Money, Mishaps and Murder by Beard David

Author:Beard, David [Beard, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781784625672
Publisher: Troubador
Published: 2015-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

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During his Sunday investigations Smalacombe was surprised at the size and wealth of A Gate Services. He was even more surprised when he visited its office in a large, glass, high rise building in the centre of Bristol. The exterior may have looked impressive but the area occupied by A Gate Services was a small, modest, soulless place and on the tenth floor. The management had an inner sanctum but incongruously the furniture looked as if it had been bought from a charity shop. The reception area fronted a busy office with everyone pouring over a screen, some with two and others with three screens spread in front of them. However, the electronic hardware was impressive and so was the managing director, Manik Tagore.

‘I’m pleased to see you, Chief Inspector. I have been waiting for quite a while; it has taken you a long time.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Tagore,’ Smalacombe answered, relying on the receptionist’s pronunciation, ‘It is embarrassing that it has taken us so long. You are the MD?’

‘Yes, to clear up any confusion, Henry was the chairman; I am just the employee whose duty is to run things. It has not been easy to do so this last week.’

‘I can imagine, what with his computer being wiped.’

‘Nightmare and we had no idea for a while that Henry was gone, so we were in limbo.’

Smalacombe asked, ‘Can we address this computer incident first?’

‘The computer wipe is not the central issue. I don’t understand what that is about. What matters is that someone has been trying to destroy the business or at the very least, seriously cripple it, which the culprit has succeeded in doing,’ Tagore outlined his difficulties.

Smalacombe hadn’t picked up on Tagore’s inference and went back to the wipe incident, ‘It was a bit amateurish surely. He must have known there is software to recover files and that you had backups.’

‘On the contrary, it was a very proficient piece of nastiness. Leave aside the wiping bit, there is much more to it than that. Our policy was to back up once a month onto other systems. Serious error on our part and we now do it every day. It meant the current work was vulnerable. He knew that, so before he wiped Henry’s hard drive…’

‘Can I interrupt you? It was Mrs Crossworth who wiped the computer and on her husband’s instructions.’

‘That’s interesting, as I have intimated, I feel that is a side issue. If Henry organised it then it can’t be part of the real problem. Frankly, our difficulty is there are other things that are crippling us. Why would Henry want to do that?’

‘I was hoping you had the answer, Mr Tagore.’

‘I’m afraid not. We only fully understood what was going on a few days before he died. We discovered that someone was hacking into our system regularly. Phone numbers and addresses were altered, occasional but important figures were modified; a five replacing a three, say. All done in such a way that we didn’t notice until we began to use it.

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