for his own lunatic decisions. Only the previous evening Ruth had said brightly, 'The boys will go through Pagford and post your pamphlets for you.' Andrew had seen, in his peripheral vision, Paul's look of horror and his attempt to make eye contact with his brother.
'I wanna go in here,' mumbled Andrew, turning right.
They bought tickets with codes on them, and sat down at different computers, two occupied seats apart. The middle-aged man on Andrew's right stank of body odour and old fags, and kept sniffing.
Andrew logged onto the internet, and typed in the name of the website: Pagford ... Parish ... Council ... dot ... co ... dot ... uk ...
The homepage bore the council arms in blue and white, and a picture of Pagford that had been taken from a point close to Hilltop House, with Pargetter Abbey silhouetted against the sky. The site, as Andrew already knew, from looking at it on a school computer, looked dated and amateurish. He had not dared go near it on his own laptop; his father might be immensely ignorant about the internet, but Andrew did not rule out the possibility that Simon might find somebody at work who could help him investigate, once the thing was done ...
Even in this bustling anonymous place, there was no avoiding the fact that today's date would be on the posting, or of pretending that he had not been in Yarvil when it happened; but Simon had never visited an internet cafe in his life, and might not be aware that they existed.
The rapid contraction of Andrew's heart was painful. Swiftly, he scrolled down the message board, which did not seem to enjoy a lot of traffic. There were threads entitled: refuse collection - a Query and school catchment areas in Crampton and Little manning? Every tenth entry or so was a posting from the Administrator, attaching Minutes of the Last Council Meeting. Right at the bottom of the page was a thread entitled: Death of Cllr Barry Fairbrother. This had received 152 views and forty-three responses. Then, on the second page of the message board, he found what he hoped to find: a post from the dead man.
A couple of months previously, Andrew's computing set had been supervised by a young supply teacher. He had been trying to look cool, trying to get the class onside. He shouldn't have mentioned SQL injections at all, and Andrew was quite sure that he had not been the only one who went straight home and looked them up. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had written the code he had researched in odd moments at school, and brought up the log-in page on the council website. Everything hinged on the premise that the site had been set up by an amateur a long time ago; that it had never been protected from the simplest of classical hacks.
Carefully, using only his index finger, he input the magic line of characters.
He read them through twice, making sure that every apostrophe was where it should be, hesitated for a second on the brink, his breathing shallow, then pressed return.
He gasped, as gleeful as a small child, and had to fight the urge to shout out or punch the air. He had penetrated the tin-pot site at his first attempt. There, on the screen in front of him, were Barry Fairbrother's user details: his name, his password, his entire profile.
Andrew smoothed out the magic paper he had kept under his pillow all week, and set to work. Typing up his next paragraph, with its many crossings out and reworkings, was a much more laborious process.
He had been trying for a style that was as impersonal and impenetrable as possible; for the dispassionate tone of a broadsheet journalist.
Aspiring Parish Councillor Simon Price hopes to stand on a platform of cutting wasteful council spending. Mr Price is certainly no stranger to keeping down costs, and should be able to give the council the benefit of his many useful contacts. He saves money at home by furnishing it with stolen goods - most recently a PC - and he is the go-to man for any cut-price printing jobs that may need doing for cash, once senior management has gone home, at the Harcourt-Walsh Printworks.
Andrew read the message through twice. He had been over it time and again in his mind. There were many accusations he could have levelled at Simon, but the court did not exist in which Andrew