What if someone had actually answered Paton’s door, Tony had asked him. Danny had sighed and retorted that he wasn’t so stupid as to have left it to chance and had phoned the house twice before making his move to be sure that the place was empty.
But what if there was a burglar alarm, Winter persisted — a unit hidden out of sight maybe? Danny had exhaled again and explained that a burglar alarm couldn’t stop anyone from breaking into a house and it wasn’t designed to do so. It was a deterrent and there wasn’t much point in an alarm that couldn’t be seen.
The pair walked silently down Sutherland Avenue, breath freezing before them, lost in their own thoughts about what lay ahead and what had already been. Winter had considered telling Danny about the dreams he’d been having, the ones he couldn’t tell Rachel about. In the end, he decided to keep them to himself but couldn’t help but wonder if the other two were dreaming the same dreams he was.
They had started the night after he and Rachel had been to the island and he’d ‘seen’ Lily lying on the frozen ground, abandoned and alone. She’d lain there for four months and part of her was still there, waiting to go home. He’d tried to photograph that part of her, that thing that might be soul or plasma or memory.
The house where Paton had lived was half of the first semi at the end of the street and only a thigh-high fence and a neighbour’s garden separated them from the dead man’s back door. The gardens on Paton’s side of the street were maybe thirty yards long and backed on to more gardens coming the other way, separated by a six-foot-high wall. Bedroom lights still flamed in a few of the homes on the other side of the wall but those neighbouring Paton’s house were, reassuringly, shrouded in darkness.
As they approached, Danny reached into the pockets of his jacket and produced two balaclavas. When the headgear was wordlessly shared and pulled on, it was Tony’s turn to dig into his pockets and come out with two pairs of nitrile gloves and two pairs of elasticated shoe covers, all liberated from the office stores. They stopped briefly before the rust-coloured fence and slipped the protective coverings over their feet and hands, ready for the task ahead.
With an easy stride that belied his age and increasing girth, Neilson stepped over the fence first, followed by Winter. The photographer was the taller of the two by an inch or so but his uncle Danny was easily the bigger man. Sometimes he looked as broad as he was tall, burly and thickset, and not someone to be messed with despite being in his sixties. The pair of them padded across the manicured lawn, their covered footsteps leaving a crunchy wake in the frosted grass, then stepped across a narrow area laid out with stone chips so as to avoid unnecessary noise. No fence separated the neighbour’s house from Paton’s and they simply walked across the grass to the English teacher’s back door.
The houses in Wallace Place dated back to just after the First World War and that, according to Danny, was good news for them and any other would-be housebreakers.
‘Old house, old locks,’ he’d told Winter.
As they stood outside the back door, their breath clouding the air in front of them, Tony moved from foot to foot in a vain attempt to stop the frost from invading his feet until a glare from Danny brought him grudgingly to a standstill. Neilson reached inside his jacket and brought out a selection of thin pieces of card, the moonlight reflecting off their plastic surfaces. As he approached the door, Winter turned his back, looking around edgily in case their arrival had been noticed and fearful that the time it would take to open the door would put them at risk.
Tony had barely begun to scope the lights in the houses beyond the garden wall, wondering if anyone was watching them through barely closed curtains and reaching for a telephone to call the police, when he heard a hissing sound behind him. He turned and Danny was standing inside Paton’s house, gesturing for Winter to join him inside.
Taking a deep breath, Winter crossed over the threshold into criminal activity and stepped into Paton’s kitchen, Neilson quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. Both of the men had torches, Danny having been insistent that they couldn’t take the chance of turning on the house lights. With no sign of a computer in the kitchen, Neilson led them into a hallway, their plastic-covered feet making no more than quiet sliding sounds as they moved slowly across the carpets.
In the first of two reception rooms facing the street, they saw photographs on the mantelpiece and both men paused to look. A man in his mid-forties looked back at them, his arm around a woman of similar age: Mr and Mrs Paton, they presumed — Laurence and Irene. He had fair hair that was greying at the temples, a tight smile that seemed to be forced onto his lips and a blush to the cheeks of his otherwise fair skin. She wore dark-rimmed glasses the colour of her hair and grinned at the camera in an altogether more carefree way than her husband could manage. Winter knew that he now had a face to put to his mental images of Paton lying fatally fractured and bleeding on the path outside. His internal camera snapped an image that would sustain his need. All the photographs above the fire were of the Patons, either together or individually, but with no evidence of any extensions to the family.
Neilson tugged at Winter’s sleeve and led him out of the room, back into the hallway and into the next room. In the light afforded by the streetlamp, they could make out walls lined with books, a low table covered in magazines and then in the corner they saw it: a wooden desk and a computer.
Tony crossed the floor, looking to see the model and age of the PC, running his gloved fingers lightly over it as he appraised it like a safecracker.
Danny raised his eyebrows at him, asking if he could do it. Winter nodded and reached into the pocket of his trousers; it was his turn to bring out a small piece of rectangular plastic and metal.
‘What’s that?’ Neilson asked in a low voice.
‘It’s a bootable USB stick,’ Winter whispered back at him. ‘You can buy one for fifty quid but I thought it better that no one knew what we were going to do so I made this one myself. It should do the job. Thankfully his PC is just a few years old so we can bypass the hard drive and use this little beauty to boot it up instead.’
Winter inserted the stick into one of the computer’s USB ports and within a minute it had grumbled into life, the noise worrying both of them, and he had access to the computer’s files. He swiftly copied everything he could see onto the stick, gobbling up every bit of information.
‘Damn,’ he muttered.
‘What is it?’ Danny asked. ‘Even I can see the files transferring across.’
‘Yeah, and that’s fine as far as it goes. We can take the stick and look at everything on here in our own time. But I can’t get into his emails this way. He’s using Web-based mail rather than something like Outlook Express or Evolution.’
‘So we’re stuck?’
Winter shook his head and produced another stick from his pocket.
‘Plan B. It’s not ideal because if someone takes the time to check the log files, then they’ll know we’ve logged in. The other way would have left no trace but the saving grace is they won’t know who we are.’
Neilson breathed heavier as he deliberated.
‘Okay. Do it.’