‘I’ve just spoken to Tim Cook,’ said Sellers.
‘Is he still shagging that granny?’
‘I doubt it. They’ve been living together for nearly ten years.’ Silence. ‘You’re supposed to laugh at that. I suppose you haven’t been married long enough.’ No response. Sellers tried a new approach. ‘The dental records were a match. The two skeletons are Encarna and Amy Oliva. Were,’ he corrected himself.
Gibbs looked up. If Sellers was right, he might as well stop what he was doing. But since he’d got this far… ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
‘There’s more. Amy Oliva’s nanny finally-Why do I bother?’ Sellers broke off, impatient. ‘If you’re interested, stop surfing porn sites and come to the briefing. You know they can find out what sites you’ve logged on to?’
‘I’m in Yahoo Mail at the moment.’ Gibbs grinned. ‘Porn sites? How do you know about those, then?’
Sellers gave up.
Once he’d gone, Gibbs typed in his ID and password. Amy Oliva was dead. Her body had been found in Mark Bretherick’s garden. It was optimistic to assume she might have replied to the e-mail Gibbs sent her yesterday.
She hadn’t. The only new message was from Gibbs’ sister. He opened it, saw that it had to do with arrangements for Christmas and closed it again without replying. It was August. Christmas wasn’t until December. You had to draw the line somewhere.
Porn sites. He sniffed contemptuously. Sellers had to be one of those sex addicts he’d read about, like… was it Kirk Douglas or Michael Douglas? The HTCU lot probably had a file on Sellers twenty inches thick. Gibbs thought about Norman Grace, who wore pink shirts and thin stripy scarves wound round his neck. And slip-on shoes. Kombothekra had entrusted the hard disk of Geraldine Bretherick’s laptop to a man who dressed like a woman. Once, Gibbs had seen Norman in the canteen reading a fashion magazine. If he was gay it wouldn’t be so bad, but the dickhead was straight, had loads of girlfriends-fit ones, too. So what was he playing at?
Gibbs was about to get up when he had an idea. Another job for Norman. Come to think of it, he probably didn’t need Norman. He could have a stab at it himself. He went to the Hotmail site. When the sign-in box appeared, he typed in Amy Oliva’s e-mail address, amysgonetospain@hotmail.com. Then he clicked on ‘Forgot your password?’. If it was anything like Yahoo Mail…
It was. Gibbs smiled when he saw the security question: ‘Who wrote Heart of Darkness?’ He typed in ‘Blondie’ and swore under his breath when it didn’t get him in. He tried Debbie Harry, Deborah Harry and Debra Harry before remembering that the Blondie song was called ‘Heart of Glass’. Bollocks. He went to Google, typed in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and discovered that it was a book by a bloke called Joseph Conrad. He clicked back to the Hotmail screen and gave this name he’d never heard of a try.
Result. He had to create a new password for the account in order to read the messages, since he’d claimed to have forgotten the old one. He decided on ‘Debbie’. In honour of his wife, not Debbie Harry.
Amy Oliva had three new messages. Gibbs clicked on ‘Inbox’ and waited. His eyes widened when the next screen appeared. The unread communications were highlighted in yellow to distinguish them from the ones that had been opened. The first of Amy’s new messages was from Oonagh O’Hara. The second and third were from Great Western Hotels and the Halifax bank-junk mail.
Gibbs’ message, the one he’d sent from St Swithun’s yesterday, was the fourth one down. It wasn’t highlighted in yellow. He shivered, rubbing the back of his neck. He’d e-mailed a dead girl, believing her to be alive, and she’d opened the e-mail. Or someone had, probably the person who had killed her.
Gibbs looked at the names beneath his own. Oonagh O’Hara was a frequent correspondent, as was somebody called Silvia Ruiz Oliva-a relative, presumably. The rest was spam.
Silvia turned out to be Amy’s grandmother: her messages were all signed ‘Gran’. He read them all, finding them increasingly interesting as he took in the cumulative meaning. There had obviously been a family row. Silvia kept asking when she might see Amy. In one she had written: ‘Please tell Mummy that if she’s cross with me, I’m sorry.’ Gibbs scrolled down to see if there were any messages from Amy attached to the bottom of Silvia’s. There weren’t. He went to the ‘Sent Messages’ page. Nothing. Not a single message had been copied to the folder.
He opened one of Oonagh’s messages. Nothing out of the ordinary, if you didn’t count the fact that its recipient was no longer living when it was written and sent. He read to the end, then breathed in sharply when he saw that Amy’s original letter hadn’t been deleted. Gibbs scrolled down further and found, beneath Amy’s section, another message from Oonagh, probably one that was also in the inbox. Beneath that, another message from whoever was pretending to be Amy. A lengthy back-and-forth correspondence, all trailing from this one message. Oonagh’s e-mails, Gibbs noticed, contained the odd spelling mistake. Amy’s written English was faultless.
Stepford had interviewed Oonagh O’Hara yesterday and she’d told him she hadn’t heard from Amy since last May. Clearly she was lying. Or rather she believed she was lying. In fact, she’d told the truth: she had been exchanging letters with Amy’s killer, not with Amy.
Gibbs raced through the messages. At the end of each of her letters, before signing off, Oonagh had written, ‘Hows your mum?’ or ‘Is your mum okay?’ In one she’d gone further and said, ‘How are things with you and you’re mum?’ Twice, after enquiring about Encarna Oliva, Oonagh had written ‘Hows Patrick? ’ and once, ‘Hows Partick?’
Had Encarna Oliva left her husband for another man? Had Patrick worked at the bank with her? Or maybe he’d been a friend or colleague of her husband’s, someone Angel Oliva had worked with at Culver Valley General Hospital. There were some women, Gibbs knew, who’d think nothing of shagging their husbands’ mates. Gibbs thought it was inevitable that one day Sellers would try to bed Debbie; he was training himself to dislike Sellers in advance, so that when it happened he’d be prepared.
Amy’s replies to Oonagh’s e-mails were chatty but bland, full of news about watching bullfights and flamenco dancers. Clichés of Spain. Lies. Despite her e-mail address, Amy Oliva never got to Spain. She never got further than the garden at Corn Mill House. Interestingly, she-her killer, Gibbs corrected himself-had not once answered Oonagh’s enquiries about Encarna and Patrick.
Why had Oonagh O’Hara lied about when she’d last been in touch with Amy? There was nothing secret or personal about any of these e-mails. ‘Something weird’s going on,’ Gibbs said aloud.
He was on his way out of the CID room when the phone rang. It was Barbara Fitzgerald, the head of St Swithun’s. ‘Hello, Christopher,’ she said warmly, once Gibbs had identified himself. ‘I’m just phoning to let you know I’ve e-mailed you a full list of everyone who went on the owl sanctuary trip last year. I did forget a few names, as it turns out.’
Gibbs thanked her.
‘Is there… any news?’
‘No.’ He didn’t want to be the one to tell her that another of her pupils had been murdered. Nor did he want to talk, knowing what he was withholding; guilt made him more brusque than usual and eventually Barbara Fitzgerald gave up.
Feeling unsettled, ashamed of his cowardice, Gibbs navigated his way back to Yahoo Mail. He entered his ID and password, and was waiting for his inbox to appear when he realised his mistake. Barbara Fitzgerald didn’t know his Yahoo address; she would have sent the list of names to his work e-mail, the address from which he’d e-mailed her earlier. Dick-brain. He was about to log out of his Yahoo account when he saw that he had a new message. From Amy Oliva. No amount of blinking made it disappear.
Gibbs double-clicked on the envelope icon. The message had been sent from a Hotmail address, but a different one: amysbackfromspain@hotmail.com. It was only three words long, three ordinary words that worried Gibbs more than an overt threat would have. He got up and left the room, not bothering to sign out of his account.