Page 4

FOUR

Tanner had visited this particular Digital Forensic Unit hub before, so once she’d shown her warrant card at the reception desk of the nondescript office block in Wembley, she dispensed with the offered escort and made her own way up to the third floor.

The man she was here to see was sitting at a corner desk of the vast, open-plan office.

He looked up and waved at her as she walked across.

‘Greg . . . ’ Tanner dragged a chair across from an unoccupied desk nearby and sat down next to the chair Greg Hobbs was in. The much larger one, with wheels.

‘Nice hair, Nic.’ Hobbs removed his headphones, took a closer look and nodded approvingly.

As always, he was dressed immaculately; a tweed waistcoat over a crisp white shirt buttoned to the neck.

His beard was perfectly trimmed and the assortment of silver earrings gleamed as if they’d been freshly polished.

The first time they’d encountered Greg Hobbs, Thorne had been astonished to discover that a nerd could also be a hipster.

‘Suits you,’ Hobbs said.

‘You think?’

Tanner immediately began fiddling with her hair, still not sure if she was doing the right thing.

The blonde highlights had made their first appearance almost nine months before when she’d started seeing a woman she’d met on a dating site.

She and Fiona were still seeing each other, on and off, and even though Fiona’s tastes in the bedroom were a little less vanilla than Tanner’s own, the semi-casual arrangement seemed to suit them both.

OK, a lot less vanilla.

‘Freaky Fiona’, Thorne and Hendricks called her.

Tanner watched as Hobbs began to type and a series of pages appeared one by one on the three huge screens in front of him.

They were predominantly black with plain white type, though Tanner knew this was not why it was called the Dark Web.

Hobbs continued clicking and scrolling, navigating his way rapidly through a slew of sites with which he was clearly familiar.

Tanner had spoken to him on the phone a few hours before and let him know what she was looking for, so perhaps he had begun looking straight away and found something already.

Hobbs clocked her look and guessed what she was thinking. ‘I’ve made similar searches before,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, bearing in mind some of the stuff that your lot’s been up to, it’s not a big surprise that a few of the Met’s bigger cheeses are keen to keep an eye on what their critics are saying.

’ He peered at the centre screen. ‘I say critics , but we’re not talking about the kind of people who write strongly worded letters to The Times . ’

‘Activists,’ Tanner said.

‘That’s putting it politely. The powers that be have requested that some of them be . . . monitored. The more dangerous-sounding ones.’

‘Not closely enough,’ Tanner said.

Hobbs grimaced. ‘Obviously not. Nasty business, those four PCs.’

‘So, you know where to look?’

‘I know where to start looking,’ Hobbs said. ‘There’s no shortage of this stuff. You could likely nick a fair few of them for hate speech straight away, but you’d have to find them first, which takes some doing. One of the benefits of the Dark Web.’

‘We’d best crack on, then,’ Tanner said.

‘OK, cool.’ Hobbs called up a fresh page and peered. ‘How’s Phil?’

Tanner sighed. ‘Oh, much the same.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ Hobbs said. ‘There’s not too many like him.’

The words small and mercies leaped into Tanner’s mind, but she chose to leave them there.

Having met not long after she and Thorne had first visited the DFU, Hobbs and Hendricks had quickly become extremely matey which came as something of a shock to those who were present at the time.

Predictably, Hendricks had refused to do as most others probably did and tiptoe politely around the issue of Hobbs’s disability.

He had pointed out that tiptoeing around a disability that had cost a man the use of his legs was at best ironic and at worst downright tasteless, then proceeded to gleefully trample all over it in heavily studded size ten Dr. Martens.

Having casually asked how Hobbs had wound up the way he had, he’d grilled him about his sex life, then asked if he could borrow his blue badge before helpfully suggesting a variety of ways in which Hobbs might ‘pimp’ his wheelchair.

Go-faster stripes and cup holders. A flashing blue light on the top . . .

And Greg Hobbs had loved it. He’d laughed like a drain the whole time and, most impressively, given every bit as good as he got.

‘I’ll tell him you said hello,’ Tanner said.

‘Here we go.’ Hobbs nodded towards the centre screen. A page with the heading Social Networks: Message Boards; Hidden Answers; Intel Exchange. ‘Some of this might not make for pleasant reading,’ he said.

‘I think I’ll cope.’

‘And like I said, it won’t tell us anything about who these people are. I mean, I’m good, but if people have taken the proper steps to stay hidden . . . ’

‘I’m not expecting to leave with anyone’s name and email address,’ Tanner said.

Hobbs began to navigate various sites and mini-sites, tunnelling his way deeper into the dark until he found the anti-police message boards he was looking for.

FUCK THE FILTH

STAB UP DA COPZ

BLUE CLOTH, BLACK HEART

Hobbs had been spot on; it didn’t make for comfortable reading.

There was little that hadn’t been said to Tanner’s face at one time or another, though, even before the recent upswing in serious criminality among Met officers.

In truth, she had little argument with many of the sentiments expressed and, more importantly, she saw nothing that suggested serious criminal intent or might even prompt others to move in that direction.

People were angry, simple as that.

They were venting and Tanner couldn’t blame them.

Towards the end of the day, after a break for coffee during which Hobbs had shown Tanner umpteen seemingly identical photographs of his cat, they found themselves studying a message board Hobbs had never come across before.

‘All manner of nooks and crannies in here,’ he said.

ROASTING THE PORK

Much of it was, by now, dispiritingly familiar. A litany of complaints and abuse, a frenzied outpouring of shock and disgust. A post from three months earlier caught Tanner’s attention and briefly stopped her breath. A winged avatar and a simple message from a woman calling herself ButterflyGrrrl.

I was raped six months ago by a copper. Too scared to go to the police .

Tanner looked at Hobbs. ‘There’s no way . . . ?’

He shook his head. ‘All this stuff’s relayed via multiple computers. The browser . . . well, it’s not even what you’d think of as a browser . . . is encrypted and the circuit is automatically refreshed every ten minutes. These things are virtually untraceable. Sorry, Nic.’

Hobbs continued scrolling.

There were no further messages from ButterflyGrrrl, but towards the end of the final page was a post from only three days ago that brought Tanner to her feet. A simple statement which made her think that, despite the cat photos, the trip to the DFU might turn out to have been worthwhile after all.

‘What?’ Hobbs asked.

A message from someone calling him or herself LoveMyBro.

Two names that Tanner recognised, for very different reasons.

Chris Tully and Craig Knowles. Two peas in a pod.

‘I need you to print that out for me,’ Tanner said.