Free The Cutting Crew by Steve Mosby Page A

with data protection laws being what they were. I could be a mad parent or a vengeful ex-lover or even - god forbid - not a cop at all. And there would be legal hell to pay if the secretary had said, 'Yes, she's in room six,' and then I went off and killed her. No - I'd expected that I would need a warrant to get information out of them, and I wasn't likely to get one. Fortunately, I knew from previous investigations that there were easier - if slightly less ethical options available to me.
    A little over twenty minutes later, I was sitting in one of the university's computer rooms. Despite the fact that exams were underway, it was relatively busy, with rows of students typing, the noise undercut by the low, constant hum of the network. A few people were talking quietly, and there was an occasional sniff from someone waiting by the printer, but that was about it. I didn't like it in here: it was lit to clinical levels by artificial strip-bulbs in the mirrored ceiling, as though an operation was about to be performed. The air smelled of electricity, plastic and body odour.
    I tapped a few keys quickly and logged in to the system.
    The way computer accounts work at university is this: everybody gets one - staff and students - and because every single computer on campus is connected to a central server, you can log in on any of them and still have access to your own files - essays, spreadsheets, databases, internet bookmarks, emails - the works. Anything that Alison Sheldon had been working on - and anyone she had been writing to or receiving email from - should still be available. Ten minutes logged into her account would tell me more than Mariehow-can-I-help-you could in two hours.
    Breaking into a student's account is pretty simple. People forget their passwords all the time and so there needs to be some system in place for confirming your identity and then giving out the information you need to get into your mail. Fortunately, it's automated. All you need is your student identification number and your date of birth - you have those, and any computer you sit down at will happily remind you of your password. I had this information for Alison from her Missing Persons Report. Her password, if you're interested, was gtwxkt.
    Once logged in, I began my search in her essay folder, but then realised quickly that there was no hope of reviewing all the material now: there was simply too much, and most of it looked irrelevant. But I'd brought a few blank disks with me, and so I copied everything just to be on the safe side. If there was nothing on television one night, at least I'd never be lost for something to read.
    Next, I opened up her email account. Hopefully it would give me some kind of contact details for any friends not mentioned in the report, and also - if I was very lucky - there might be messages from the man she'd been seeing in the weeks leading up to her murder. But when the mail program loaded, I was met by an empty inbox: No new messages it told me, in a panel down the left-hand side, and underneath that: No read messages. Which was unusual, to say the least, because free email was one of the perks of university life, and usually the easiest way to keep in touch with absent friends. It wasn't just that she'd kept her inbox tidy, either there weren't even any old-message folders. It was as though she'd never used it.
    I frowned mentally. Okay - so perhaps she'd used an internet based account for some reason. I had one myself; they were handy because it meant you could access your mail from anywhere in the world. But it was still odd that she hadn't used the university one at all. It was so nice and easy - right there on the desktop.
    I double-clicked the internet browser icon to see if I could check what sites she'd been logging into. But, just like the email, it was empty.
    No bookmarks; no drop-down URLs; no history.
    5*
    My mental frown deepened. A student who hadn't surfed the internet? I looked around the room. At