Free One Last Lesson by Iain Cameron

cars, but Traffic suspect she was on the phone and are pulling her mobile phone records.’
    ‘You know what I think about people using mobiles when they’re driving. I hope they throw the book at h er for causing an accident like that.’ He paused for a few moments. ‘The other reason I called was to let you know there’s been a new development in the Robson case.’
    ‘ Great. What is it?’
    ‘Are you still up for it?’ his voice was deadpan but he had been worked with Gerry Hobbs long enough to know when he was being serious.
    ‘ What do you mean?’
    ‘Well, the Chief’s making noises about you not being around the office for the next few weeks and suggesting your head might be somewhere else.’
    ‘For God’s sake!’ he snapped. ‘She’s only been in hospital for a morning and already he’s pensioning me off.’
    ‘No worries boss, I know what he’s like; he’s an awkward sod when he puts his mind to it. If he was schoolteacher, he’d be in charge of taking the bloody register or supervising detention.’
    ‘Let’s forget about Steve Harris for a minute and concentrate on the case. Tell me about this new development.’
    ‘I ’d rather not say over the phone as I need you to judge how important you think it is, but I’ve got something on CCTV you need to see.’
    ‘ You’re in the office?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    He looked at his watch: two-fifteen. ‘I’ll see you at three.’
     

ELEVEN
     
     
     
    An anonymous warehouse in Hollingbury was the nerve centre for Jon Lehman’s finest creation, a website that was taking the web by storm. Out went the tired old slappers, the mainstay of other adult websites with tattooed arses, more metal rivets and pins on their flesh than an old Land Rover and as many lines on their faces as a Network Rail map, and in came nubile young things with barely a blemish on their beautiful bodies and looking as young, intelligent and sexy as many of his students, which in fact many of them were.
    In the past, he was a keen browser of this sort of material but was becoming increasingly alarmed at rocketing prices, the source of many of the models and security. He, and many others, were put off supplying credit card details to these sites as they imagined, quite rightly, it was owned by a fat, sweaty oik, operating a bank of servers from a seedy, dank basement in the back streets of Kiev or Tirana who sold their details to his friends in the Russian mafia, which they used to bombard computers in the west with spam emails for Viagra or how to make a killing from Forex trading.
    Their website was cheaper than most but not too cheap to suggest tacky. They used SSL encryption technology to scramble credit card details and this was subtly emphasised along with their UK credentials, which all served to engender feelings of stability, security and legality. In only four months of trading, the business grew from one hundred thousand hits a week and a couple of hundred subscribers, to a dizzying half a million hits a week with over one hundred thousand subscribers and growing at over twenty per cent per month.
    The main floor area of the warehouse was subdivided by partitions to create several individual room scenes where models would pose, and these could be quickly altered when the photographs became tired or were being copied too frequently by other web sites. This month, Room A was furnished to replicate the kitchen of a modern apartment with granite and chrome worktop fittings, large flat screen television and stylish appliances that would never be used to cook, iron or wash.
    Room B, the largest , was a 1950s school room with blackboards, canes and desks, while Room C looked like a real doctor’s surgery with an examination table, height measuring devices, wall charts and a screened changing area, all supplied by a medical friend of Alan Stark, left over after the health centre where he worked was refurbished. Ideas for new scenes were never in short supply although he would