Preface to Murder, M Morris [best selling autobiographies TXT] 📗

Daniel shook his head. ‘No, Mum never mentioned this company either.’ But the prospect of yet more money coming his way seemed to have raised his spirits considerably.

Bridget finished her coffee and biscuit and put the cup and saucer back on the tray. ‘Before I go, just one more quick question. I don’t suppose either of you know the password to Diane’s laptop?’

‘No, sorry,’ said Daniel.

‘Me neither,’ said Ian. ‘Diane tended to be rather secretive about such matters.’

Bridget nodded. She was beginning to suspect that Diane had been secretive about a number of matters.

‘You know,’ said Ian, ‘Diane had a strong interest in secret codes, the kind that spies used. She used to invent her own codes when she was a teenager, and she collected books on espionage, cryptography, and so on. She loved all sorts of puzzles, cryptic crosswords, secret languages and suchlike. So I imagine her password isn’t going to be easy to guess.’

‘Right,’ said Bridget, standing up. It seemed that nothing Ian or his son told her today was going to be helpful.

‘Before you go,’ said Ian, ‘I have a question for you. We were wondering when it will be possible for the family to have access to Diane’s house. There are documents that will be needed to complete all the formalities of her death, and although Daniel will inherit everything of value, there are personal items like photographs and other mementoes that should go to certain family members.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Bridget. ‘I don’t see any reason why the house needs to remain off limits beyond the end of this week. I’ll give you a call as soon as we’ve finished with it. I assume you have a key?’

‘I have one,’ said Daniel. ‘And Aunt Annabel does too.’

‘Actually,’ said Ian, ‘Annabel has lost hers.’

‘Lost it?’ queried Bridget. ‘Do you mean somebody took it?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. I think she probably just misplaced it. She’s been so upset, you know. I’m sure it will turn up.’

Bridget thanked the father and son for their time and rose from her seat. Ian showed her to the front door. He lingered, and she sensed there was something on his mind. ‘Listen, please don’t think badly about my son,’ he said. ‘I know that sometimes he appears to be mercenary and ungrateful, but he’s not really. It’s just that he and Diane didn’t have an easy relationship.’

‘So everyone keeps saying.’ It was hard for Bridget to reconcile Daniel’s resentful attitude towards his mother with the photograph albums that Bridget had seen in Diane’s house, filled with photograph after photograph of her only son. It was obvious from those photographs that she had thought the world of him, and she had left everything to him in her will. Yet he clearly hated her.

Ian sighed. ‘I suppose the truth is that Diane was a product of her time. Back in the eighties, women were being told that they could have it all. Even the woman Diane loathed most in the world, Margaret Thatcher, had it all – she ran the country and looked after her family at the same time. So Diane felt that in her own way she had to do the same. I suppose that she may have treated Daniel the same way that she treated her career – a project, with goals, targets and a timetable. It wasn’t really what a young boy needed from his mother.’

‘But Daniel enjoyed a good relationship with you?’

‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ said Ian. ‘You know, I would have liked to have had more children, but Diane was adamant that one was enough. She had already put a tick in that box with Daniel’s birth, and she didn’t have time for more. If I’m being completely honest, that was probably the main reason we drifted apart.’

‘I see,’ said Bridget. ‘I’m sorry.’

So now the truth of the failed relationship was emerging. The “amicable parting of the ways” that Ian had described to her at their first meeting was little more than a fiction intended to conceal the usual bitterness and recriminations of a broken marriage. Well, Bridget couldn’t blame Ian for that. No one wanted to dwell on love turned sour. Better to paper over the cracks, fix a smile to your face and soldier on. It looked as if Ian had found happiness with his second wife whilst maintaining a good relationship with his son from his first marriage. Not a bad outcome in Bridget’s book.

24

Ffion drummed her long fingers on the keyboard, her green-painted nails tapping at the keys idly, unconsciously beating out the four-to-the-floor rhythm of the techno music that she loved. But no matter what combination of letters and numbers she tried, none matched the password of Diane’s laptop.

Ffion had cracked plenty of passwords in her time. Obvious passwords like birthdays and pet’s names. Trickier ones that involved a combination of a date and a name. Even more obscure ones that required some kind of external key to crack them. But nothing she had tried here was working, and she was out of ideas.

If only the filesystem wasn’t encrypted. Then her USB cloning device would have let her bypass the laptop’s security and read the data with ease. But with encryption in place, there was only one way in, and that was with the password.

Why on earth had the academic gone to the trouble of encrypting her data? What had she wanted to hide? Ffion had asked some of Diane’s colleagues at the Blavatnik School, wondering if this was official policy, but she’d been met with puzzlement. None of the other academics even knew how to encrypt a computer. Diane had clearly been determined to conceal something. And Ffion was equally determined to find out what.

Encrypting a filesystem wasn’t an easy feat to pull off. It suggested a high degree of