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
