Thursday, 6 August – 4 p.m.

It was touching, Dad’s level of excitement, as they sat down at his computer. He insisted on being there while Laurie navigated her way round the British Library website until she found Log in as a Reader Pass holder. Did she only imagine his hum of approval when she typed in 364511? There could be little doubt that her facility with numbers came from him. If by any chance she had forgotten the digits read out by Mrs Pennington, she was sure he would have been able to fill the gap. Now for the password. She tried freddy first, all lower case. No joy there: the red error message at the top of the screen made that clear. Freddy had the same result.

‘Try moving the upper-case letter along the word.’ Dad suggested. fReddy, frEddy, freDdy, fredDy and freddY were all equally unsuccessful. Just for the hell of it, Laurie tried dnilg: useless.

‘The trouble is’ Laurie said, ‘that even if you’re right about “freddy”, he could have manipulated it in any one of a number of ways that only he would know.’

‘No,’ Dad replied with surprising certainty, ‘because then he would have had to remember it. It’s got to be something simple.’

‘What if he had another dog, one that died, or a cuddly toy when he was a child?

‘They’re all possibilities.’ Dad admitted. He seemed deflated, or at least lost in thought.

Laurie tried logging on as herself. It was marvellously simple. She could, she realised, order any book she wanted from the comfort of the computer in her bedroom and find it waiting for her in the Reading Room by the time she’d cycled down. More to the point, there was the button at the top of the page: My Reading Room requests. She clicked on it, re-entered her details and got straight through to a page with three tabs: Current requests and Unsuccessful requests were both empty, but Older requests showed, all too clearly, the previous day’s activity. Behind her, Dad murmured, ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of Georgette Heyer for soothing the soul.’

Laurie shut down the page and stood up. ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ she declared. ‘Just to clear my head.’ She had to get away from Dad for a while. It was lovely spending the day with him, but he knew her too well. Besides, this would be her first chance to phone Paul all day: perhaps in five minutes she would be speaking to him!

 

‘Hi, this is Paul. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but if you leave a message I’ll get back to you.’

That was Paul’s voice all right, but no substitute for talking to the real thing. Laurie tried hard to sound positive after the beep. ‘Hi, it’s Laurie. Give me a call when you can. I’d love to talk to you.’ His gym might be underground, she reflected. That would explain why her calls kept going straight through to voicemail. She carried on walking.

Turning the corner, Laurie suddenly remembered the argument she’d witnessed there a few days before. What had brought that to mind? The man had been so free with his swear words. Well, used one swear word a lot, but then been curiously reluctant to say the word ‘shit’. How had he said it? ‘Ess-aitch-one-tee’. Laurie liked it, the idea that you denatured a word by replacing its vowel with a digit. That was, now she thought of it, what Dad said William Pennington had done with the word dog – just replaced the ‘o’ with ‘0’ when storing the clue to his password. You could do it with every vowel really: ‘A’ would be ‘4’; ‘E’ would be ‘3’. Laurie never got on to thinking about ‘U’. She’d had an idea. It was time to return home.

 

fr3ddy: that was it! Laurie was logged on to the British Library website as someone else. Was she doing something wrong? Should she be feeling this excited? Who cared? With Dad watching, she clicked on the link for My Reading Room requests and re-entered the user number and password. Just as it had been for her, the Current requests page was empty. She clicked on the tab for Older requests, entered a date range for the whole year, and there, in front of her, was the complete record of what William Pennington had been reading.

Titles like The Greek Kingdom of Bactria from Alexander to Eucratides the Great and A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia leapt out at her. What was it Margaret had said her husband was interested in – that there might be descendants of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan? Well, no inconsistency there: William Pennington was taking his research seriously. Dad pointed out the date against the first titles on the list. ‘Looks like he ordered these the day before he died. That doesn’t strike me as the action of a man about to kill himself.’

‘No,’ Laurie agreed, ‘but I don’t know if the police would see it that way. I guess if we look at his unsuccessful requests we can see if he’d ordered books for the following days.’ She clicked on the appropriate tab, and entered the same dates in the search boxes. Only three books were listed, and all had been requested months before William Pennington’s death.

‘Ah well,’ said Dad. ‘No reason why he had to order books in advance, I suppose.’

Laurie was quiet for a while, looking at the titles of the three books he had never got around to reading. Two clearly continued with the theme of Central Asia, but it was the third title that caught her eye: Pension Fund Deficits and the Minimum Funding Requirement. Was that just an aberration, the only time William Pennington had strayed into this particular topic? No: a quick check within Older requests showed that he had ordered a number of similar titles at around the same time, and had at least got as far as picking those ones up from the issue desk. In fact, she realised, those had been the first books he had ordered that year, almost as if it was the desire to learn more about pensions that had brought him back to the British Library. What was he trying to find out?