“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.”