‘Joan’s dead? I can’t believe it. Tell me it’s not true.’
‘I’m afraid it is. And I have a terrible feeling that in some way it’s connected to the reason Connor hasn’t returned home.’
‘Come on, Mom, aren’t you getting a little paranoid? After all, Dad’s only been away for three weeks.’
‘You may be right, but I’ve still decided to move that video you made of his farewell party to a safer place.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the only proof I have that your father ever met a man called Nick Gutenburg, let alone worked for him.’
The Deputy Director touched the ‘Stop’ button. ‘The conversation continues for some time, but it doesn’t add a great deal to our knowledge. When Mrs Fitzgerald left the house a few minutes later carrying a videotape, the officer listening in realised the significance of what he’d just heard, and tailed her to the university. She didn’t go straight to the Admissions Office as usual, but dropped in at the library, where she went to the computer section on the first floor. She spent twenty minutes searching for something on one of the computers, and left with a printout of about a dozen pages. Then she took the elevator down to the audio-visual research centre on the ground floor. The officer didn’t want to risk joining her in the elevator, so once he knew which floor she’d stopped at, he went to the computer she’d been working on and tried to call up the last file that had been opened.’
‘She’d erased everything, of course,’ said Dexter.
‘Of course,’ said Gutenburg.
‘But what about the printout?’
‘Again, no clue as to what was on it.’
‘She can’t have lived with Connor Fitzgerald for twenty-eight years and not picked up something about the way we work.’
‘The officer left the library and waited in his car. After a few minutes Mrs Fitzgerald came out of the building. She was no longer carrying the tape, but she was …’
‘She must have deposited it in the audio-visual centre.’
‘Exactly my thought,’ said Gutenburg.
‘How many tapes does the university store in its library?’
‘Over twenty-five thousand,’ said Gutenburg.
‘We don’t have enough time to go through them all,’ said Dexter.
‘We wouldn’t have, if Mrs Fitzgerald hadn’t made her first mistake.’
Dexter didn’t interrupt this time.
‘When she left the library she didn’t have the video, but she did have the printout. Our agent followed her to the Admissions Office, where I’m happy to say her principles got the better of her.’
Dexter raised an eyebrow.
‘Before returning to her office, Mrs Fitzgerald called in at the recycling centre. She’s not the Vice-President of GULP by accident.’
‘GULP?’
‘Georgetown University Litter Patrol. She dumped the printout in the paper depository.’
‘Good. So what did you find on it?’
‘A complete list of the videos currently on loan and unlikely to be returned until the beginning of next term.’
‘So she must have felt it was safe to leave her video in an empty box, because no one would come across it for weeks.’
‘Correct,’ said Gutenburg.
‘How many videos are there that fall into that category?’