Free The Cutting Crew by Steve Mosby Page B

least half of the people in here were casual surfers, with a steady queue waiting to replace them. But apparently Alison never had. It felt like bullshit.
    I thought it through, tapping my finger absently on the mouse.
    Perhaps Alison had cleared it all out before she was killed, because she was frightened of something or somebody. But that didn't sit well or make much sense - why would she bother? If you're in danger, you don't waste time clearing your email: you just get the fuck away from wherever you are. The net would probably be the last thing on your mind. But it was still possible.
    If not Alison, Sean might have erased the data. It was a reasonably safe assumption that he'd been here before me and so I couldn't rule it out, but I also couldn't think why he would. Like the other explanations, it didn't seem right.
    The third possibility was that someone else had logged in as Alison and methodically removed any evidence that had been there.
    I had no way of knowing, but that idea felt more right than the others.
    So, how thorough would they have been? It was a long-shot, but I found the email folder on the computer's hard drive and copied every non-program file I found there onto a second disk. Sometimes deleted mail could still be read, assuming you had a little technical knowledge. I didn't have that knowledge personally, but life can throw all sorts of odd people into your path.
    I shut down the internet and was about to log out and leave when a pop-up window appeared and caught my eye for a moment. Pop-ups aren't unusual: there are loads of web pages where, when you close them down, they automatically open a new page. When I'd shut down the window, a page advertising a tiny camera had appeared, proclaiming that you could take pictures without anybody realising. The page was mostly taken up by a picture of a half-naked woman, posing seductively. I shook my head and closed it down, half-expecting another, but that was it.
    An empty desktop.
    I paused.
    Junk web pages.
    So where was the junk email?
    I opened up the mail program again, irritating the nearby queue of students, who had obviously pegged me as being about to leave and got their hopes up. Bags shifted and I heard a few sighs of annoyance.
    Alison Sheldon had no junk email.
    Everybody with an email account gets junk mail: it's called spam.
    Like cheap gold envelopes through your front door, it arrives in your inbox on a daily basis. I got maybe twenty spam mails a day, and yet Alison didn't seem to have received a single one since she'd died. Even if someone had cleared out her account very recently, there would still have been some.
    I looked to see whether the account kept a record of earlier logins but there was nothing obvious, and so I stared at the screen for half a minute. Then, I felt a thrill of recognition, quickly opened up the options menu and saw it. All of Alison's mail was being forwarded to a different account. Anything that arrived in her inbox was sent to that and then immediately deleted from her university account. I'd known I was right even before I'd opened the menu. Once upon a time, I thought, I must have been a really fucking good detective.
    The name of the destination account was histmjh, which meant it was someone in the History department with the initials mjh.
    Possibly another student, but I opened up the internet again anyway, heading to the History department's website. I clicked on the Staff tab and scrolled down the list to see if anyone there matched the initials.
    Nearly halfway down: Dr Mark Harris.
    There was a photograph of him too. He looked maybe thirty years old, with a smart, slightly smug face, jet black hair that had been gelled into wet tumbles hanging down as far as his eyebrows, and a smile that curled slightly - half arrogance, half seduction. I imagined his smile could shift very quickly, and that it would generally mean something very different to the girls than it did to the boys.
    There was no middle