Then the less defined sounds, rustles in the hedgerow, and the faint whirring and clicking as something insect-like but mysterious to her ears buzzed close by.

As always when she focussed on what she could hear, her sense of smell seemed to increase. Overlaying the scent of thyme and chamomile, crushed now beneath her feet and releasing its almost apple fragrance, was the damp air that she had mentioned to Patrick. It carried its own earthy smells, faint must and moist soil, newly turned now by Patrick’s digging. Drawn by the scent, she moved cautiously forward, Napoleon at her side. She knelt down where she guessed Patrick might have done, reached out, felt grass and a stray, sneaking bramble runner; drew her hand back from the pain of grasped thorns. She reached out again a little more towards her left. Her fingers sank this time into soft earth that had been churned by the boy’s fingers, granular and friable beneath her fingers. A tremor of excitement ran though her belly, though she could not have explained exactly why. Maybe it was all that talk of buried treasure that chimed so readily with her childhood fantasies when she and her sister had dug up half the beach searching for pirate hoards.

She wormed her fingers deeper into the hole, then drew back, almost in alarm.

There was something there. There really was.

‘Naomi?’ she heard Alec calling to her. ‘Where the devil are you?’

He couldn’t see her? Of course, it must be fully dark by now and the overgrown garden was shadowed by the thick hedge. It was funny to think of him at such a disadvantage.

‘Over here. Don’t you have a torch?’

‘Torch but no batteries. Patrick’s gone upstairs to find his. Reckons he’s got a little Maglite packed away somewhere.’

She heard him swear as he stumbled over something in the dark. ‘Watch yourself, there are nettles that think they’re Triffids and brambles sneaking about in the grass.’

‘Thanks. I know that. Now.’

She stood up and a moment later he had his hand on her arm. ‘I can see you now,’ Alec said. ‘Eyes getting used to the dark. Not often I’m in a place with so little light pollution. You can’t even see the house from here. You said you found something?’

‘Yes.’ She squatted down again, taking Alec’s hand and drawing him down beside her. ‘Here, dig your fingers down into the mud.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘Don’t be a baby. Here, let me show you.’ She found the place again, feeling for the scooped earth and then guided Alec’s fingers into the hole she had made.

‘You’re right. Something hard, like the edge of a box. Hey, Patrick, bring that light over here.’

Naomi could hear Patrick running across the grass, Harry following behind.

‘Shine it there. You’ve got something to dig with?’

‘Didn’t know where to find a spade or anything, but I’ve got a paint scraper from the kitchen drawer and a couple of large spoons.’

‘That will do, it isn’t very deep, whatever it is.’

‘There’s really something there? Here, Naomi, can you shine the torch while we dig?’

Before she could voice any objection she might have had, he had placed the torch in her hand and positioned her arm so that the light shone down upon their little excavation. Harry joined them, accepting his spoon. Alec had taken possession of the scraper.

‘Er, you realize this is a silver spoon,’ Harry stated.

‘Well, I guess it’ll wash. You take that side and Patrick, you start there. I’ll go down where Naomi found whatever it was.’

She listened as they set about their task; the occasional scrape of metal on stone or a shuffle of feet and knees as someone changed position the only sounds that told her anything about their progress. Even Patrick had forgotten to commentate.

‘Do you see anything?’ she asked at last.

‘I’ve got an edge,’ Alec told her. ‘Something plastic, wrapped in a supermarket bag and …’

‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ Naomi could hear the excitement in Patrick’s voice. ‘It’s Rupert’s laptop. That’s why no one could find it. He’s buried it out here.’

Eighteen

It seemed such a bizarre thing to do; bury a laptop and, it turned out, it wasn’t just a laptop Rupert had sunk into the ground.

They carried the bags back to the house and laid the contents out on black bin bags spread across the kitchen table.

‘This has to be what they were looking for.’ Patrick’s excitement was obvious.

‘We don’t know that …’ Harry, cautious as always.

‘No, we don’t but it’s a definite possibility,’ Naomi agreed with Patrick. ‘But why bury it? That’s the sort of action that indicates a real and immediate threat.’

‘Marcus said Rupert was frightened.’

‘Then … I don’t know … why not remove the hard drive and mail it to a friend?’ Naomi wondered

‘Um, two possible reasons I can think of.’ Harry was the surprise respondent this time. ‘He’d have had to explain to the friend and that might have led to all sorts of questions Rupert didn’t want to answer. And it’s a laptop. It isn’t like an ordinary PC. I’ve got a little caddy thing for mine so I can take the hard drive out any time I need to.’

He sounded quite proud of his grip on technology, Naomi thought.

‘Which you’ve never used,’ Patrick pointed out.

‘Well, no, but I could, but my point is that to take the hard drive out of a laptop you have to dismantle the thing. I certainly wouldn’t like to try.’

‘Why not just wipe the drive?’ Alec said.

‘Because wiping it doesn’t get rid of the information. You can recover it with the right software,’ Patrick pointed out.

‘Specialist stuff,’ Alec argued.

‘Possible to get hold of though,’ Patrick told him. ‘There are sites that specialize in hacking software and there’s usually recovery stuff on them.’

‘Patrick, I’m not sure I want to know and I definitely don’t want to know how you know. Anyway, from what I’ve seen of Kinnear, that’s way too subtle,’ Alec argued again.

‘I think we may be missing the point here,’ Harry said. ‘We don’t actually know if there’s anything on the laptop.’

‘If there’s nothing, why bury it?’

‘Um, good point, I suppose. What about the other stuff?’ They had not yet examined the other contents of the protective plastic bags.

‘Time to take a look,’ Alec agreed. ‘Patrick, would you run upstairs and grab my laptop. I think the leads will fit this one. Harry, would you mind popping the kettle on. Now, what do we have here?’

Naomi heard the crinkle of plastic as Alec explored the contents of the bags.

‘They’re a bit damp,’ he said. ‘Rupe didn’t wrap the books quite as well as the laptop, but I think they’ll dry out OK.’

‘Books?’ Naomi asked.

‘Yes. Three small hardback … journals from the look of it and … Harry, this is more in your line, I think. It looks like a ledger of some kind.’

Patrick returned with Alec’s laptop and Alec gave him the job of firing up the one they had found in the hole.

‘Make sure everything is dry,’ Harry warned. ‘I don’t want you starting a fire or anything.’

Naomi, impatient now, realized that she was the only one not doing anything. ‘So? What do they say? Why did he hide all this stuff?’

‘I think it’s going to take more than a two-minute peek to answer that one,’ Alec told her. ‘OK, journals was probably too grand a name. He didn’t keep a daily diary or anything. The first entry is from 2001, March 2nd. The next isn’t until the following week. You know, I think I remember seeing a book like this in the study.’

‘But these?’

‘Naomi, hold on there. I don’t know yet. The first entry is something about a trip to the theatre in Doncaster and in the second entry he’s rather pleased with himself for picking up an arts and crafts coal scuttle for bugger all at a sale.’ He flicked a few pages on. ‘More sales, a walking holiday in Yorkshire, an argument with someone over the price of a piece of Meissen. He won, by the way. Naomi, if there’s anything important here we’re going to have to go through the lot.’