The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2565 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 Angharad

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“Who was it?” I asked agog at the cleverness of this young woman.

“Bernard Black,” she said triumphantly.

“When was that?” I asked feeling concern for what she was going to say.

“Ten days ago.”

“Sam, he was killed before Christmas in one of our biology labs. We never discovered why or who did it.”

“Well, that’s the identity of the URL of the person who hacked into the Land Registry.”

“I’m not disputing that, all I’m saying is that either it’s someone else with the same name, or someone is using his name.”

She shrugged, “Well that’s who owns the URL.”

“I suppose if someone had access to his computer and his passwords...”

“It’s not that difficult to hack someone’s computer and leave a false trail.”

“Not for someone with your skills.”

She smiled at my acknowledgement of her abilities and shrugged again.

“Now do we tell the police? It’s crazy, we had them there for about a month pursuing their enquiries which as far as I know turned up sweet Fanny Adams, then we have different ones trying to pin a very poor frame up on me. If we tell them, will you get into trouble? If we don’t tell them are we withholding evidence in a murder enquiry?”

“Sounds like pretty serious shit, either way?” Sammi was no longer smiling.

“It is.”

“I could probably leave a false trail for them to find the same address but without them discovering how.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I can do that without them finding me.”

“We’d be doing something then, wouldn’t we?”

“Who was this Bernard Black guy?”

“One of our technicians. I didn’t hire him, had only spoken to him a handful of times, so didn’t know much about him at all until I found him with his head bashed in lying on the floor of one of our labs smelling rather unsavoury.”

“Lovely,” said Sammi meaning exactly the opposite.

“They reckon he’d been there from the Friday afternoon and in a warm room he was starting to pong rather a lot. I had Danni and Trish with me, they’d been playing soccer for the school and we went to check the dormice.”

“They didn’t see him, did they?”

“No, but you know what Trish is like, she wanted to have solved it by the time the police were called.”

Sammi shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder if she’s part machine.”

“No, she’s just able to withdraw any emotional content from things. I suspect she learned to do it when she was being abused in that children’s home. I’ve heard of this sort of dissociation with sexual abuse before, the victims just blank it out. In Trish’s case, she’s able to function intellectually at the same time.”

“Doesn’t that make her like a psychopath?”

“No, that’s a personality disorder. Trish only does it to protect herself from threatening or unpleasant situations—it’s a bit like the police surgeon keeping his lunch down while examining the body at the scene.”

“Hadn’t they opened the windows by then?” Sammi gave a little grimace.

“I have no idea. By Monday, when I was asked to go back, they’d cleaned it all up. Tom, Suzy Hamer and I were asked to say if anything was missing or out of place.”

“Was it?”

“I have no idea. I usually only go in the other lab, it’s where our dormice are. Suzy is the one who does the messy stuff, I avoid it like the plague.”

“Yeah, but you had to do it surely to get your degree?”

“I did it at A-level and for my baccalaureate, or some of it. I could slice up a rat or dogfish as well as the others but didn’t enjoy it. I always wore surgical gloves, most of the others didn’t—certainly not the boys. I did enjoy making slides.”

“What sort of slides?”

“Microscope slides, I was good at it too, got an A+ for my practicals, ol’ Butterworth told me he’d only ever awarded two in twenty five years.”

“Cool, my mum the slide maker par excellence.”

I blushed. “He always used to call me Miss Watts.”

“What was he supposed to call you then—mister?”

“Officially yes.”

Now she blushed, “Sorry, I forget—you seem as if you were always female.”

“I was, I just didn’t go round telling people—well not directly. I was wearing unisex or girl’s clothing most of the time because it fit better, especially trousers or jeans. I’d also started growing my hair again, plus it was in a girl’s cut as my hairdresser used to think I was female.”

“You were, Mummy.”

“Yeah, course.”

“I’ll go and let the plod find the Land Registry hack.”

“Just make sure they don’t find you.”

“They won’t.” She trotted off back to her room half of which is very girly and the rest like an electronics laboratory. Her room is always tidy, compared to Danni’s which is once again like a sorting room for a rag and bone merchant. They don’t have them anymore, Steptoe and son, a sort of primitive recycling system. Nowadays councils are much better organised though there are still individuals who drive round skip diving for anything they can sell on. I had an engineer friend who once got a nearly new Dyson vacuum cleaner from a skip. The fault was simple to fix and rewarded him with a working vacuum cleaner that cost nothing.

I informed Tom of Sammi’s discovery and he was shocked. “Wull they no let thae puir man rest.”

“They haven’t found his killer yet, have they?”

“Daes that worry ye?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I assumed he was killed by someone he knew and that they were both possibly up to something they shouldn’t have been.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know,” I blushed.

“Whit if he disturbed some one?”

“But who?”

“I dinna ken, but it’s as valid as yer suspicion.”

“That’s true.” I had to admit I found him a little creepy, as if he was spying on me or watching me, so it was easy to assume to he was up to no good.

I returned to my study and called James asking him to find out all he could about our deceased technician. All I knew was his name and that he had a degree in chemistry.

I was sitting at my desk wondering what all this had to do with the apparent plot to defraud the university, when Sammi dashed in. “They’ve found a body, someone from your place—it’s on the local BBC news website.”

“What?” I gasped and clicked on to the internet. It was the young auditor I’d frightened off at the first meeting. The report suggested he’d killed himself. I didn’t know what to say or think other than I felt incredibly sad and hoped he had no children.

Whatever happened now we’d be knee deep in police again tomorrow—bloody wonderful.