The Ex Factor. Eva Woods

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ up now and groping for her phone, Helen realised she didn’t know if Marnie even had the money to get home. Or where home currently was for her. In fact she hadn’t managed to find out anything about Marnie’s life for the past two years. Some friend she was. But at least, in all this talk of exes, there’d been no mention of Ed. She squinted at her phone. It glowed with message symbols, missed calls and voicemails, emails, texts, even WhatsApps. And her heart stilled.

      No. Not now. It couldn’t be her mum, after all this time—Oh, thank God! They were all from Logan.

      Logan Cassidy: internet mogul, entrepreneur, and owner of a vast network of shady businesses, from the dating/cheating website Helen reluctantly ran, to a cut-every-corner budget airline and a chain of underwear shops for larger ladies, More Than a Handful.

      MASSIVE EMERGENCY, the first email read. Helen scrolled down. BIG SECURITY BREACH CALL ME NOW. And the last one—WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?

      Helen closed her eyes for a second. It was going to be one of those days. She called Logan, clearing her throat again and again to try to sound like she hadn’t just woken up. ‘Hi! Sorry, I had an early doctor’s appointment. Er, women’s troubles.’

      ‘Whatever, whatever,’ he said hastily, in his South London growl. ‘Now I need you on this ASAP. I think we’ve been hacked. Like them that got into the Pentagon.’

      ‘What’s happened?’ Logan had an overdeveloped sense of the importance of bitontheside.com in global events. It was probably just a server glitch.

      ‘Someone’s replaced the profile pics. Instead of all that skiing and raising bloody glasses of wine, they’re bloody—well, have a look.’

      Helen felt panic bubble into her bloodstream. This wasn’t supposed to happen today. She was already behind on dusting the bookcases and brushing Mr Fluffypants, a job that was only slight less dangerous than being a UN weapons inspector. ‘They didn’t get into the personal data?’

      His voice softened. ‘No, that’s locked up tighter than a nun’s chuff. But the rest—the fences are down, the T. rex is out, ya know? So I’m gonna send in the T. rex wrangler.’

      ‘Er, what?’

      Logan was a big Jurassic Park fan. He reputedly had a life-size model of a dinosaur in the atrium of his mansion in Essex. He saw a lot of John Hammond in himself. ‘I’m sending a web guy to you,’ he yelled. ‘He’s meant to be good. Total geek. He’ll fix it, OK?’

      ‘OK. But what do you mean, to me?’ He didn’t mean to her flat, surely?

      ‘You’re still in that dump in Peckham, yeah?’

      ‘It’s Peckham Rye actually and it’s really up and coming—but Logan—Logan!’

      ‘Going into a tunnel. Bloody sort this for me, Helen. I’m counting on ya.’ His voice faded.

      Helen caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, eyes bloodshot, blonde curls sticking up, boobs falling out of her Frozen-motif pyjamas. Then she heard the cheerful trill of the doorbell. It really was going to be one of those days.

      She shuffled to the door of her basement flat, tying up her silk dressing gown—a present from Marnie when she’d worked in a vintage shop, and which for years Helen had felt too big to wear, preferring to hide inside massive towelling robes. A big man stood on her doorstep. Not fat, but very tall, very wide. Strapping. If you could call someone strapping when they wore a T-shirt that said ‘No I cannot fix your computer’ and combats with more pockets than a snooker table. He had flaming red hair and a red beard, like a Viking, and he glanced pointedly at a Casio watch.

      ‘Yes?’ she said, irritably, through the security chain.

      ‘You’ve got a bug,’ he said. Northern accent.

      ‘Um, no, I just—I worked late…’

      ‘In your website, I mean. I’m here to have a look.’

      ‘How do I know that’s who you are?’

      ‘Did your boss not say I’d be around?’ He scrabbled in one pocket, then another. ‘Bollocks,’ he muttered. ‘OK, here.’

      She glanced at what he’d handed her. ‘That’s a Blockbuster video card. Which expired in 2004.’

      ‘It’s not my fault the high street could no longer keep up with the increasing ease of pay-to-view websites. Speaking of websites, yours is borked.’

      ‘Borked?’

      ‘Yeah, it’s like—a technical computer term for up the swanny. Now let me in or it’ll only get worse.’

      ‘OK,’ she relented. ‘I’m not—this has taken me by surprise.’ He looked puzzled. ‘I’m not dressed,’ she explained.

      He looked her over. ‘You are dressed, i.e., you’re not naked.’ Helen stared at him. He stared back. ‘Computer… fixey? I’m sorry, you are employed by that dodgy South London geezer, yes?’

      ‘Yes.’ Helen snapped into action and held the door open. ‘I’m sorry. What do you need me to do?’

      ‘Show me the admin details. Who does the coding?’

      ‘The original design was before my time, but I do the basic maintenance and admin.’

      ‘You know code?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said defensively. ‘What, because I’m a woman?’

      ‘No, because you wear pyjamas with cartoons on. Actually that’s quite a coder-y thing to do, I should have realised.’ He sat down in one of her lovely vintage armchairs, making the old springs groan, and whipped out a laptop. It was square, functional and very un-sleek. Like him. ‘I’ll need your computer too.’

      ‘What? Why?’

      ‘Because, if you have malware or something, it’ll be on there. Malware is, how can I put this—totes bad software that will totes corrupt everything.’

      ‘I know what malware is!’ People really didn’t take you seriously when you wore Disney clothes as an adult, Helen reflected. She set him up with the details, then hovered anxiously in the kitchen as he worked.

      ‘Jesus Christ on a bike,’ he said at one point.

      ‘Not good?’

      ‘Let’s just say your defences are more lax than Dad’s Army. A child could get into this.’

      ‘Why would a child want to get into a dating website?’ she said, crossly.

      ‘Dating. Is that what you call it?’

      ‘Of course. It’s a place to meet new people.’

      ‘New married people.’

      ‘You think it’s any different from other sites? Half the people on Tinder are married—and so dumb they use their wedding photos as profile pictures. At least this way it’s more open, and you know what СКАЧАТЬ