‘It’s always struck me as strange that if Brendan wanted you to have the dongle, he didn’t also want you to have the password. I mean, he might as well have just hidden it or put it in a bank vault or something.’

‘I know what you mean, but all he gave me that night was the dongle and a scribbled note with his “friends only” telephone number on it.’

Grace flicked her head round towards me, her eyes wide and anxious:

‘And where is that note now?’

‘I threw it away, on Camberwell Grove. It’s long gone.’

‘Are you sure it was a phone number?’

‘Yes, I am. I actually dialled it and it went through to a company that sold novelty socks. It was just one of Brendan’s little jokes.’

‘So, you’ll still have the number you dialled on your phone?’

‘Yes, I guess. Hold on, do you think the shop number could be the password?’

‘It’s worth a try.’

I ran next door to fetch my phone and scrolled through the recent calls. There it was: the number that Brendan had given me. Grace and Lassoo had followed me into the flat. I grabbed my old laptop off the top of the kitchen-wall cabinets and opened it up. It needed charging, so we sat and stared at the screen waiting for it to come to life. When it did, the usual box appeared: ‘Enter password’. I hadn’t used the laptop for months or even years and had no idea what it was.

‘Try the one you use at work,’ suggested Grace.

So I typed in:

PASSWORD1

It didn’t let me in, so I tried some others that I had used in the past:

PassWord

LetMeIn

SOILSCIENCE

68TallAnts

ChinDoctor

None of them worked. Grace grabbed the laptop off me and placed it on the table in front of her. I noticed on the back of the lid a sticker that depicted a bunch of bananas with a knife and fork either side of it. I had written something on the corner of the label: ‘Fruit999’. I took the laptop back off Grace and typed that in. The screen came immediately to life and I put the dongle into the USB slot. Its name appeared on the screen so I clicked on its icon and the ‘password protected’ box appeared. I typed in the phone number of the sock shop and handed the laptop to Grace for her to click ‘enter’. She clicked on it and a document began to load. Grace leapt off her seat in celebration.

‘We did it! We fucking did it!’ she yelled. Then she walked around the table and gave me a great big kiss on the top of my head. ‘I knew it. I knew we could do it. We are shit-hot, Gary. Do you realize that? Literally shit-hot.’

‘Yeah, I guess we are.’