“Those boxes are full of completely irrelevant shit,” Lindsay complained. “Every letter she’d ever been sent from the office, from pay rises to hero-grams from the editor. Gas bills, electricity bills, deeply boring credit card bills.”

“What about the personal papers?” Sophie asked.

Lindsay shrugged. “I’m only just getting to them. There’s a couple of scribbled sheets of paper that seem to be the plot of a novel that she never wrote. There’s a list of feature ideas that she was obviously planning to work on. Nothing contentious there, as far as I can see. Letters from her mother, letters from an old university friend in Canada. There are a load more letters and cards farther down. Maybe they’ll help. What about you?”

“Nothing you could describe as illuminating. She seems to have done quite a bit of freelance work on the side, mainly on the kind of arts features that the Clarion would never use. Letters to friends, mainly of the ‘yesterday I went to the theatre and saw . . .’ variety. A couple of the disks are virtually empty.”

“What about secret files? You know, hidden ones? Judging from her diary, she had a bit of a fetish about secrecy. Would you know if there were any like that?” Lindsay inquired.

“I don’t know . . .” Sophie mused. “I don’t see any signs that she was a great computer expert, so if there were any I’d imagine they’d be easy enough to find.”

“So how would you hide something you didn’t want anyone else to see?” Lindsay demanded, draining the tagliatelle and dividing it into two bowls.

Sophie poured sauce over the pasta while she thought. “I suppose,” she started hesitantly. “I suppose I’d make it into a limbo file.”

“What on earth is a limbo file?”

“It’s a sort of failsafe in the Locoscript word-processing program. Any file you erase goes into limbo—a sort of backup memory. It doesn’t appear in your file directory, but you can still get it back. It’s supposed to stop you accidentally losing stuff, but it’s a handy hiding place,” Sophie explained.

“So did you check Alison’s disks for limbo files?” Lindsay asked through a mouthful of pasta.

Sophie shook her head. “I didn’t think of it. But I will.”

After they’d eaten, they headed back eagerly to the study. Lindsay perched on the edge of Sophie’s desk and watched her as she called up all the limbo files on Alison’s personal correspondence disk. “Bingo,” Sophie breathed. There were four files, each identified by a year.

Sophie pressed the keys to restore the 1989 file to the main file directory, then tried to enter it. At once, a box appeared on the screen saying, “Error in: Edit document. Not a Locoscript document. Cancel operation.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Lindsay demanded.