Eve hung up. She knew better than to turn on the PC and meddle. Bernard probably didn’t keep anything valuable on it anyway, and if he did there’d be passwords and maybe booby traps for the unwary. Whoever had killed him and taken the hard drive was pursuing a fool’s errand.
She glanced at the filing cabinet. The top drawer was ajar. Papers had been pulled out, but she saw a scattering of rectangular plastic containers like wombat turds in the bottom. They were diskette boxes: when she’d been growing up, the cash-starved comprehensive school she’d attended had still used PCs with floppy disks, even though they were long-obsolete in business.
Eve smiled to herself. The killer was not only impulsive and slapdash: they were young or expensively educated or both. And Eve, who was neither of those things, now had the beginnings of a profile of her enemy.
Bernard’s antiquarian PC might have lost its hard drive, but it gave up its secrets with barely a fight.
Eve’s first stop on her arrival back at Chateau de Montfort Bigge was the IT Department. IT, in keeping with Rupe’s disdain for boffins, were confined to a sad, windowless gerbil hutch under the main staircase that had once served as a cloakroom. There was always at least one semi-interchangeable minion on duty. “You!” she barked at the nearest gerbil—or possibly the least able to scramble for cover when she slammed through the door. “What’s your name?”
“M-Marcus, Miss?” Marcus was bald, bearded, and gnomishly middle-aged. He wrung his hands as he looked up at her through horn-rimmed glasses with pebble-thick lenses. “Can I help you?”
“I should think so.” She reached into her Louis Vuitton handbag and produced three boxes of floppies. “These are backup disks from a PC. I want them imaged, cracked, and a copy of the original files restored.”
Marcus froze, then focussed on the boxes, oddly intent. “May I, Miss?” he asked eagerly. She tipped the boxes into his cupped hands: he stared at them as if they were a particularly delectable treat. “Ooh, I haven’t seen these in a while!” He carefully popped the lid on one box and peered inside. “High density, 1.44 jobs. Definitely an old PC, not a Mac?”
“A beige boxy thing from the late 1980s. It didn’t have a mouse, if that’s any help. The hard disk is missing, and this is the only material that could be salvaged. I’m relying on you,” she said.
His eyes glazed as he dreamily stroked the exterior of the box. “I may need to get hold of some specialized kit, I don’t think we’ve got anything that can read floppies any more, but having said that—”
“Buy anything you need; just keep the receipts. I expect a full work-up within twenty-four hours.”
“Uh-uh-yes, Miss.” Marcus snapped back to terrified obedience. “Right away, Miss.”
Eve stalked back to her lair, brooding. Someone had killed Bernard and taken the hard disk. The timing strongly implied that his murder was connected to the auction. So it suggested that the item was worth considerably more on the market than Rupe had indicated. Interesting. The killer was now one jump ahead of her, unless they were incompetent and had killed Bernard by mistake before weaseling the auction details out of him. In which case (an unpalatable thought) they might have irremediably fucked up the entire job for everybody and she’d have to start again from scratch, this time using an unfamiliar book dealer. Either way, Eve was clear on the steps she needed to take.
It occurred to Eve that she’d need a thief. And for a job like this, there was only one person she could turn to.
Eve didn’t need much sleep, and the promise of the coming treasure hunt kept her awake as effectively as a pint of espresso. She spent the early evening making use of the gym in the basement, then moved on to the firing range, where she flung ball bearings at pistol targets by force of will alone until her head ached. Returning to the office, she handled issues arising in the American subsidiaries. For dinner she ordered up a cold collation from the kitchen, which she ate at her desk. At eleven, she rose, restless, and returned to the shooting gallery, where she amused herself with a bag of marbles that shattered satisfactorily when they slammed into their targets. By two in the morning she was drained, but she was no closer to sleep than she had been at eight the night before: the febrile anticipation of action had her in its grip.
Finally she could no longer contain herself. She returned to her lair, restored her appearance—hair secured in a scalp-tugging bun, lips and mascara retouched, suit straightened—then marched on IT. “Well?” she demanded.
Marcus was still at work, but clearly flagging. He jolted upright at her voice: “Yes Miss!” he blurted. “It’s done and dusted!”
“What precisely is done and dusted?”
“You were right about it being an antique, Miss! Norton Backup, vintage 1992, from a 40Mb hard disk on a 286. The disks weren’t corrupt but the backup was encrypted, so I had to copy the images and spin up a few thousand VM instances on EC2—” Eve narrowed her eyes at him and he gulped—“erm, I cracked the password and there’s a VirtualBox with a bootable copy of the hard drive right here.” His hands fluttered above the keyboard of his workstation. “What do you want me to do to it?”
“Get out and leave me to it,” she told him. Marcus bolted from his chair as if she was a cheetah. Eve took his place at the desk and found herself doing a double-take.
Bernard’s PC had run MS-DOS—nothing as sophisticated and slickly modern as Windows 3.1—but he’d had an email client, a text-mode monstrosity that collected mail from some weird modem-connected lacuna of the internet that hadn’t yet discovered fire, let alone the World Wide Web. After some swearing she
