When Maxine returned home from the Hospice, she sat still for a while. The carers were busy cleaning the Bedroom where Adrian had slept for the past two months. The medical equipment … The medical equipment was all being boxed up to be sent back to the rental company. It all seemed so final. She just had to accept that Adrian was not coming home again. Now it was up to her to run her life and the business. For the first time since she’d gone to that interview with Sally Jameson, she felt truly alone. She mentally sighed to herself. There would be many more days like this in the days, weeks and months to come.

Maxine sat at her desk and gazed into space for god knows how long thinking about everything and nothing at the same time.

It was only when the carers came to say goodbye that she returned to something approaching reality. She wished them well and then the house was silent. Even Cliff was out. He was having a cataract operated on and was going to stay close to the hospital that night.

Maxine wandered into the kitchen and tried to think about food. Nothing seemed to even be the slightest of interest so she passed on that for the time being.

There was nothing for it, she had to make that phone call.

It was answered after two rings.

“This is Maxine Forsythe. I will do the project.”

A voice on the other end said,
“Thank you. A delivery will be made inside three hours. The driver will wait for the form in the brown envelope to be completed. Thank you.”

Then the line went dead.

She sat back and smiled to herself and thought…
“All very James Bond isn’t it?”

Then she laughed out loud. It didn’t fill the emptiness left by Adrian’s move to the Hospice but even if it the work was a pile of dog poo, it would give her something to think about for the next few days. The business of ‘Lorelei Investments’ was ticking over just nicely and all their partners understood the situation with Adrian.

There was a file of prospective leads sitting on her desk but those could wait until after…. After the inevitable and into the next year. Because they’d had time to plan for this event, there was very little for her to do in terms of organising the funeral and everything. It felt rather nice to have something different to do. The vote to leave the EU that June had messed up a lot of their plans. Most of the prospective clients had put their plans on hold due to the uncertainty about the economy and what would happen when the UK truly left the EU.

Maxine spent the time waiting for the delivery of what exactly she didn’t know but there was some information in the email that allowed her to start organising my thoughts.

Those heady days in Chichester or what she’d taken to call ‘BA’, ‘Before Adrian’ came back to mind. Back then she just ploughed into a project and to hell with it. It was probably just luck that she’d been given the wrong file and turned up the deal that allowed Adrian to buy the Hotel in Devon. The rest is history but the relatively short-lived era of Adrian and Maxine was over. In a few short days or at most weeks, it would just be her. That would have been quite daunting to most people but she had to give Adrian his due, he’d trained her well but his death would be a big hole in her life and one that would take a rather special person to fill.

Maxine set about preparing her computer equipment for the investigation. Adrian had instilled in her that just about any activity on the internet left a trail of crumbs. Those crumbs could be used to tell an awful lot about a person, their life, their habits and everything else. Then, he’d introduced her to the wonderful world of VPN’s and TOR. The company kept a laptop computer just for this purpose. After each use, it would be wiped clean and restored from a safe backup. At first, Maxine had questioned this but once he’d shown her just how much information there was about Thomas sitting out there on the internet, she adopted his methodology.

With her investigation system all setup, she went into the kitchen and fixed herself something to eat. Then she waited.

A little over two hours after her call the front door bell rang.

A man was standing outside carrying a cardboard box. His white van was parked in the road. It had a sign on the side that read ‘DeliverMe Parcels’. It looked just like a hundred other parcel delivery vans.

“Maxine Forsythe?” asked the man.

“That’s me.”

“Please take the box and check the contents. There is a form for me to take away.”

“I understand. Please wait here,” she said as she took the box from him.

Maxine went into the kitchen and opened the box. On top was a list of the contents. There was just one item on the list. That was another box that was totally wrapped in tape.

She checked and signed the shipping list. Then she opened the brown envelope. It was as he’d said, a copy of the Official Secrets Act. It was all filled out apart from her signature and the date. She did the deed and signed it. Then she looked at it again. More than once since the visit of Mr Blair, she had wondered what the hell that she was getting into. At that moment, she had nothing better to do so she put the signed form back in the envelope and sealed it shut.

“Here you are,” she said to the delivery driver as she handed him the envelope.

“Thank you. Mr Blair says good luck.”

He took the envelope and returned to his van. Maxine watched him drive off before going back inside.

Back in the kitchen, she removed the heavily wrapped box from inside the other one. The whole surface was covered in tape but a sharp knife soon revealed the contents to her. As she expected, there was a lot of paper. Most of it was photocopies of account ledgers. There were also copies of shipping manifests and expense claims. All the sort of things that you’d need to have when running an import/export business. Right at the bottom was a load of customs declarations.

She took each type of document into the office that she had shared with Adrian. His last task when handing over everything to her was to clear his desk. It was totally clear. His computer was in a box in the storeroom. She had a total backup of it on the company server should she need any files. But the result was that his desk was totally clean.

She did feel a momentary twinge of guilt as she sat in his chair. She’d often remarked at how low the chair was set. Maxine adjusted it to her satisfaction and began the task of reading each document, giving it a number and adding her conclusion of its contents. This was all entered into the laptop that she used for this sort of work. This is a very boring task but one that needs to be done if any sort of collation is to be done later on.

When she’d done that, she sorted the documents into what was to her a logical order. Then she returned with the next set of documents.

By the time she’d finished collating everything, it was nearly midnight and it was time for bed.

---

The next morning and with a fresh mind, Maxine started looking at the documents for patterns. People are creatures of habit. If we find one thing that works well then, we will often repeat that again and again until it no longer works. She remembered a TV program on how the wartime code breakers at Bletchley Park had looked for patterns in the messages. An operator would often sign off a message in the same way. This was a weak point that was exploited to great effect. Pattern recognition is one of the tools of the analyst. Some are easy to find and others aren’t.

There were some obvious patterns from the documents Maxine had spread out on the desk before her. Not all of them would be suspicious. Far from it. For example, the company always did its travel arrangements using one Travel Agent. The same was true for the shipping of goods. That was often good practice and, on the surface, there was nothing nefarious about it at all.

She spent the rest of the day cross referencing all the most commonly used businesses, hotels, shipping companies and suppliers. Gradually, a picture of the business began to emerge from the myriad of facts and figures. She finished work early and made herself something to eat. All the time those facts and figures were rattling around in her brain as it looked for the code that would unlock the secrets of the company.

The following morning, she went to the Hospice to see Adrian. He smiled when he saw her come into his room. He was now hooked up to a drip. She read the label. It was just saline. He needed fluids and this was the best way to give them to him.

She talked to him for over an hour. Then Cliff arrived with one eye covered in a bandage.

“A right bunch of invalids, aren’t we?” remarked Cliff.

That got a smile out of Adrian so she left them alone to talk for a while.

An idea that had been rattling around in her mind for a few hours had bubbled to the top while she was explaining to Adrian what she’d been doing with her time. Maxine went and got herself a cup of tea and then composed an email to herself on her phone. To anyone who read it, it would be gibberish but it made sense to her. She sent it and finished her tea happier in the knowledge that at least one problem had been solved.

Maxine returned to Adrian’s room and relived Cliff who went home by taxi with firm instructions not to come to the office for the rest of the week. He wasn’t allowed to drive so it made sense but like many men, he hated the idea of twiddling his thumbs at home. Besides, she didn’t want him to see the files she had literally strewn over Adrian’s desk and floor. Cliff was a well known ‘neat freak’ and there was every chance that he’d start tidying it all up if he was given half a chance. Maxine was determined not to give him that chance.

Maxine spent until it was time for Lunch with Adrian. He’d made it clear that when the time came for him to be fed, she wasn’t to do it. The carers took over and Maxine left him alone. As she walked to her car, she tried hard but found it impossible to put herself in his place. What must be going on in that mind of his as his body fell apart from underneath him. She wasn’t sure if she would have been able let it go on like this if she was in his place.

After leaving the Hospice, Maxine didn’t go straight home but instead, she went to ‘Bea Beautiful’. She had an appointment to get her lashes and nails done. Maxine always received a warm welcome from Bea and today it was going to be even warmer when she updated her on Adrian’s move to the Hospice.

After lots of hugs and tea, Maxine got her new lashes and had her nails refreshed. Ready to face the world again, Maxine went home and after getting herself something to eat, she settled in for a long session with what she was calling ‘todays ultimate sudoku’. The work she was doing was like starting with a totally blank sudoku square and adding pieces until you got a complete puzzle. Rules just like those of Sudoku applied.

Maxine finally called it a day at just before one in the morning. By then, she had a good idea where the business was sending their more lucrative cargoes and how but what their value was worth was as yet unclear.

The package also contained where the details of how she should submit her report and how to ask for more specific data. There were a lot more unanswered questions that needed some data that had to be obtained from a source overseas. She doubted that it could be obtained but she asked for it nevertheless. Included in the details was the login information for a webmail account on a service that operated out of Germany. This was how she was to ask for more information. Maxine used a VPN to access the site and logged in. There was just a welcome to the site message waiting for her. It had been sent the previous day.

She sent the email and went to bed.

---

Maxine slept in the next morning so it was around 11:00 when she checked the email on the German System. There was a reply waiting for her.

“The data you requested will be delivered at 18:00 today.”

That was it. The sender address gave no indication as to who had sent it but these were obviously the way these people did business. she wasn’t sure if she could work like that for any length of time. She needed someone to bounce ideas off. Working in secret was hard.

Maxine’s inquisivity got the better of her. Instead of waiting for the package, she fired up the laptop and after chaining together five VPN’s that were spread across 4 continents, she started searching. A lot of the data seemed almost too easy to find. Then she realised that the data was false. She quickly disconnected the VPN network and used a new one. This time she got past the false data and had the real data all safely copied to a cloud service in Brazil. As she initiated the transfer she thought back to ‘before Adrian’ and how inept Thomas was when it came to using the internet for anything other than a bit of Social Media activity.

After visiting Adrian that afternoon, she returned home in good time to receive the next lot of data. She was particularly keen to see if the ‘Man from the Ministry’ was going to give her the fake data or the real McCoy.

She was expecting the same delivery driver or at least the same delivery company to arrive. At 18:05, the bell rang. It wasn’t who she was expecting at all.

Standing there was a really hunky man in his late 40’s or early 50’s. He had the sort of tan that you get from working outside in all weathers but like Mr Blair, he was impeccably dressed but the style was a little dated compared to Mr Blair’s. With a briefcase under his arm, he looked like a Lawyer.

“Maxine?” he asked.

“Yes. How can I help you?”

“My name is Jacques Chelon. I work for Mr. Blair. I have some data for you. May I come in?”

“Oh! Please come in.”

The arrival of Mr Chelon, had wrongfooted her all right. She was not expecting a delivery in person like this. Add to that, the fact that Mr Chelon was certainly a bit of a hunk especially given his age. The grey hair at his temple gave him a rather distinguished look. Then she reasoned that he spent his time outside and his suit was rather dated. How he fitted into the company that Mr Blair worked for was another mystery to be solved.

She let him in and closed the door behind him. After taking his overcoat and hanging it up, she said,
“Please come through to the kitchen. You look as if you could do with something warm inside you?”

He smiled back at her. It was a nice smile.

“Thank you. Some tea would be nice. I’ve been travelling since lunchtime.”

---

After some refreshments, Jacques showed her the data he’d brought with him. It was all that she’d asked for and a lot more besides. One bit of data interested her. Most of it was the same set of real data that she’d found earlier. She actually had more data than this but it was good to know that they were working from basically the same reference point.

“It is going to be useful then?”

“You bet. This is just about everything I need to complete the puzzle.”

He smiled back at her.

“We hope so.”

Then he took a deep breath.

“Time is of the essence. Some things have happened in relation to the main players since Mr Blair was here.”

“Oh!”
Then she thought.

“You mean the next shipment to Germany? That is due to leave tomorrow.”

He looked at her with a slightly startled expression on his face.

“How did you know?”

This was the question that she was not expecting. It was like when a maths teacher sees that you have the right answer and then demands to see your working. A lot of her work has no method that could be turned into an algorithm unless it can work on a whole load of very random Fuzzy logic.

Maxine and Thomas before her was always one of those annoying people who could resolve anagrams in under a second, work out abstract puzzles with ease. The answer just appeared to her. It was the same with the datasets that she’d received. She could see the links between what looked like otherwise totally separate sets of information as long as you don’t ask her to explain why. She couldn’t do that in a month of Sundays.

Maxine tried her best to explain her reasoning to Jacques. He said that he understood but his body language said differently.

She tried a different tack.

“Normally, a container is would to leave the warehouse and go to Harwich. It is booked on the Thursday overnight sailing to ‘The Hook of Holland’. That is how it works for most of the month. However, on the last Thursday of the month the container is sent to Hull for the Ferry to Zeebrugge. This load never gets to the distribution centre in Maastricht. The bills of lading appear to show that it does but the delivery notes are always signed by a different person. That person has a pretty unique name and according to Facebook, they live close to Strasbourg which is as you may well know on the German border. I’d track that container if I was looking for you.”

Jacques looked at the wall to her Office where she had laid it all out. He seemed very non-committal until…

“That is brilliant,” said Jacques.

The smile disappeared from his face.

“Can you pack all this up? I’ll get the courier to collect it in the morning.”

She felt deflated.

“Is that it?”

“Sorry but yes, it is. Now it is for others to take over and work the case.”

“Does that mean you?”

“It certainly looks like that it is going to be me. I’m fluent in Dutch and German as well as French. I’ll be off across the channel tonight or early tomorrow morning.”

Then he went outside to call his boss. When he returned he said?

“Mr Blair is very pleased with your work.”

Beyond that there was very little that he could say.

He didn’t hang around long after that.

As she packed everything away she started feeling a bit sad.

---

Once the courier collected the box of documents the following day, Maxine went to the Hospice.

She had just walked into the building when the nurse in charge came up to her with a serious look on her face.

“I’m so glad you are here. Adrian has taken a turn for the worse.”

Maxine felt herself get visibly smaller. She had thought that she was prepared for this moment but she wasn’t. She didn’t know of anything you could do to prepare you for the death of a loved one even if it had been on the cards for months.

“Is it time?”

“Nearly. The Doctor is with him now. He sort of sagged at breakfast. It is often a sign when people are near the end.”

A great pit opened up in Maxine’s stomach. To her credit, the nurse took her arm and led her towards a chair.

She sat Maxine down and took her hand.
“The Doctor will be out in a few minutes. Then you can be with him,” said the Nurse.

“Th… thank you.”

The pair sat in silence until the doctor emerged from Adrian’s room. Right away, she saw that he had a grave look on his face as he approached them. The two women both stood up as he reached them.

“Mrs Forsythe?”

Maxine nodded.

“Please go and be with your husband. His time is near.”

Maxine simply nodded her understanding and walked towards Adrian’s room. When she reached the door, she hesitated. She wasn’t sure what she’d find inside. After what seemed like and age but was more likely only a few seconds, she went inside.

Adrian was lying with his eyes closed. A monitor showed his heartrate. Thankfully, there were none of those annoying bleeps they seem to make on all TV shows that are set in Hospitals.

Maxine pulled over a chair and sat next to him. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He didn’t respond.

“I’m here darling,” she said quietly.
He didn’t respond.

“Cliff sends his best wishes.”

Maxine sat there talking to him for over an hour. She didn’t remember what she’d said but it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t until one of the nurses came in and gently tapped her on the shoulder.

“He’s gone.”

Maxine looked at the heart monitor in horror. It was showing a single flat line. She was so engrossed in talking to Adrian that she hadn’t noticed the change.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It was peaceful and you were with him at the end. That’s what matters isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“What happens now?”

“We get the Doctor to certify the death and then the plan that you and he agreed to swings into action. There really isn’t much for you to do apart from registering the death.”

Maxine felt a bit foolish for forgetting that.
“Oh yes of course.”

The Nurse looked at her.
“Are you all right to drive home? We can get a Taxi?”

The nurse was right. Maxine didn’t feel much like driving at all.
“Yes, I think that would be for the best.”

She gripped her hand.
“Don’t worry Mrs Forsythe we are here to help you just as much as for your husband.”

Her words were comforting but seemed to go in one ear and out of the other. Maxine’s mind was on other things.

---

A Taxi dropped Maxine off at her home some two hours later. She wasn’t really in a fit state to do anything but Cliff appeared as if out of nowhere and proceeded to take charge of proceedings.

“Don’t argue Maxi. I’m staying for the duration. You need someone to be here for you.”

A couple of hours later Maxine’s mother turned up and all was well as it could be given the circumstances although Maxine hadn’t called her to inform her of Adrian’s passing. She decided not to press things for the time being.

Maxine’s Mother took Maxine to the Hospice to collect the Death Certificate the following morning and to collect her car. They duly registered the death and filled out numerous forms to change her status to ‘widow’. It felt really strange to think of Maxine as being a widow but that’s how she now appeared to the world. To her, the fact that her Husband had died made her a widow and that was good enough for her.

Because of the nature of Adrian’s disease, he’d planned his funeral down to the last detail. It was also all paid for in advance. The funeral director came around to check to see if there were any last-minute changes. There were none or at least none that Maxine could think of.

The only issue was that they’d have to wait a week before there was space in the Crematorium schedule.

The time between a death and being able to finally say goodbye to your loved one is a horrible sort of limbo. You can’t even begin to think about what’s next until that day and then the reading of the will is all done and dusted.

Maxine hated it. It was like being in limbo. She’d never felt as empty in all her life. It is just not fair. It made no sense at all for someone as good as Adrian to die so early. All she could think of were the good times they had together and now that it was down to her to carry on his work.

The only bit of good news was that Maxine’s very own car was ready for delivery. The current one was Adrian’s choice but she’d never really gotten on with it. As she read the email from the dealer, she fondly remembered the days that they’d argued over her choice of car, the colour and what options it would have. It was just Adrian’s way of making sure that she’d really thought things through. Adrian wasn’t sure about her choice but they’d gone on a demonstration day the previous spring. One lap of the Millbrook circuit was enough to convince him that going electric was the right choice. Maxine had already decided to call her car Adrian in memory of the man that had done so much for her. That way, she’d always remember him. She’d always remember him because one of the features of the car was that you could name it. As soon as she’d found out about this, she’d decided to call it ‘Adrian’s Folly’.

[to be continued]