“Taken on its own, none of it means much. But if we took this to the police, along with Penny’s synopsis, plus Danny King coming forward at the last gasp to make a false statement about Meredith . . . well, it all adds up. It hangs together. This ghost-employment con couldn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny, especially if he’s supplementing it with a ghost-publication scam. As soon as the cops start looking at it seriously, the whole house of cards is going to collapse.”

“And this is what Penny uncovered,” Sophie said dully.

“I think so. The phone calls made her suspicious, especially when she found out about Lauren’s little list. My guess is that her main motive for getting into the computers here was to check out Baz’s files, to see if there was any solid evidence for her suspicion that Baz was the one that Meredith had had her disastrous little fling with. But when she was actually faced with the prospect of uncovering the truth, she bottled it.”

“So she took a look at the mystery men in Danny’s files as a way of putting off what she knew she had to do,” Sophie said. “That would be just like her. She hated unpleasantness. She’d have done anything she could think of to postpone actually having to face up to the proof that she’d been betrayed twice over.”

Lindsay took a floppy disk out of her bag and slotted it into the computer, keying in instructions for it to copy the files in the personnel database. “I think that’s the way it happened. She had a devious mind, did Penny. She’d have realized right away there was something seriously dodgy going on. Even if she didn’t work it all out at the time, she learned enough to figure it out later.”

Sophie turned back to the filing cabinets and started pulling out the files that corresponded to the list. For a few moments the only sound was the rattling of file drawers and the mechanical groans of the disk drive. Then Sophie said, “But how did Danny find out she knew what was going on?”

Lindsay took the floppy out of the drive and zipped it into the back pocket of her organizer. She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I think it went something like this. Penny, as Meredith found out to her cost, is a woman to whom honesty and integrity were paramount. The issue between her and Meredith splitting up wasn’t infidelity, it was breach of trust. And Penny was ruthless, even though it cost her the woman she really loved. Agreed?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Sophie said. “She wasn’t a forgiving woman. She was absolute for truth and it made her judgemental. It was the side of Penny I liked least. You think she confronted him with what she suspected?”