Bright halogen strips temporarily blinded her, but as her sight returned she knew she was in the right place. Tool racks lined the walls. Where the racks ended, metal shelves filled with parts and smaller tools filled the space. Next to the wall-mounted power point was a workbench covered in half-built parts, oily chamois leathers, an oil-stained portable stereo, stacks of CDs, an electric kettle and a coffee mug. The workbench was as untidy as anything in Ten’s house. The tool racks and shelves, by contrast, were extremely neat and well arranged.
And in the centre of the unit, in differing states of repair, were four sports cars.
Bridge smiled to herself. Ten hadn’t been bullshitting at all. They were real. The only problem now was that she knew very little about cars. Sure, she could drive. Advanced Driving and Pursuit was one of the many courses she’d undertaken at the Loch, though not her best, and once she got out of the driver’s seat she stopped caring. To her, cars were nothing more than tools, a means of getting from A to B, and in London there were a multitude of ways to do that without the indignity of having to drive yourself.
So none of the cars were immediately recognisable to her, although she definitely remembered a couple from the days when Tenebrae_Z used to post occasional ‘Adventures in Elbow Grease’ photo sets to uk.london.gothic-netizens, for the benefit of the half-dozen other members who oohed and aahed over them. Ten was always careful never to show anything that could give away his location, or include his own face in the photos — another reason why some had cast doubt on whether he was pulling their legs. But the more Bridge looked around the garage itself, the more she recognised it from the background of those pictures. She glanced over the manufacturer badges of each car. A green Austin-Healey, a white Lotus, a blue MG…
And there, a bright red Triumph TR7.
It was a funny-looking thing, a triangular wedge that was all hard angles and corners, none of the smooth curvature associated with modern sports cars. She’d seen it somewhere before, and not just in Ten’s photos from the garage. A Bond film, maybe? She smiled and shook her head, wondering if that was why Ten had chosen to direct her to this car in particular. But direct her to it was all he’d done, and now she had to figure out why. She found the keys to the TR7 on a rack hanging above the work bench, opened the car door, and slipped inside.
The first thing she noticed was how small it felt. She couldn’t imagine driving this thing for more than five minutes without needing to stop and stretch her legs. The thought made her realise that she had no idea how tall Ten was, no context for his own comfort in a vehicle like this. On the one hand, why buy a car too small for you to sit in comfortably? On the other hand, she knew enough about restoration geeks to guess Ten may never have intended to drive the car. She’d noticed on her initial walk around the exterior that it had no licence plate.
What was she looking for? She didn’t know, but Ten must have thought it important enough to send her here, and specifically to this car.
Like most old cars, the interior was sparse. The driver’s side had a small coin shelf, but all she found in there were two small screws. The gearbox was uncovered, affording a view down into the guts of the car, which made the lack of anything meaningful quite obvious. She turned round in the seat, wondering if there was something in the back — then laughed at herself when she came face to face with the rear window, and remembered that cars like this didn’t have back seats. Probably didn’t have much boot space, either. Not exactly designed for a family holiday; more for a day trip out to the country house, all goggles and driving gloves.
Gloves.
The glove compartment was locked, and she wondered who on earth would need to lock a glove compartment? But there was a second, smaller key on the TR7’s ring that opened it.
Inside was an owner’s manual, a logbook, and a Western Digital portable hard drive.
Chances were that nobody except Ten had touched the drive, but Bridge wasn’t in the mood to take chances. She wasn’t carrying latex gloves, but did have a pack of tissues in her coat pocket. She used one to pick up the drive, turned it over in her hands — two terabytes, she noted — and placed it in her inside pocket.
The train ride home seemed to take days.
22
“Sorry, but the number you have dialled is not in service. Please replace the handset and try again.”
Bridge never understood the point of that last bit. Try what again, exactly? Dialling the same number, on the off-chance it might have come back into service in the last three seconds?
The number was the one Ten had called to speak with the man who’d been posting the ASCII art pieces, and arranged to meet twenty-four hours ago. The man Ten described as ‘just a bloke’, but who had presumably killed him. Far from ordinary. But when Bridge dialled it, the very polite pre-recorded woman’s voice delivered nothing but disappointment.
To get the number, she’d had to decode the ASCII posts. To decode the ASCII posts, she’d had to figure out the encryption method. And to figure out the encryption method, she’d had to read through Tenebrae_Z’s notes, on the cloned hard drive.
Bridge had returned home, found an old Thinkpad laptop, disabled all its networking capabilities just in case, dug a USB cable out of her desk drawer, and hooked up the WD hard drive from Ten’s