The lounge was the focus of the forensics team’s efforts, and she could see why. It was packed with stuff, bookshelves overflowing (and not just with books), barely a flat surface visible under the piles of papers, magazines, and more books, walls covered in posters and cork boards…
One cork board was covered in photos, a combination of printouts and real photographs, of goths. She peered at it, and quickly realised she recognised some of them — other members of uk.london.gothic-netizens, either people she’d met herself at club nights, or who had posted JPEGs of themselves to the group. “Shit,” she sighed, “it’s him.”
“What makes you so sure?” asked Andrea.
Bridge gestured around the room. “Everything.”
The posters were all bands she knew Tenebrae_Z was into. The Mission, All About Eve, Faith and the Muse, Dream Disciples, and an old Joshua Tree era U2 poster. She’d never understood Ten’s love of U2, but then she hadn’t known he was Irish. Now she’d never know him at all, never chat with him again at two in the morning, never roll her eyes at his boyish pride in fitting a new exhaust to his latest sports car.
And it was all her fault. If she hadn’t stayed subscribed to france.misc.binaries-random, if she hadn’t noticed the ASCII posts, if she hadn’t mentioned them to Ten, if she hadn’t spent weeks musing with him on what they might mean…none of this would have happened, and Declan O’Riordan would still be alive, making bad jokes, fixing cars, and listening to all the wrong bands.
There was no way to make up for that. No way to turn back time, or undo the things she’d done. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to be able to snap her fingers and make Ten live again. It was impossible. But finding whoever did this to him, and bringing them to justice? That was possible. That, she silently vowed to do, no matter how difficult it was or how long it took.
“One hundred per cent bachelor pad,” said Andrea. “I expect he was a lonely soul.”
That wasn’t true, but trying to explain online friendships, and the goth lifestyle, would take more time than Bridge had patience for right now. Instead she turned to the desk, noting an empty space, and called to the SOCOs, “Where’s his computer?”
“Which one? They’re all bagged and in the van,” replied a woman. “Weirdo like this, they’re probably full of porn and guns. We’ll get our nerds on it.”
Perhaps sensing Bridge was about to say something impolitic, Andrea cut in, “No, I don’t think so. We’ll handle the computers. What about his phone?”
The forensic officer shrugged. “Nothing here, maybe it was on the body. Ask me, this is all a lot of trouble for a rando who got stabbed.”
Bridge jerked up from the desk in surprise. “Stabbed? I thought he drowned?”
“Maybe I heard wrong,” said the officer, shrugging again as she exited the room with a bag full of computer software boxes. “Best ask the Inspector.”
“I’ll go,” said Andrea, “and I’ll get whatever laptop was on that desk while I’m about it. You stay, see if you can find anything here that might tell us who he was meeting.” Bridge was pretty sure his computer would hold that information, but something in Andrea’s tone suggested she didn’t trust her not to start punching people for their gallows humour. She was probably right.
It wasn’t hard to see why Andrea would assume Ten, or rather ‘Declan’, was lonely. Despite his age, he lived like a student bachelor. The large flatscreen TV on the wall was hooked up to an expensive home theatre system, and one of every modern videogame console. His stereo could have come straight from a showroom, and was surrounded by racks of CDs piled three-deep or towering on top of the speakers. There was just enough space on the sofa for one person to sit, so long as that person didn’t mind being surrounded by books, magazines, DVDs and videogames taking up the other seats, piled over the arms and back.
And the newspapers. God, the newspapers.
Bridge had a similar mini-tower of her own, old copies of Private Eye she kept around ‘just in case’, but Ten seemed to have bought and held on to almost every newspaper printed in the past year. The broadsheets she could understand, especially for a freelance consultant, but the tabloids baffled her. Ten had his foibles and the occasional odd opinion, but he’d never struck her as a Sun reader, let alone the Mail. There were a few copies of the Daily Star lying around, for heaven’s sake, which didn’t even have a crossword —
She stopped, stared at the piles of newspapers, realising why her mind had focused on that. They were all open to the crossword, but only a few were fully completed. Most had maybe half a dozen answers filled in. Here was the Times, June 18th. Four clues answered. Meanwhile, a copy of the Mirror from the same day had just two answers completed. Then there was the Sun, also June 18th…and the Guardian, June 18th…
Bridge found a second pile of newspapers, all different publications, and flicked through the pages. All from the same day, last month. She turned to another loose pile, thumbing through them. All from a single day, six weeks ago. All with part-finished crosswords. There was something here. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Hang on, isn’t this you?”
Andrea re-entered the room. Under one arm she carried an evidence bag, inside which was a bulky Alienware laptop covered in stickers, and with her other arm pointed at a photograph printout on the cork board, pinned along with all the others.
“It can’t be,” said Bridge, looking over Andrea’s shoulder. “We never met, and I don’t post photos of myself to — oh.”
Andrea raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think this is a selfie.”
The picture was taken
