up just a few of them confirmed Enzo’s suspicions. So this, it seemed, was where Marc Fraysse had actually kept his culinary secrets. He stopped scrolling on one, mid-list. It was titled, simply, Moi. Me. He opened it. Inside was a single document called moi. dssr. Enzo had no idea what that was. He double-clicked it, and saw a piece of software called Dossier opening up on the dock. The document moi. dssr then appeared on the screen as a blank pane containing one large window, and one narrow one down the left-hand side, which was headed Title, and 0 entries. A slide-out pane to the left of that contained one single icon called Unfiled Entries. Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. It seemed that the document was empty.
Instinctively he moved his cursor to click on Unfiled Entries, and suddenly a document entitled Moi appeared in the narrow window, and an icon of a padlock in the large one next to it. Locked. Enzo’s eye flickered up to the top of the document and a toolbar, where he spotted the same padlock icon. He clicked on it, and a window dropped down asking for a password. Enzo took a deep, tremulous breath, and glanced at his watch. He must have been in here ten minutes now. There was no knowing where in the hotel either Guy or Elisabeth might be, and God knew how long it might take to crack Fraysse’s password.
He drew his mouse across the blotter, and his cursor swooped down to the dock where he selected and opened the Safari web browser. When its window filled the screen with Marc Fraysse’s homepage, he selected Google from the toolbar and typed into search: most common computer passwords.
Within seconds, more than thirty-three million links to sites on the subject appeared on his screen. He selected the top one, which took him to a magazine article which listed the ten most commonly used passwords. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. Were people really so stupid? The number one password was password. Then came 123456, followed by qwerty, which on a French keyboard would be azerty. More in hope than expectation, Enzo began trying them out, one by one. Some seemed surprising, like monkey or blink182, or idiotic, like abc123 or letmein, but none of them worked. He was not surprised.
He closed his eyes, his mind turning over furiously. Some people, he knew, used the names of their children, but he had no idea what Marc and Elisabeth’s children were called. He tried Elisabeth, without success. Then Marc’s first and second names separately, followed by his date of birth. Nothing. He sighed and sat back in frustration, and found his eyes wandering over the doodles on Fraysse’s blotter. They came to rest on the quotation from Sartre: la nature parle et l’experience traduit. As with the letters, JR, Fraysse had gone over again and again the initial letters of each word in the quotation, so that they stood out quite markedly. He didn’t believe for one moment that Fraysse had done it consciously, but rather sub-consciously, perhaps while speaking on the telephone. But together, those initial letters produced the acronym lnpelt. It was a seriously long shot, but Enzo turned back to the keyboard and typed the letters into the password window and hit the return key. The large empty window to the right immediately filled with text, and the scrollbar revealed that there was a lot of it.
But Enzo had no time to scan even a few sentences. He heard the door opening into the bedroom next door from the living room beyond, and his heart pushed pulsing up into his throat. Someone was in the bedroom. Perhaps just the maid. But it was equally possible that it could be Elisabeth. What to do?
As quickly as he could he re-typed the password, which he had to do twice before it would lock the document. Then he shut it down. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for the memory stick he always carried with him and plugged it into the USB socket. When its icon appeared, he dragged and dropped the document on to it, and it began to copy. Infuriatingly slowly. He could hear the unknown person moving about in the next room. “Come on, come on!” he muttered under his breath, through clenched teeth. He stopped breathing as the progress bar moved painfully, protractedly, from left to right, before finally the transfer was complete and he sucked air back into his lungs. He ejected the icon and pulled the memory stick from its socket, stuffing it into his pocket and rising to his feet as the door from the bedroom swung open.
He turned, hoping to see the maid. But it was Elisabeth who stood there, her right palm placed flat against her chest. She seemed startled, even shocked, to find him there. “Monsieur Macleod!”
Enzo did his best to seem relaxed. “Just taking a look at your husband’s computer, Madame Fraysse. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“You startled me. The staff never come in here. So when I heard movement I thought perhaps we had an intruder.”
Enzo grinned self-consciously. “Just me.”
“It is customary, Monsieur Macleod, in polite society, to ask permission to view private belongings. Even those of a deceased person.”
There was no mistaking the controlled anger in her voice.
“My apologies, madame. Since you had shown me in here yesterday, I didn’t feel I was intruding on privacy. And I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“Well, you have. I have nothing to hide from you, Monsieur Macleod, and am happy to show you whatever you want to see. But, I would like to be asked.”
Enzo nodded contritely. “I appreciate that, madame. My apologies again, if I upset or startled you.” He glanced at the computer. “Shall I close it down?”
“No, that’s alright.”
They stood for a moment in awkward silence. Then Enzo forced a smile. “Well. I’ll leave you in peace, then.” He turned toward the door.
“Monsieur Macleod?”
He stopped, and turned, the door half open. “Yes?”
“Did you find anything?”
He frowned.
“On the computer?”
“Oh. No. Nothing of any significance.” But he knew that the moment he was gone she could track exactly where he had been by checking the Recent Items menu. He wondered why it was that he didn’t want to ask her about the emails, or tell her about the locked document. But instinct and experience told him that information shared could be information compromised. “I’ll see you later.”
And as he stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him, he exhaled a deep breath of relief.
Chapter Nine
Enzo’s laptop sat open on the coffee table, while he squatted on the edge of the settee waiting for the moi. dssr file to transfer from his memory stick to his hard drive. Sophie was curled up beside him, one arm draped idly over his shoulder watching the slow progress of the transfer. It was after eleven, and she had sneaked straight up to his room after the evening service.
“Won’t you be missed?” he had asked her.
“Nah. Everyone’s too tired to bother about socialising at the end of the day. And the only one who’s liable to notice I’m not in my room is Philippe.”
“Who’s Philippe?”
“The sous-chef. I told you!”
“Oh. The boy who’s taken a shine to you?”
“Yes.”
“So how will he know that you’re not in your room?”
“Oh, papa, stop being so suspicious.” She had drawn a deep breath of indignation. “He quite often comes in to listen to music and chat.”
“And that’s all?”
“That’s all.” She had sighed, then. “Anyway, I’ve been playing a bit hard to get lately, so he won’t be surprised if I don’t answer when he knocks on the door.”
Finally the file finished transferring, and he double-clicked on it. A message appeared informing him that he did not possess any software that would open it.
Sophie squinted at the screen. “So what are you going to do?”
“See if I can track down the software and download it.”
