The Complaints Read Online Free PDF

asked.

    Inglis looked around her. ‘We do what we can.’

    ‘Are there just the two of you?’

    ‘At the moment,’ Inglis admitted. ‘High rate of attrition and all that.’

    ‘Plus we mostly end up passing cases to London,’ Gilchrist added. ‘They’ve got a hundred-strong team down there.’

    ‘A hundred seems a lot,’ Fox commented.

    ‘You’ve not seen their workload,’ Inglis said.

    ‘And do I call you Inglis? I mean, is there a rank, or maybe a first name . . .?’

    ‘Annie,’ she eventually told him. There was no one at the desk next to hers, so she motioned for Fox to seat himself there.

    ‘Give us a twirl, Anthea,’ Gilchrist said. From the way he said it, Fox got the notion that the joke was wearing thin for all concerned.

    ‘Bruce Forsyth?’ he guessed. ‘ The Generation Game ?’

    Inglis nodded. ‘I’m supposedly named after the gorgeous pouting assistant.’

    ‘But you prefer Annie?’

    ‘I definitely prefer Annie, unless you want to keep things formal, in which case it’s DS Inglis.’

    ‘Annie’s fine by me.’ Fox, seated, picked a loose thread from the leg of his trousers. He was trying to avoid the file on the desk in front of him. It was marked ‘School Uniform’. He cleared his throat. ‘My boss told me you wanted to see me.’

    Inglis nodded. She had settled in front of her computer. An additional laptop was balanced precariously atop the hard drive. ‘How much do you know about CEOP?’ she asked.

    ‘I know you spend your time rounding up perverts.’

    ‘Well put,’ said Gilchrist, hammering away at his keyboard.

    ‘I’m told it was easier in the old days,’ Inglis added. ‘But now we’ve all gone digital. Nobody hands their photos in for processing any more. Nobody has to buy magazines or even go to the trouble of printing anything, except in the privacy of their own home. You can groom a kid from the other side of the world, only meet up with them when you’re sure they’re ready.’

    ‘Good and ready,’ Gilchrist echoed.

    Fox ran a finger around his shirt collar. It was hellishly warm in here. He couldn’t take off his jacket - this was a business meeting; first impressions and all that. He noted though that Annie Inglis’s jacket was over the back of her chair. It was pale pink and looked fashionable. Her hair was cut short, almost in what would have been called a pageboy. It was a glossy brown, and he wondered if she dyed it. She wore a little make-up; not too much. And no nail varnish. He noticed, too, that unlike the rest of the offices on this floor, the windows were opaque.

    ‘It gets hot in here,’ she was telling him. ‘All the hard drives we keep running. Take off your jacket if you like.’

    He gave a thin smile: all the time he’d been trying to read her, she’d been reading him, too. He dispensed with the jacket, draping it across his knees. When Inglis and Gilchrist exchanged a glance, he knew it was to do with his braces.

    ‘Other problem with our “client base”,’ she went on, ‘is that they’re getting smarter all the time. They know the hardware and software better than we do. We’re always trying to catch up. Here’s an example.’

    She had nudged the mouse on her desk with her wrist. The computer screen, which had been blank, now showed a distorted image.

    ‘We call this a “swirl”,’ she explained. ‘Offenders send each other pictures, but only after they’ve encrypted them. Then we need to devise software to allow us to un-swirl them.’ With a click of the mouse, the photo began to resolve itself into an image of a man with his arm around an Asian boy. ‘You see?’ Inglis asked.

    ‘Yes,’ Fox said.

    ‘Plenty of other tricks, too. They’ve gotten so they can hide images behind other images. If you don’t know that’s the case, you might not bother stripping them out. We’ve seen hard drives hidden inside other hard drives ...’

    ‘We’ve seen everything ,’ Gilchrist