Blowback

Chapter Eight

He was not quite certain why he was reluctant to ask Elisabeth for permission to examine her late husband’s computer. But lurking somewhere at the back of his mind was the fear that perhaps she might refuse him, in which case a valuable line of investigation would be permanently closed off. Why he thought it was even remotely possible that she might do that was unclear to him. But he didn’t want to take the chance.

And so when he returned to the hotel he made sure that both Guy and Elisabeth were downstairs before he headed up, ostensibly, to his suite. Service staff were in all the rooms, making beds, cleaning bathrooms. Service carts stood about in the hallways, the sound of vacuum cleaners coming from several open doors. He slipped past his own rooms, nodding to a middle-aged lady in green and white who was taking toilet rolls from her cart to re-stock one of the bathrooms, and when she went back into the room, he turned the handle on the door of Guy’s study to slip quickly inside.

He closed the door behind him and stood, with his back against it, controlling his breathing for several moments. It occurred to him how ridiculous this was. Why hadn’t he just asked her? Still, he was here now. He crossed quickly to the bureau and rolled up the top. The MacBook Pro sat where he had last seen it, and he lifted the lid to press its power button. Its start-up chorus chimed loudly and he tensed, waiting nervously for it to boot up. When, eventually, the desktop loaded on to the screen, he sat down to look at it and take stock.

The first thing he checked was the Airport connection and was pleased to see that the computer was still connected wirelessly to the hotel’s wifi system. So he was online.

From the dock along the foot of the screen he selected the mailer and clicked on it to load. The in-box was, as he expected, empty. He checked for Sent mail. Also empty. Then scrolled down a long list of folders in the left-hand window. A complete archive of all Marc Fraysse’s emails, sent and received. There was an odd sense of prurience in going through a dead man’s private correspondence, but Enzo had no time to dwell on it. He scanned the titles of the folders. Many of them were simply people’s names. Jacques, Paul, Michel, Pierre. Others catalogued bills and invoices, correspondence with amazon. fr, exchanges between Fraysse and his website designer. There were folders filled with the emails that had passed back and forth between the chef and his various suppliers. Then one titled, RECIPES, which brought Enzo’s scrolling cursor to a halt. Had a three-star Michelin chef really exchanged emails with others about recipes? He clicked to open it. Apparently he had. They were sub-divided into folders: Boeuf, Agneau, Lapin, Cheval, Porc… Enzo’s cursor hesitated and hovered over the folder titled Cheval. It seemed inconceivable, somehow, that horsemeat would ever be served up to customers in a three-star restaurant. He opened the folder. Information across the top of the mailer told him that it contained nearly 600 messages. They had all been sent to a single address: ransou. jean@wanadoo. fr. None had been received in reply. Enzo double-clicked to open one, and was puzzled to be greeted by a series of apparently random letters and numbers:

PV: 18/12: 3e: 14: 150; 7e: 4: 130; 9e: 5,9,10: 200

D: 1re: 3,7,15: 125; 4e: 13: 175; 12e: 2,5,12: 150

L: 6e: 11: 200; 8e: 10: 125; 9e: 1,7,8: 150

There was no name and no signature. Enzo gazed at it uncomprehendingly, then checked the date that the email had been sent. 18th December, 2002. So the 18/12 was the date. He checked the time at which the email was sent. 2:14am. He opened the next mail down. More of the same.

MB: 19/12: 2e: 9: 175; 5e: 3,6,9: 150; 6e: 16: 200…

This one sent on December 19th at 2:53am. Enzo frowned. These were not recipes for horsemeat. He opened several in quick succession, all filled with the same mysterious code. He had no idea what the letters indicated. PV, D, L, MB, but another thought was beginning to coagulate in the stream of information uploading to his brain.

Quickly he checked to make sure that the computer was still connected to the printer. It was. He turned the printer on, and winced at the noise it made during start-up, praying that it was still in use and that the ink had not dried up completely. He selected two of the Cheval emails at random and chose Print. The old ink-jet printer whirred and clattered and churned out two print-outs, faded but legible. He folded them together and slipped them into his jacket pocket, then returned to the computer.

He felt as if he had been in the dead man’s study for an inordinately long time now, although in reality it had been no more than a few minutes. He pressed on. Scrolling rapidly through the Finder desktop, he clicked on the Home folder, which was named frayssemarc. Near the top of a column of folders was one named Documents. He opened it. It was filled with sub-folders whose headings seemed to indicate lists of recipes and ingredients. Opening up just a few of them confirmed Enzo’s suspicions. So this, it seemed, was where Marc Fraysse had actually kept his culinary secrets. He stopped scrolling on one, mid-list. It was titled, simply, Moi. Me. He opened it. Inside was a single document called moi. dssr. Enzo had no idea what that was. He double-clicked it, and saw a piece of software called Dossier opening up on the dock. The document moi. dssr then appeared on the screen as a blank pane containing one large window, and one narrow one down the left-hand side, which was headed Title, and 0 entries. A slide-out pane to the left of that contained one single icon called Unfiled Entries. Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. It seemed that the document was empty.

Instinctively he moved his cursor to click on Unfiled Entries, and suddenly a document entitled Moi appeared in the narrow window, and an icon of a padlock in the large one next to it. Locked. Enzo’s eye flickered up to the top of the document and a toolbar, where he spotted the same padlock icon. He clicked on it, and a window dropped down asking for a password. Enzo took a deep, tremulous breath, and glanced at his watch. He must have been in here ten minutes now. There was no knowing where in the hotel either Guy or Elisabeth might be, and God knew how long it might take to crack Fraysse’s password.

He drew his mouse across the blotter, and his cursor swooped down to the dock where he selected and opened the Safari web browser. When its window filled the screen with Marc Fraysse’s homepage, he selected Google from the toolbar and typed into search: most common computer passwords.

Within seconds, more than thirty-three million links to sites on the subject appeared on his screen. He selected the top one, which took him to a magazine article which listed the ten most commonly used passwords. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. Were people really so stupid? The number one password was password. Then came 123456, followed by qwerty, which on a French keyboard would be azerty. More in hope than expectation, Enzo began trying them out, one by one. Some seemed surprising, like monkey or blink182, or idiotic, like abc123 or letmein, but none of them worked. He was not surprised.

He closed his eyes, his mind turning over furiously. Some people, he knew, used the names of their children, but he had no idea what Marc and Elisabeth’s children were called. He tried Elisabeth, without success. Then Marc’s first and second names separately, followed by his date of birth. Nothing. He sighed and sat back in frustration, and found his eyes wandering over the doodles on Fraysse’s blotter. They came to rest on the quotation from Sartre: la nature parle et l’experience traduit. As with the letters, JR, Fraysse had gone over again and again the initial letters of each word in the quotation, so that they stood out quite markedly. He didn’t believe for one moment that Fraysse had done it consciously, but rather sub-consciously, perhaps while speaking on the telephone. But together, those initial letters produced the acronym lnpelt. It was a seriously long shot, but Enzo turned back to the keyboard and typed the letters into the password window and hit the return key. The large empty window to the right immediately filled with text, and the scrollbar revealed that there was a lot of it.

But Enzo had no time to scan even a few sentences. He heard the door opening into the bedroom next door from the living room beyond, and his heart pushed pulsing up into his throat. Someone was in the bedroom. Perhaps just the maid. But it was equally possible that it could be Elisabeth. What to do?

As quickly as he could he re-typed the password, which he had to do twice before it would lock the document. Then he shut it down. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for the memory stick he always carried with him and plugged it into the USB socket. When its icon appeared, he dragged and dropped the document on to it, and it began to copy. Infuriatingly slowly. He could hear the unknown person moving about in the next room. “Come on, come on!” he muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth. He stopped breathing as the progress bar moved painfully, protractedly, from left to right, before finally the transfer was complete and he sucked air back into his lungs. He ejected the icon and pulled the memory stick from its socket, stuffing it into his pocket and rising to his feet as the door from the bedroom swung open.

He turned, hoping to see the maid. But it was Elisabeth who stood there, her right palm placed flat against her chest. She seemed startled, even shocked, to find him there. “Monsieur Macleod!”

Enzo did his best to seem relaxed. “Just taking a look at your husband’s computer, Madame Fraysse. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“You startled me. The staff never come in here. So when I heard movement I thought perhaps we had an intruder.”

Enzo grinned self-consciously. “Just me.”

“It is customary, Monsieur Macleod, in polite society, to ask permission to view private belongings. Even those of a deceased person.”

There was no mistaking the controlled anger in her voice.

“My apologies, madame. Since you had shown me in here yesterday, I didn’t feel I was intruding on privacy. And I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Well, you have. I have nothing to hide from you, Monsieur Macleod, and am happy to show you whatever you want to see. But, I would like to be asked.”

Enzo nodded contritely. “I appreciate that, madame. My apologies again, if I upset or startled you.” He glanced at the computer. “Shall I close it down?”

“No, that’s alright.”

They stood for a moment in awkward silence. Then Enzo forced a smile. “Well. I’ll leave you in peace, then.” He turned toward the door.

“Monsieur Macleod?”

He stopped, and turned, the door half open. “Yes?”

“Did you find anything?”

He frowned.

“On the computer?”

“Oh. No. Nothing of any significance.” But he knew that the moment he was gone she could track exactly where he had been by checking the Recent Items menu. He wondered why it was that he didn’t want to ask her about the emails, or tell her about the locked document. But instinct and experience told him that information shared could be information compromised. “I’ll see you later.”

And as he stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him, he exhaled a deep breath of relief.