Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [238]
Tim’s bedroom was the last place they looked, and here too all was in order. The fact that it was the bedroom of a fourteen-year-old boy was nowhere in evidence, although his clothing still hung in the wardrobe, and his tee-shirts and jerseys were folded within the chest of drawers.
“Ah,” Freddie said, approaching a table that did service as a desk beneath a window. On this sat Tim’s laptop computer, its top open as if it had been recently used. “This might give us something,” he told Manette. He sat down, stretched his fingers, and said, “Let’s see what we can see.”
Manette went to his side and said, “We don’t have his password. What do we know about delving into other people’s computers without passwords?”
Freddie looked at her and smiled. “Ah, you of little faith,” he said. He began to whittle away at the problem, which didn’t turn out to be much of a problem at all. Tim’s computer was set to remember his password. They needed only his user name, which Manette knew since she had done her best to e-mail Tim regularly. The rest, as Freddie said, was bingo.
He chuckled at the ease of it all and said to Manette, “I do wish your back had been turned, old girl. You might actually have thought I was some sort of genius.”
She squeezed his shoulder. “You’re genius enough for me, my dear.”
As Freddie set about examining e-mails and trails to various websites, Manette looked at what was on the desk along with the computer. School books, an iPod with its docking station and speakers, a notebook filled with disturbing pencil drawings of grotesque alien beings consuming various body parts of humans, a book on bird watching— where had that come from? she wondered— a pocket knife that she unfolded to see a chilling brown crust of blood on its largest blade, and a map printed from the Internet. She took this last and said, “Freddie, could this be— ?”
Car doors slammed outside the house. Manette leaned over the table to look out of the window. She thought it likely that Kaveh had returned, that, perhaps, he’d found Tim himself and had brought him home, in which case she and Freddie would need to be off the boy’s computer posthaste. But the arrivals weren’t Kaveh, as things turned out. They were, instead, an older Asian couple, possibly Iranian like Kaveh. With them was a teenage girl, who looked up at the manor house with a long-fingered hand pressed against her lips. She shot a glance at the older couple. The woman took her arm and together all three of them approached the front door.
They had to belong to Kaveh in some fashion, Manette thought. There were few enough Asians in this part of Cumbria, and hardly any at all in the countryside. They’d come on a surprise visit, perhaps. They’d come to call on their way from Point A to Point Z. Who knew why they’d come? It didn’t matter because they’d knock on the door and no one would answer and then they’d skedaddle so that she and Freddie could get on with things.
But that didn’t happen. Apparently with a key in their possession, they let themselves inside. Manette murmured, “What on earth…?” And then, “Freddie, someone’s arrived. It’s an older couple and a girl. I think they belong to Kaveh. Shall I…?”
Freddie said, “Damn. I’m getting somewhere here. Can you… I don’t know …Can you handle them in some way?”
Manette left the room quietly, closing the door behind her. She made a suitable amount of noise as she descended the stairs. She called out, “Hullo? Hullo? C’n I help you?” and she came face-to-face with everyone in the passage between the kitchen and the fire house.
The best course was bluffing, Manette decided. She smiled as if there was nothing unusual in her being inside the manor house. She said, “I’m Manette