“And Jackie wouldn’t have done that?”
Mark shook his head. “Absolutely not. There are shutters on the outside of that window, and we’ve always kept them closed—that helps stop reflections appearing on the computer screen—so there would never be any need to draw the curtains.”
“Well, somebody must have done,” Bronson said. “The police would have had no reason to do so. Maybe the burglars closed the curtains because they were looking for something in the study and wanted to ensure no light shone through the window.”
“But we’ve checked the study,” Mark protested, “and there’s nothing missing.”
“I know, so we need to go back and check it again.”
In the study, Bronson switched on the computer, and asked Mark to check every drawer and cupboard in the room, just in case they’d missed something. While he waited for the operating system to load, Bronson rummaged through the papers scattered over the desk, and found invoices, estimates and quotations for the work the Hamptons were doing on the property, plus the usual collection of utility bills. There were also several sheets of A4 paper that he presumed Jackie had used to write herself notes, as he found shopping lists and to-do lists on a few of them. One of these interested him, and he put that piece of paper to one side, together with another, apparently blank, sheet.
When the computer was ready for use, Bronson checked what programs were installed and then scanned through the “My documents” folder, looking for anything unusual, but found nothing. Then he checked the e-mail client, looking in both the “Inbox” and “Sent items,” again without result. Finally, he opened the Web browser—like most people, the Hamptons had used Internet Explorer—and looked at the Web sites Jackie had visited recently. Or rather, he tried to. There were no sites listed in the history, so he checked the program settings. That puzzled him, and he leaned back in the black leather office chair with a frown.
“What is it?” Mark asked, closing the door of the cupboard they used to store their stationery.
“I don’t know that it’s anything, really. Was Jackie an experienced computer user? I mean, would she have fiddled about with program settings, that kind of thing?”
Mark shook his head. “Not a chance. She used the word processor and the spreadsheet, sent and received e-mails and did a bit of surfing on the Internet. Nothing else. Why?”
“I’ve just checked the settings for Internet Explorer, and pretty much everything uses the default values, including the history, which is set for twenty days.”
“So?”
“Despite the default setting, there are no sites at all listed in the program’s history, so somebody must have deleted them. Could Jackie have done that?”
“No,” Mark said firmly. “She would have had no idea how to do it and, in any case, why would she have wanted to?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Back in the kitchen, Mark made coffee while Bronson sat down at the table, the papers in front of him.
“Right, then,” Mark said, carrying two mugs across the room. “What have you found?”
“Apart from the anomaly with the computer, I picked up a shopping list and what looks like a blank piece of paper.”
“That doesn’t sound promising—or even very interesting.”
Bronson shrugged. “It might be nothing, but it’s a bit odd. The shopping list, for example. It’s got the usual kinds of things you’d expect to find on it, like groceries and stuff, but right at the bottom is ‘Latin dictionary.’ There’s a line through the words, so either Jackie changed her mind or she went out and bought one and then crossed out the entry when she’d done so.”
“She bought it,” Mark said. “I saw a Latin-Italian dictionary on the bookshelf in the study. I didn’t bother mentioning it, because it didn’t seem important. But why would she want a Latin dictionary?”
“Maybe because of this,” Bronson said, holding up the blank sheet of paper. “There’s no writing on either side of this sheet, but when I looked at it I saw faint indentations, as if Jackie had written something on another piece of paper on top of this one. There are four letters altogether, printed in block capitals, and they’re reasonably clear. The letters are ‘H,’ ‘I,’ ‘C’ and ‘V.’ Those letters, in that order, are not a part of any word I can think of in English.”
“ ‘CV’ could refer to someone’s curriculum vitae,” Mark suggested.
“But what about the ‘HI’?”
“Apart from the obvious, I’ve no idea.”
“I think the dictionary Jackie bought might be a clue. I studied Latin, believe it or not, and ‘Hic’ is a Latin word. It means ‘here’ or ‘in this place,’ as far as I remember, and the ‘V’ could be the first letter of another word. There’s what looks like a dot between the ‘C’ and the ‘V’ on this page, and I think the Romans sometimes separated words with a symbol like that.”
“Are you serious? Jackie had enough trouble with Italian. Why would she be messing about with Latin?”
“I’m guessing here. Apart from this piece of paper, I’ve seen nothing anywhere in this house that looks like a Latin text, but I suspect Jackie found or was given something that had a Latin phrase written on it. That would certainly explain the dictionary.”
Bronson paused for a few seconds, because what he was about to suggest was less a leap of logic than a quantum leap.
“What is it?” Mark asked, seeing the uncertainty on Bronson’s face.
“I’m trying to make some sense of this. We’ve got a newly bought Latin dictionary, and the impression of what could be a Latin word on a sheet of paper, but no sign of the top sheet. That means somebody’s definitely been into the study, unless Jackie herself removed the top sheet and then destroyed it. But what worries me most of all is the deletion of the browsing history from Internet Explorer.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I don’t want to make too much of this, but suppose Jackie found something, here in the house or maybe in the grounds, something with a Latin expression written on it. She didn’t understand what it meant, so she bought a Latin dictionary. She’d probably have preferred a Latin-English version, but couldn’t find one. She tried to translate the text, but found she couldn’t make sense of it with the Italian dictionary.
“So Jackie did what most people in that situation would do. She logged on to a search engine, found a Latin translation service and input the phrase. Now,” Bronson said, “the next stage is pure conjecture, but it does make sense, to me at least.
“Maybe some organization, somewhere, put a form of Internet-monitoring service in place, watching for any requests to translate certain expressions from ancient languages. Technically, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to set up, as long as the translation service Web sites were willing to cooperate. When Jackie input the Latin phrase into the search engine, it raised a flag, and perhaps even identified the address where the computer that generated the query was located—”
“Hang on a minute,” Mark interrupted. “Why the hell would anyone today have the slightest interest in somebody trying to translate a two-thousand-year-old—or whatever—bit of Latin?”
“I’ve not the slightest idea, but nothing else seems to make sense. If I’m right, whoever put the monitoring service in place then came here, to this house, to search for whatever Jackie had found. It was that important to them. They obviously recovered the object, sanitized the computer so there would be no record of Jackie’s searches, and took away anything they could find that referred to the Latin text.
“And, in the process,” Bronson finished sadly, “I think Jackie just got in their way.”
III
Pierro reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a brown envelope. He looked around the cafe’, checking that nobody else was in earshot—a superfluous precaution with Gregori Mandino’s two men acting as watchdogs—and placed several photographs on the table in front of Vertutti.