Looking Good Dead

keep records on my regulars.’
    ‘So you hadn’t dealt with this man before?’ she asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘But you met him?’ Grace asked.
    ‘No. He phoned up, asked if I had them, and told me he would send someone to collect them. He sent a minicab and the driver paid cash.’
    ‘A local firm?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t use minicabs; can’t afford ’em.’
    Grace’s mobile phone suddenly beeped then vibrated. Excusing himself, he turned away from the insect expert and answered it.
    ‘DS Grace,’ he said.
    It was Branson. ‘Yo, old man,’ he said. ‘How you doing?’
    ‘I’m shopping,’ Grace said. ‘Buying your birthday present. What’s up?’
    ‘The bloke who rang me during the briefing – the paranoid one I had to speak to in the phone booth who said he thinks he witnessed information about Janie Stretton’s murder?’
    ‘Uh huh,’ Grace said.
    ‘He said he saw it on his computer after inserting a CD he found on a train.’
    ‘Is he letting us have a look at it?’
    ‘I’m working on that now.’

37
    Looking into someone’s computer was like looking into their soul, Detective Sergeant Jon Rye believed, and he had had more than enough experience to make that observation. He had lost track of the number of computers he had examined in the past seven years – probably quite a few hundred, he had recently estimated. And today he had another one, a Mac laptop, fifteen-inch screen, about a year old.
    He had never yet come across a computer that could hide its secrets from him and his team. Villains of every type – burglars, fraudsters, car-ringers, phishers, paedophiles – all thought they could wipe their hard disks and be safe. But there was no such thing as erasing a disk. The software that Jon Rye had at his disposal could recover just about every bit of deleted data from a disk, and could prise every digital footprint out of every nook and cranny of a computer’s system, however complex, however well concealed.
    At this moment, seated at his desk in the High Tech Crime Unit, which he ran, he was about to stare into the soul of a man called Tom Bryce. And there was no option but to spend the weekend at work because this man, who was a potential witness not a suspect, needed his machine back for work on Monday morning.
    It was Jon Rye’s boast, and it was no idle boast, that within an hour of looking at any man’s computer, he would know more about him than his wife did. And invariably the computers which arrived in his bailiwick belonged to men rather than women.
    The High Tech Crime Unit occupied a substantial space on the ground floor of Sussex House. To the casual observer, most of it didn’t look any different to many of the other departments in the building. It consisted of an open-plan area densely packed with workstations; on the desks of several of these stood large server towers, and on some the entrails of dismembered computers as well. On one of the untidy shelves, between rows of tilted files, sat a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar. There was a Bart Simpson clock on the wall above one desk, at whichJoe Moody, a large, ponytailed man in a T-shirt and jeans, sat intently at his keyboard, logging the images of a bunch of dumber than usual young vandals, who had photographed themselves torching a car they had stolen.
    One section of the room was caged off from the rest – this housed Operation Glasgow, a major child pornography investigation which had been going on for two years and was on the verge of cracking one of the largest rings in Europe. The caging was to prevent cross-contamination of evidence with the rest of the department. Four people were at work in the cage today, and Rye did not envy them. Day in, day out, for the past twenty-four months they had had to spend their working hours looking at sickening pictures of sex acts involving children. Much of Jon Rye’s work involved suspected paedophiles and nothing lessened the anger he felt every time he saw one of those pictures. God, there were some sick people out there in the world. Too damned many.
    The Venetian blinds were drawn shut against the gloomy view of the cell block, made even more depressing by the pelting rain. But at least it was a tolerable temperature in his office today; most days in summer it was far too hot and stuffy, and the damned windows did not open.
    A tough, wiry-framed man of thirty-eight with a boyish, pugnacious face and thinning, brush-cut fair hair, Jon Rye was dressed in a