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.”