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imagine what he speculated.”
    Meacham turned to look back at the table and the raft of recording units. “Does this sound turn up anywhere else?”
    “We’re still checking. He made hundreds of hours of audio. But we don’t think so. His journal entries for this date express frustration at not having a recorder at the same location as the camcorder.”
    “Was there anyone else in the house?”
    Fretwell shook his head. “The police gave the place a going over, and so did we. No one was there but Adams.”
    Meacham leaned against the work station. “Your take?”
    “Without having seen his psych profile ...” Fretwell paused, giving Meacham the opening to offer the information. When she said nothing, he shrugged. “Our best guess is depression.” His smile was wry. “One might say his interests were a bit on the morbid side.”
    Not morbid enough, though. There was nothing in his file to suggest instability. Adams was an odd duck, but seemed a pretty happy ducky. “And what about that scream?”
    Fretwell’s unease returned. “We’re still working on that. How does an audio glitch sound? Some kind of electronic gremlin? These are the thoughts that are calming things down around the office.”
    “Good enough for government work.”
    “Precisely.”
    She flirted with the temptation. “ Ghost Hunting Spy Was Suicidal” for the tabloids. A more bureaucratically worded version of the same in a report for Korda. No reason why this wouldn’t work. The tabs didn’t have the scream recording, after all. Ta-da, job done, home again by the end of the week. Oh, for life to be that simple. She sighed and resisted. The story might look neat and tidy. That didn’t mean it actually was. The loose end of the scream was still dangling. There was always the possibility of a leak re-igniting media interest. The worst case scenario was a failure to follow Korda’s injunction: I want to know what kind of missile is heading our way before it hits . Going with the tidy story might turn out to be as good a defence as closing eyes and plugging ears against the missile. She had to know definitively, one way or another. “I’m going to have to check into a few things,” she said.
    Fretwell grunted in sympathy. “Better you than me, dear, that’s all I can say.”
    Meacham walked over to the equipment again. She riffled the pages of a notebook. “How much longer will you be going through this stuff?”
    Fretwell gave her his sad smile. “You must have mortally angered the gods. Let me guess. If you need this unholy tech mess, you’ll be wanting it down at Gethsemane Hall.”
    “I must look depressed.”
    “You do.” Fretwell thought for a moment. “Will the end of the week be soon enough?”
    “I’ll call you from there, let you know. If I can muster the right troops, I won’t need any of this.”
    “You should be so lucky. In the meantime ...” He pointed to the notebooks. “Feel free to abscond with those. We have all the copies we’ll need.”
    “Thanks.”
    “No, thank you. You’ve just added to the downward slope. Now the shit can roll down past me.” He smiled, one of the happiest people Meacham had seen all year.
    That night, she sat in her hotel just off Charing Cross Road and ploughed through the notebooks. There was much she couldn’t decipher. She was going to have to consult an expert, she realized, and shuddered at the implications. Her season in Hell was going to be long and hot. Exclamation and question marks were scattered like seasoning over the pages, becoming more and more frequent as the dates crept closer to Adams’s leap. They were suggestive but told her squat. The diary was more detailed and interesting. She started with the date of the scream, and saw that Fretwell was right: Adams was amphetamine-excited about his recording. He was also crack-mad about not having caught more. No surprises there. What had her frowning was how surprised Adams was. Not that he’d recorded anything