‘Yes, a word of not more than eight letters. It can be just a meaningless jumble of letters, of course, but most people use a word.’
‘Yes,’ said Jennifer. She became aware that she was biting her nails.
‘Try Recorder,’ she said. And as she spoke she realised it was stupid. Marcus would not have used the name of his paper, and he hadn’t.
She tried some more. KRUG, his favourite champagne; EASTON, the street he had lived in when he first came to London; MARTHA, his mother’s name; JAMES, his father’s name. Then all of those backwards, GURK, NOTSAE, AHTRAM, SEMAJ. Nothing. It was hopeless. She had to get inside Marcus’s head. Suddenly she had a brainwave, or at least she hoped it was, because it was so simple, so obvious. What was the one constant factor in Marcus’s life apart from his driving ambition? The answer was a touch arrogant but also the truth — it was her, Jennifer Stone.
‘Try JENNIFER,’ she cried.
Dominic glanced at her curiously, but made no comment as he punched her name into the computer. It did not work. Neither did REFINNEJ or STONE or JSTONE or JENSTONE, or any of those backwards.
She felt defeated. Dominic was continuing without success to try variations of her name and the other words she had suggested to him. She must think back over all the years she had known Marcus. She had to believe that he had used a word with some significance to him. Almost everybody who ever chose a computer password did that, surely even Marcus. So what else was there?
‘It’s usually something really obvious, surprisingly enough,’ she heard Dominic say in the distance.
She was concentrating hard, trying to be methodical. When had she first had doubts about Mark, vague, indefinable doubts? It had been after the trial when she had half suspected he had lied about Johnny Cooke. He had convinced her that she had been confused, and allowing herself to be convinced had been the easy way out at the time. So it all went back to the very beginning in Pelham Bay. Everything that happened seem to stem from there...
‘Try PELHAM,’ she said suddenly. Dominic did so. Nothing.
‘Backwards?’ he asked.
She nodded. She felt it was hopeless. She would have to go in cold, but she needed more ammunition. She did not have enough to convince him, or maybe even totally to convince herself, and the stakes were so high. She was lost in despairing thoughts, not even watching Dominic or the computer.
Then she heard him say quietly: ‘I think you’ve cracked it, old girl.’
He was in. He was working the disc. She knew better than to speak.
After a few minutes he said: ‘Give me those codes.’
He studied the copies of the pages from Bill Turpin’s notebook.
‘What I can’t understand is why anyone should write codes like this down. They should be in the computer for the user to call up.’
‘What if the person who wrote them down never really trusted computers?’
He looked at her as if she were crazy.
‘It is possible, you know,’ she said with a smile.
It was the first time she had smiled at him that morning, and he realised how pleased he was to see it. Maybe he didn’t really dislike the old bat as much as he thought he did.
He turned back to the keyboard. She watched him for about ten minutes more, and ultimately could contain herself no more.
‘Any joy?’ she asked.
He swung around to face her, brows knitted in a deep frown.
‘I am a genius, not a magician,’ he said.
She laughed. He found that pleased him too.
‘Look, this is going to take time,’ he said. ‘I reckon that this disc is programmed to plug in through a modem with a particular computer system elsewhere. What exactly and where exactly is another bigger question.’
She breathed a sigh of relief: at least it wasn’t Marcus’s blessed laundry list. It looked as if she’d had some luck and stumbled across a disc that might at least give her a clue or two. But could Dominic put it all together?
Her eyes were a question mark.
‘The disc can only be put into operation with the right codes. Maybe one of these is it, maybe not.’ He held the copied notebook in his hand. ‘All I can do is try all the possible codes with all the possible combinations on the disc and give it a whirl.
‘I have to interrogate the disc, and if it is that important it will almost certainly be programmed to wipe itself clean if I ask the wrong question or feed it wrong information. It’s not a five-minute job.’
She just carried on looking at him, expectant. He sighed.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll work better on my own. I can’t stand being watched. Go away and come back in a couple of hours.’
She looked at her watch. It was already ten o’clock. Two hours would be cutting it very fine indeed. She wanted to get it all over with quickly, before Marcus had time to do too much thinking — and the man thought fast.
‘Two hours?’ she queried. Her expression was stricken.
He sighed. ‘OK. An hour-and-a-half — but don’t build up too many hopes.’
She kissed him on the top of his head.
‘You are a genius,’ she said. ‘I know that because you’ve told me often enough.’
‘That’s better,’ he replied.
She knew what he meant, and indeed she was feeling just a little better as she left him to it. If anyone could succeed it would be Dominic McDonald, that she believed absolutely.
An hour-and-a-half. She looked down at herself. She was a mess, her shirt was crumpled and her hair greasy and lank. She had not even waited to shower and shampoo, and she was aware that she smelt, which was not surprising after the night she had spent with Marcus. She tried not to think about it. She just hoped Dominic hadn’t noticed how she smelt, and in fact doubted that he had. Dominic was unlikely to notice anything like that. She desperately needed clean clothes and a bath, but she didn’t have time to go home to Richmond as she had told Marcus was her intention. She walked the streets until she found a branch of Marks & Spencer where she bought fresh underwear, a couple of cotton tee shirts and a plain black sweatshirt. It was cooler today and she could not stop shivering, but she was unsure whether it was the cold or what she was doing which was the cause of that. Outside in the street again, she slipped the black sweatshirt over her crumpled white shirt. It made her look fractionally more presentable — certainly she felt warmer and more comfortable — and with a bit of luck it might trap her smelliness within its thick cotton. There was a chemist’s shop across the road, where she bought toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo and a jar of her favourite moisturiser.
Little more than half an hour had passed. She began to walk as slowly as she could make herself back to Dominic’s office, and stopped on the way at an Italian coffee bar. She ordered a double espresso and found to her slight surprise that she was hungry. She and Marcus had not eaten properly the night before and she had skipped lunch as well. Of course when he was on a sexual roll, Marcus never needed to eat at all, or to sleep — she did. She ordered croissants and bacon and egg and fresh orange juice. The croissants were fresh and warm and mouth-melting, the bacon and egg tasted almost as good as it smelt, and the orange juice had definitely been in the form of several round fruits minutes earlier. There weren’t too many cafes in London that served a breakfast like this. She complimented herself on her luck and hoped fervently that it was an omen and that Dominic was also having good fortune and that her plans for the rest of the day would prove lucky too. After another double espresso, the hands of her watch had moved painfully forward to reach eleven-twenty. She paid her bill and headed for Dominic. She was stopped by the receptionist in the hall of his office, and had to wait impatiently while the man called upstairs before clearing a visitor for entry. It was eleven-twenty-seven when Dominic picked up the phone and confirmed that Jennifer was expected. This time with a yellow ‘Visitor’ tag stuck to her black sweatshirt, Jennifer rode to the third floor in the lift. As she opened the door to his office, the minute hand of the big electric clock on the wall clunked once and settled on the half-hour position. It was exactly eleven-thirty.