Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

the house, checking every room and cupboard, every cubbyhole and boxed-in space big enough to accommodate a woman of Bev’s dimensions. And as anticipated, she drew a blank.
    She expected the next phase to be more productive. Now she would sweep the house in a quest for anything that would give her the inside track on Bev’s life. Notes, diaries, phones, photos, computers. Torin had his own tablet with him; he’d said Bev never used it and he never touched her laptop, not now they’d got a wireless printer he could command from his own machine. She’d already spotted the laptop on the desk in the cubbyhole office Torin had described, but she didn’t want to fuck that up for the techies. Time to call in a favour.
    Paula took out her phone and checked the time before she keyed in the call. Half past nine wasn’t too late to call a woman who spent her spare time communing with the digital world. To her surprise, it took four rings before Stacey answered. ‘Paula, hello, what’s going on?’
    If Paula hadn’t known her better, she would have said Stacey sounded flustered. But that wasn’t her style. She’d never seen the former MIT’s computer analyst anything less than cool under pressure. And Paula didn’t think a call from her qualified as pressure. ‘This and that. Started today in my new firm at Skenfrith Street. And you?’
    ‘Don’t ask. I’m doing stuff that a GCSE student could manage. It’s not a productive use of my skills.’
    ‘I thought as much. That’s why I was wondering if you might be interested in doing a favour for me?’
    Stacey gave a prim little laugh. ‘It did cross my mind that might be why you’re calling. What do you need?’
    ‘I’ve got a misper. It’s a bit complicated. I know the woman concerned so I’m doing the prelims myself. I’ll have to hand the laptop over to the CSIs. And they’ll take for ever and they won’t fillet it the way you will.’ Paula let her voice tail off.
    ‘And you want me to come over and make a shadow hard drive and analyse it, all without leaving a trace for the CSIs to find?’ Stacey was back to her usual calm deadpan.
    ‘Pretty much, yeah.’ And then Paula heard what sounded like a male voice in the background. ‘Have you got company? Is this a bad time?’ Then it hit her. ‘Oh my God, it’s not Sam, is it?’
    ‘It’s OK,’ Stacey said briskly. ‘I’ll pick up an external hard drive and meet you there. Text me the address. I’ll see you soon.’ And she ended the call. With anyone else, it would have been rude. But with her, it was just Stacey.
    While she was waiting, Paula scouted out the kitchen and living room. A calendar fixed to the side of the fridge revealed the routines of normal life. Football practice, chess club, a school in-service day, a couple of sleepovers for Torin. A dental appointment for Bev. A trip to the movies, a gig for Torin, some friends for dinner. She flicked back a couple of months; it was much the same. A wood-framed blackboard fixed to the wall acted as a memo board. ‘Spaghetti, bacon, milk, nutmeg’ to one side, ‘School trip deposit, tickets for Leeds fest, dry cleaning’ on the other. Drawers and cupboards revealed nothing she wouldn’t expect to find in a kitchen. The living room was no more productive. There wasn’t even a notepad beside the phone. Nobody wrote down messages any more. They texted each other instead.
    Paula was on the point of heading back upstairs when Stacey arrived. The daughter of Hong Kong Chinese parents, Stacey had proved to be a computer prodigy, seeming to grasp the finer elements of programming as readily as if they were a child’s building blocks. She’d set up her own software company while she was still at university, coming up with a couple of boilerplate programs that had made her enough money never to have to work again. Then she confounded everyone by joining the police. She’d never explained her motives but over the years Paula had learned enough about her colleague to suspect that what Stacey loved was the licence to poke around in other people’s data without fear of being arrested for it. She was also convinced that Stacey was firmly ensconced somewhere on the autism spectrum, so socially awkward was she. But towards the end of the MIT, it had dawned on Paula that Stacey was carrying a torch for another colleague, Sam Evans.
    Sam’s naked ambition and lack of team spirit had been obstacles to friendship as far as Paula was concerned.