He poked strands of tobacco into the end of the roll-up with a match.
‘Miles Mollison’s wife’s got gigantic tits,’ said Fats.
An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned her head to glare at Fats. Andrew began to laugh again.
‘Humungous bouncing jubblies,’ Fats said loudly, into the scowling, crumpled face. ‘Great big juicy double-F mams.’
She turned her red face slowly to face the front of the bus again. Andrew could barely breathe.
They got off the bus in the middle of Yarvil, near the precinct and main pedestrian-only shopping street, and wove their way through the shoppers, smoking Fats’ roll-ups. Andrew had virtually no money left: Howard Mollison’s wages would be very welcome.
The bright-orange sign of the internet café seemed to blaze at Andrew from a distance, beckoning him on. He could not concentrate on what Fats was saying.
He did not know. His feet kept moving, and the sign was growing larger and larger, luring him, leering at him.
But the alternative… the humiliation of having Simon show what he was to the world; the toll it would take on the family when, after weeks of anticipation and idiocy, he was defeated, as he must be. Then would come rage and spite, and a determination to make everybody else pay 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 café 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.
