Serafina and the Virtual Man - By Marie Treanor Page 0,50
up something from bits. I just have to touch the right bits.”
After a few minutes’ more sifting, Jilly finally uncovered a plastic bag. She dragged it free and discovered with some triumph that it was heavy, full of stuff. Broken stuff, as it turned out. A piece of glass poking out of the bag cut her finger.
“Ouch,” she said and quickly sucked the blood before it dripped onto her skirt. Over it, her gaze flew to Blair, who stopped lifting up the larger pieces of wood to watch her. His eyebrow twitched. He licked his lips.
“Blair, stop teasing her,” Sera commanded, and Blair winked before bending back to his work.
Jilly, unconvinced it was all teasing, opened the plastic bag with more care. Her breath caught. It was full of photographs. Some of the glass and wood from the frames had been broken, and some of the photographs were either pierced or scrunched, but it was the closest to intact they’d so far seen in this room.
Jilly pushed a heap of rubble to one side and began to ease out the photographs, one at a time. Four young lads in a bedroom, sprawled around a computer, grinning at the camera. Adam was there, his hand on the mouse, smiling over his shoulder while someone aimed a pillow at his head—Dale. Student days, Jilly guessed from the institutional look of the room, like a university hall of residence. Both Adam and Dale certainly looked several years younger. Dale’s hair was longer, and he looked less smart, more carefree. But Adam didn’t seem to have changed a great deal. His black hair was just as uncut and unruly, and he had the beginnings of a beard on his jaw.
Something contracted in Jilly’s chest. She wished she’d known him then. She wished—
Hastily, she moved on to the next photo. Adam wasn’t in all of them. Neither was Dale. There were several of Roxy, some with Adam, some not, a few of her on stage with her band, a couple of other women Jilly had never met. There was even one of Dale, Adam, and Petra, arm in arm in Trafalgar Square, London. Jilly looked at that one quite closely. Petra, in the centre, had linked arms with both men. Smiling, her face was half-turned toward Adam.
It was only when she found the tiny picture of the raven-haired toddler that she was sure. He was on a battered-looking tricycle in front of a block of council flats, and a young, equally dark woman in tight jeans bent over him, holding on to the tiny handlebars while she smiled up at the camera. The little boy was smiling too, with great glee, as if this was a rare treat he was enjoying to his utmost.
Genesis Adam, with the woman who’d named him.
Jilly swallowed. “Eureka,” she said. She passed it to Sera, who’d crawled over to see what she was looking at. “I’ll bet you anything these came from Adam’s flat. Dale must have removed them to make it look as if Adam took his personal stuff with him to Australia, and just dumped them in here.”
“Maybe. Or he could have kept them as a keepsake of his old friend. Jilly, if Dale did him in and was responsible for this whole charade, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep anything that’d incriminate him.”
“Suppose not,” Jilly said reluctantly. “But he’d have gone through them, wouldn’t he? Why would he keep a picture of Adam and his mum from long before they ever met?”
“I don’t know,” Sera admitted, picking up the tiny, battered picture. “But I should be able to use this. All of them, in fact, if they were in Adam’s home and meant something to him.”
Sera sat back in a cleared space, her back against the wall, holding the photograph and what was left of its frame between her hands. She closed her eyes. Blair and Jilly looked at each other, then at Sera. Her expression didn’t change from calm concentration for several moments.
Then she opened her eyes. “Nothing,” she said in a frustrated voice. “But then, this isn’t the best place to try. It’s too full of our friend the poltergeist. And Jilly? This is the man who killed Killearn. Remember that.”
Sera didn’t answer. She was looking at the other photos. “Hot, though,” she observed, before casting a quick, half-annoyed glance up at Jilly. “For a geek. All right, let’s take the photos and find the virtual man himself.”