Free Forget Me Never by Gina Blaxill Page B

cheering up.’
    After checking what we were doing for the rest of the day and whether I was coming back tonight (I said yes, mostly because I felt I’d outstayed my welcome at Reece’s), Julie went back to playing a board game with the kids. I couldn’t help feeling glad she was so laid back – as long as she knew where I was, who I was with and that I was OK, she didn’t usually ask awkward questions. She had clearly decided that the police interview was history.
    I explained to Julie that I was borrowing the external hard drive and promised to bring it back later. Then it was back to Reece’s – the computer at Julie’s was too public. Once we were in his room, we linked up the drive to Reece’s computer. I located my files, and, with a rising sense of anticipation, opened the folder where I’d stored Danielle’s stuff.
    ‘Sure this is it?’ Reece said. There were about eight files, mostly Word documents.
    ‘She got a new desktop just before she died.’ I clicked on the first, but it was just a letter to a rail company asking them to refund a ticket. We looked through the others. A job application, a birthday card made for a friend, some copy-pasted information about travelling to Spain. Nothing I could imagine being worth Aiden nicking Edith for. Frustrated, I threw my empty Coke can across the room. It missed the bin and rolled under Reece’s bed.
    ‘Waste of time!’
    ‘Maybe there were files on the laptop that weren’t in My Documents,’ said Reece.
    I shook my head.
    ‘I’d have spotted them.’
    ‘Hey, cheer up. There are still two files we haven’t opened.’
    ‘Yes, but one of them is titled “Thank you letter” and the other one I can’t open. It’s got a weird file extension.’
    Reece clicked on the thank-you letter – as I’d predicted it wasn’t worth reading – but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He hovered the cursor over the last file.
    ‘You won’t get anywhere with it,’ I said. ‘Dunno what it is.’
    ‘Oh, I know what it is,’ Reece said. Just trying to remember where . . . aha!’
    Mystified, I watched him get up and rifle through the drawers by his bed. Out of the bottom one he withdrew an iPhone.
    ‘That’s not yours, is it?’ I said.
    ‘Yeah, but I bought myself a new one for my birthday. This is its predecessor.’ Reece waved the phone, looking pleased with himself. ‘That file, Soph, is an iPhone backup!’
    I stared at him blankly. ‘What do you mean?’
    He rolled his eyes at me. ‘God, it’s like you’re stuck in the Dark Ages! OK, so iPhones access the Internet, take photos, store emails and messages and so on. You can configure it so that if you connect it to a computer, the iPhone backs up everything on it. Looks to me like that’s what Danielle did. If we load that file on to this old phone – we’re in!’
    I wasn’t sure how much sense this made, but then Reece had always been a lot more into technology than me. ‘Why do we need your old phone?’ I asked as Reece pulled out a lead from the cabinet by the desk and connected the phone to the computer’s USB socket.
    ‘If I loaded Danielle’s file on to my current phone, it would replace my stuff with hers, and I’m not willing to do that. But it doesn’t matter on this old one.’ I watched Reece as he clicked about on the screen, presumably configuring the file with the old phone. After a while he nodded.
    ‘It’s loading.’
    ‘Are you sure this will work?’ I asked.
    ‘Trust me! This phone will be a replica of your cousin’s the last time she backed it up on Edith.’
    It seemed like an agonizing wait as everything transferred. But eventually everything was ready.
    ‘So,’ Reece said, ‘shall we have a look?’
    The iPhone’s display didn’t just show texts from other people – it showed chains of messages, so we could see Danielle’s replies too. I began to realize just how basic my mobile was.
    The most recent text was from Aiden, dated two weeks before Dani