22nd March
We arrived back at the farm from Waterford just before midday.
Robert took the photographs of Helen to progress enquiries, and Jenny took Sam’s laptop.
There was nothing more I could do immediately, so I walked over to the outhouse into which we had moved all of Sam’s books and papers. I had reasoned that there might be a lot of spare time while we were at the farm, and I had begun to quite enjoy the cataloguing of the documents – even though I now knew that ‘the book’ I had originally been seeking did not exist. In fact, the job was now virtually finished.
I set myself the task of completing the cataloguing today in order to take my mind off what had become of Helen.
~*~*~*~*~
It was one o’clock in the afternoon when Jenny joined me.
She had been assigned to this case partly due to her expertise in computing and surveillance technology. She also had farming knowledge from growing up on a farm in Kent.
Her first degree had been in ancient languages and cultures, and she had taken an interest in my cataloguing. She had introduced me to software that had capabilities to cross reference entries in a far more sophisticated way than my earlier, simple spreadsheet could achieve.
‘Any news about anything?’ I said.
‘Nothing on Helen, I’m afraid,’ she replied sympathetically. ‘I went over the hard disk of Sam’s laptop. He clearly deleted a lot of files and then regularly washed the blank space. There’s evidence of darknet activity too. Although we’ll check his ISP for the sites he visited, I expect that the important ones are invisible. He was very security conscious.’
‘What about any message relating to Arkangel?’
‘There is one message from the day Sam died. It just contains seemingly random letters and numbers though, and I can’t make anything of it. I’ve sent it to our crypto guys at GCHQ to see if they can get something out of it.’
Jenny sat down at my computer and started idly browsing through the catalogue of Sam’s documents.
‘That’s it,’ I said after a further half hour. ‘I’ve finally got all these bloody documents catalogued.’
As I finished speaking, Robert put his head around the door. ‘There’s an unknown vehicle approaching the farm,’ he said.