Page 18 of Read Between The Lines

‘Fine, that’s good enough for me.’

‘Oh,’ he said.

I got the impression it had been a while since someone had put their faith in him like this.

‘I’ll text you my password,’ I said. ‘Actually…’

I hesitated, regretting that I’d not saved this conversation until I’d changed my password to something more innocuous.

‘You’ve come to your senses. Good,’ said Leo.

‘No, I’m sending it now.’ In for a penny, in for a pound.

There was a pause as he checked his texts followed by a low chuckle at the other end of the line.

‘MrDarcy1whereru? Seriously, that’s your password?’ he said.

‘The IT guys at work always say it’s safer to use a pass phrase rather than a password.’ I tried to defend myself.

‘You have got a bad dose of the romance bug,’ was his only reply. ‘Look, I still feel uncomfortable with this situation, so here’s my guarantee. I won’t log into the app and read your messages unless we’re together, or you’ve got in touch to direct me towards a particular exchange. And you should feel free to change your password at any point to lock me out.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Perhaps we can look at a selection of the messages together at the library tomorrow during my break. And in the meantime, I guess I’d better get on with my reply. Wish me luck with this first stage of Operation Get Brian.’ I frowned. ‘I can hear Moira’s voice in my head saying we need to come up with a catchier name for our mission. What did you do when you were in the police? How did you choose operation names?’

There was a long pause. ‘Operation Get Brian is just fine. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday evening.’

He ended the call before I could respond.

ChapterSeven

Istared at the screen and drew a blank. Writing to Brian had always come easily to me, but now I felt at a loss as to what to put. What if I ended up saying something that sounded completely unnatural, which set alarm bells ringing? I gave myself a mental pep talk. My favourite fictional heroine Harriet Vane would have come up with the perfect response. I would just have to channel her literary and detective abilities, and pretend to myself that everything was normal.

Hey B, I’m so so sorry I’ve taken an age to reply. My phone died and I was locked out of everything until I got it fixed. It’s been soooo frustrating! My one comfort was that at least I knew you were home safe and sound– and earlier than promised, what a bonus. To know you’re in the same country as me at last makes me very happy, but I can’t believe the army are still keeping us apart! How’s the debrief going? Hope it’s not as intense as it sounds, and that they let you go on leave as soon as poss. They will let you go on leave, right? I will be counting the minutes until then xx

I returned to watchingThe Tinder Swindlerbut could no longer concentrate on the intricacies of the programme. It felt so frustrating to be sitting around at home waiting to see if or how Brian might respond. I wanted, no, I needed to be doing more.

I opened up the SO Ox app again and started spooling through its list of upcoming events. If there was one thing I’d learnt from my true crime binge today, it was that, when you were tracking down a criminal, it was important to establish their modus operandi, or MO, as all the shows referred to it. Yes, I knew how the scammer had acted with me so far. But, after all my research, I figured it was unlikely I was his only victim, and I needed to find out if this was his usual technique when he was courting his quarry. If I could uncover a pattern of behaviour, then Leo and I would have more information to go on in our investigation. There was a chance Brian had discovered a way to set up multiple identities on the app, so if we could identify his MO, we might be able to find these other identities and maybe track down fellow victims.

But setting up fake profiles in response and trying to lure him out still felt like leaving too much to chance, even supposing I could work out how to bypass the app’s security measures to do it. Besides, behaviour that was good enough for Brian was certainly not good enough for me.

No, what I needed to do was take the investigation into the real world. If I signed up for one of the in-person events run by the app, I’d be able to speak to actual people, find out if they’d had any weird experiences, and persuade them to report their situation to the app’s staff as well. It would be much harder for them to ignore multiple in-person complaints. And maybe Scammer Brian would even be arrogant enough to turn up himself?

But there was no way I wanted to head to any kind of event without backup, which of course meant roping in Leo. The only problem was that, in order to attend the in-person events, he had to be a member of SO Ox, and I anticipated a battle.

* * *

The next day, I set my strategy in motion.

‘I’ll need to start working elsewhere if you’re going to insist on distracting me like this,’ said Leo, as I dragged the reshelving trolley past his table for the third time that morning. ‘That ruddy thing needs putting out of its misery.’

Given that I’d got into work early and spent nearly an hour unscrewing the wheels and reassembling the trolley to try to fix it, I was somewhat disappointed that my DIY efforts to reduce the squeak had gone unnoticed.

‘Still wrestling with the business plan?’ I asked sympathetically, hoping his grumpy attitude was related to that rather than being solely the result of my presence.

‘She’s showing an interest in what I’m up to. That must mean she’s after something. Okay, what is it that you want?’ he asked, leaning back and linking his fingers behind his head as he surveyed me.

‘I’m doing some reshelving. Not everything is about you,’ I said, irritated that he’d seen through me so easily.

He shook his head. ‘We really must work on your covert investigatory skills if we’re still going through with this plan of yours,’ he said. ‘Your face might as well have a neon sign on it, the way it signals everything you’re thinking. Do you require evidence?’ He nodded and gestured for me to sit down as he started pointing out my apparently massively obvious errors. I reluctantly pulled up a chair. ‘First, there were the darting glances towards me. She’s wondering if I’ve noticed she’s there. Then you did the whole gaze shifting nervously between the books on the trolley thing, none of which are for this section– by the way, you should probably think about that for your next foray into surveillance. She’s pretending to be getting on with her job as normal, while working out the lay of the land and whether she dares speak to me about what’s on her mind. And now, the final tell, the furrow is back between your eyebrows. I know that one particularly well. It means you’re royally pissed off with me for calling you out.’

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