‘Is he sulking?’ Siobhan asked.

‘Or away from his machine.’

She looked at him. ‘Your bedroom, is it full of computer stuff ?’

‘You’re angling an invite to my bedroom?’

She smiled. ‘No, I was just wondering. Some of these people, they can spend all day and night at a monitor, can’t they?’

‘Absolutely. But I’m not one of them. Three chat rooms where I’m a regular, maybe an hour or two of surfing when I get bored.’

‘What are the chat rooms?’

‘Tekky stuff.’ He shifted his chair towards the desk. ‘Now, while we’re waiting, maybe we should take a look at Ms Balfour’s deleted files.’ He saw the look on her face. ‘You know you can undelete files?’

‘Sure. We already looked at her correspondence.’

‘But did you look at her e-mails?’

Siobhan was forced to admit she hadn’t. Or rather, Grant hadn’t known it could be done.

Bain sighed and got to work on Flip’s PC. It didn’t take long. Soon they were staring at a list of deleted messages, both from Flip and to her.

‘How far back do they go?’ Siobhan asked.

‘Just over two years. When did she buy the computer?’

‘It was an eighteenth birthday present,’ Siobhan said.

‘Not bad for some.’

Siobhan nodded. ‘She got a flat, too.’

Now Bain looked at her, shook his head slowly in disbelief. ‘I got a watch and a camera for mine,’ he said.

‘Is that the watch?’ Siobhan pointed to his wrist.

Bain’s mind, however, was elsewhere. ‘So we’ve got e-mails stretching right back to when she first got started. He clicked on the one with the earliest date, but the computer told him he couldn’t open it.

‘Need to convert it,’ he said. ‘The hard disk has probably compressed it.’

Siobhan was trying to study what he was doing, but he was going too fast. In no time, they were reading the first e-mail Flip had sent on her machine. It was to her father at his office:

Just testing. Hope you get this. The PC’s super! See you tonight. Flip.

‘I suppose we need to read them all?’ Bain guessed.

‘I suppose,’ Siobhan agreed. ‘Which means converting them one at a time?’

‘Not necessarily. If you can fetch me a tea – white, no sugar – I’ll see what I can do.’

By the time she got back with the drinks, he was printing out sheets of messages. ‘This way,’ he said, ‘you can be reading them while I’m preparing the next batch.’

Siobhan started chronologically, and it didn’t take her long to find something more interesting than gossipy exchanges between Flip and her friends.

‘Look at this,’ she told Bain.

He read the e-mail. ‘It’s from Balfour’s Bank,’ he said. ‘Someone called RAM.’

‘I’m willing to bet it’s Ranald Marr.’ Siobhan took the note back.