Page 67 of Deep Blue Lies
“Me neither.” Our eyes fall back to the broken laptop on the table.
“I can understand stealing it, but why smash it up?” Sophia asks.
I try to make my brain focus on the question, but I’m tired now, tired and a little drunk still.
“It wasn’t a very good laptop. Maybe whoever took it realised that – that it wasn’t worth selling, and they were angry?”
It doesn’t sound convincing to me, and it seems Sophia agrees.
“Do you believe that?”
I shrug. “I don’t know what else to believe.”
“Did you have a password?” she asks a moment later. “You’d have to…and your fingerprint for unlocking it?”
“Yeah.”
“So they wouldn’t have got into it, whoever stole it. Macs are secure,” she continues. “So maybe that’s what made them angry? They were looking for something, and they couldn’t find it? So maybe it’s a message?”
That unsettles me even more.
“What kind of message?”
“I don’t know, stop digging? What you’re doing, looking into your past, it’s opening up questions about the ADR? And if Mum’s right, and it wasn’t Jason Wright who killed Mandy Paul, but both of them were murdered, then maybe whoever did it doesn’t want those questions asked?”
“Well who do you think did it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.”
I think of everyone I’ve met from that time. There’s one face that sticks in my mind, one presence.
“What about Kostas?”
“What?”
“There’s something about him, I keep seeing him watching me, it freaks me out…”
“Don’t be stupid.”
I pause. Something about the way she says the word “stupid” opens an immediate and gaping void between us.
“Why’s it stupid? He was there at the time, he lied when I first spoke to him and?—”
“Because he’s myboss.” She glares at me now. It’s crazy, I really thought something might happen between the two of us tonight. But this isn’t what I had in mind.
“Just because you work for the guy doesn’t mean you know what he was doing twenty years ago.”
She gives me an angry look, but I think she isn’t going to argue with the logic.
“What about Gregory Duncan? He’s a weirdo,” she says instead. My mind goes right back to the meeting I had with him, in his house. He seemed scared of something, could it have been me that worried him, and what I might find out?
“There’s loads of people it could have been,” I reply. “If it was anyone. The simplest answer is that Jason Wright did it. My dad.”
“Yeah,” she shrugs. The gap closes, a sort of truce between us.
We’re both quiet a moment, and I think of something else, something I meant to ask her before.
“The other day I was walking past the old Aegean Dream Resort, and I thought I saw something there –someonethere. Maybe watching me?” As I say it I remember how freaked out I was by the sound of breathing inside the ruined room. I should have told her before. But I didn’t really know her then.
