Ben had absolutely no doubt by then that he was wasting his time.
He slipped the papers back inside the file and closed it, with no intention of ever reading more. The agricultural economic history of 1800s England would just have to manage without him.
He stood up and walked over to Raul’s table, where he quickly realised things hadn’t been going much better. Raul turned to Ben with a defeated look. ‘Anything?’
‘Not exactly what you’d call anything useful to us,’ Ben said. ‘You?’
‘The same,’ Raul said. He motioned at the screen. It was filled with a more or less blank window that said ‘Documents’. Ben looked. He couldn’t see any.
‘I thought there might be all kinds of document files here,’ Raul explained. ‘But I’ve searched everywhere in both the laptop’s own drive and the external hard drive, and they’re each virtually empty apart from the default programs and stuff already stored in them. It’s as if she never used the machine at all.’
Ben was no expert, but the laptop didn’t look to him like a brand-new item freshly unwrapped from its factory packaging. It bore the typical marks and scratches of a machine that had been in occasional, if not everyday, use for maybe a year or more. It had to have been used for something.
‘Or else she deleted whatever documents were stored on there,’ he said. ‘Alternatively, she could have called Kazem from Munich and told him to do it.’
‘We can’t exactly confirm that with him either way, though, can we?’ Raul said unhappily.
Ben thought for a moment, then pointed at the screen. ‘You’ve checked the recycle bin? Deleted items could still be stored there.’
‘I’m not an idiot. Of course I’ve checked it. And backup files, and everything else. I’m telling you there’s nothing here.’
Ben rubbed his chin. ‘What about emails?’
‘There’s a shortcut on the desktop that takes you to a webmail service she could have accessed from anywhere,’ Raul said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He clicked out of the files menu he was in, and the desktop appeared. Catalina had replaced the default image with one that looked like the curved edge of a blazing golden disk set against a black backdrop. Ben realised it was a close-up of the sun. It was a stunning image that he could almost feel the heat from.
Raul moved the little white arrow cursor over the sun’s face to double-click on a desktop icon. The sun disappeared abruptly and was replaced by a blank window with a blinking cursor that asked for the access password. He said, ‘I’m scared it will shut itself down if we get too many wrong guesses.’
‘How many have you tried so far?’
‘Five. First I tried “Amigo”. That was the name of the little mongrel dog we had when we were children. She loved that dog. Then I tried “Marisol”, the name of our maternal grandmother, who Catalina was closest to out of all the family. Then I tried—’
‘I get the picture,’ Ben said.
‘I can’t think what else she might have used. I mean, it could be absolutely anything.’
‘Try “Herschel”,’ Ben said. It was the first thing that came into his head, but it had as much chance of being correct as anything else they might come up with.
Raul looked at him. ‘Come on. Based on what?’
‘Just try it.’
Raul shrugged. ‘Okay. It’s on you if the program closes down and shuts us out forever.’ He used one finger to prod out the letters H-E-R-S-C-H-E-L, and then hit Enter.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Raul muttered as the email program opened up and a new window appeared in front of them.
‘Told you,’ Ben said.
The website flashed up on the screen, with a ‘welcome back’ message. In the top corner was a little red icon labelled WEBMAIL. Raul clicked on it, and a box appeared with the heading MY TODAY PAGE, with the current date. Down the left side was a vertical menu for Inbox, Sent Messages, Deleted Messages, Drafts and Trash. Over to the right was a subheading that said UNREAD MESSAGES (0). Beneath that was CALENDAR, which had no entries, then LATEST RSS ITEMS, of which there were none, then right at the bottom, DATE LAST ACCESSED.
Proof that the last time Catalina had visited her webmail account was July twelfth. The same day she went to the pawnshop. Four days before her car plummeted into the Baltic.
‘Let’s see what we have,’ Raul said, and flashed the cursor over to click open the Inbox.
There weren’t just no unread messages. There were no messages at all.
‘Damn.’ Raul tried Sent Items.
Empty.
He clicked on Deleted Items, then on Drafts, then on Trash.
Same result each time. The folders were all completely blank.
‘It’s just like what we found before,’ Raul muttered. ‘She must have deleted everything.’
‘She wouldn’t have needed to call Kazem to do it, either,’ Ben said. ‘She could have erased the emails herself back in Munich, from her desk at work, or at home, or anywhere.’
It was bad news. Raul stared sullenly at the screen. He looked as if he wanted to punch it. ‘This leaves us with nothing. Zero. No way even to tell who she was in touch with, let alone what about or why.’
‘One thing we do know,’ Ben said. ‘She didn’t give this email address out to many people. Only to a closed circle, or else the inbox would have been flooded with messages since her last visit.’
‘A very closed circle,’ Raul said bitterly. ‘And we’re closed right out of it.’
‘Hold on,’ Ben said. He reached past Raul’s shoulder and went to place his finger on the laptop’s touchpad.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We can assume that the last time she logged onto her webmail is the same day she deleted whatever messages were on here,’ Ben said. ‘Yes?’
Raul shrugged, nodded. ‘That sounds logical.’
‘And we know that was the same day she visited Braunschweiger. You remember how edgy she looked on the security video. She was anxious and had a lot on her mind, with a whole list of things to take care of before she disappeared, and not much time.’
‘Yes. So?’
‘So people running scared and looking over their shoulder don’t always remember to tidy up every loose end,’ Ben said. ‘That’s usually how they get caught. Even someone as organised and methodical as your sister can miss something under pressure.’ His finger on the touchpad, he steered the cursor back up to the inbox and clicked it open. CREATE NEW MESSAGE. Click. The new message appeared, a blank sheet with an empty space inviting him to enter the address he wanted to email. But Ben had no intention of writing anyone a message. In the top corner of the message box, there now appeared the thing he’d been hoping to find.
The address book.
Ben clicked again, and smiled as a drop-down list of names opened up on the screen. In her haste, Catalina had been too flustered to remember to delete them.
‘Loose ends,’ he said.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was everything they had, but it wasn’t much. Only four names had been entered into the webmail address book. A closed circle, all right. All four were men. Their names were listed alphabetically by first name: Dougal Sinclair, James Lockhart, Mike McCauley and Steve Ellis.
‘Who are they?’ Raul said.
‘Obviously, people whose correspondence was important enough for your sister to want to erase every last word,’ Ben replied. ‘Now all we have to do is figure out what that correspondence was.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘We could always email these four blokes and ask them straight out.’
‘You think that would work?’
‘Maybe.’ Ben slid the cursor up to the top name on the list. The small white arrow morphed into a small white pointing hand as it touched, and the alchemy of software conjured up another little box that showed the corresponding email address. Ben grabbed his pen and snatched a file from the bed, and wrote both the name and email down on the back of the cover.
br /> The suffix of the email address puzzled him a moment or two before he understood what it signified. It wasn’t a regular @joebloggs.com or .co.uk. It was ed.ac.uk. Odd, until Ben realised that he’d seen similar in the past. As a mature student returning to finish his theology degree at Oxford – an undertaking that had been cut short in typical fashion by the kinds of events that governed his life – his primary contact there had been a don with the memorable name of Vaughn Goss-Custard, whose email address was
[email protected]: ox, for Oxford; ac, for academia.
Ox, ed. Oxford, Edinburgh. Which made Dougal Sinclair some kind of lecturer or professor at Edinburgh University.
Ben did the same thing with the second name on the list, James Lockhart. This time, the email suffix that popped up at the touch of the cursor was auckland.ac.nz. University of Auckland.
Germany, Scotland, New Zealand. Three academics, three countries. It might have meant nothing, or maybe it meant everything.
The pattern broke at the third name in the list. Mike McCauley had a regular email with one of the big providers in the United Kingdom. Which at least narrowed the field down to a specific country, but didn’t tell Ben anything more. Steve Ellis, the fourth name on the list, was another Brit with another generic email.
‘That’s a start,’ Ben said to Raul as he wrote it down with the others. ‘Now let’s refine what we know.’
Ben went back to sit on the edge of the bed, picked up his phone again and used it to jump back online and run a search on each of the four men, starting again from the top of the list. Raul sat backwards on the chair to face him, resting his chin on his forearms along its backrest and watching Ben intently as he worked.
It didn’t take Ben long to start finding information. But what he found wasn’t good.
Dougal Sinclair had been born in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy in 1972, and earned his PhD in climatology in 1999. After a two-year stint as a senior researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Science Center in Silver Springs, Maryland, Sinclair had quit NOAA to return to his native Scotland, joining the faculty at Edinburgh University’s School of Geosciences. He had published various books and papers and won a number of academic awards for his research work.
‘But I don’t think he’ll be winning too many more of them,’ Ben said.
Raul asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s dead.’
Ben passed the phone over to Raul, who reached out an arm to grab it. The news item hadn’t taken a lot of digging to find online, given its recency. According to BBC News Scotland, the tragic accident had occurred somewhere over northern Greenland on July eighth, when the light Piper aircraft chartered by the independent R.I.C.R. Reykjavik Ice Core Research science expedition, had lost control and flown into a glacier. All four people on board had been killed, including the pilot, the expedition leader Dr Sinclair himself, and his two research assistants, Kerry Holder and Mark Linton, both graduate students at Edinburgh.
Ben watched Raul’s face darken as he read. Raul handed the phone back. ‘July eighth,’ he muttered.
Ben said nothing, but they were both thinking the same thing. The dates were clustering together like bullet holes in the ten ring of a marksman’s target. Returning to his search engine, this time Ben entered the name James Lockhart.
‘Here we go,’ he said a few moments later when the search had thrown up its results. ‘Professor James F. Lockhart, departmental head at the Faculty of Earth Sciences, University of Auckland.’
‘New Zealand,’ Raul said. ‘That fits with the email address.’
‘Looks like our man, all right. Says here he’s a leading oceanography expert and authority on Antarctic climate conditions, and a former advisor to the New Zealand government on environmental issues.’
Raul buried his face deeper into his arms and frowned. ‘Ice core research, meteorology, climate. I get the connection between these people. But what’s that all got to do with a solar astronomer like Catalina?’
‘William Herschel,’ Ben said. ‘That’s what links her to them. The reason she was interested in his work. Something to do with the sun, solar energy and Earth weather.’
‘Solar power? Clean energy resources? Is that what this is all about?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘This Herschel stuff is two centuries old. I don’t think people were too worried about green issues back then.’ He scrolled a little further down his search results, then stopped. His shoulders felt suddenly heavy, and a pain started biting into the muscles of his neck.
‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What? What did you find?’ Raul asked, jerking his chin up off the back of the chair.
This was getting worse. Ben heaved a sigh. ‘From a website called “stuff.co.nz”. Listen to this. “A man who suffered gunshot wounds during what police believe was a serious aggravated burglary at his home in Tamaki Drive, Auckland, has been identified as university lecturer Professor James Lockhart, 53. He was found unconscious following the incident, and despite the efforts of paramedics who attempted CPR for twenty minutes, he died at the scene. A woman named as the victim’s wife, Mrs Patricia Lockhart, 46, was taken to hospital with severe head trauma. Today a police cordon remains at the scene as detectives continue to investigate Professor Lockhart’s death. Tributes are being paid …” etc., etc.’
Raul had gone rigid and pale. ‘Oh, my God. When did this happen?’
‘July tenth,’ Ben said. ‘This year.’
‘But that’s—’
‘A very big coincidence, that’s for sure,’ Ben said, nodding. ‘Two deaths, two days apart, both victims in email contact with your sister, who deleted their correspondence just four days before she apparently killed herself.’
‘It’s not possible these were unrelated incidents, is it?’
‘It’s possible,’ Ben said. ‘But I wouldn’t put money on it.’
Raul jumped up from his chair and started pacing up and down the room, teeth clenched, burning up with nervous energy. ‘It’s unbelievable. It’s just incredible. My God, it’s so obvious. Completely transparent. They’re not even trying to hide it. How could anyone not see what’s going on here?’
‘It’s only obvious if you know what connects them,’ Ben said. ‘Catalina’s email is the common denominator. Without that, it just looks like random incidents, scattered across the world. Shit happens all the time. Planes crash, people get murdered, folks kill themselves, every second of every day. No particular reason why anyone should ever put it together.’
‘How many names left on the list?’ Raul asked.
‘We’re two down. Literally. With two to go. Steve Ellis and Mike McCauley.’
‘Two more scientists, do you suppose?’
‘It would fit the pattern,’ Ben said.
Raul grunted. ‘Yeah. And what are the chances they’re dead as well?’
Ben said nothing, but he was willing to bet that Raul was right, and that the next two searches would turn up two more corpses. Accidental drowning, maybe. Food poisoning. Chemical asphyxiation. Falling asleep drunk on a railway line. Anything was possible.
But as it turned out, Ben and Raul were both wrong.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The university email addresses for the first two had made them simple to identify. Numbers three and four wouldn’t be so easy, with generic email providers and common names that would throw up a million false results. Ben ditched the search on Lockhart and keyed in ‘Steve Ellis scientist’, which he decided might even the odds in his favour.
It did.
If he was the same guy Catalina had been in contact with, Steve Ellis was indeed a scientist – albeit a retired one, as Ben discovered from the man’s personal website. Images there showed him as much older than Sinclair and Lockhart, pushing seventy with a snow-white beard that looked as if he’d been growing it since around the time Ben had left school. According to the short résumé on the site, he’d been an astronomer like Catalina back in the
day. Quite a celebrated one, too – having, at the tender age of twenty-eight, won the 1975 Copley Medal for his research on solar physics: a highly prestigious award, as far as Ben could make out. After going on to teach at several different universities Ellis had taken early retirement in 1997, and now supported himself by making custom-built astronomical telescopes for private clients in his own workshop in Brecon in the Welsh borders, not far from where Ben had once upon a time endured the hell of 22 SAS selection training.
The website displayed images of Ellis’s telescopes, which looked to be of extremely fine quality. Ben wondered whether maybe Ellis had built equipment for Catalina’s observatory. Why else might they have known each other?
‘So? Is the guy dead or what?’ Raul asked tersely from the other end of the room, where he was still pacing up and down.
Ben saw there was a news page, and navigated to it in case he might find anything of note there, such as a helpful recent entry saying ‘I am dead’ or an announcement from a distraught relative saying that Steve had suffered a bizarre accident in his workshop. He found neither. Instead, right at the bottom of the webpage, was a paragraph in large block font declaring:
JULY 10TH: DUE TO A CHANGE IN PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES, I REGRET THAT I AM NO LONGER TAKING ORDERS FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. ALL OPEN ORDERS WILL BE REFUNDED IN FULL.
I WILL BE UNAVAILABLE TO CONTACT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
‘Ellis is alive,’ Ben said. ‘Or was, when he suddenly closed up his business in a real hurry. July tenth.’