Ollie stood, stunned. The towel loosened and began to slip away, but he barely noticed. ‘I’m sorry, Charles, please — can you explain?’
He turned away from Caro’s curious gaze, and stepped out of the room, the towel falling away completely as he did so, closing the door behind him. ‘Explain?’ Cholmondley said. ‘I think you’re the one who’d better explain.’
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No? Is this your way of having a laugh? When you get drunk perhaps and start insulting your clients?’
‘I can assure you I’ve done nothing of the sort. Please tell me what you mean?’
‘And telling the whole world at the same time? Our arrangement is terminated. You’ll be hearing from my lawyers on Monday.’
‘Charles, please,’ Ollie said, desperately. ‘I’m really sorry — what’s happened? Please tell me, I’m totally in the dark.’
‘In which case you must be suffering short-term memory loss.’
‘Memory loss?’
‘You’re either mental or you have a very strange sense of humour, Mr Harcourt.’
Ollie heard the beeping of an incoming call. He ignored it. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you are talking about, or why you are upset.’
‘No? Well try imagining how you might feel if I’d sent you an email like that — and copied it to all your rival companies. Eh?’
The phone went dead. As Ollie pressed the button to finish the call his end, utterly baffled and reeling, he heard another voice on the line that he recognized. The cultured Indian accent of Anup Bhattacharya.
‘Mr Harcourt?’
‘Anup, good morning!’ Ollie said, uneasily.
‘Just what exactly is the meaning of this?’
If Cholmondley had sounded incandescent, Bhattacharya’s tone, although reserved, contained even deeper anger.
‘I’m sorry — the meaning of what?’
‘I’m just calling to let you know that our business relationship is over, Mr Harcourt. Goodbye.’
The line went dead.
His head spinning, and now even more bewildered, Ollie knelt down, pulled the towel back round his midriff, then hurried along the corridor and up the stairs to his office. If I’d sent you an email like that...
What the hell was Cholmondley talking about? From time to time his mate Rob Kempson would send him crude or risqué emails containing sexual and sometimes politically incorrect jokes. Occasionally he would forward them on to other friends. Had he forwarded one to Cholmondley and Bhattacharya, by mistake, that had offended them?
He was certain he hadn’t. He’d not heard from Rob in over a week or so.
Had he been hacked?
He sat down in front of his computer and logged on. He went straight to his mail box, and then to Sent Mail.
And could not believe his eyes.
There was an email from him, dated today, timed at 3.50 a.m., to Cholmondley. It was also openly copied to each of the other classic car dealers whom he had met at the Goodwood Revival last Sunday, whose business cards he had brought back and entered into the computer.
Dear Charles,
Forgive the directness of this email, but I’m a man who has always maintained strict moral principles in all of my business dealings. When you commissioned me to create a new website for your business, I knew you were a bit of a wanker, but not a fraudster as well.
I’ve now learned that most of the cars that you are advertising on this site do not have the provenance you are claiming. You specialize in cloning exotic cars, providing them with a fraudulent history, and trying to get away with it through your veneer of respectability. What has prompted this email is that you have now asked me to put up an advertisement for the sister car of a 1965 Ferrari GTO that was sold in the USA recently for $35m. You told me this ‘sister’ car has impeccable provenance. If ‘provenance’ comes from cannibalizing a couple of written-off Ferraris and manufacturing new ‘old’ parts in a workshop in Coventry, faking a newspaper article on how this vehicle had been found in a barn, where it had been under a dust sheet for 35 years, and faking its serial numbers and logbook, then fine, this car does indeed have ‘provenance’. The provenance of a master shyster who should long ago have been drummed out of the motor trade and put behind bars.
Ollie could not believe his eyes. Who the hell had written this? A disgruntled former employee of Cholmondley? Someone with computer skills who had hacked his computer here? And this person had somehow found a way in through the website?
He looked again at the Sent box, and saw another email, this one to Bhattacharya.
He clicked to open it.
Hey, Anup, you old fraud, you! You put yourself out as a Brahmin in your caste system, but we all know that really you are an Untouchable. From just how many different, honest, hard-working Indians have you stolen the recipes for your restaurants? How many people have bought from your online ‘deli’ — or should that read, ‘Delhi belly’??? — your amazing Prawn Tikka, or Prawn Dhansak, or Prawn Korma, not knowing that those little curly things are not prawns at all, but monkfish cast-offs?
Oh and you have conveniently omitted that your Nottingham restaurant was shut down for three weeks by the Food Safety Officer and you were fined three thousand pounds after a dead rat was found beneath one of your kitchen fridges.
Ollie sat back in his chair. These were emails sent from this computer, no question about that. But who the hell had written them?
His first thought was Jade. But he dismissed that, rapidly. She might have been able to log in — his password, Bombay7, wasn’t that difficult to crack. But she could not possibly have known the technical details about the Ferrari. Neither could she have known stuff about Bhattacharya, true or otherwise.
He phoned Chris Webb and asked his computer guru if it was technically possible for an outsider to have hacked into his computer and sent these emails.
‘Well, yes. Not easily, but it could be done.’
Webb asked him to fire up the Team Viewer application, then give him the code and password. Moments later Webb had control of his computer and Ollie saw the cursor moving around the screen.
‘I could send any email I wanted, as you, right now,’ Webb said. ‘So which are the two emails you wanted me to see?’
Ollie temporarily took back control and directed him to them.
For the next few minutes, as he stayed on the phone, Ollie watched the cursor shoot up to the toolbar, then move to System Preferences, and then begin drilling down through the options.
Finally, Webb said, ‘I can’t find any evidence that you’ve been hacked — but then again someone good enough to do that would know how to hide their tracks. You sure you didn’t get pissed last night and just not remember sending these?’
Ollie thought back to his weird dream during the night. The one where his laptop went missing. Was it possible he could have sleepwalked and sent these emails, composing them from deep inside his unconscious mind? But why on earth would he have done? That made absolutely no sense.
‘Chris,’ he said, ‘why would I want to insult these clients and self-destruct my business?’
‘You sure you’re OK at the moment, Ollie? You’ve been seeming pretty stressed these past few weeks.’
‘I’m stressed because I’m trying to build my business — and deal with all the work and stuff going on here. But I’m coping with it.’
‘I’m sorry, mate, I just don’t have any other explanation.’
After ending the call, Ollie sat in silence and read through both of the emails again. So who had done this?