Once inside Mrs Dove’s office, I spent time relocking the door so that anyone outside trying it for security would find it as it should be. If anyone came in with keys, I would have warning enough to hide.
Mrs Dove’s cote was large and comfortable, with a wide desk, several of the Scandinavian-design armchairs and grainy blow-up black and white photographs of racing horses around the walls. Along one side there were the routine office machines — fax, copier, and large print-out calculator, and, on the desk, a computer, shrouded for the weekend in a fitted cover. There were multiple filing cabinets and a tall white-painted and — as I discovered — locked cupboard.
Mrs Dove had a window with louvered blinds and a. distant view of the Mersey. Mrs Dove’s office was managing director stuff.
I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. The audited accounts I’d seen in Companies House seemed not to match the actual state of affairs at Frodsham. The audit did, of course, refer to a year gone by, to the first with Owen Yorkshire in charge, but the fragile bottom-line profit, as shown, would not suggest or justify expensive publicity campaigns or televised receptions for the notables of Liverpool.
The old French adage ‘look for the lady’ was a century out of date, my old teacher had said. In modem times it should be ‘look for the money,’ and shortly before he died, he had amended that to ‘follow the paper.’ Shady or doubtful transactions, he said, always left a paper trail. Even in the age of computers, he’d insisted that paper showed the way; and over and over again I’d proved him right.
The paper in Mrs Dove’s office was all tidied away in the many filing cabinets, which were locked.
Most filing cabinets, like these, locked all drawers simultaneously with a notched vertical rod out of sight within the right-hand front comer, operated by a single key at the top. Turning the key raised the rod, allowing all the drawers to open. I wasn’t bad at opening filing cabinets.
The trouble was that Topline Foods had little to hide, or at least not at first sight. Pounds of paper referred to orders and invoices for incoming supplies; pounds more to sales, pounds more to the expenses of running an industry, from insurance to wages, to electricity to general maintenance.
The filing cabinets took too long and were a waste of time. What they offered was the entirely respectable basis of next year’s audit.
I locked them all again and, after investigating the desk drawers themselves, which held only stationery, took the cover off the computer and switched it on, pressing the buttons for List Files, and Enter. Scrolls of file names appeared and I tried one at random: ‘Aintree.’
Onto the screen came details of the lunch given the day before the Grand National, the guest list, the menu, a summary of the speeches and a list of the coverage given to the occasion in the press.
Nothing I could find seemed any more secret. I switched it off, replaced the cover and turned my lock pickers to the tall white cupboard.
The feeling of time running out, however irrational, shortened my breath and made me hurry. I always envied the supersleuths in films who put their hands on the right papers in the first ten seconds and, this time, I didn’t know if the right paper even existed.
It turned out to be primarily not a paper but a second computer.
Inside the white cupboard, inside a drop-down desk arrangement in there, I came across a second keyboard and a second screen. I switched the computer on and nothing happened, which wasn’t astounding as I found an electric lead lying alongside, disconnected. I plugged it into the computer and tried again, and with a grumble or two the machine became ready for business.
I pressed List Files again, and this time found myself looking not at individual subjects, but at Directories, each of which contained file names such as ‘Formula A.’
What I had come across were the more private records, the electronic files, some very secret, some not.
In quick succession I highlighted the ‘Directories’ and brought them to the screen until one baldly listed ‘Quint’: but no amount of button pressing got me any further.
Think.
The reason I couldn’t get the Quint information onto the screen must be because it wasn’t in the computer.
OK? OK. So where was it?
On the shelf above the computer stood a row of box files, numbered 1 to 9, but not one labeled Quint.
I lifted down № 1 and looked inside. There were several letters filed in there, also a blue computer floppy disk in a clear cover. According to the letters, box-file № 1 referred to loans made to Topline Foods, loans not repaid on the due date. There was also a mention of ‘sweeteners’ and ‘quid pro quos.’ I fed the floppy disk into the drive slot in the computer body and got no further than a single, unhelpful word on the screen: PASSWORD?
Password? Heaven knew. I looked into the box files one by one and came to Quint in № 6. There were three floppies in there, not one.
I fed in the first.
PASSWORD?
Second and third disks — PASSWORD?
Bugger, I thought.
Searching for anything helpful, I lifted down a heavy white cardboard box, like a double-height shoebox, that filled the rest of the box-file shelf. In there was a row of big black high-impact plastic protective coverings. I picked out one and unlatched its fastenings, and found inside it a videotape, but a tape of double the ordinary width. A label on the tape said Broadcast Quality Videotape. Underneath that was a single word, BETACAM. Under that was the legend ‘Quint Series. 15 X 30 secs.’
I closed the thick black case and tried another one. Same thing. Quint series. 15 X 30 secs. All of the cases held the same.
These double-size tapes needed a special tape player not available in Mrs Dove’s office. To see what was on these expensive tapes meant taking one with me.
I could, of course, simply put one of them inside my tracksuit jacket and walk out with it. I could take all the ‘PASSWORD’ disks. If I did I was a) stealing, b) in danger of being found carrying the goods, and c) making it impossible for any information they held to be used in any later legal inquiry. I would steal the information itself, if I could, but not the software.
Think.
As I’d told Charles at Aynsford, I’d had to learn a good deal about computers just to keep a grip on the accelerating world, but the future became the present so fast that I could never get ahead.
Someone tried to open the door.
There was no time to restore the room to normal. I could only speed across the carpet and stand where I would be hidden by the door when it swung inward. Plan B meant simply running — and I was wearing running shoes.
The knob turned again and rattled, but nothing else happened. Whoever was outside had presumably been either keyless or reassured: in either case it played havoc with my breathing.
Oddly, the pumping adrenaline brought me my computer answer, which was, if I couldn’t bring the contents of a floppy disk to the screen, I could transfer it whole to another computer, one that would give me all the time I needed to crack the password, or to get help from people who could.
Alongside the unconnected electric cable there had been a telephone cable, also unattached. I snapped it into the telephone socket on the computer, thereby connecting Mrs Dove’s modem to the world-wide Internet.
It needed a false start or two while I desperately tried to remember half-learned techniques, but finally I was rewarded by the screen prompting: ‘Enter telephone number.’