We Own the Sky(89)

I want to look at some photos of her, but I have deleted them all. They had been everywhere, once. Digital flotsam, dormant in the memories of half-forgotten devices. Badly framed photographs, videos taken too late. But then one night, not long after I had moved to Cornwall, after I had had too much to drink, I deleted them. I remember the phone’s question: Are you sure you want to delete?

I suddenly have frantic need to see those photos of Anna once again. I

download some hard-drive recovery software that claims it can retrieve files that were deleted years ago, but it doesn’t work. My drive has been written and rewritten so many times, the digital imprint is long gone.

And then I remember. My backups. Old habits die hard, and I have always

backed up, fastidiously once a week, connecting my computer to an external

hard drive.

I open up the backup software and scroll through all the old versions of my computer on the laptop that Anna and I used to share. I choose one, from a few months after Jack died, and hear the fan start to kick in as the drive begins to restore.

I go downstairs to have some lunch and when I return, the restore is finished. I start looking through the directories, and then I find what I am looking for. Anna on the beach, her sun hat casting a shadow over her face; Anna in a Cambridge pub, poking out her tongue; Anna looking exhausted and flushed, a tiny newborn Jack held closely to her breast.

She was so beautiful, never entirely comfortable being photographed, always with a little smile as if she knew something you didn’t but wasn’t going to tell you.

As I am looking through the photos, I see some pictures of Josh that I must have downloaded and put on my desktop in the last few days in Hampstead. I flick through them: Josh wearing his Manchester Utd uniform; Josh at a birthday party; that video Nev had sent of him wearing his Robin mask; the picture of him sitting on a rock. Despite everything I now knew about Dr. Sladkovsky, it still didn’t make any sense. Nev and Josh were not bots. They were not the creation of a Czech intern working in Dr. Sladkovsky’s marketing department.

They were real. I had spoken to them, seen pictures of them in flesh and blood.

I know I have to find them, to find out if Josh really died. In recent weeks, I have dug around, trying to track Nev down, and there is one more thing I have been meaning to try. I open up a penetration-testing program I have in Linux and test the URL of Nev’s blog.

wpscan—URL [nevbarnes.wordpress.com]

The program looks for weaknesses, backdoors, spewing out lines of code. Nev is using an old version of WordPress, unpatched and riddled with vulnerabilities.

I search for his user profiles, but they are hidden and password protected.

I guess that “Nev” is his username and try to find the password by brute force.

wpscan—URL  [nevbarnes.wordpress.com]  wordlist  [root/desktop/Nev]

<27<1

More lines of code and then a ticker, a little hourglass, as the script tries to crack his password with thousands of different combinations, all within milliseconds of each other. Then, a cursor, and there it is. I let out a little sob when I see what he has chosen for his password.

Josh2606

I log in to Nev’s WordPress account and go straight to his billing information.

Underneath one of his listed credit cards there is an address. I find it on Google Maps: a house in Preston.





3

There is a sheen to the red brick of the road, as if it has recently been hosed down. The mock Tudor houses, with brown beams and overwrought gables, are arranged in a semicircle around the cul-de-sac. The planners have tried to break up the monotony of the new builds, adding features to each property: a rockery, climbing ivy, a rustic wooden fence.

It is more upmarket than I imagined, not the sort of place I thought Nev would live. Too middle class, a road for real-estate agents and marketing executives, a road where people read the  Mail and the  Times and send their children to minor private schools.

I am tired as I park my car outside number 36. The drive, nearly seven hours, was longer than I thought, and I am glad I have booked a hotel for the night.

I walk up the drive, gravel scrunching under my feet, and then follow a neat concrete-slab path through the grass. I ring the doorbell and it is an electronic chime, a deep baritone that echoes around the house. I wait for a while, but no one comes. I am just thinking about leaving when a man opens the door. For a moment, I think it is Nev—a smarter, monied Nev—but then I look again and see that this man is older and wearing some kind of cravat.

“Hello?” he says in what I think is a well-to-do northern accent. “Can I help?”

He looks at me askance, and I realize I must be staring.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, seasoning my accent with a little Cambridge. “I’m looking for Nev Barnes. I’m an old friend and we lost contact, and this is the last address I have for him.”

My palms are sweating, and I can sense the man taking me in, my voice,

clothes, furtively glancing over my shoulder at the Audi.

“Oh, Mr. Barnes is the previous owner,” he says. “They left about two years ago. Him and his little one.”

Him and his little one. I think about those words. Him and his little one.

“Ah, okay,” I say, thinking about Nev and Josh driving away, in a car packed full of suitcases and garbage bags full of shoes. “And you don’t have a forwarding address?”