Vanished by James Delargy (free novel 24 TXT) 📕

So that was why she was distant, thought Lorcan. She had been terrified she’d lost Dylan and he hadn’t been there to help. Hurt herself doing so. She was recovering from the shock. And the anger towards him. She was right to be angry at him.

‘I had another nightmare too.’

‘The rumbling again?’

The boy nodded. ‘Mum wasn’t there.’

‘She probably went back to her own bed,’ said Lorcan. ‘You’re a growing boy. It’s a tight squeeze both of you on one bed.’

‘No, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the house.’

Lorcan stopped shovelling, the grey mixture settling into a shapeless blob on the metal he had scavenged from a collapsed building across the road.

‘I don’t know where she went, Daddy.’

‘I’m sure she was just getting some air, Dyl,’ said Lorcan, though he wasn’t sure at all.

27

Emmaline

More officers were dragged in – requisitioned from Kalgoorlie and Perth – and the whole town thoroughly checked, building to building right to the outskirts. Fourteen other tunnels had been found. All either empty or collapsed. And not recently.

At the end of it, the conclusion was that the family, or their bodies, were nowhere in town.

A fresh KLO4 for the family or their vehicle was reissued statewide and a plane was sent up to check the major thoroughfares for any crashed utes.

As those were out of her hands, Emmaline’s focus switched to finding out who Lorcan Maguire had met in Wisbech. She started with questioning the people at his former job.

INK Tech was based in an industrial park in Welshpool, a short skip south of Perth Airport. It was a basic building with grey prefab walls and an all-encompassing dreariness. All of the capital had clearly been spent on the hardware inside, rows of state-of-the-art computers and servers droning in the background.

She first met with Nikos Iannis, the joint owner. His brother, Georgios, the co-owner, was unavailable as he had been confined to hospital for the last three months with a particularly virulent type of bone cancer. The prognosis wasn’t good. So Nikos was in sole charge and immediately she could see that he had enough personality and bulk to command ten businesses, the giant of a man unable – or unwilling – to rise from his desk as Emmaline was led inside by his secretary.

She took a seat. Introductions were forsaken. She had done that already over the phone.

‘You recently made Lorcan Maguire redundant, didn’t you?’

At the mention of his name, Nikos’s self-satisfied smile vanished. Emmaline continued. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘That he was a snake,’ spat Nikos.

‘You said “was”,’ she noted. ‘Do you know something we don’t?’

The smile returned. There was a calculating menace behind it. ‘I probably know a lot of things you don’t, Detective Taylor.’

‘That’s not an answer, Mr Iannis.’

‘Should I have my lawyer present?’

‘This isn’t a formal interview but if you wish—’

‘I said “was” only because he was my employee. Now he isn’t.’

Emmaline ran with it. ‘What was he like?’

‘I told you what he was like.’

‘When he was employed with you. Before he was made redundant.’

Nikos drew a breath that struggled to enter lungs crushed by the fat weighing in his chest. ‘From what I hear, he had been underperforming for the last year. As if he was bored of the work. Then after a warning his work had picked up again. Probably because he wanted to stay in the job while stealing my information.’

‘What was the information?’ asked Emmaline.

‘Client data. Numbers.’

‘Financial information?’

Nikos’s face turned to stone. ‘I don’t think I need to answer that.’

‘No, but it might help.’

‘What makes you think I want to help?’

There was a pause as they stared at each other.

‘Why was he let go?’ asked Emmaline.

‘Business pressures. We needed redundancies. He just missed the cut. I actually had sympathy for the bugger. We gave him to the end of the month and another month’s wages on top. Pretty generous I’d say. Then we found that we had a chunk of data missing.’

‘Why do you think he stole it?’

‘Only a few people had access to it. It was him.’

‘The court didn’t agree.’

‘It couldn’t be proved for certain,’ said Nikos. ‘But that works both ways.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Reasonable doubt.’ Again the dark eyes flashed menace.

‘Did you see him again?’

‘Lorcan? No. Not after court. We were too busy warning our rivals off purchasing stolen information. In case he tried to sell it to them. Now they’re all over us.’

Emmaline had seen the newspaper reports. INK Tech was under intense media fire for losing sensitive client data.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to court,’ said Emmaline.

Nikos didn’t respond, the cold stare suggesting he didn’t need to be reminded. Maybe his lawyers had even warned him against it at the time but in a throwback to earlier years, he couldn’t let a slight pass. But now, as a proper, law-abiding businessman it was a reputation rather than a body that took a hammering.

‘I’ll need to question some of his colleagues.’

Nikos frowned. ‘Be sure and let me know if they know anything.’

A check of the comings and goings of the employees in the last two weeks revealed nothing of interest. After that she interviewed the rest of the employees on an informal basis and got blank faces from them all. The overall consensus was of Lorcan being a colleague rather than a close friend, none of them offering any new information and that they didn’t socialize outside of the office.

As she sat there afterwards packing up her notes, she watched the office in crisis mode, phone calls with tense clients, desperate reassurances offered that their data was safe and that all steps would be taken to ensure it stayed that way. She wondered just what effect the loss of the data and the ill-advised court case had on the company. Nikos – and the stricken Georgios – would have lost a lot of money. They might even lose more in lawsuits and claims should the stolen data ever leak. Was that enough to threaten Lorcan?