The Cuckoo's Calling(91)

The flare of a match turned Strike’s attention from his own double espresso to his guest.

“This is a non-smoking office, Spanner.”

“What? You smoke like a f*cking chimney.”

“Not in here I don’t. Follow me.”

Strike led Spanner into his own office and closed the door firmly behind him.

“She’s engaged,” he said, taking his usual seat.

“Wasting my powder, am I? Ah well. Put in a word for me if the engagement goes down the pan; she’s just my type.”

“I don’t think you’re hers.”

Spanner grinned knowingly.

“Already queuing, are you?”

“No,” said Strike. “I just know her fiancé’s a rugby-playing accountant. Clean-cut, square-jawed Yorkshireman.”

He had formed a surprisingly clear mental image of Matthew, though he had never seen a photograph.

“You never know; she might fancy rebounding on to something a bit edgier,” said Spanner, swinging Lula Landry’s laptop on to the desk and sitting down opposite Strike. He was wearing a slightly tatty sweatshirt and Jesus sandals on bare feet; it was the warmest day of the year so far. “I’ve had a good look at this piece of crap. How much technical detail do you want?”

“None; but I need to know that you could explain it clearly in court.”

Spanner looked, for the first time, truly intrigued.

“You serious?”

“Very. Would you be able to prove to a defending counsel that you know your stuff?”

“ ’Course I could.”

“Then just give me the important bits.”

Spanner hesitated for a moment, trying to read Strike’s expression. Finally he began:

“Password’s Agyeman, and it was reset five days before she died.”

“Spell it?”

Spanner did so, adding, to Strike’s surprise: “It’s a surname. Ghanaian. She bookmarked the homepage of SOAS—School of Oriental and African Studies—and it was on there. Look here.”

As he spoke, Spanner’s nimble fingers were clacking keyboard keys; he had brought up the home page he described, bordered with bright green, with sections on the school, news, staff, students, library and so on.

“When she died, though, it looked like this.”

And with another outburst of clicking, he retrieved an almost identical page, featuring, as the rapidly darting cursor soon revealed, a link to the obituary of one Professor J. P. Agyeman, Emeritus Professor of African Politics.

“She saved this version of the page,” said Spanner. “And her internet history shows she’d browsed Amazon for his books in the month before she died. She was looking at a lot of books on African history and politics round then.”

“Any evidence she applied to SOAS?”

“Not on here.”

“Anything else of interest?”

“Well, the only other thing I noticed was that a big photo file was deleted off it on the seventeenth of March.”

“How d’you know that?”

“There’s software that’ll help you recover even stuff people think’s gone from the hard drive,” said Spanner. “How d’you think they keep catching all those pedos?”

“Did you get it back?”

“Yeah. I’ve put it on here.” He handed Strike a memory stick. “I didn’t think you’d want me to put it back on.”

“No—so the photographs were…?”

“Nothing fancy. Just deleted. Like I say, your average punter doesn’t realize you’ve got to work a damn sight harder than pressing ‘delete’ if you really want to hide something.”

“Seventeenth of March,” said Strike.

“Yeah. St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Ten weeks after she died.”

“Could’ve been the police,” suggested Spanner.

“It wasn’t the police,” said Strike.

After Spanner had left, he hurried into the outer office and displaced Robin, so that he could view the photographs that had been removed from the laptop. He could feel Robin’s anticipation as he explained to her what Spanner had done and opened up the file on the memory stick.

Robin was afraid, for a fraction of a second, as the first photograph bloomed onscreen, that they were about to see something horrible; evidence of criminality or perversion. She had only heard about the concealment of pictures online in the context of dreadful abuse cases. After several minutes, however, Strike voiced her own feelings.

“Just social snaps.”

He did not sound as disappointed as Robin felt, and she was a little ashamed of herself; had she wanted to see something awful? Strike scrolled down, through pictures of groups of giggling girls, fellow models, the occasional celebrity. There were several pictures of Lula with Evan Duffield, a few of them clearly taken by one or other of the pair themselves, holding the camera at arm’s length, both of them apparently stoned or drunk. Somé made several appearances; Lula looked more formal, more subdued, by his side. There were many of Ciara Porter and Lula hugging in bars, dancing in clubs and giggling on a sofa in somebody’s crowded flat.

“That’s Rochelle,” said Strike suddenly, pointing to a sullen little face glimpsed under Ciara’s armpit in a group shot. Kieran Kolovas-Jones had been roped into this picture; he stood at the end, beaming.