This saw him through most of the afternoon, leaving him half an hour to sort out the other files that he’d moved from the recovered folder.

He didn’t say anything to Norman about them, but they were copies of Kayla’s personal files, that she had left on the office computer. She had presumably wanted to make use of them in the workplace for her own ends, while Norman wasn’t aware that she hadn’t always been working on the job tasks he’d given her. So she would still have her own copies of the files at home. She must have moved the lease into the encrypted folder at the end of the day she’d been challenged about her performance, perhaps as an attempt to get control over Norman and force him to ease up on her work requirements. Then having resigned over the phone, in a subsequent decision the next morning, and never having come back into the office, she would have had no chance to remove her personal files, and had counted on the encrypted folder to protect them from discovery.

The only thing Kayla hadn’t factored into her cryptic legacy was Murray.

Having looked at Kayla’s personal files, he saw one entitled ‘Time Class lecture notes’.

He opened the file and saw that the contents page included a list of chapters on various methods of time travel.

Murray’s work day was running out of time. So he quickly copied all of Kayla’s personal files onto a disc, and then deleted them from Norman Tesoriero’s clerk’s office computer. When he got home, he copied them onto his own laptop, and spent the entire evening reading through her journal. Years ago she had been one of the students of an elite time travel education class, run by a former teacher in the village named Sandra Corlani. Most of the students had been male, but Kayla had been the one female with a strong interest in the subject. It crossed Murray’s mind that males tended to exponentially outnumber females in the market for certain aspects of science fiction. Apparently time travel was one of them, with Kayla’s female colleagues being more interested in romance.

For the moment, Murray found that her journal (being something of a digital diary) interested him more than studying the actual time travel techniques. He read on and learned that all of the male students had mysteriously disappeared. Kayla had concluded that there must have been some fatal flaws in the time travel techniques, and had resolved never to make use of them. What she couldn’t have known was that all of the male students had been fascinated with the idea of travelling into the past, and had used their time travel methods to do so. This had taken them through the area of the time stream affected by the interaction between the Leprechaun’s use of the Ring of Reversal and the residual reduction radiation created by the many uses of Colleen Balfour’s shrinking devices during the period of time that the Leprechauns had chosen to reverse.