty sure Reid would be working late into the night, but the police artist was probably a nine-to-five guy and he’d be gone before I got there. So, tomorrow then. In the meantime, what evidence did I have that wasn’t already in my head?

  I sat there wracking my brain for ages but came up with nothing. All right, I needed a different approach. I looked at the whiteboard for the thousandth time and realised there was a set of lines missing that would connect all the people there. There were relationships between each of them and at least one other. I jumped up and began drawing them in. The first was the easiest. I drew a line from Chelsea to Kazima and wrote “worked together, friends”. The line between Chelsea and Anning I labelled “university friends, doing business”. Anning to the thugs got a dotted line and a question mark. The thugs to Mr. Big lines were already in place. Finally, there were dotted lines between Anning and Mr. Big, Chelsea and Mr. Big, and Kazima and Mr. Big, each with a question mark. Were there any relationships between any of those people? I didn’t know but it raised all kinds of questions and possibilities.

  It also triggered my memory. I had Chelsea’s diary and access to all her work-related documents. Excited, I rushed to my laptop, retrieved the links and passwords from my phone and began searching. There was a lot of material. Chelsea’s diary alone was a nightmare. I’d never kept a diary. If I ever had an appointment per week, it was unusual. But Chelsea’s was full to bursting. Every single day had every half hour blocked out for something or other. The weekends and evenings stood out as periods of relative calm in the maelstrom of her frantic life. It made me stop and marvel all over again at this busy, complicated life she had led. I only ever saw the calm, uncomplicated parts of it. How hard did she have to work to make that possible? Was her time with me dead space, or was it blessed relief from the whirligig of client meetings and marketing presentations, code reviews and process audits? I wished… I wished I’d appreciated how hard her life had been, and how easy mine was by comparison.

  Sifting through all the names and dates and places in the diary was slow and tedious. I drew up charts on lots of pieces of paper, connecting people to products, to companies, to addresses. I started three months before her death. It was a bit excessive, I realised by the time I had worked through a few weeks. The sheaf of notes it generated was probably just noise, more likely to mask the information I was after than to reveal it. But I pressed on to the end.

  It was dark by then. I got up and put the light on, made a coffee and went back to work. The other documents amounted to hundreds, possibly thousands of separate files. Fortunately for me, Chelsea had a neat and clear filing system. So I was able to ignore swathes of material relating to internal company matters – project reports, staff appraisals, product design, and so on – and focus on the externally oriented ones, like sales and marketing. I found the files relating to Anning quite quickly. She’d had only had three physical meetings with him; an initial presentation of the company’s electronic payment products, and two meetings that progressively narrowed the “scope of supply” as she called it, and the price. There were also several phone calls. Chelsea and Kazima were both in the habit of making notes in preparation for all these meetings and for the pre-arranged calls, along with notes of everything that was said. It was a fascinating insight into how these things worked but, otherwise, not very helpful. Nothing that was discussed – at least nothing that ended up on the record – hinted at anything other than a perfectly normal business relationship.

  I’d almost given up. It was late and I hadn’t eaten. I was now so desperate, I was flicking through slide decks from the presentations and idly thinking about ordering a pizza, ready to call it a day, when something tugged at a memory. It wasn’t the slide I was looking at, it was something earlier. One by one, I went back through them. And there it was. On a slide with the title “Fully Integrated” a set of coloured blocks were s
hown fitting together like pieces in a game of Tetris. Each block had a line to a product name and company logo. Chelsea’s finance engine was in there and, snuggling up against it was another block linked to a logo I’d seen very recently, a silhouette of an archer, along with the slogan, “Powered by Archerfield. Gamble securely. Win big.”

  I stared at it and blinked. It was the slogan I’d seen at the bottom of Anning’s game when I was in his house. For a moment it seemed massively significant but then I began to realise that, if Chelsea’s slide was simply showing how her software would fit well with the rest of the products Anning’s company was using, it was hardly a surprise that it was there. Archerfield was not a major new lead, it was just a name I’d seen before.

  Even so, I did a complete text search of every document in Chelsea’s whole file system, looking for the word “Archerfield”. There were about twenty files flagged as containing it, which surprised me, but most of them were saved emails and internal memos about an internal investigation checking on “compatibility with exposed interfaces”, whatever that was. It was incredibly technical stuff that I could not believe had anything to do with murder. One document, however, was a note Chelsea had made. From the date, it was just after the last of her phone calls with Anning. It wasn’t part of an official meeting note, but was added as a separate, personal note. All it said was, “Talk to Simon re Archerfield db tables. Poss source of errors.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock but I phoned Kazima anyway.

  “Luke? What’s up?”

  “Tell me about the errors in the Archerfield database.”

  “Archerfield?” Did she sound nervous?

  “Yes. They’re something to do with the gambling in Anning’s games.”

  “Yes, I know who they are.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So what about the errors in their database?”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t have anything to do with the software. Didn’t, anyway.”

  “Chelsea found errors. She was going to talk to Anning about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Archerfield is nothing to do with Anning. It’s a completely separate company. We don’t have any business with them at all.”

  “Who is...” I scrolled through the emails and memos. “Sanjay Patel? His name comes up a lot in discussions about Archerfield.”

  She hesitated. “He’s our systems integration specialist. It’s his job to make sure our products work with all the third-party software they have to coexist with.”

  “I need his number.”

  “What? Do you know what time it is? Why don’t you come in tomorrow and see him?”

  “Would he know if there were any concerns about the Archerfield software?”

  “Yes, if anybody would but—”

  “Then I need his number. Please.”

  With a heavy sigh, she told me to wait. I heard the phone being set down and, a minute later, being picked up again. “He’s a bit…” She seemed to have a lot of trouble finding the word. “Touchy,” was her eventual choice.

  “I’ll try not to upset him too much.”

  “Please do. Running an office full of sensitive geniuses is a bit like running a kindergarten sometimes.” She gave me his number and with a curt “goodnight” hung up.

  Her reaction surprised me. Was it so bad that I’d called her so late? Or that I was going to call Sanjay? Chelsea used to mock me sometimes because I didn’t always keep the same hours as other people, working when the enthusiasm or the inspiration took me, sometimes working through the night and getting out of bed not long before she got home from work, completely out of sync with the world. But this wasn’t so extreme, was it? So maybe it was something else. Maybe Kazima liked to keep home and work strictly separated. Maybe I’d broken one of her rules. But this wasn’t work. This was about Chelsea. It just happened to involve that part of her life that overlapped with Kazima’s.

  It was not good. I couldn’t account for her moodiness. I dialled the number she’d given me.

  “Yeah?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Sanjay Patel?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s Luke Kelly. I – I was Chelsea’s de facto. I’m sorry to call so late but I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Questions?”

  “Yes, about your investigation of the Archerfield software.”

  There was a long silence. “Does Kazima know you’re calling me?”

  Talk about cagey! “She gave me your number.”

  “Right, you’re the new owner.”

  “Is there some reason you don’t want to talk about Archerfield?”

  “No. Why should there be?”

  “I don’t know. You just seem to be… Look, I came across some internal memos and emails where you seem to suggest there are problems with the Archerfield software. Something about errors in the database?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  It was becoming difficult not to shout at the bloke. I took a deep breath. “So I wonder if you could explain to me what that was about.”

  “What do you know about relational databases?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then I can’t possibly explain it.”

  You arrogant little shit! “Perhaps you could dumb it down for me?”

  “Do you know about remote procedure calls?”

  Wearily, I said, “No.”

  “What about stored procedures?”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “Then I don’t know how I can help you.”

  For a moment, I fumed in silence. “All right, what if I asked you a few simple, non-technical questions?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, could the errors in the Archerfield data be caused deliberately?”

  “Why would they be?”

  “I don’t know. Could they?”

  “Yes, of course, if someone had modified the code to make that happen.”

  “Did you inspect the code?”

  “No, of course not. That’s proprietary. We get the APIs and the test data.”

  “So you don’t know what the software is doing but it doesn’t seem to be doing what you’d expect.” He didn’t respond. “Have you ever played Silent Empire?”

  “What? Yeah. Sure.”

  Of course you have. “Have you gambled with it?”

  “Nah. Gambling’s for plebs. I always join one of the combat teams. I’ve got a six-point-three rating, which isn’t bad. Most people are spectators. They’re the ones that gamble.”

  You need to take this more seriously, or you’re off the squad, man. There’s a lot of people got money on this.

  “People take it seriously, don’t they?” I said, remembering. “There’s a lot of money involved.”

  “Oh yeah. A winning squad can pick up big prizes.”

  “Anning didn’t seem rich,” I said, thinking aloud. “His house was nice but nothing special. So where did all the money go?”

  “Back into the business, of course,” said Sanjay, as if I was an idiot. “The IPO is the prize these tech entrepreneurs are working towards – or maybe a buyout from Apple or Google – and Anning was still years away. Like Chelsea. I bet your house is nothing special, either, right?”

  I nodded. “Right.” We were worth millions and we lived in a one bedroom unit in Indooroopilly.

  “Is that it?”

  “Sorry?”

  I was caught up in thinking about Chelsea again. Had she ever tried to talk to me about her plans? She’d mentioned IPOs and growth targets and raising capital and so on but had I ever listened? Had she found my responses so uninformed or lacklustre that she’d left me out of all that? Was this another way I’d let her down?

  “Any more questions?”

  “Yeah, nah. Look, maybe I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said a
nd hung up.

  I sat for a while, staring at the interior of the room reflected in the black glass of the window. Sanjay was a dick and he hadn’t told me anything useful, but he’d nevertheless helped me see things more clearly. It was all about gambling. That’s where the money was. That’s why Anning was dead. That’s why Chelsea had died. I hadn’t got a clue about any of the details yet but this was all about money. Stinking, filthy greed. Anning was mixed up in something. Chelsea was asking too many questions. Mr. Big had told Anning to eliminate her, then he’d killed Anning to tie up loose ends. And Mr. Big was connected to Archerfield and probably to organised crime.

  Ronnie had been absolutely right. And I had been a jerk. I’d been selfish, wanting it all to go away. I’d been a moral coward, not wanting to face the reality of what Chelsea had got herself mixed up in. I’d stuck my head in the sand but the world had just used that as a good opportunity to kick me in the arse.

  At least now I knew what I needed to do. I had to dig into Archerfield. Dig deep. Turn over every rock and stamp on everything that slithered out from under them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I had breakfast in a café in Rocklea, just across the Ipswich Motorway from the industrial wasteland of Archerfield. It had come as a surprise, although it shouldn’t have, that the gambling software company was named after the suburb that housed it and not the owner. It was hard to find much information about Archerfield online. Their website was minimal and they were rarely in the news. Fortunately, I remembered I could get information about a company from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. From the ASIC site, I discovered that the owner and CEO was a bloke called Noah Lee.