Free Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery) by Peter Robinson

only here in the holidays. I wouldn’t know what’s supposed to be where, especially in Dad’s study. None of us were allowed in there.’
    ‘Do you know whether your father owned a laptop?’
    ‘Yes, he did.’
    Well, that was one question answered, but it begged another. ‘Did he use it much? I’m wondering why he didn’t take it with him to St Peter’s. I mean, laptops are small and light enough to carry around. That’s what they’re for. As far as I know, they had Wi-Fi available up there.’
    Jessica gave him a sad, indulgent smile. ‘Dad was such a Luddite when it came to things like that. Oh, he had one – he could just about do email and stuff like that – but it was always me or Robbie had to sort it out for him whenever we came up. He was always messing it up, getting viruses, ignoring error messages. If something didn’t work immediately, he just kept pressing the “enter” key or clicking the mouse. Honestly, he’d have about ten copies of Internet Explorer open at the same time, and he wondered why it was running so slowly. He was hopeless.’
    ‘Did he use it for writing or anything else? Facebook?’
    ‘Writing? Dad hated writing. Reports were the bane of his life. And Facebook . . . well, I’d blush if I had to tell you what he thought about social networks. No, if anything, he probably used it a bit for surfing the Internet, you know fishing and gardening sites, that sort of thing. And he did manage to work out Skype so we could talk for free during term time. Half the time he couldn’t get the video bit working, though, so it was voice only.’
    ‘Games?’
    ‘I doubt it. He wasn’t much of a one for computer games. Now trivia, that’s another thing. He probably used Wikipedia a lot.’
    Banks smiled. He supposed, then, that there wasn’t much, if anything, of value on Quinn’s laptop, except, perhaps, for some emails. Whoever had taken it had probably done so as a safety measure, just in case there was something incriminating on it, or because he believed it contained information he wanted. In either case, he was probably out of luck. If Quinn wasn’t a big computer fan, they had a far better hope of finding something interesting in his phone call logs than in his emails, Banks reckoned. ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your father?’ he asked.
    ‘No. I mean, really. I suppose maybe some of those villains he caught. But he was well liked. He didn’t have a lot of close friends outside of work. He was a bit of a loner, bit of an anorak, if truth be told. He liked being off by himself fishing and bird-watching. And working on his allotment. I used to go with him and help him sometimes when I was younger, especially on the allotment, but you know . . . you change . . . lose interest . . . grow apart. Robbie used to go to the tarn sailing model boats with him. He used to build them himself. Lovely, some of them, the detail. Now we just tease him about being an old anorak.’ She put her hand to her face and stifled a sob. ‘Sorry.’
    Banks could feel sympathy. His own children had been the same, interested in whatever seven-day wonder he had been passionate about at the time until they were about thirteen, and then they didn’t want to know; they just wanted to be off with their friends. He made a mental note to ask Keith Palmer’s lads to check out Quinn’s allotment. The odds were that he’d have at least a little gardening shed there. It might be just the sort of place to hide something, and the burglar would probably not have known about it.
    Jessica’s expression had become wistful, and Banks got the impression that she wished she hadn’t lost interest in the things that bound her to her father, that she had continued to help him on the allotment and accompany him on fishing trips and bird-watching expeditions, that they hadn’t grown apart. But it happens to everyone. There was nothing he could say to her to make her feel better. It was too