“No. Everything was normal. Both of us worked all day Monday. It was probably a bit too much for Rebecka. She went to bed early, around five thirty, because she had a headache. I went to Shakespeare. That’s the pub on the corner. A group of us usually meet there on Mondays and put together our betting pool for the week.”
“What did you do afterward?”
“I went home.”
“Did you see Rebecka?”
“No. She had gone to her place.”
Glen couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Don’t you live together in this house?”
“Yes, and no. I’ve owned the house next door for some time, the one which now has a blue door. My office was located on the ground floor and I lived on the two other floors. The office felt too small, and I was looking for a new location when this house became available. I bought it and offered Rebecka the same living arrangement as I have, including breaking through the wall on the first floor and expanding the office. As you can see, it worked out very well.”
“So you don’t live together as a couple?”
Christian Lefévre glared angrily at Glen. “No. And I don’t see how that has anything to do with your investigation.”
“It does. Rebecka is the only surviving member of the Schyttelius family. Everything which affects her life is important to the investigation,” Glen told him.
It wasn’t really true that everything was important, thought Irene, but it quieted the Frenchman, if he truly was a Frenchman.
Lefévre squirmed in his chair. Finally, he said, “If there is nothing else, I’d actually like to get back to work.”
“I’m glad you said that. What exactly is your work? Are there other employees?” Glen asked.
Christian sighed heavily before he answered. “Here, in London, it’s just Rebecka and myself. Andy St. Clair has moved up to Edinburgh and works from there. But he has a lot of other businesses to run as well. So it’s mostly Rebecka and I who work together. We take on different projects from companies and organizations that deal with computers and networks. Right now, we’re working on exponential and open networks. We look at security questions. Our client is a secret, but I can reveal that there’s a military interest in this. The risk that terrorist groups could completely paralyze the Internet is actually quite high.”
“But you can’t paralyze the whole Internet! There are millions of Web sites that would have to be destroyed,” Irene objected.
“Not at all. It’s quite simple. The Internet is an open network. It’s not sensitive to occasional problems, but it’s sensitive to attacks against the important computers and servers that make up the backbone of the system. Through an attack directed at these servers, the interconnected Internet could be reduced to isolated islands.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Glen said. “What are exproportional networks or whatever they’re called?”
Sincere interest and curiosity could be heard in his voice. Christian had relaxed as he spoke about the Internet. Apparently, he felt much more comfortable in cyberspace. “Exponential networks don’t have any servers. All the computers are equally strongly linked to each other, peer-to-peer. This makes the network sensitive to occasional problems but protects it against attack.”
“Does Rebecka also work on these things?”
“Yes. We’re specialists on everything that has to do with different networks, where one’s own organization’s competence isn’t enough.”
“Is there a lot of money in this sort of thing?”
Lefévre treated himself to a smile for the first time since he had opened the door for them. Without attempting to conceal his satisfaction, he said, “Yes. Lots.”
Glen rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “Let’s see … we’ve spoken about Monday. Nothing unusual happened on Tuesday?”
Christian’s smile disappeared as if someone had shut off a circuit breaker. “No. Nothing strange happened on Tuesday. Except that I slept late in the morning. I guess I had too much beer and whiskey at the pub the night before. But I bought croissants and Danish pastry to make up for it. Rebecka had already eaten breakfast, but she took a Danish anyway.”
“What time was it then?”
“Nine thirty, ten o’clock. Something like that.” Christian threw his hands up as he shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of bafflement at their interest.
“Did you both work here during the day?”
“Yes. But I told Rebecka to stop at around four. Personally, I sat here until nearly eight o’clock.”
“Did Rebecka receive any strange phone calls during those two days?”
“No.”
“And as far as you know, there hadn’t been any strange phone calls earlier?”
“No.”
“And nothing via E-mail either?”
“I said no.”
Christian couldn’t hide his irritation any longer. He rose and started clearing the table. Irene remained sitting because Glen did. Neither broke the silence.
“Will you go now? I have a lot to do.” Christian’s self-control broke. He walked to the door and held it wide. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he tried to swallow his anger. “Get in touch if you have any further questions but right now I don’t have any more time,” he said as calmly as he could manage.
Irene and Glen walked through the impersonal white computer room with the beautiful green plants and on toward the dark entrance. John Lennon’s voice in “Hey Jude” accompanied them out. Now Irene understood why the vestibule was so narrow. It was split by a wall and a door, which led to Rebecka’s apartment.
“Are the apartments identical?” she asked Christian.
“Yes.” His facial expression told her that he considered it to be none of her business.
“HE’S HIDING something. He seems tense. Maybe he really is only trying to protect Rebecka’s weak nerves, but I doubt it,” Glen said as they walked back to the hotel.
“Hard to say. But what would he be hiding?”
“Don’t know. Maybe there’s some threat that he doesn’t want to reveal. Or maybe he really doesn’t know anything. Then he is what he says he is: a young hard-working millionaire in the IT business who’s trying to protect his business partner.”
Glen had voiced something which Irene had been mulling over for a while.
“Don’t you also think that he’s very keen on his partner? I mean, he let Rebecka move into the house next door and he renovated it.”
“True. But it could have been for simple, practical reasons. That part about expanding the offices. Space is terribly expensive in London these days. He’s probably saving a lot by having his office at home in a building he owns,” said Glen.
They walked through different parts of Bayswater than the ones they had passed through before. Here the streets were wider and people swarmed on the sidewalks. Commerce was in full swing in shops and restaurants. Irene started wondering what to buy as a souvenir. Yet again, Glen displayed a creepy ability to read her thoughts.
“If you want to do some shopping, we can go to Whitley’s. It’s nearby, all sorts of shops in one place. I usually take the wife and kids there when it’s time for a shopping trip. They buy, and I sit in the pub on the top floor and read the paper.”
He smiled his infectious smile and Irene was strengthened in her opinion that he was very pleasant. A man who willingly went along on shopping trips! Although he cheated a bit and sneaked off to the pub, he was still there.
They walked up to a building which looked like a shining white wedding cake in the sunshine, more like a grand cathedral than a department store. Glen stopped inside the colonnade but outside the large glass doors. “We’ll meet here in an hour, then we can have lunch. While you’re shopping, I’m going to try to reach Dr. Fischer.”