He smiled at her, his warmest smile, so she would understand that this was something beautiful. Something for her to be happy about. But she didn’t look happy. Even though he was stroking her hair ever so gently, she managed to spit out the rag and scream at the top of her lungs. And he didn’t like screaming.

Not one bit, as a matter of fact.

69

After twenty minutes in front of the two computer screens, clicking through folders and files, Fabian had found nothing more sinister than accounting, client lists and myriad pictures of Jacobsén himself, his friends and family by the pool and on various holidays.

Nothing from his alter ego Columbus. Nor any external servers, either physically present in the office or in the cloud, and the search history showed only innocuous visits to Facebook, Google and news sites.

He started closing down all the open windows to turn his attention to the contents of the bookshelves and cabinets instead, when one of the windows marked Docs archive caught his attention.

It contained all the files on the hard drive, the ones he’d just been going through. But it wasn’t an item in the list that had made him react, it was one of the settings in the top right corner that controlled what was being shown. He’d never reflected on there being such a setting, but there it was.

Hidden items, it said, under Details and Current view.

He ticked the little box next to it and started scrolling through the list again; at first glance, it seemed unchanged. But a minute later, he noticed a folder he was sure hadn’t been there before. It was called Santa María and was one of the largest folders on the hard drive with its three hundred gigabytes. He opened it, which made a number of subfolders appear in a new window. He chose the top one, marked TAT, whose contents had last been changed three days earlier.

A long list of subfolders opened up, all labelled with a number. He chose one at random, which turned out to contain pictures of a woman sprawled on a leather sofa. There were clamps on her nipples, and in another picture, she looked straight up into the camera while taking the man who was holding it into her mouth.

Every last folder turned out to contain pictures of women in various positions. It was everything from Asian to dark-skinned women, blondes to redheads. Some wore knee-high boots, others vinyl and leather, but most were completely naked. Of Jacobsén, if it was him, nothing more than a hand, a sculpted torso and from time to time an erect penis adorned with a tattooed arrow could be seen.