The telephone rang in the vestry of St Patrick’s Church in the village of Drumloghan, County Donegal. Oona O’Brien tutted and put down her pen, reaching for the handset without looking. She’d been tapping away on her calculator and was halfway down a column of figures on the handwritten ledger when the sound rudely interrupted her workflow.
“St Patrick’s, good mornin’,” she said with barely disguised irritation. She listened for a second or two and replied. “Hold on a wee minute Sister and I’ll see if he’s free.” She pressed the mute button and called across the office to her priest sitting at his desk reading the Irish Times. “Father Donal, it’s Sister Shona. She’s soundin’ a wee bit distressed, so she is.” Seventy-five-year-old Father Donal Byrne peered over the top of his newspaper and gave her a thoughtful look.
“Oh, now I wonder what that could be about.” He folded his paper and reached for his own handset. “Sister Shona? May God be with you Sister, what can I do for you? Wait… hold on a wee minute, will you?” Oona had resumed her calculations. “Time we had a wee cuppa tea, don’t you think, Oona?” She looked at him with renewed irritation and pushed her chair back. “So, what’s troublin’ you, Sister?”
“Oh Father. I’ve had a terrible experience. That awful woman has been here and she’s been askin’ questions. I didn’t know she was comin’. She tricked Sister Breda by sayin’ she had an appointment, so she did, and Sister Breda showed her around and then when I found out I got angry and asked her to leave.”
“Calm yourself Sister. What awful woman?”
“That journalist Father.”
“Journalist? You mean the one from The Examiner?”
“Aye, Father.”
“And what would she be wantin’ now.”
“She told Sister Breda she wanted to write a piece on the excellent work of the Charity. She tried to be helpful, but then the woman asked some horrible questions. It was vile and disgustin’ so it was.”
“What sort of questions?”
“I can’t repeat them Father, it’s just… too awful for words. She implied we have been mistreatin’ our girls. And after all the work we’ve done over the years, it’s just too awful, so it is. Too awful.”
“There, there Sister. I’m sure it’s nothin’. I’ve spoken to many a journalist over the years and what I’ve learned is all they want to do is make up a story about nothin’. Now you mustn’t worry yourself.”
“Thank you, Father. You’re so kind.”
“Not at all, not at all. This is the cross we have to bear for the sins of others. Did she ask about anythin’ else?”
“Aye Father. She asked me what I knew about Eamonn Flynn.”
“Did she now? And what did you tell her?”
“I told her I wasn’t goin’ to answer any more of her vile questions and she must leave immediately.”
“Aye. Well that probably explains it. I’ll talk to Bishop McKenna. He knows the editor at The Examiner and can have a wee word in his ear. Lodge a complaint, so to speak. We can’t be havin’ these godless folk makin’ up lies about The Sisters.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“And if she contacts you again, be sure to let me know.”
“Yes Father. I will Father.”
“And we’ll see you on the fourteenth for the diocesan assembly.”
“Yes Father.”
“Bye now and God bless.” He replaced the handset just as Oona returned holding a tray with two mugs.
“And I brought you a wee biscuit to go with that.”
“Oh, you’ll be the death of me Oona O’Brien.”
She’d worked as clerk to St Patrick’s for forty years. It seemed only yesterday that the dashing young priest Father Donal Byrne had visited the convent and picked eighteen-year-old Oona to be his clerk in Drumloghan. He needed someone with administrative skills and intelligence and the dear departed Mother Superior Sister Bridie had recommended the novice Oona whose devotion to the Order seemed less than absolute.
Father Donal had just taken over St Patrick’s and found not only was the building in a mess, but the church records were in a similar state. As well as day to day management of the church’s correspondence, book-keeping and general administration, he needed someone to categorise, register and file thousands of church documents packed in boxes that had lain gathering dust since before the Easter Rising in 1916. Oona was thrilled to have the opportunity and she was happy to leave the Order, where she’d never really settled. She’d set about the task with gusto and never looked back, devoting her entire life to the church and in particular to Father Donal whom she still adored, though just like an elderly married couple, they bickered regularly and were often a source of irritation to one another.
She returned to her ledger and he to his paper until he heard her tut again and mumble under her breath. “Dear, dear, dear.”
Father Donal munched on his bourbon biscuit and looked up. Oona was shaking her head. “Is there somethin’ botherin’ you there Oona?”
“Aye Father. I’ve been through last month’s donations twice now and I’m sure one of them is missin’.”
“Do you know which?”
“Aye. It’s that local councillor. The one from Ballydown.”
“How much is it?”
“Fifty euros.”
“Now are you sure you haven’t miscounted, Oona.”
She flashed him a look of scorn, irritated by the implied criticism of her book-keeping precision. “Yes Father.”
“Yes, I’m sure you haven’t. Send him a wee letter remindin’ him how important his monthly subscription is to the continuance of the Charity and all its endeavours. I’m sure it’s just an oversight.”
“Yes Father.”
“Oh, and remind him confidentiality is assured.”
“Yes Father.”
She switched on her old Olympia typewriter. It hummed and jerked into life and she slid a heavy sheet of conqueror topped with the embossed gold letters of St Patrick’s between the rollers. Thirty-five years ago, she’d made the mistake of suggesting one of those new word processor machines would be a great benefit in her work, but Father Donal had flatly refused. We don’t want the devil watching us do God’s work Oona. The old ways are the best. Over the years, Oona O’Brien had not only become an expert typist, she was skilled at shorthand and had continued to keep all the church’s records by hand in leather-bound tomes in the same way it had been done for centuries. In 1991, as a concession, Father Donal had bought her an electric calculator fitted with a paper roll and she’d been thrilled. But even at fifty-eight, she would have welcomed the opportunity to learn some of this new technology everyone else had. It would make her life so much easier, and she’d willingly work night and day to transfer all the records to a computer storage system, if asked.
“You know Father, if we had all the records stored on one of those computer things, we would be able to manage the affairs of the church and The Sisters a lot easier. I think they would be much safer too. I mean, what if the place burnt down? Everythin’ would be lost, so it would. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
Father Donal put on his stern face and affected a tone of mild admonishment. “Now Oona, we’ve had this talk before. These machines you speak of are the gateway to hell, so they are. They’re a portal to the devil’s own domain.” He stood up and raised a finger in the air as if he were standing in the pulpit on Sunday preaching to the masses. “We will not yield to the temptation the devil lays before us. We will do God’s work in the manner prescribed by God as laid out in the scriptures; God who gave us the gift of pen and ink and vellum and leather.” His voice rose to a crescendo. “We shall not be daunted in that task, nor shall we spurn his gift and surrender to the infernal, diabolical contraptions invented by Satan’s acolytes in California.”
“Yes Father,” sighed Oona, suitably reproved. He could be insufferable at times, but he was a good man.
“Now, can you see if you can get me Bishop McKenna on the telephone?”
***
It was mid-afternoon when Jack stopped the Range Rover on the gravel drive in front of his house. He’d managed to bring forward his crossing by an hour, but traffic was heavy on the motorway and progress was slow. In an idle moment while he sat in a traffic jam, he’d used an app on his phone to turn on the heating and hot water in the house and was grateful for the welcoming blast of warm air that greeted him as he stepped over the threshold. He dropped his bag in the hall, satisfied the smart technology had functioned as intended.
Despite the warmth, the house felt alien. Natalie’s presence was everywhere, from the carpets to the curtains, the furniture, the colour of the walls, the bathroom and kitchen fittings, even down to the door handles. It had all been her doing and would forever remain a source of painful memories. They’d bought the house three years ago. Money was piling into the business and his accountant Martin had persuaded him to cash in a little.
“Take the dividends Jack. You’ve worked for them so go out and enjoy them.”
“No, I want to pay off the bank first.”
“Don’t do that. They don’t want you to.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re gold plated now. The risk has all but gone. Next year’s profits could pay off the bank twenty times over. You’re exactly the kind of borrower they want. I’ll be amazed if your relationship manager isn’t on the phone soon trying to get you to borrow more.”
“What for?”
“To fuel expansion.”
“But I’m not interested in expanding. I like it the way it is.”
Martin Devereaux had sighed. “Listen, you can’t stand still. It’s not an option. A business that stands still withers on the vine. Apart from that, the company now has a momentum of its own. You can’t stop it even if you tried. And the sad fact is Jack, that while you’ve made a phenomenal success of starting, building and running a small business, the skills required to run a big one are just not the same.”
“Are you saying I’m going to fuck it up?”
“No. Just that people who run small businesses are good at innovating and people who run big ones aren’t. People who run big ones are good at operating and if you aren’t able to adapt and develop your operating skills, you’ll bring the whole thing crashing down and you’ll lose everything.”
“Do you have to be so bloody pessimistic?”
“Realistic, mate. Take the profits while you can and leave the bank be. The boot’s on the other foot now.”
So he’d taken a massive dividend and they’d bought a £2m split-level chalet bungalow in an acre of land in the affluent village of Milton Aston. It was just what Natalie needed. She dived headlong into the project, spending another million redeveloping every square inch of the property and it kept her busy and motivated for over a year. But eventually, the job was done. She lapsed into a slough of despond and took comfort from the bottle. It had been a medium-term, but temporary distraction that simply kept her mind off the real issue. Siobhán had been right; Natalie just didn’t want to be.
He couldn’t live here any longer. He hadn’t slept in the master bedroom since the day he found her there and every object in every room was a constant reminder. While walking along the beach, he’d come to a decision. He’d get onto Charlie’s estate agent and put the place on the market as soon as possible.
He was tired, but anxious to get started so he made some coffee and retrieved his laptop from the study. He found a redundant cable from a drawer full of wires and plugged the Samsung into a USB port. The screen lit up. He launched the data recovery software on his laptop and performed a scan of the phone. An icon spun as the progress indicator slowly inched its way up to a hundred per cent and within ninety seconds the window split into two with a folder structure on one side and a statistical analysis on the other.
A third panel opened up in the centre of the screen with two coloured buttons: red for ‘Cancel’, green for ‘Restore All’. He pressed green. Another progress indicator took ten seconds and finished with a triumphant pinging sound. ‘Restore complete’.
He felt his heart beating in his chest and a profound feeling of guilt threatened to overwhelm him, questioning his motives. It was irrational and no one would ever know, but he felt he was intruding on something very personal and private. He feared no good would come of it. His thumb wavered on the phone icons but then a thought struck him, and he searched around on the laptop to find a security application he’d used before to scan for viruses. He hadn’t thought twice about plugging an Android phone into his MacBook as the risk was negligible, and if the phone were infected, it might be too late, but he decided a scan still worthwhile.
The software went through its scan and at 67%, began spitting out lines of text onto the results screen. A cold chill enveloped him as he watched transfixed, waiting for more warnings to appear. There was only one alert: ‘Name: Tracksys. Type: Trojan’. He clicked on an information icon and Wikipedia loaded with several pages about smartphone viruses. The phone had a stealth tracker app installed; it’s icon invisible to the user. Location services were switched off, but the app was still transmitting the phone’s precise location on the planet to within three metres. It also warned that if the phone were switched off, the virus would just turn it on again automatically, which explained why it was powered up when he found it. She must have known or at least suspected she was being tracked and that was the reason she’d ditched it. It was also the reason the men in black were able to find him. The cold chill returned. It was the reason they could still find him now.
He went back to the laptop, feverishly looking for options but it was staring him in the face. A button with the label, ‘Remove now’? He clicked ‘OK’ and was rewarded with a sound like a pinball machine. It was probably too late though. If they still thought he would lead them to her, they now knew where to start. He cursed his stupidity. It was a schoolboy error, and he should have known better. He was now committed even though, if he were honest, he’d been committed from the very moment he’d met her. He’d have to take extra precautions in future but at least now the Irishmen would know the tracking signal had been turned off, they’d been rumbled and would maybe keep their distance.
He returned his attention to the phone. There were a few photos in and around Bembridge and one of Jerry, but nothing more than two weeks old and no selfies. There was no music and there were no downloaded apps. The call log had only a dozen entries; including the ones from him and those from someone called Clare Cummings, aka Mrs Angry, the owner of the timber-clad house, identifiable now her contact details had been restored. The other four were either from undisclosed numbers or the 121 answering service.
Text history had only one chat. A message signed off Sinéad, timed at 11.15 a.m. on Thursday telling Clare Cummings she had to leave immediately due to a family emergency and that Jerry was safe and sound with neighbours at No.12. Profuse apologies were offered. It was followed by a blizzard of increasingly angry replies from Mrs Cummings berating her for messing them about, and demanding she pick up the phone.
The lack of history either meant she had only just bought the phone or else only ever used it for emergencies. Both were indications of someone who wanted to be off grid but still needed the facility to communicate from time to time. For all he knew, this may not have been the first time she’d ditched a phone. He switched to the Mail app and felt the pulse throbbing in his neck.
There was only one email account in the name of Sineád O’Callaghan at Gmail. He decided to work on the basis Caitlín was her real name, Sineád her working pseudonym for the present and Siobhán, one she’d thought up on the spur of the moment, possibly just for him. The inbox was sparsely populated but three emails immediately caught his eye. Two were from someone called Louise Harrison but were very different. He opened the older one that was timed 4.13 a.m. on Tuesday and carried the subject: “You’ll Enjoy This”. The text read: “Hi, just wanted to share this with you. Hope you’re well. Lou xxx.” And below it, a complicated hyperlink. He’d seen enough of these in his time to know immediately it was a phishing attempt.
The second was dated Thursday at 8.25 a.m. from a different email address and carried the subject: “HACK ALERT” and was to no one in particular but presumably blind-copied to her entire address book. The text read: “WARNING! Hi all – please be aware my Talkcom email address has been hacked. Do not open any attachments or click any links from my Talkcom address. Sorry about this. I’m really gutted! Lou xxx.
He worked it out in an instant. Siobhán/Sineád/Caitlín had clicked on the hyperlink in the first email and had no doubt been presented with a humorous video of a performing animal while the tracking trojan was installed on her phone. She may have thought nothing more until two days later when she got the second. Either she had reason to be suddenly fearful or was just taking extreme precautions by immediately going off grid. Whoever the hacker was, it would be a stretch to believe they were targeting her directly when Lou’s contacts list, like most people’s, was probably extensive. Yet she had been tracked down by two Irish thugs within forty-eight hours, plenty of time in which to make the journey from Ireland to the Isle of Wight, if indeed, that was where they had come from. His own phone rang, startling him.
“Hello sweetheart.”
“Are you back yet?” He could hear from the background noise she was in the car.
“Yes, about an hour ago.”
“Has Henry called you?”
“Yes, thanks dear, I had a wonderful time.”
“Oh yeah, sorry. How was it on the Isle of Wight?” He was surprised Charlie even remembered where he’d been, but pleased none the less.
“It was great. Did a lot of walking and eating and…”
“Gavin! Left here and down the street to the end…” Charlie was talking away from the mouthpiece obviously giving instructions to the git driving. “Yeah, I’m listening.”
“… and I did a lot of thinking…”
“No! I said left here…” Jack sighed.
“And I beat the living daylights out of a couple of Irish hoodlums…”
“Then straight on… Aw, that’s nice.” He couldn’t help smiling. He loved her to bits. “So, Henry?”
“Best I text you his number and you deal with him direct.”
“Oh, okay.” She didn’t sound too sure.
“Then nothing will get lost in translation.”
“Okay. Cool. Did you get the Richer Sounds bill?”
“Yes, but they only want a deposit with the balance the day before delivery. You’re not moving in for a while, are you?”
“Couple of weeks.” There was no chance of that happening, especially with surveys and banks and mortgages, but he would not be the one to spoil it for her. He’d leave others to do that. “When are you coming to see the house?”
“Whenever you like.”
“Okay. I’ll text you. Bye. Love you.”
“Love…” the phone went silent before he could finish.
He looked up his contacts and dialled.
“Henry Burnham please. Its Jack Fleming.” He held Siobhán’s phone in his left hand as he waited.
“Hello Jack. How the devil are you?”
“Fine Henry. I assume you got my message?”
“Yes indeed. I’ve had details through from the agent. Just waiting for the mortgage offer from the bank.”
“I’m going to give Charlie your number if that’s okay? Best deal with her direct. But keep me in the loop will you?”
“Of course. Did you say ‘loop’ or ‘hook’. Ha ha.”
“Very funny Henry. You’d do the same.”
“Of course, I would. Keep in touch.”
He texted the number to Charlie and grinned. He guessed it would take five seconds for Henry’s cage to be seriously rattled. He returned his attention to Sineád O’Callaghan’s emails.
The third one was dated ten days ago from Customer Service at Reliance Rent-a-Car. Subject: Your Vehicle Rental Contract. The text started “Dear Sineád O’Callaghan” was full of puff about nothing and ended with an attachment icon. He didn’t hesitate to open it. She’d rented a Volkswagen Golf from a centre in Watford. The document had all the car’s registration details together with her email address and phone number, both of which he already knew and were no use to him at all. But it also showed a residential address, also in Watford. He felt his heart skip a beat.