‘Through here,’ he said. He led her through a small kitchen – more of a lobby than a kitchen – to the bedroom, which was at the back of the house. It was smaller than the front room, and was sparsely furnished with a bed, a small chest of drawers, and an empty hanging rail by the chimney breast. Under the window was Gemma’s desk, with her computer. The screensaver wove intricate patterns in ever-changing colours. Luke went over to it. ‘Look,’ he said. He clicked the mouse to open the documents window, and then jerked his head to bring Roz over. She looked at the screen. The documents window was open, but there was nothing there, no files or folders, just empty space: 0 objects. 0 bytes.
Roz looked at it, and looked at Luke. He shrugged a shoulder. ‘Last time I saw this, Tuesday night, that would have been, she had loads of stuff on here,’ he said.
‘Maybe she wiped it – for space,’ Roz said. ‘Maybe it’s all saved on disks.’
Luke pulled open the desk drawer. ‘She keeps her back-up stuff here,’ he said. The drawer was empty. ‘Anyway, Gem keeps all her stuff on her hard disk. She says it’s easier to keep track of. And she has back-up disks for everything.’ He folded his arms and looked at her, leaning against the desk, waiting.
Roz wondered what he wanted her to do. She wondered what she should do. Gemma had gone to Manchester on Thursday and attended a meeting. She had definitely been there – Joanna had checked on Friday. She was due back on Thursday evening. Luke had said that he expected her to phone – or half expected her to phone. She was certainly expected in the department on Friday morning. The meeting had been the main focus of Joanna’s attention for the past month. Gemma had sent an e-mail with a lame excuse. She hadn’t come back, and she had apparently wiped her document files from her hard disk before she went. Luke was still watching her from by the desk, waiting to see where her thoughts took her. ‘The police?’ she said.
‘I did that as well,’ he said. ‘Yesterday.’
‘And?’ It was like pulling teeth.
‘They weren’t that interested. They took details, but they didn’t see any reason to worry. Gemma does go off sometimes, weekends. Said to leave it until Monday. They thought I was overreacting, thought we must have had a row. Lovers’ tiff.’ He said it lightly enough, and she wondered why he was worried, if Gemma was in the habit of taking unplanned trips. There didn’t seem much point in asking him. He wouldn’t talk to her these days. ‘I just thought there was something wrong. Thing is, I hadn’t been round here then.’
‘What do you mean?’
He jerked his head impatiently. ‘Just look round you, Roz.’
She looked, and the implications of the empty hanging rail hit her. She went over to the chest and opened the drawers. They were empty. ‘All her stuff’s gone,’ she said. That meant that wherever Gemma had gone, she’d planned it, but the sense of unease stayed with her.
‘First prize for observation, Bishop.’ Luke had turned back to the computer and was moving the cursor across the screen.
‘Look, did you two have any kind of, you know…?’
‘Any kind of what, Roz?’
‘Any kind of row, or disagreement or something that would have upset her. You know what I mean, Luke.’
His expression didn’t change. ‘If I knew of a reason for her being away, I wouldn’t be looking.’
So that’s a ‘no’, then. ‘If Gemma deleted those files, should you be planning a raid on them?’ she said. She was beginning to understand that Gemma must have personal reasons for going away and that Luke knew more than he was telling her. She wasn’t prepared to be the patsy in whatever complicated game he and Gemma were playing. He smiled at her and waited. You haven’t thought it through, Bishop. ‘You’ve already looked,’ she said.
‘It’s no problem getting deleted files back,’ he said. ‘But…someone’s taken a bit of trouble here – all I’m getting is gibberish.’
So Gemma had done more that just issue a delete instruction. ‘Can’t you get them back at all?’
‘If I…I don’t know. Probably not. Not from something like this.’ He frowned, looking into space, thinking. ‘I don’t think Gemma could have done it. She could have wiped her hard disk, no problem. She knows how to do that…’ Roz reflected that she herself had managed to achieve just that, once, without either meaning to or knowing exactly what she’d done. ‘But she’d have needed a bit more for this.’
Roz thought about it. She wondered how she would tackle the problem if she wanted to take stuff off her hard disk in such a way that it was permanently removed. You couldn’t work in her field without knowing how easily such files could be retrieved. If she wanted to do it, she’d probably ask Luke. But if she didn’t want Luke to know…She thought she might have been able to come up with some kind of a solution. She just wouldn’t be 100 per cent confident that the files would be permanently deleted. And that, presumably, wouldn’t be too difficult to find out. ‘Gemma could have done it,’ she said.
Luke shrugged. He clearly thought she was wrong. He shut the machine down and stood up. ‘I’m going into the department,’ he said. ‘I’m going to look on her PC there.’
The Arts Tower was quiet on a Sunday. Students were using the library, and people were riding the paternoster – a university never really closes down – but the milling crowds of weekdays, of lecture and seminar days, weren’t there. They rode up in the paternoster in silence. N floor was deserted, the lights out, the corridors dim and empty. Luke led the way to Gemma’s room and used his master key to open it. Roz looked round. Everything was as neat and ordered as it had been on Friday. She remembered being in here, looking for Gemma’s draft report. She realized the significance of that as Luke switched the computer on, and felt a relief she couldn’t quite account for. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten. I looked up one of Gemma’s files on Friday. There was a report she had to get in. Everything’s there. Or at least the files I was looking for were there. I…’ Her voice trailed off as she looked over Luke’s shoulder. The computer was flashing a message at them, white letters on a black screen: error, error, error.
Luke looked at her. ‘It may have been here on Friday,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t now. It’s been wiped.’
Roz pushed her hair back from her face and shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anywhere else to look,’ she said. Whoever had wiped Gemma’s machine, they’d done a thorough job. The painstaking removal of files from her home computer would have taken a bit of time. Here, the hard disk had been reformatted. Everything was gone.
Roz and Luke had gone through the desk and the filing cabinets in Gemma’s room, checked the shelves, the window sill, the pockets of the lab coat that hung on the back of the door. Roz wondered why it was there. She’d never seen Gemma wear it. They were looking for Gemma’s back-up disks. Luke straightened up from the filing cabinet, and for a moment, his face was unguarded. He looked anxious, confused, and there were lines of tension around his mouth and eyes. He saw she was watching him, and made an attempt at a smile. ‘What’s the point in wiping the computer and leaving the back-ups?’ he said. ‘They’re not here.’
‘Whoever did it might not have known…’ Roz was still hoping the back-up disks that Gemma should have kept would turn up. Maybe they’d missed something. She turned back to the desk.
‘They aren’t here, Roz. Stop wasting time.’ He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and looked round the room, his face angry now. ‘I told her we needed an automatic back-up system.’
‘Who?’ Roz pushed the desk drawer shut. He was right. There was nothing here. They’d looked everywhere. She pushed her glasses back up her nose, then, irritated by them, she took them off.
‘Grey. I told Grey.’ He ran his hand through his hair and