*
The other floaters called in, one by one. According to the Chicago boys, Ian Spain’s reaction had been “all good”—your standard mix of shock and grief, nothing to raise red flags; he said he and Pat hadn’t been e-mailing much, but Pat hadn’t mentioned any stalkers, any confrontations, anyone who was worrying him. Jenny had barely more family than he did—her mother had shown up at the hospital and there were some cousins in Liverpool, but that was it. The mother’s reaction had been all good too, complete with a side order of near-hysteria about being kept away from Jenny. In the end the floater had managed to get a basic statement, for what it was worth; Jenny and her mother weren’t close, and Mrs. Rafferty knew less about the Spains’ lives than Fiona did. The floater had tried to nudge her into going home, but she and Fiona had set up camp at the hospital, which at least meant we knew where to find them.
Emma had actually been going to primary school, where the teachers said she had been a nice kid from a nice family: popular, well behaved, a people pleaser, no genius but well able to keep up. The floater had a list of teachers and friends. No suspicious knife wounds at the nearby A&E departments, no phone calls to us from the Spains. The door-to-door had turned up nothing: out of maybe two hundred fifty houses, fifty or sixty showed any signs of official occupation, about half of those had someone home, and no one in those couple of dozen knew much about the Spains. None of them thought they had seen or heard anything unusual, but they couldn’t be sure: there were always joyriders, always half-wild teenagers prowling around the empty streets, setting bonfires and finding things to smash.
Jenny’s shopping traced back to the supermarket in the nearest decent-sized town, where at about four o’clock the previous afternoon she had bought milk, mince, crisps and a few other things that the checkout girl didn’t remember—the shop was working on pulling the receipt, and the CCTV footage. Jenny had seemed fine, the girl said, hurried and a bit stressed, but polite; no one had been talking to the family, no one had followed them out, at least not that the girl had seen. She only remembered them because Jack had been bouncing up and down in the trolley, singing, and while she swiped their shopping he had told her he was going to be a big scary animal for Halloween.
The search tossed up small things, low-tide flotsam and jetsam. Photo albums, address books, cards congratulating the Spains on their engagement, their wedding, their babies; receipts from a dentist, a doctor, a pharmacist. Every name and every number went into my notebook. Slowly, the list of question marks was getting shorter and the list of possible contact points was getting longer.
Computer Crime rang me late in the afternoon, to say they had taken a preliminary look at what we had sent them. We were in Emma’s room: I had been going through her schoolbag (lots of pink-based crayon drawings, TODAY I AM A PRINCESS in careful, wobbly capitals), Richie had been down on his hunkers on the floor, flipping through the fairy tales on her bookshelf. With her gone and the bed stripped—the morgue boys had wrapped her sheets around her and taken the lot, in case our man had shed hairs or fibers while he did what he did—the room was so empty it sucked the breath out of you, as if she had been taken away a thousand years ago and no one had stepped in here since.
The techie was called Kieran or Cian or something. He was young and fast-talking, and he was enjoying himself: this was clearly a lot nearer to what he had signed on for than trawling hard drives for kiddie porn, or whatever he usually did with his day. Nothing that stood out on the phones and nothing interesting about the baby monitors, but the computer was a different story. Someone had wiped it.
“So I’m not going to turn the machine on and wreck all the access times on the files, right? Plus, for all I know, someone’s set a dead man’s switch to wipe the whole thing when it gets powered up. So first thing I do, I take a copy of the hard drive.”
I put him on speakerphone. Above us, the insistent, nasty drone of a helicopter was circling, too low—media; one of the floaters would have to find out who, and warn them off showing footage of the hide.
“I plug the copy into my own machine and go for the browser history—if there’s anything good in there, that’s where you’re going to find it. Except this computer doesn’t have a browser history. Like, nothing. Not one page.”
“So they only used the internet for e-mail.” I already knew I was wrong: Jenny’s online shopping.
“Bzzt, thanks for playing. Nobody uses the internet just for e-mail. Even my granny managed to find herself a Val Doonican fan site, and she only has a computer because I got it to stop her getting depressed after my granddad died. You can set your browser to delete your history every time you quit, but most people don’t: you see that setting on public computers, internet cafés or whatever, not home machines. I checked anyway, and nope, the browser’s not set to clear history. So I check for any deletions in the browser history and the temporary files, and voilà: four oh eight this morning, someone manually deleted the lot.”
Richie, still kneeling on the floor, caught my eye. We had been so focused on the lookout post and the break-in; it had never occurred to us that our man might have subtler ways of coming and going, less visible catflaps to let him wander through the Spains’ lives. I had to stop myself glancing over my shoulder, to make sure nothing was watching me from Emma’s wardrobe. “Good catch,” I said.
The techie was still going. “Now I want to know what else the dude did while he was messing around in there, right? So I do a scan for any other stuff that was deleted around the same time. And guess what pops up? The entire Outlook PST file. Nuked. At four eleven in the A.M.”
Richie had his notebook propped on the bed and was taking notes. I said, “That’s their e-mail?”
“Oh yeah. All their e-mail, like everything they’ve ever sent and received. E-mail addresses, too.”
“Anything else get deleted?”
“No, that’s it. There’s a bunch of other stuff on the machine—all your basics, like photos and documents and music—but none of it’s been accessed or modified in the last twenty-four hours. Your dude went in there, went straight for the online stuff, and got out.”
“‘Our dude,’” I said. “You’re sure the owners didn’t do it themselves?”
Kieran or Cian snorted. “No chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because they aren’t exactly computer geniuses. Do you know what’s on that machine, like right on the desktop? A file named, I couldn’t make this up, Passwords. In which are, you’ll never guess, all of these people’s passwords. E-mail, online banking, everything. But that’s not even the good part. They used the same password for a load of stuff, like a bunch of forums, eBay, the actual computer: EmmaJack. I get a bad feeling about this straightaway, but I’m all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, so before I actually start banging my head off my keyboard, I phone Larry and ask him if the owners have rug rats and what they’re called. He says—brace yourself—Emma and Jack.”
I said, “They probably assumed if the computer got nicked, it would be by someone who didn’t know the children’s names, so he wouldn’t be able to switch it on and read the file to begin with.”
The techie did a gusty sigh that said he had just dumped me in the same category as the Spains. “Um, not the point. My girlfriend’s called Adrienne, and I’d spork my own eyes out before I’d use that for a password to anything, because I have standards. Take it from me, right: anyone clueless enough to use his kids’ freaking names as a password can barely wipe his own arse, never mind his hard drive. Someone else did this.”
“Someone with computer knowledge.”
“Well, some, yeah. More than the owners, anyway. We don’t have to be talking about a professional, but he knew his way around a machine.”
“How long would it have taken?”
“The whole deal? Not long. He shut the machine down at four seventeen. In and out in less than ten minutes.”
Richie asked, “Would this fella have known you would work out what he’d done? Or would he figure he was after covering his tracks?”
The techie made a noncommittal noise. “Depends. Plenty of guys out there think we’re a bunch of muck savages with barely enough brains to find the on button. And plenty of guys are just about computer savvy enough to land themselves in the shit, specially if they’re in a hurry, which your dude could have been, right? If he was really serious about zapping the crap out of those files, or about covering his tracks so I’d never know anyone had touched the machine, there are ways—deletion software—but that takes more time and more smarts. Your dude was short on one or the other, or both. Overall, I’d bet he knew we’d be able to see the deletions.”
But he had made them anyway. There had been something crucial in there. I said, “Tell me you can get this stuff back.”
“Some of it, sure, probably. The question is how much. We’ve got recovery software that I’m gonna try, but if this dude overwrote the deleted files a few times—and I would’ve, if I was him—then they’re gonna be kind of munged. The damn things get corrupted enough anyway, just through normal use; throw in a little malicious deletion, and we could end up with soup. Leave it with me, though.”
He sounded like he was itching to get stuck in. “Give it everything you’ve got,” I said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”
“Don’t bother. If I can’t beat some half-arsed amateur and his delete button, I might as well hang up the big-boy jockstrap and find myself a job in tech-support hell. I’ll get you something. Trust me.”
“‘Half-arsed amateur,’” Richie said, as I put my phone away. He was still kneeling on the floor, absently fingering a framed photo on the bookshelf: Fiona and a guy with floppy brown hair, holding up a tiny Emma swamped by her lace christening dress, all three of them smiling. “But he managed to get past the login password.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Either the computer was already on when he got here, in the middle of the night, or he knew the children’s names.”