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‘Yeah. I
learned a lot.’
‘Did any of it help?’
‘All of it helped. I’m going to need to adjust a few things. There were some good points that I hadn’t thought about.’
‘We don’t want to take advantage of you, you’re already giving us a great deal of your time...’
‘I’m not looking to just do the bare minimum. I’m here to learn and to make my product better. And to give you something that exceeds your expectations.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s the way I work. You don’t get a say in it.’
He thought about asking why Driftwood should be so important to her, and decided that would be a bad idea. He’d already crossed the line twice. Three strikes and, according to the rules that he’d made, he should be out. ‘As long as you’re okay with it.’
She nodded. ‘I’m okay with it.’ She turned, almost as if she sensed that Jamie was hovering behind her, staring at the back of her head. ‘How are things, Jamie? Getting to grips with the blog?’
‘Yeah, it’s great. I’ve almost written my first post, it’s called Where do we go from here?’
‘Blimey.’ She smiled at Jamie. ‘And do you know the answer to that?’
‘Nah. Maybe someone else does.’ Jamie’s gaze was darting between Euan and Sam. ‘I’ve...um...got something...’
‘Shall we go and get some tea?’ That was Euan’s usual way of getting someone who wanted to talk to sit down and open up.
‘We could do. But I was thinking more of having tea with Sam.’ Jamie grinned at him.
‘Is this some kind of code?’ The puzzled look on Sam’s face made Euan want to smile.
‘Yeah. It means I want to talk to you both.’
Sam shrugged, as if Jamie might have said that in the first place. ‘Let’s talk, then.’
Jamie waited until the room had cleared and closed the door. ‘I’ve got Kirsty’s computer.’
Sam looked at him blankly. ‘Kirsty...?’
Euan sighed. He had a nasty suspicion he knew where this was leading, and he wished that Jamie would just let it go. ‘Kirsty is one of our clients. She’s been in hospital for a while.’
‘Yeah. She took something...’ Jamie pursed his lips. ‘But a week before that she lent me her old laptop because mine was really struggling and I needed to get one of my college assignments in. I used her email to send a couple of questions to my tutor.’
‘Right.’ Euan had been hoping that he was wrong, but it didn’t look too much like it.
‘And when I picked up the emails again to get his reply, there were some others for Kirsty. I wasn’t snooping, they just appeared...’
Sam nodded. ‘Yeah, they would. Until you change the settings on the old one, both laptops will pick up her emails—’
Jamie cut her short. ‘That’s not what I mean. I haven’t given the laptop back yet because she’s been in hospital. And last night I went back and looked at her mail.’
Sam was frowning, clearly lost as to the point of this conversation.
‘There’s an email that just gives a date, a place and a time. It’s the Saturday evening before she took the overdose.’
Understanding crept across her face. Euan wished there was some way he could shut this conversation down, but he knew full well that if it didn’t happen here and now, it would happen at some other place, some other time. Jamie was like a dog with a bone and he wasn’t going to let go of this easily.
‘And you think that the email’s from the person who supplied her with the drugs.’
Jamie nodded triumphantly. ‘I’ve seen on the television where they trace things back and find the computer they came from. There’s a map and it zooms right in on the house...’
‘Well, that’s on the TV.’ Sam seemed to understand the need to keep a sense of proportion here. ‘You can’t always do that in real life.’
