The Courier. Ava McCarthy

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       9

      ‘Someone’s been looking for you.’

      Harry spun round, backing up against the safe. A pintsized young woman stood in the doorway, a mug of coffee in her hand. Harry rolled her eyes at her own jumpiness.

      ‘You scared me,’ she said.

      Imogen Brady stepped into the room. ‘He called three times, wouldn’t leave his name.’

      Imogen’s eyes raked Harry’s face. Friend and business partner, she occasionally doubled up as Harry’s self-appointed keeper.

      ‘He sounded pissed off about something,’ she said.

      Harry’s pulse raced. Baseball cap, tanned face, the barrel of a gun. Had he started to track her down already? She turned back to the office safe to hide her panic.

      ‘Probably a recruitment agency.’ She swiped her keycard and punched in her access code with trembling fingers. ‘Do me a favour, next time he calls, tell him I’ve gone away for a while.’

      Imogen came to stand beside her, her head barely reaching Harry’s shoulder. ‘Is that the laptop from the new client?’

      Harry bit her lip. She’d told Imogen about the call-out to Monkstown before she’d left, but now she wished she hadn’t. Her next move was definitely the wrong side of legal, and the less Imogen knew about it the better. She shoved Garvin’s laptop to the back of the safe, then snapped the door shut.

      ‘It’s just routine stuff.’

      Imogen blocked her path. Her eyes were huge in her pixie face, but she still managed to look stern.

      ‘You look terrible.’ Imogen glanced at the safe, then back again. ‘What’s up?’

      ‘Just tired.’ Harry tried to keep her voice light. ‘Not sleeping well lately.’

      That much was true, at least. For the past few months she’d been plagued by nightmares that slashed like hatchets through her sleep. Recurring flashes of betrayal and death. She suppressed a shudder.

      ‘It’s that house of yours, if you ask me.’ Imogen plonked a hand on one hip. ‘Cooped up in the middle of nowhere, it’s enough to depress anyone. Why don’t you get a place in town, somewhere closer to the office?’

      Harry’s gaze drifted around the small, open-plan space where Blackjack did its business. The walls were a mix of exposed brick and pipes, the high domed ceiling a mess of ancient plumbing from the original Guinness Brewery warehouse.

      The office was located in the Digital Hub, a cluster of technology companies based in the old Liberties area of inner-city Dublin. Harry had chosen it as the home for her new company a few months before, funding it with money left over from her exploits in the Bahamas. The location had an edginess that had appealed to her: state-of-the-art technology tucked in between the bargain stores of Thomas Street and the chimney stacks of Guinness with its yeasty, Bovril smells.

      Harry shivered. Normally, the Blackjack office filled her with pride, but not today. Today it was a place where a man with a gun might find her.

      ‘Here –’ Imogen thrust her untouched coffee into Harry’s hands. ‘You look like you could do with this more than me.’

      Before Harry could reply, the phone rang and Imogen bustled off to answer it. Harry took the opportunity to slip away to her own desk, where she’d hooked up her office computer to the copy of Garvin’s hard drive. She pulled up a chair and sat hunched over the keyboard.

      Given the choice, this was the last place she’d be. But she needed to do some snooping, and this was where she stashed her burglar’s tools.

      She stared at the screen and wondered where to start.

      You could tell a lot about a person just by digging through his computer: what internet sites he browsed, what files he opened, what photographs he downloaded. In fact, you could unearth more information than there was time to analyse, and that was the problem.

      Harry drummed her fingers on the desk. Normally, she’d have some context, some obvious starting point. If a client hired her as a computer forensics investigator, her mandate would be clear: find evidence to show an employee was downloading pornography on company time; prove the new sales guy was passing information to a competitor. But what was she looking for on Garvin’s laptop? Some clue to ‘Beth’? Or to the man in the baseball cap? Suddenly, the idea seemed far-fetched.

      She checked on Imogen. Still on the phone. She’d jammed the receiver into the crook of her neck, her hands free to fiddle with her rings. Harry turned back to her screen and launched her forensic toolkit program.

      Small hairs rose on the back of her neck. She was about to cross a line. Garvin’s hard drive was evidence in a murder investigation, and she’d no business trespassing on its data. Whatever way you looked at it, she was probably about to commit a crime.

      Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She thought of the trouble she was already in: of Detective Inspector Lynne, still stalking her past; of Hunter, who’d pegged her as guilty of theft, or maybe even murder; of the killer on her tail, and Hunter’s indifference to the danger she was in. She balled her fingers into fists. Was she supposed to clock up brownie points before she qualified for police protection?

      To hell with it. Maybe it was time she protected herself. She jabbed at the keys and leapfrogged into Garvin’s files.

      She took a few moments to scout out the landscape, eyeballing the installed programs, skimming through the logs and noting the most recently used files. It was like nosing around someone’s house while they were away, and it took effort not to look furtive. She picked her way around, until gradually she’d built a picture of how Garvin had used his laptop.

      It was standard stuff. Mostly he switched between spreadsheets, a word processor and the internet. The everyday tools of the ordinary user. And with them, he’d produced thousands of files.

      Harry leaned back in her chair, hands in her pockets. Analysing files was as much instinct as science, but right now she was all out of hunches. Her fingers touched the rounded pebble she’d found inside her bag. It still felt cold. She worried at it for a moment, then let it drop, leaning back into the keyboard. Sometimes the most obvious was worth a try.

      She keyed in a search for the word ‘diamonds’.

      Thousands of filenames СКАЧАТЬ