“‘The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” Lindsay muttered as she cast around the room for any possible remaining hiding place for a laptop computer and a fistful of floppy disks. It was conceivable that the police might have taken the manuscript away with them for further scrutiny once murder had been alleged. But she found it hard to believe that even the most dim-witted of detectives would have taken the laptop away for further study without the source of its power. Admittedly, it ran off batteries too, but not for long enough to scrutinize every file on the hard disk.

The absence of the laptop was a serious problem. Lindsay had hoped it would still be here, not least because Penny and her computer were virtually joined at the hip. Unlike most authors, who seemed content to use their machines merely as word processors on which to write their novels, Penny fed everything into her machine—accounts, diary, notes, scanned photographs of Meredith, her friends and her beloved garden. Lindsay had expected to find answers to almost all of her questions nestling somewhere in the massive memory of a machine that weighed little more than a bag of sugar. To find it gone was more than a setback; it was a puzzle.

Whoever had taken it was no petty thief; the printer, for example, was still sitting on the floor under the table. Lindsay decided the chances were it had been taken by someone who knew a little about computers, since there wasn’t a floppy disk in the place. After a painful episode in the early days of her computing life when a hard disk had crashed and Penny had lost seventy pages of a new book, she had been particular to the point of paranoia about making copies of all her material on floppy disks. Given that her motto when working was “Back up early and back up often,” it was inconceivable that there were no floppies to be found.

The only reasonable conclusion seemed to be that the killer had known Penny’s habit of storing every piece of her personal and professional data on her computer and had needed to make sure some incriminating piece of information was gone for ever with the absence of her hard disk and every floppy in the place. Whoever killed Penny Varnavides had not only known about the murder method outlined in her book. They had also had to possess a considerable amount of information about her life. Lindsay rubbed her tired eyes and sighed. If she hadn’t been representing Meredith, she’d have been her prime suspect.

She had a last trawl round the flat, checking she hadn’t missed the laptop and the back-ups. Finally, she was forced to admit failure. Wherever they were, it wasn’t in the flat. And there was nothing else to be found here.

Dispirited that she had learned so little, Lindsay made sure she’d left nothing tell-tale behind, then let herself out of the flat. As she turned the top mortise lock, she heard footsteps coming up behind her on the stairs.