Judgement Day

room. A uniformed police officer ushered everyone back into the room, and began asking Pad questions.

‘Do you use computers? Do you use the name Pad on com- puters?’ they asked.

Pad concluded the game was up. He answered their ques- tions truthfully. Hacking was not such a serious crime after all, he thought. It wasn’t as if he had stolen money or anything. This would be a drama, but he was easy-going. He would roll with the punches, cop a slap on the wrist and soon the whole thing would be over and done with.

The police took Pad to his bedroom and asked him questions as they searched the room. The bedroom had a comfortably lived-in look, with a few small piles of clothes in the corner, some shoes scattered across the floor, the curtains hanging crooked, and a collection of music posters - Jimi Hendrix and The Smiths - taped to the wall.

A group of police hovered around his computer. One of them began to search through Pad’s books on the shelves above the PC, checking each one as he pulled it down. A few well-loved Spike Milligan works. Some old chess books from when he was captain of the local chess team. Chemistry books, purchased by Pad long before he took any classes in the subject, just to satisfy his curiosity. Physics books. An oceanography textbook. A geology book bought after a visit to a cave excited his interest in the formation of rocks. Pad’s mother, a nursing sister, and his father, an electronics engineer who tested gyros on aircraft, had always encouraged their children’s interest in the sciences.

The policeman returned those books to the shelves, only picking out the computer books, textbooks from programming and maths classes Pad had taken at a Manchester university. The officer carefully slid them inside plastic bags to be taken away as evidence.

Then the police picked through Pad’s music tapes - The Stone Roses, Pixies, New Order, The Smiths and lots of indie music from the flourishing Manchester music scene. No evidence of anything but an eclectic taste in music there.