Molly's sitting at the kitchen table, her slate propped up in front of her. She's staring at the news story over a bowl of cereal that she knows she isn't going to be able to eat.
The boy found dead on the construction site a mile up the road: that has to be Danny. A fatal accident. A killer fall. The article doesn't name him, but Molly knows. Detective Inspector Martin Drake warns about the dangers of trespassing, says he can't release any more details until the family is informed. There's a callback to a last month's tragedy, a young graffiti artist killed on railway tracks.
She switches tabs in the slate's web browser, finds the other story. One dead in gas explosion. The body of Steven Morrison, 32, is recovered from the ashes of his home following a fire in the early hours of Sunday morning. Investigators are working to determine the cause of the blast, but it is probably a faulty appliance.
There's no mention of the fact that the two people killed lived opposite each other. No suggestion the two stories could be linked.
She's turning this puzzle over and over in her mind when Molly realises there are tears running down her cheeks. She puts her head in her hands and cries for Danny Solomon.
She forces herself to eat a piece of toast, puts food in Stanley's dish, and goes to clean herself up. The fluorescent light in the Roots' small windowless bathroom makes the face in the mirror look like a ghost: a pale spectre that she can barely pick out against the pristine white tiles behind her. Her hair is lank and knotted, and her eyes are rimmed with red.
Molly takes a shower, combs out her hair, and puts on clean clothes. The face in the mirror looks a little more human, now, back in focus. She feels like she's back in control. And there's a click-click of polished stones in her head: she knows where to find a password.
Back in to her room, she opens the curtains and lets the sun in. It's before 8 – Molly's always been an early riser – and outside it's a crisp, cold morning, one that suits her mood. She sits at her desk, and out of nowhere Stanley is in her lap, purring gigantically.
She boots up the PC and dumps the contents of Danny's phone into her hard drive. What she's interested in is his ebook library. Pride and Prejudice. Northanger Abbey. Little Women. Barchester Towers. The Brothers Karamazov. The Art of War. She opens Pride and Prejudice.
It's a Project Gutenberg book – a free, public domain title, part of a huge archive of texts available on the internet. Molly's got a lot of them herself. It's the plain text version, no fancy formatting. And it looks just like it ought to: there's Elizabeth Bennett, and there's Mr Darcy. No surprises here.
Molly clicks through to the Gutenberg site and downloads a second copy of each book, giving them different filenames. Then she opens a command terminal, and tells her computer to compare the two sets. The command is 'DIFF': Danny's last message to her.
The computer chews on it for a fraction of a second, and tells her there's only one difference in the two sets. It's in The Art of War – a book about samurai warfare from over a thousand years ago.
Oh divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands!
Good advice, Molly thinks. DIFF tells her that Danny's added the h in Oh, and the last exclamation point.
She double-clicks the larger of the two encrypted files and copies the whole quote into the password box. It doesn't work. She tries the same thing with the smaller file, clicks 'OK' – and her heart leaps as it starts to decrypt.
Inside the archive are only two files. The first is nothing but a link pointing to the website of a tanning salon in Auckland. The second is a text file with a username and password. Molly is about to click the link, then thinks better of it, and spends a few minutes setting up an anonymous connection from her computer using one of Danny's suite of handy little programs. They didn't save Danny, though, thinks Molly, and for a moment she's scared she might cry again.
She clicks through to the website. Molly sees she's been brought through to the service entrance: it's the login page that the site owner would use to get in and poke around in the code. She uses the login details from Danny's file, and it lets her in.
Molly quickly realises two things. Firstly, Danny's been using this website as a kind of post box. Files are coming in from various places and being stored on the tanning salon's server. She'd bet the owner is blissfully unaware of this. Secondly, some of the files in Danny's secret stash are recent. Very recent. The latest one is stamped only a few hours ago. So whatever Danny was using it for, it's still working.
She downloads everything, closes the website down, and looks at what she's got.
Depressingly, it's another load of encrypted emails. She's starting to get a little sick of the 'Password required!' message that pops up whenever she's trying to open one. There's only one that she can open:
From: adpp331@gmx.com
To: wizard_world22@hotmail.com
You can relax. We plugged the leak, and there shouldn't be any more water damage to your property. We didn't find any of the documents you were concerned about, but we'll continue to investigate now that the immediate danger has passed.
We're even now, right?
Molly sits back, strokes Stanley, and thinks. A couple of people with disposable email addresses, talking about plumbing. But the time stamp is less than an hour after Molly found the phone. Perhaps not long after Danny died. She doesn't think that's a coincidence.
She's fiercely curious about who these people are.
She opens a browser window, makes herself a throwaway email address, and taps out a message:
From: dam0c73sgh0st@hotmail.com
To: adpp331@gmx.com
I've got the documents you're looking for. Let's meet.
Molly hits 'SEND'.
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