He pointed at Will first, staring into his eyes to see if there was any sign of it, the weakness that was set to bring him down. ‘Will died of a drug overdose a few weeks back. And Rob.’ He moved his finger along the glass. ‘He was a journalist, in Africa mainly but in the Balkans too. He was killed in Kosovo.’
‘When?’ She was taking it badly, even though these were people she didn’t know, people with whom she was still angry.
‘Also a couple of weeks ago.’
For a moment it looked like she would make some comment about these two deaths coming so closely together, or about the bad luck that had befallen their whole group, but she steered away again and said, ‘I knew Robert Gibson was a journalist. I did a search a year or so ago and came up with a lot of stuff on him and you.’ She laughed a little, distancing herself from her own past anger. ‘You can imagine how much more bitter I felt when I saw him being all compassionate about the suffering in Africa, and then you, the eminent sleep researcher, helping people with their disorders.’
‘I can understand that, but Rob was a complicated person, and if he’d ever dreamed that Matt was in trouble he would have been here. And as for me, I’m not really in the business of making people better. I don’t run that type of sleep lab.’ He thought about what he’d just said and added, ‘Who can say though? I have helped people in the past. Maybe I could have helped Matt.’
She shook her head in sad dissent and took the picture from him, placing it back on the desk, positioned still so that Matt could see it if he was sitting there. Alex looked around the room, a room that there’d been no life in for seven years. How could he have been dead for that long? Matt had been too vital, too full of promise and potential.
‘Did you give away all of his clothes? Even that big old black overcoat he wore?’
She smiled and said, ‘Isn’t it funny? I’d forgotten that coat. He lived in it.’ The smile faded with the turn of her words. ‘Who knows, maybe some college kid somewhere is wearing it right now.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Shall we go back down?’ He nodded and walked out first, waiting for her as she turned off the light and closed the door.
As they walked the landing back to the stairs Alex said, ‘You said you did a search on us. What did you mean?’
She looked embarrassed, some colour rising on her pale cheeks.
‘Oh, it’s silly, I know. It’s just that it’s really played on my mind over the years, that none of you had ever tried to get in touch with him, never even been curious, never sent a Birthday or Christmas card. So one day curiosity got the better of me and I did a search.’
‘How?’
‘On the web,’ said Martha, sounding surprised that she had to spell it out.
‘I see. You can search for people on the web?’
She frowned, bemused, and said, ‘Of course. You go to any search engine and type in the name of the person you’re looking for, then sift through the responses to figure out which one’s yours. How can you not know this?’
He laughed and said, ‘I use the web for work. I knew you could do searches, but I have to be honest, it’s never occurred to me to search for information about people I know. You can even get information about regular people?’
‘It helps if they have a reason to be mentioned somewhere or other but you’d be surprised how many people are mentioned. Come to the study and I’ll show you.’ He followed her, wondering what he could have found out about the others, perhaps even about Emily Barratt, simply by tapping their names into a search engine.
The first name she brought up was his own and suddenly the screen was full of links to pages, most of them related to sleep research institutes and publications. There was no surprise there, nor when she put Rob’s name in, plenty of links to Rob’s work in amongst the links to the lives of all the other Robert Gibsons.
She typed Will’s name in and sighed a little.
‘I didn’t get anywhere with this one. There are too many William Shaws, too many different things. I thought one of them could easily be him but I had no way of knowing which one.’
Alex looked at them, baseball players, financial analysts, a Shaw family homepage. It saddened him as he said, ‘Probably none of them were Will.’
She turned and glanced at him briefly and said, ‘Matt didn’t feature either, and neither did Natalie. At least, she might have done but Natalie Harrison brings up lots of references to genealogical sites.’ She was typing as she spoke and the links in question appeared on the screen now, references to a Natalie Harrison who’d married a Francis Jeffers in 1758, another who’d been born in 1801, another who’d died two years earlier, the trails of people searching out their ancestors. Martha leaned toward the screen then and said, ‘Oh, wait there, that wasn’t there when I searched before. Nor that.’ She clicked on a link before Alex had time to read it and a new page appeared on the screen.