‘I put that to the prosecutor one time. She said forget it, it is pure speculation. And even if it was the same weapon, it does not mean that the same person used it. Perhaps McBride sold it on or gave it to someone as a Christmas present. Also, you have no evidence that this is in any way drug-related.’
‘My young friend has a theory that Redway and Parsons came here because they’re representing the other end of McBride’s supply chain, back home,’ Vic said. ‘They met with McBride, things went bad, McBride zapped Redway in the head.’
‘Nice story. Here’s another. It could be this guy really is some kind of businessman. He got lost, he was mugged, put up a struggle, and zzzt…’ Alain touched his forefinger to the back of his neck.
Vic said, ‘A mugger with a ray gun?’
Alain shrugged. He had that stubborn, smouldering look. ‘On this world, why not? No, my friend, this one belongs to your partner. I am not eating it for him.’
Skip said, surprising Vic, ‘You don’t have to. I want to follow it through.’
It surprised Alain too. After a moment he smiled and told Vic, ‘How is it that only this kid knows the right thing to do?’
11. Sleuthing
London | 7 July
‘I have a free day,’ Chloe said. ‘I could sit around here, or in my flat with the curtains drawn, hiding from reporters. Or I could do something useful.’
‘If you want to do something useful, you should rest up for the rerun of the committee hearing,’ Jen said. ‘But I know you won’t.’
‘This can’t wait,’ Chloe said. ‘Not with Chief Inspector Nevers on the case.’
‘We’ve already been over that,’ Jen said. ‘All he wanted was those fragments that Ram took. Now he has them, that should be the end of it.’
‘I don’t think so. He wanted me to know that he was interested in the breakout in Dagenham. Plus his friend saw the flyer, so they know we’re interested in it too. In Fahad Chauhan.’
‘Do you really think this boy is in trouble?’
‘I think he’s hiding from someone. Hence the midnight flit. And then there’s the number the artefact is doing on his head.’
‘Because if he is in trouble,’ Jen said, with relentless patience, ‘wouldn’t it be best to let the police help him?’
‘Not if he’s hiding from the police. And suppose Eddie Ackroyd finds him first?’
They were talking in the sunny kitchen of Jen’s roomy semi-detached house in Finchley, after Jen’s husband had left for his job in the City and Jen’s daughters had been dispatched to school, joining a walking train of children escorted by four parent volunteers. Chloe had spent the night on the sofa. Her flat was being staked out by a small gang of journalists; there’d been a clip on Sky News showing them outside the entrance of the tower block, followed by a twenty-second interview with a bewildered neighbour. Apparently Chloe had always been ‘quiet’. She couldn’t go home, she’d had to switch off her phone because some hacker had outed its number, and her Facebook wall was plastered with messages from journalists offering to treat her side of the story sympathetically and a spew of anonymous threats and insults. She was going to have to ride out this moment of notoriety and hope it passed quickly.
At least she’d been able to put across her side of things in the TV interview. It had been set up in neutral territory, a room in a hotel in Bloomsbury. Daniel’s friend Jim Ford, a man in his sixties Chloe had seen on TV now and then, with snow-white hair and dressed in a vintage Paul Smith suit and a brightly patterned tie, had quickly and charmingly probed her background and established what she wanted to talk about, and then they’d got down to business. Two armchairs facing each other under bright lights, a woman behind a video camera, another woman who’d dusted Chloe’s cheeks and forehead with powder and fastened the microphone beneath the top button of her blouse, Jim Ford with a prop clipboard. It had taken just twenty minutes. Jim Ford and his crew had zoomed off because they needed to edit the footage for the seven o’clock news; Daniel had treated Chloe and Jen to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, and Jen had taken Chloe back to her house.
Now, in Jen’s kitchen, in the borrowed trouser suit she’d worn to face the committee, her hair wet from Jen’s shower and smelling of Jen’s apple shampoo, Chloe promised that she wouldn’t get into any trouble, or talk to any strange reporters.
‘At least tell me where you’re going,’ Jen said.
‘Spitalfields, to begin with. I thought I’d do a little sleuthing, and ask some old friends for a little help.’
Chloe rode the Tube to Liverpool Street station, where she bought two pay-as-you-go phones from a booth that printed them for her right there. She used one, still warm in her hand, to call Jen and give her the number.
‘Just in case anything comes up at your end. How’s Daniel?’
‘He’s doing interviews. Helena isn’t too happy about it, but you know Daniel.’
‘Has he mentioned anything about my field trip to Norfolk? I know he was going to talk to Ada Morange’s people. Maybe you could ask him if he remembered to mention that the Hazard Police are interested in this thing.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Jen said, ‘Dr Morange’s security people have reached out to us.’
‘What do they want to know? If you give me their number, I could talk to them directly.’
‘I don’t think you should discuss it over the phone,’ Jen said. ‘You need to come in for a briefing.’
‘I have my own thing to do first,’ Chloe said, adding, when Jen started to object, ‘I’ll call when I’m finished.’
She felt a mixture of excitement and dismay, a sense of things moving out of her control. More than ever, she needed to find out everything she could about Fahad Chauhan, and Eddie Ackroyd and his client. She needed something she could use to prove her worth, to keep herself in the game.
She headed out of the station in the river of rush-hour commuters, trying not to look at the big screen where BBC 24 was replaying a clip of the assassination, dodged through the traffic juddering and honking down Bishopsgate, and cut across Spitalfields Market. She walked fast, head down, trying to blend in, tingling with anxiety and exhilaration. A spy in her own city, a fugitive on an urgent clandestine mission. The game was on, and she had only a small window of independence before Ada Morange’s people started to interfere.
Tonani’s, the café frequented by runners and scouts before most of them had decamped to the Reef, was dismayingly empty. The orange plastic chairs and white tables, and the poster-sized photographs of alien land- and seascapes, were still there, and the owner, Rosa Jenners, still presided over her hissing Gaggia, but where there’d once been a buzzing crowd of people looking for deals, making deals or boasting about deals, there were only a couple of bemused Chinese tourists and a guy Chloe didn’t recognise poking at a tablet. After she had answered the inevitable questions about Richard Lyonds and the Jackaroo avatar, saying that, no, she didn’t think she’d be getting any kind of reward or medal, Chloe asked Rosa if she’d seen Eddie Ackroyd recently.
Rosa, a short, thick-waisted woman, grey hair done up into a bun skewered with a pink and purple robber-worm quill, wanted to know what kind of trouble Eddie had got himself into now.
‘I just need to ask him about something.’
‘Because we had the police in earlier, asking after him.’
‘A tall white guy, Adam Nevers?’
‘No, it was two young men from the Hazard Police. Are you all right, dear?’
Rosa sat Chloe at a table and gave her a mug of builder’s tea fortified with a heaping spoonful of sugar, and Chloe told Rosa that things were moving faster than she’d expected, and explained about her encounter with Eddie at the Dagenham breakout, his boasts about his mysterious client, the clues sent to the LFM wiki board.