How did he know?
A dozen questions cried out for attention in Bridge’s mind, but that one kept surfacing, pushing the others aside, even though the others were more immediately pressing. OK, figuring out her real name probably wasn’t that hard for someone of Ten’s abilities. Obtain her IP somehow, drag through ISP records. And he’d used that info to find her address, which is how he’d taken a photo of her coming out of her usual coffee shop in the morning, before catching the tube. So then he must have — oh, God. Followed her to work? That’s more like your job, isn’t it? Had he watched her disappear through a secure gate at Vauxhall, and guessed what she did for a living?
It was all a bit creepy. Why not just ask her?
Simple: because she’d already lied to him, and everyone else, telling their online friends she worked in finance. Somehow, Ten had figured out she was lying, and decided to find out for himself. Bridge had always got the impression Ten worked in some sensitive areas — they didn’t give any old BOFH a key to Telehouse, not any more — but he’d never been specific, and she’d never asked. Now she wondered if perhaps he’d ever consulted with SIS or GCHQ, if that was how he’d recognised that she lived in a world of lies and secrets familiar to him.
But the closer she got to London Bridge, speeding through tunnels on the Northern line, the more she doubted her actions. An email, scheduled to be sent in the event of his death? It was like something out of Agatha Christie. Mind you, Mr O’Riordan had been an avid reader. The toppling bookshelves in his house were testament to that.
But it was the Faith and the Muse lyric in his sig that sealed it. Unlike normal people, Ten didn’t have an email signature stored away to be sent with every message. Instead he typed his signature out, by hand, every time he emailed or posted to Usenet, allowing him to insert whatever quotation came to mind at that moment. And there always was one, right under the handle. Most of them went over Bridge’s head, if she was honest. A few classical text quotes, occasionally some Shakespeare, sometimes a Yeats, Wilde, or Joyce (so obvious in hindsight), and the odd song lyric that she recognised. But just as often they were lines she wouldn’t have known if they’d hit her over the head.
Except this one. She knew precisely one F&TM song, because Ten had once made her an MP3 playlist featuring his favourite bands. The ploy hadn’t worked — she still couldn’t stand The Mission, for example — but she remembered telling him she liked that particular F&TM song. And now its opening line was the signature quote in his ‘dead man’s trigger’ email.
Who else would know? Who else could possibly know Ten’s sig habits, and that Bridge would recognise a lyric from that one particular song, by that one particular band? Nobody. For the email to be fake required a level of coincidence that she simply wouldn’t credit.
But if it really was Ten, why didn’t he just tell her what he wanted to say? Why send her chasing down his garage keys, of all things? He wasn’t a spy. And that was one thing Bridge knew for sure, as both she and Andrea Thomson had checked with their respective offices that very morning. He’d even made fun, with the ‘cloak and dagger’ reference. If this really was a practical joke or hoax of some kind, it had gone too far. But it couldn’t be. Declan O’Riordan’s corpse was currently laid out in a city morgue, awaiting autopsy.
No joke.
Perhaps he thought Bridge would appreciate this kind of thing, that she might actually enjoy it, having figured out what she did for a living. Or perhaps whatever he’d found when he decoded the ASCII messages was too sensitive to disclose in email. Ten, more than most, knew just how insecure most of the internet really was.
One other big question was more straightforward, and troubling. Why hadn’t she called this in? What the hell was she doing out here on her own? As she changed to the overground at London Bridge, she considered several justifications. It was late; it might be nothing; Giles would be baffled by the email; she still didn’t have anything concrete to show anyone, or prove anything.
But deep down she knew she hadn’t called anyone, or asked for help, or advised the police she was on her way, for a simple reason. She had no jurisdiction. And Andrea would fight to take the case from her, citing its fully domestic nature, not to mention Bridge’s relationship with the victim.
As she left Catford station and approached the house, Bridge wondered if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Night had fallen, and the earlier hue and cry of activity around the house had faded with the daylight. The only hint of anything amiss was the two uniformed police officers standing guard outside the door. But those officers stood between her and the only clue she had about what had happened to her friend.
“Evening, chaps,” she said, displaying her ID as she walked up the front path. “I was here earlier, if you remember?”
The senior officer squinted, apparently struggling with that memory, but the younger officer smiled. “The spook girls,” he said. “You and the short one.”
Bridge returned the smile, suppressing the urge to wonder what Andrea Thomson would make of her new epithet. “Need to take another look inside, if you don’t mind. SOCOs are all done, yeah?”
The younger officer nodded, and made to lift the crime scene tape across the front door, but the older officer stopped him. “Hold on,” he said, “we weren’t informed. Shouldn’t we get notice from your boss?”
She’d anticipated this. Actually, she was a little disappointed in the younger officer for intending to let her in so easily. She tapped her ID card, still held loose in her hand. “Do you really think we announce this sort of thing over the radio? There is a reason we’re called the secret service, you know.”
The policeman shrugged. “Even so.”
Bridge sighed theatrically. “All right, look. My boss is having dinner with the Home Office PUS tonight. And in about…” she checked her watch, “…ten minutes’ time, the Secretary is going to ask him if the rumours about this case are true.”
The younger officer looked confused. “What rumours?”
“Oh, you’re not —” She stopped herself, then lowered her voice. “Look, you didn’t hear it from me, but there’s a suspected IS cell in Turkmenistan that we think might be connected to this Irish chap. You know he worked with computers, right?”
The senior officer looked sceptical. “SOCOs already took his computer.”
“And we took it from SOCO, and I’ve spent all day trying to get some sense out of the bloody thing. Which is why I’m here, to make sure we didn’t miss anything this morning.” She checked her watch again, then looked expectantly at the policemen. “And I’m cutting it fine, if you know what I mean.”
The moment hung in the air, then dropped as the senior officer lifted the tape. “All right,” he said, “but I’d better accompany you.”
Inside Bridge cursed, but outwardly she beamed a magnan-imous smile. “Absolutely. Whatever you need to do.”
The electrics had been cleared as safe, and under the house bulbs rather than the hard light and shadow of SOCO lamps, Ten’s lounge looked much more mundane. It was still a terrible mess, but something about normal illumination made the scene almost banal. She had to remind herself she was standing in a room belonging to a man she’d known for more than a decade, but to whom she would never speak again.
The policeman following her hadn’t been part of the plan. She’d hoped to be left alone, to simply go into the kitchen, take the garage keys, and leave. Instead, she now had to play out a charade for the benefit of the officer, rifling through drawers and papers as if she was looking for something unknown. The back of her neck began to warm, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice the golf ball sized beads of sweat on her skin. A burst of static from the policeman’s radio made her jerk around as if someone had been shot.
“You all right, ma’am?”
“Yes, sorry…little bit jumpy. Like I said, terrorism. Never good.”
“No, ma’am.”
Bridge finished rifling through the stack of papers she’d occupied herself with and pouted, as if frustrated and considering another place to look. Then she shook her head and head walked past the officer into the kitchen, praying that Ten was the kind of person who kept books and papers in there alongside food-related items. Knowing there was a skull candlestick gave her some hope.
It turned out that not only was Declan O’Riordan the kind of person who kept books and papers in the kitchen, but he had also been the kind of person to keep bills, receipts, bank statements, and much more stuffed into kitchen drawers. She removed them all, placed them on the counter, then took her time leafing through while the officer paced around the room.
“Seems like a decent area, this,” she said. “I need to find a new place. What do you know?”
The policeman shrugged. “Changed a lot since we moved here, back in the nineties. It was pretty rough, back then, but it was all me and the missus could afford. Now it’s all slowly turning into cafés and crêches.”
“Ah, hipster central?”
The policeman chuckled. “Used to be that if you came across a man covered in tattoos you kept your hand on your baton, know what I mean? These days…”
Bridge interrupted him, startled. “What was that?”
“What?”
“I don’t know, did you hear it?” She fixed her gaze on the hallway. “I thought I heard… Oh, never mind. I’m hearing things. Maybe the place has mice.”
But the line had worked, and now the policeman was also staring at the door into the hallway. Without looking away, he thumbed his radio. “You OK out there?”
The younger officer replied immediately. “All fine. Something up?”
“Stand by.” The older officer walked into the hallway, cautious and alert — with, she noted, one hand firmly on his baton.
The moment he was out of sight she reached across the counter, lifted one edge of the skull candlestick, swiped the keys from underneath, lowered the skull, dropped the keys in her coat pocket, and replaced her hands on the bank envelopes she’d been sifting through. It took one and a half seconds, and she barely looked at the keys. If they weren’t the right ones, she was out of luck. There was no way she’d be able to bluff her way back in a second time.
“All clear.” The policeman returned to the kitchen, and winked at Bridge as he said into his radio, “The place has probably got mice.”
She smiled as if embarrassed, then took three random bank statements from the pile in front of her and laid them on the counter. “I reckon this is what we missed,” she said to the officer, taking out her personal phone, “I mean, who keeps bank statements in the kitchen?” She opened the camera app and took pictures, as if documenting the statements. “Some very interesting financial stuff on here. My boss is going to love me for this, thank you.” She put her iPhone away, replaced the papers back in the drawers, and nodded to herself firmly.
“All done?” asked the policeman.
Bridge smiled as he ushered her out of the house. “All done.”