Skin

38

In the maisonette Caffery peered up the silent stairwell. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got that key on you? To the studio?’

‘I wasn’t expecting this visit. Give me some notice next time.’

They went into the living room. Caffery put on gloves, switched on the computer and got into the cache folders, where all the cookies should be stored. There were just ten. For a while he sat at the desk, face close to the blank white space where the files should be. The recycling bin was empty too. Sometimes what is missing is the most crucial evidence of all, a CID trainer had once told him. Sometimes it’s not what you see but what you don’t see.

In the kitchen Mahoney put the sandwiches they’d bought in the pub on to a plate and brought it through. He stuck it on the table and stood behind Caffery, his eyes on the screen. Caffery knew he should wait. He should pass the PC to the hi-tech unit at Portishead, but he wanted this now. He scrolled around the free data-recovery sites and chose a shareware programme – Restoration – downloading it from a fast European site.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Unless someone ran a wipe utility, like Killdisc, the files’ll still be on the hard drive somewhere. As long as no one’s wiped the partitions, and as long as a system file hasn’t been allocated over those spaces, it should all still be here.’

They ate the sandwiches and waited for the download to finish. Then Caffery hit ‘set up’ and watched the programme unpack itself. He chose C drive to search, ticked ‘include used clusters by other files’, configured it to display the date the file was created, and set it in motion. The numbers in the ‘files found’ box spun round dizzyingly. In seconds the window had filled with folders, files of every extension, doc, xls, ppt. Near the top of the list a Word file had been created on 6 May, 9.30 p.m. Last Sunday. The day she’d gone missing. Titled ‘Goodbye’.

Caffery opened it and let all his breath out at once. The suicide note. He’d read it several times already at Wells and there wasn’t anything unusual in it: the same depressing stuff he’d seen too many times – too much pain to go on, life not worth living, no one who understands. Others killed themselves out of cowardice, or from the strain of living with the knowledge of what they’d done. People like Penderecki. But he’d never known anyone write a suicide note, print and delete it.

‘She didn’t write that,’ Mahoney said. ‘No way she wrote it. That’s not Lucy’s language.’

‘Someone else did, though. Wrote it and wiped it. If it had been on here, the search adviser would have found it.’

He scrolled through the list. ‘There are emails to the estate agent, all deleted, but he’s left others on the desktop. He’s only hiding specific things.’

Mahoney pointed to a folder halfway down the list. ‘Is that something?’

‘NatWest statements.’ Caffery restored it to its original location and opened it. It contained twenty-four jpegs, each titled by a month in the last two years. He opened one from January two years back. It was a scanned image of a bank statement. He gave a low whistle. ‘The missing statements.’

‘She was scanning them into the computer? To save space?’

‘Looks like it.’

Caffery opened the most recent one, dated this April. For a moment he and Mahoney stared at the screen, neither speaking.

Lucy Mahoney had died with the mortgage on her £200,000 house at just seven thousand pounds. There was another £190,000 in her savings account.

‘Je-sus,’ Mahoney muttered. ‘What the hell was she up to?’

‘All coming in in cash.’ Caffery clicked into the other months. ‘Two thousand here, another eight thousand in December.’

‘Jesus.’

‘And look.’ He tapped the screen. ‘This is where it started. Almost two years ago.’

Both of them peered at the bank statement. Twenty-six months ago Lucy had been receiving a regular wage from her job at the Christmas-decorations factory. Then, in the May after she and Mahoney had separated, she’d made a one-off payment of £7,121. It had been a cheque – no indication of who the payee was. Two weeks after the debit the cash deposits had started.

‘Any idea what that seven grand payment was for?’

Mahoney shook his head. Wearily, as if he’d come to the end of anything like rational thought, he picked up the plate. He trudged into the kitchen, leaving Caffery at the computer, clicking through the scanned statements. There was a lot of money here. If it wasn’t from a rich boyfriend, if she hadn’t got a job and she hadn’t got a loan, where the hell was it coming from?

‘Blackmail.’ Mahoney had come back from the kitchen. He was holding out a steaming mug of coffee to Caffery. His eyes were cold and hard. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Caffery said. ‘It’s one explanation.’

‘It’s the only explanation. She was blackmailing someone. They got fed up with it. Decided to put a stop to it.’

Caffery took the mug. ‘Tell you what, let’s start slowly, sensibly. Let’s start by getting the case reclassified.’