Page 86 of Summer at Croftwood Cinema
Patsy spent the rest of the day bug hunting. It was something she could lose herself in and before she knew it, it was late afternoon. She stood up and stretched, pondering the next thing she could try for the website she was working on. She made a cup of tea and took it out onto the roof to get some fresh air. As much as she wanted to spend all day out there, the laptop needed charging and she didn’t have a long enough extension lead, so she’d had to make do with periodically sitting indoors beside the open window. As the sun warmed her face, she had an idea about what she was going to try next. She stepped back inside and went to the file explorer on the laptop. She wanted to set up a virtual machine inside the laptop but it was so ancient, she needed to check whether there was enough space on the disk. She clicked onto the C drive which was supposed to be 240GB but was showing as 200GB. Patsy frowned. Why would the size of the disk be showing differently? She wasn’t puzzled for long, realising almost straight away that something was amiss, and whatever it was that was taking up this mysterious 40GB was probably what Dan was after.
Around an hour later, Patsy had discovered a hidden partition on the laptop, where she found a single file with ‘wallet’ in the name, but it was password protected. Years before, she’d been on an ethical hacking workshop that had explained how to attempt brute forcing of passwords and even though she was rusty on the details, there was one thing in her favour. The fact that she’d had the laptop for three years and it had been sat on a shelf gathering dust for at least another three meant that the password had been chosen before anyone cared about two-factor authentication or special characters, which made attempting to crack it a lot easier.
The next several hours went in the blink of an eye for Patsy. She had never been more focused or more determined to get to the bottom of anything in her life. A plan was formulating at the back of her mind that she wouldn’t allow herself to pay any attention to until she knew that she could get access to this wallet. She downloaded a password cracking tool to help her get there faster, frustrated knowing that if she had a better computer, it really would be faster. The size of the memory on the ancient laptop meant that everything was slow. As soon as she added the word list — basically a dictionary of possible passwords — into the tool and defined some rules to use, the pace slowed to glacial. But finally, at a bleary-eyed three o’clock in the morning, she did it. The password was R1chDan1988.
Patsy could hardly believe she’d managed to get into it. Thank god she’d been practising her skills for weeks with all the bug bounty hunting she’d been doing. Otherwise, coming at it cold, it could have taken longer than she had. Realistically, it was only a matter of time before she’d have had to face Dan demanding the laptop again and it would have been gutting to have handed it over without knowing why he wanted it so badly.
She held her breath as she looked at what was held in the wallet. It was no wonder he had wanted the laptop back. He had close to twenty Bitcoin. A quick google search told Patsy that when he’d bought them in 2016, he’d paid around £2,000 for them and now they were worth over £300,000. At their peak in November 2021, he would have been within spitting distance of being a millionaire. That thought filled her with glee, imagining him in prison, unable to sell and seeing the value drop like a stone before he was released.
She knew exactly what she was going to do.
36
AS SOON AS it was an acceptable time to call round to Oliver’s, Patsy let herself into the coffee house, raced up the stairs and rapped on the bedroom door.
‘Ollie, are you awake?’
‘Christ, Pats! What’s happened?’ He came bursting out of the bedroom, half-asleep, trying to pull some jeans on over his boxer shorts. He didn’t look amused when Patsy started laughing.
‘I’ve got a present for you.’
He did up the fly on his jeans, collapsed on the sofa and sat with his head in his hands. ‘It couldn’t wait until a more civilised hour?’
‘Check your bank account.’
‘Seriously, Pats. It’s way too early to be this demanding. Can I have a coffee first?’
‘Ollie! Look at it and then you can have a coffee.’ She needed one herself, having been up all night, but she was fuelled by adrenaline and the need for closure.
He picked his iPad up from the coffee table and found the app for his bank account. He rubbed his eyes and blinked as he saw the balance.
‘Is that enough to pay Amy?’
‘Where did this come from?’
‘Is it, Ollie?’
‘It’s more than enough, Pats but I don’t understand. Where did it come from?’
‘It came from me.’
‘But…’
‘This is what Dan had on the laptop. That’s why he wanted it. He had a crypto currency wallet hidden on there with Bitcoin in it.’
‘Is it legal? How do you know it isn’t the proceeds from his fraud thing?’ Oliver asked.
‘Because this happened at least a year before that, and although it’s worth a lot of money now, it was worth £2,000 when he bought it.’
Oliver still looked dubious.
‘That £2,000 was mine. To start with, all of my money went into a joint account which he syphoned off the minute it went in there. Then when I tried to change my account details so that my wages would go into my own account, because he worked in the accounts office, he used to change the bank details on the file that got sent to the bank from mine to his. It took me ages to realise that’s what was happening because every time I confirmed my details with the payroll system, they were correct. And even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. Not then.’
‘Okay.’ Oliver still wasn’t looking as thrilled as she’d hoped.
‘It’s fair.’
Oliver stood up and put his arms around her. ‘I know it is, Pats. You deserve this, that’s why you can’t give it to me.’
