DARKMARKET

Standard Bank account in South Africa? Or my ICICI one in India? Or maybe all three?' Even more puzzling: what did she actually mean? 'How have they broken into my account?'

Coming so soon after his exhausting flight, the whole affair made the Reverend anxious and edgy. 'I'll deal with this later when I get to Bradford and after I've rested,' he muttered to himself.

Bradford is 200 miles north of Heathrow Airport. Sixty miles due east of the city lies Scunthorpe, where Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson's small team was nervously awaiting the Reverend's phone call. The officer began to feel he was sinking in the quicksand of a case that he suspected was very big, and which presented him with one seemingly insuperable problem – he couldn't get his head round it. The evidence gathered so far included hundreds of thousands of computer files, some of which were large enough to hold the complete works of Shakespeare 350 times over. Inside these documents lay a planetary library of numbers and messages in a language that was effectively indecipherable to all but a tiny elite around the world who are trained in the arcane terminology of cybercrime.

DS Dawson may have known nothing about that novel and particularly rarefied branch of criminal investigation, but he was a first-class homicide officer with many years of service behind him. He could detect among the endless lists and number strings an agglomeration of sensitive data, which should not be in the possession of a single individual.

Yet as police officers in many parts of the world were discovering in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was one thing to stumble across an information trove like this. It was quite another attempting to link it to a specific crime.

If DS Dawson were to persuade a magistrate in the sleepy town of Scunthorpe on the Humber estuary to place his suspect on remand, then he needed to show crystal-clear evidence of a specific crime. Furthermore, there was always a fair chance that he would be presenting said evidence to a doddery old circuit judge who might have difficulty using a TV remote, let alone accessing email. Convincing wasn't sufficient – the case had to be watertight and simple enough for anyone to understand.

Time was dribbling away. The suspect could only be held for three days and two of those had already passed. Among the files, figures,