Li said, ‘Lyang, I need you to wake up. This is really important.’
He saw her make the effort. ‘What is it?’
‘Lynn Pan had her own private space on the academy website. What about Bill? He must have had his own space, too.’
Lyang was still trying to clear her head. But even through the fuzziness something connected. ‘Jesus,’ she said, a part of her husband left indelibly in her vocabulary. ‘He did.’ And as the implications of that sunk in, ‘So maybe he put his files in there to keep them safe.’
Li glanced at Margaret and saw the fire of hope light her eyes.
Lyang sat at the computer by the light of the single lamp on Hart’s desk. Her white satin night-dress hung loosely from her shoulders. Her hair was a mess, her face smeared and puffy. Margaret stood behind her, looking not much better, eyes burning and gritty. Li had pulled up the chair from Lyang’s desk, and sat beside her. ‘How can you access Bill’s private stuff from here? He had to go to the academy last night to get into Lynn’s folder.’
‘He brought a copy of the FTP software back with him last night.’ Lyang shuffled through the desk drawers to find the CD, then slipped it into the iMac. She double-clicked the icon and loaded the software on to the hard disk. ‘Okay.’ She squeezed her temples and let out a long breath. ‘Jees, I feel like shit. Can someone get me a glass of water?’
‘I’ll get it,’ Margaret said, and she disappeared out into the hall.
Lyang opened up the Fetch programme and entered the academy’s FTP address into the dialogue box.
‘You know his user name and password?’ Li asked.
‘Sure. It’s bill.hart.’ She tapped it in, then paused at the password, trembling fingers hovering over the keys. Li heard her breathing become shallower and saw tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. ‘He changed his password to Ling after she was born,’ she said, before finally she was able to bring herself to type it in and hit the return key.
Margaret returned from the bathroom with a glass of water and Lyang drank thirstily, emptying it in one draught. They were now looking at a screenful of icons, all of Hart’s personal and private files. Lyang pushed the arrow about the screen until it was hovering over a folder labelled Pan’s Files. She dragged it to the desktop and it copied on to Hart’s computer. She double-clicked to open it. Inside there were thirteen folders, and a computer-shaped icon with the MRM motif in blue within it. Twelve of the folders looked like copies of the ones they had found the previous night among Lynn Pan’s files. Graphs A to F and Pics A to F.
Lyang flashed the arrow around the screen with frightening speed, opening and closing folders. There were three graph files in each of the Graph folders, but instead of being empty, the Pics folders now contained jpeg images of all the photographs the testees had been shown during the MERMER demonstration.
Li said, ‘Bill told me that one of Pan’s students thought she still had those on disk at home.’
‘Looks like she came up with the goods, then,’ Lyang said. ‘We can look at all of these.’
Margaret leaned in closer to the screen. ‘But you won’t be able to see the graphs, will you? Not without the software.’
Lyang’s arrow shot across the screen and double-clicked on the MRM icon. ‘Looks like Bill thought of everything,’ she said. The computer whirred, and images flashed across the screen as the MERMER software loaded up. ‘He’d have known he’d need a copy of this to work with the graphs at home.’
‘What’s this?’ Li stabbed a finger at the thirteenth folder. It was labelled, Report.
Lyang opened it up to reveal a word-processing document. She double-clicked to open it. A document unfolded on the screen. It was headed Preliminary Findings, MERMER Demo — Bill Hart. ‘Seems he already started to write up what he found,’ Lyang said, and her voice cracked on found. She put her hand to her mouth to hold back her emotion, and bit hard on her finger. ‘Typical Bill,’ she said.
Li pulled his chair closer to read the document which Hart had written.
A careful comparison of the first of the three graphs in each folder with the known sequence of photographs shown to each subject has enabled us to identify which of them was briefed on the murder for the purposes of the demonstration. MERMER responses to the ‘probe’ photographs, all of which related to the murder, were easily identified on the graphs. As a result, we were able to pinpoint A, B and C as the ‘murderers’, thereby eliminating them from our attempts to identify subject D, whom Professor Pan had labelled a ‘Liar’.
Li sat stunned. He knew who had been briefed on the murder, because he was one of them. And the Procurator General and Commissioner Zhu were the others. Which meant that Zhu was not the liar, and therefore almost certainly not the killer.
‘That blows a bit of a hole in your theory about the commissioner,’ Margaret said helpfully. ‘Who’s left?’
Li said, ‘His deputy, Cao Xu, the deputy minister, and Yan Bo, the director general of the Political Department.’ And he remembered Yan Bo scribbling in red ink on his notepad.
‘Jesus,’ Margaret said. ‘So now we’re climbing even higher up the ladder.’
Li turned back to the screen, agitated now. There was more.
Identifying why Professor Pan labelled subject D a ‘Liar’ has proven more difficult. Apart from a continuity of response to the ‘probe’ pictures — that is to say, none of them showed a MERMER response — the graphs relating to the ‘target’ and ‘irrelevant’ pictures appear to be anomalous.
And that was as much as Hart had written.
‘Is that it?’ Li said.
Lyang shook her head, scrolling up and down the page. ‘There’s nothing else. If he knew more than that he’s taken it with him.’
‘But what does he mean, anomalous?’ Li said.
‘Hang on,’ Margaret interrupted. ‘You two are way ahead of me here. Would someone like to explain what targets and probes and irrelevants are? It’s like another language.’
Lyang turned toward her. ‘Three of the six subjects were briefed on a murder, for the purposes of the demo. When it came to the test all six were shown nine photographs relating to that murder — things that only the ones who’d been briefed would recognise. They’re called probes. They were also shown nine photographs of things that were known to them — their apartment, their dog, their car. And these are called targets. The idea being that the brain’s response to these things that are known to them will be the same as the response to the probe photographs. In the case of the ones who were briefed, that is. And not, in the case of the other three.’
Margaret was nodding. ‘Okay, and let me guess. The irrelevants are photographs that don’t mean anything to any of them, so they have negative responses to compare to the positive ones.’
‘You got it,’ Lyang said. ‘And they get to see thirty-six irrelevants.’
‘So what did Bill mean by anomalous?’ Li asked again.
Lyang rubbed her tired and swollen eyes. ‘I don’t know. It may be that they were getting a MERMER response from some of the irrelevants.’
‘You mean recognising pictures of things they weren’t expected to?’ Margaret said.