“I don’t have his—”
“—Password, right.” There were people Louisa could ask, who could crack a phone’s password faster than a teenager could crack its screen, but the most obvious was Roddy Ho, and she didn’t want to go that route. Asking Ho for a favour was like chewing someone else’s gum.
“What about his computer? Or is that passworded too?”
“No. House rules. But they don’t use email much. It’s all texts and Snapchat. And his browser history’s the usual stuff, social media and music sites. He clears it pretty regularly.”
Even Louisa did that, and she didn’t have a mother on the premises.
She said, “Send me the list of sites he’d been looking at?”
“I’ve told you, there’s nothing unusual there.”
“And yet I’m the one you asked for help.”
She heard a noise in the background, a boy’s voice. That would be . . . Andrew.
Clare said, “I’m sorry.”
“I understand.”
“You can’t. You don’t have children.”
No, but she’d noticed most mothers were fond of them. Why was that so difficult for Clare to get her head round? But Louisa simply recited her email address so Clare could send her Lucas’s browsing history, then fretted at a traffic light, hating the stop-start of her commute. But at least that was over for the next week. Because she was going to do this, it seemed. Whether for Min, for herself, for Clare, even for Lucas: that was background fade now. She was going to do this.
Clare was saying, “Thank you.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“No, but . . . Thank you.”
Louisa ended the call, promising to get back to Clare later.
When she reached home the first thing she did was fire up her laptop and examine Lucas Harper’s online history. Clare had sent his browsing tree as a screenshot, and a quick glance revealed nothing to excite maternal discomfort—Lucas was a cricket fan, like his father; had obsessively checked stats, as if hunting for a glimmer of hope in the recent Ashes debacle; and he spent time on YouTube and Facebook, like everyone else. Also Amazon, and other online retailers: clothes and sporting goods, mostly. Wikipedia. Google.
A couple of sites fit no obvious parameters, though. One was for a catering company, Paul’s Pantry. “For all your party needs.” It was based in Pegsea, Pembrokeshire. That’s in Wales, she remembered Clare saying. The other was for a property in the same county; a place called Caerwyss Hall, which offered all the facilities your company required for a weekend getaway, including conference rooms, swimming pool, assault course, stables, quad bikes, spa and gym. The thought of her company—specifically, of Jackson Lamb—making use of all or any of these momentarily swamped any other consideration, but once she’d banished such images, she commenced wondering why Lucas had been interested. Paul’s Pantry, she guessed, had been where he’d worked over Christmas. Maybe this had been one of their catering events.
She rang Clare again to check. “Does the name Caerwyss Hall ring bells?”
“It’s near Pegsea. One of those big manor house places that’s gone corporate? Weekend retreats and team-building. Where everyone has to pretend they get on, and nobody hates anyone else.”
“Hell on earth,” Louisa agreed. While they talked, she was looking up the Wiki pages Lucas had visited. “Lucas worked for Paul’s Pantry, right? Did he help cater an event there?”
“Yes. The day after Boxing Day. It was good money.”
But he’d looked at the site since then, so he hadn’t been checking up ahead of the job, to know what to expect.
The Wiki harvest was a curious collection. Some well-known names. Some obscure companies. What on earth was Bullingdon Fopp? Was this what teenagers did to pass the time: surf below-the-skyline entities from the financial news pages? It didn’t seem likely. She said, “What about his interests? I can see he likes sport. What about politics?”
“Not really. He was interested in causes, all young people are, or should be. He got uptight about the whole Me Too thing. But Labour-Tory politics, no, it turned him off. Each as bad as the other, he reckoned.”
Louisa was scrolling through Caerwyss Hall’s website, scanning their About Us page. The usual puffery, and pull-quotes from users. Our team has gone from strength to strength. We were delighted with the care and support on offer. And there, halfway down the page, Bullingdon Fopp again. A PR company. No quote offered, but the company was listed as a customer.
“And sport, yeah. He’s a fitness fanatic.”
She nodded, pointlessly. Was feeling unfit herself today, well short of her 10,000 steps. She scrolled back to the top of the page, wondering why Lucas had been so interested in Caerwyss Hall, and what had led him to research the name of one of its corporate clients.
As if she’d been reading her mind, Clare went on, “He logs his daily exercise, and if he’s fallen short during the week, he makes up at weekends. Goes on runs to get his mileage up. That sort of thing.”
Louisa paused. “Does he have a Fitbit?”
“God, yes. He’s obsessed with it.”
“And did he take it with him?”
“I imagine so. I haven’t seen it lying around.”
“Okay,” said Louisa. “I don’t suppose you can lay your hands on the paperwork, by any chance?”
In Slough House, the afternoon was doing what the afternoon did: outstaying its welcome. River had printed the photocopied passport from Southampton, the supposed Canadian called Jay Featherstone, and pinned it to his office wall. This was his father. He had no fond childhood memories to draw on, because he hadn’t met the man until last year, but he hadn’t forgotten how Harkness had dumped him in the Thames on that occasion. More delaying tactic than murder attempt, to be fair, but Frank’s absence during River’s childhood had presumably left certain gaps in his knowledge, such as whether his son could swim, so you couldn’t write it off as horseplay. Then again, River couldn’t swear his mother knew that much. Talk about a fucked-up family. They had enough raw material to float a psychotherapy practice.
He was rolling a pea-sized ball of Blu Tak between finger and thumb, and he flicked it now at Frank’s photo. It hit the paper, hung for a second, then dropped to the floor.
The name Jay Featherstone was all they had. Lamb had vetoed contacting border controclass="underline" there was no need to alert anyone—he meant the Park—that they were looking. Not that they’d need alerting. Di Taverner had been at the funeral, and would no more expect Lamb to shrug Harkness’s presence off than she’d expect him to fly, or brush his teeth. But that was par for the course; much of life at Slough House was determined by the push-me/pull-you relationship between those two. River would suggest they get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it.
“So what do we do?” he’d asked earlier, when they’d gathered in Lamb’s room once more, pooling what they knew. It had already been pooled by email, of course, but Lamb shunned emails; would have communicated entirely by dead-letter drop if he could. The stack of phone books holding up his desk lamp testified to his analogue preferences. “You can break a man’s ribs with a telephone directory,” he’d once observed. “Try doing that with a rolled-up copy of the internet.”
“I assume we have some idea where our mock Canadian has got to?” Lamb had said. “Not that I approve of mocking Canadians. That’d be like shooting kittens in a barrel.”
River said, “We have a credit card from the car hire firm.”
“He used it to book a room at a Travelodge,” said Ho.
“Classy bastard,” said Lamb. “Where?”