The Cutting Crew (9 page)

Breaking into a student's account is pretty simple. People forget their passwords all the time and so there needs to be some system in place for confirming your identity and then giving out the information you need to get into your mail. Fortunately, it's automated. All you need is your student identification number and your date of birth - you have those, and any computer you sit down at will happily remind you of your password. I had this information for Alison from her Missing Persons Report. Her password, if you're interested, was gtwxkt.

Once logged in, I began my search in her essay folder, but then realised quickly that there was no hope of reviewing all the material now: there was simply too much, and most of it looked irrelevant. But I'd brought a few blank disks with me, and so I copied everything just to be on the safe side. If there was nothing on television one night, at least I'd never be lost for something to read.

Next, I opened up her email account. Hopefully it would give me some kind of contact details for any friends not mentioned in the report, and also - if I was very lucky - there might be messages from the man she'd been seeing in the weeks leading up to her murder. But when the mail program loaded, I was met by an empty inbox: No new messages it told me, in a panel down the left-hand side, and underneath that: No read messages. Which was unusual, to say the least, because free email was one of the perks of university life, and usually the easiest way to keep in touch with absent friends. It wasn't just that she'd kept her inbox tidy, either there weren't even any old-message folders. It was as though she'd never used it.

I frowned mentally. Okay - so perhaps she'd used an internet based account for some reason. I had one myself; they were handy because it meant you could access your mail from anywhere in the world. But it was still odd that she hadn't used the university one at all. It was so nice and easy - right there on the desktop.

I double-clicked the internet browser icon to see if I could check what sites she'd been logging into. But, just like the email, it was empty.

No bookmarks; no drop-down URLs; no history.

5*

My mental frown deepened. A student who hadn't surfed the internet? I looked around the room. At least half of the people in here were casual surfers, with a steady queue waiting to replace them. But apparently Alison never had. It felt like bullshit.

I thought it through, tapping my finger absently on the mouse.

Perhaps Alison had cleared it all out before she was killed, because she was frightened of something or somebody. But that didn't sit well or make much sense - why would she bother? If you're in danger, you don't waste time clearing your email: you just get the fuck away from wherever you are. The net would probably be the last thing on your mind. But it was still possible.

If not Alison, Sean might have erased the data. It was a reasonably safe assumption that he'd been here before me and so I couldn't rule it out, but I also couldn't think why he would. Like the other explanations, it didn't seem right.

The third possibility was that someone else had logged in as Alison and methodically removed any evidence that had been there.

I had no way of knowing, but that idea felt more right than the others.

So, how thorough would they have been? It was a long-shot, but I found the email folder on the computer's hard drive and copied every non-program file I found there onto a second disk. Sometimes deleted mail could still be read, assuming you had a little technical knowledge. I didn't have that knowledge personally, but life can throw all sorts of odd people into your path.

I shut down the internet and was about to log out and leave when a pop-up window appeared and caught my eye for a moment. Pop-ups aren't unusual: there are loads of web pages where, when you close them down, they automatically open a new page. When I'd shut down the window, a page advertising a tiny camera had appeared, proclaiming that you could take pictures without anybody realising. The page was mostly taken up by a picture of a half-naked woman, posing seductively. I shook my head and closed it down, half-expecting another, but that was it.

An empty desktop.

I paused.

Junk web pages.

So where was the junk email?

I opened up the mail program again, irritating the nearby queue of students, who had obviously pegged me as being about to leave and got their hopes up. Bags shifted and I heard a few sighs of annoyance.

Alison Sheldon had no junk email.

Everybody with an email account gets junk mail: it's called spam.

Like cheap gold envelopes through your front door, it arrives in your inbox on a daily basis. I got maybe twenty spam mails a day, and yet Alison didn't seem to have received a single one since she'd died. Even if someone had cleared out her account very recently, there would still have been some.

I looked to see whether the account kept a record of earlier logins but there was nothing obvious, and so I stared at the screen for half a minute. Then, I felt a thrill of recognition, quickly opened up the options menu and saw it. All of Alison's mail was being forwarded to a different account. Anything that arrived in her inbox was sent to that and then immediately deleted from her university account. I'd known I was right even before I'd opened the menu. Once upon a time, I thought, I must have been a really fucking good detective.

The name of the destination account was histmjh, which meant it was someone in the History department with the initials mjh.

Possibly another student, but I opened up the internet again anyway, heading to the History department's website. I clicked on the Staff tab and scrolled down the list to see if anyone there matched the initials.

Nearly halfway down: Dr Mark Harris.

There was a photograph of him too. He looked maybe thirty years old, with a smart, slightly smug face, jet black hair that had been gelled into wet tumbles hanging down as far as his eyebrows, and a smile that curled slightly - half arrogance, half seduction. I imagined his smile could shift very quickly, and that it would generally mean something very different to the girls than it did to the boys.

There was no middle initial in his profile, but his email address was m. J. Harris and so I knew that I'd found my man. The profile was the usual mix of boring research and publication lists, but I read it through anyway. Harris had links with the Geography and Sociology departments, and his main research seemed to be based around city histories and legends. I made a few brief notes and then logged out and stood up. The students nearby breathed a sigh of relief, and my seat was taken almost instantly. Vultures. But I was too busy thinking to care.

Alison had been Fine Art - it wasn't a million miles away from History, and I figured there might even be some crossover, but it was hard to imagine a professional connection between Alison and Harris, and much easier to think about that boyfriend from the report. Harris was young and smarmily good-looking enough to have been on the radar for a girl her age, and so he seemed like a good candidate for her mystery man. Best to keep an open mind, I thought, as I walked out into the corridor, but the fact was that Alison's mail was all currently being forwarded to Dr Mark Harris.

It was time to find out why.

I should have known better. It was the middle of a normal working day and so any self-respecting academic would be at home doing nothing. It took a little bit of time to discover this. First, I tried his office. It was just one green door on a corridor lined with them, although he had stuck a photocopy of an unfunny newspaper cartoon beneath his nameplate, and his open-door times were listed on the wall beside the door. I checked my watch. This wasn't one of them. But I knocked anyway. There was no answer, and his office sounded very quiet. So, the man was elsewhere.

The next step was to consult the timetables on the common room noticeboard, but there was no joy to be had there either. It was exam time, so none of his lectures were running. Finally, I built myself up and went to the History department main office, and asked a rather more helpful woman than Marie where I might find Dr Mark Harris.

'Mark's working from home today,' she said. 'Can I take a message for him?'

'No, it's okay,' I said. 'Thanks.'

'Are you sure? It's no problem.'

'No - but thanks anyway.'

'Well, you might try getting in touch with him by email? That's probably best.'

'I might well do that,' I said, backing away from the counter.

'Thank you for your time.'

'You're welcome.'

She gave me a big smile, and I thought that Marie in Fine Art could take some lessons from her. But despite her friendliness, there was no way she'd have given me Harris's home address and so I hadn't risked killing the mood by asking. I'd have to find that one out on my own.

It was slightly galling to have to queue up in the computer room again but I did it anyway - and then got bored and pushed in when a terminal near me became free and allowed me to get there first. It was frowned upon, and there were a few tuts, but everybody was too polite to actually say anything. I logged in as Alison and opened up the internet.

There were a few sites I could try, and I worked my way through them - phone listings, address listings, a few of the more clandestine webpages - but Harris was ex-directory or unavailable on all of them. The police department's intranet would list him, but unfortunately my username and password had been revoked.

If I couldn't do it any other way, I thought, perhaps I could go to Rosh or Lucy.

In the thick of things, I hadn't really thought about Lucy all day, and so I got my phone out now to check for messages. I would have felt the vibration if I'd been sent anything, but I was still hoping for a 1 message received notice and still disappointed to see just the time and date. No new messages. I put the phone back in my pocket, felt suddenly melancholy and turned back to the computer.

There was a website address I knew off by heart, and I typed it now and hit go. The screen was blank and thoughtful for a moment as the page loaded slowly. About a minute later there he was, staring out at me.

His name was Rich. He was a little older than I was. Not particularly good-looking. Average build. This was his company's website, and Rich's professional appearance gave away none of the wonderful sense of humour he undoubtedly possessed. I visited this page quite often, always as a form of mild self-torture. Four months ago, I'd left Rachel because I felt I wanted to be with Lucy instead. But Lucy ended our affair and picked this man, Rich, over me.

I would have hated him but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it.

Despite the things I'd done to people in my life, hate had always been a difficult emotion for me; I could generate it, but it dissipated quickly. For a lot of people, hate is a flowchart emotion: somebody hurts them - fuck the reason - and they hate them for it; but I could never work like that. Some of the time I hated Rich, but then my mind kept taking steps back and forcing me to see the whole situation: to turn it around and feel the different angles. Most of them glinted with tragedy, but not all of that was mine.

Hatred is something very personal that you only ever feel in close-up, when you don't take other people's feelings into account.

Whenever you see things from a distance, it's not possible to sustain it. Not for me, anyway. For example, the kids who beat that guy up the night before last - at the time, I hated them for what they'd done. But if you move back a bit and watch them growing up, and listen to their hopes and dreams, try to understand everything that blocks and hurts them, then it all changes. The sad contradiction behind every single crime is that hardly anybody thinks they're a bad person. We're all products of this fucking city, acting as best we can with what we've been given; and whatever we do, there's everything we've done and everything we've had done to us pushing it along from behind.

Rich and Lucy were just trying to make themselves happy, stumbling along like the rest of us.

Fuck it.

I logged out and left.

The walk back through Horse was easier: it was later on in the afternoon now and there were fewer students, less overall hassle.

The pubs and bars were getting fuller and noisier, but that was okay and I didn't resent it so much now. And it was colder too, so people weren't just hanging around. I phased it all out and tried to think about what, if anything, I'd learned. I still knew very little, although I now had some ideas to kick around and see if they squealed. There was Harris to follow up, and there were Alison's friends to visit. But first, I would go home, get washed and changed, and top up my lagging caffeine reserves.

By the time I reached the edge of Horse, the melancholy seemed to have lifted slightly. There were things to do, and after months of inactivity it felt good to have some kind of purpose again.