‘And because our client list was full at the time,’ explained Robin.
‘Well, you should know the interested parties represented at this table have probably exhausted the cyber-investigation route,’ said Elgar.
‘Really?’ said Strike.
‘Yes. We were all acting independently,’ said Yeoman, ‘and it’s only since Edie died that we’ve pooled information. Grant—’
‘Yeah, I’ve had a good friend of mine looking into this Anomie these last few weeks,’ said Grant with another aggressive upward jerk of the chin. ‘Len heads up a cybersecurity firm. Met him out in Oman. Len says the security around this game of Anomie’s is top notch. He hasn’t managed to dig up anything on who’s behind it.’
‘Just to clarify a point,’ interjected Robin, ‘there are two people credited with creating this game, aren’t there? Not just Anomie?’
‘That’s right,’ said Yeoman. ‘The other calls himself Morehouse and—’
‘They’re the same person,’ said Heather with absolute confidence. ‘I’ve been looking into it all online. They’re the same person.’
‘Well, maybe – I don’t know,’ said Yeoman tactfully. ‘Morehouse, if he’s a real person, keeps a very low profile. He doesn’t tweet a lot and he never hounded Edie, as far as I know. It’s Anomie who’s become the power in the fandom and who’s widely credited with the game.’
‘And you two have both tried to investigate Anomie online as well?’ Strike said, looking from Yeoman to Elgar.
‘Yes,’ said Elgar. ‘As we were getting closer to a deal, the negativity coming from the fandom was starting to concern us. Anomie was pumping out a particularly pernicious mix of fact and fiction.’
‘He knew things he shouldn’t have done?’ asked Robin.
‘He did, yeah,’ said Elgar. ‘Just odd details, nothing major, but enough to make me wonder whether I wasn’t harbouring Anomie at our studio. I went to a cyber-investigation firm we previously used to look into a leak from our studios. They had no more success than Grant’s contact. Anomie and Morehouse have done a very good job of protecting themselves and their game. As a matter of fact, my guys don’t think they can be amateurs, whatever they pretend online. But we did satisfy ourselves that Anomie wasn’t tweeting from inside the company, which was something.’
‘Anomie and Morehouse claim to be an ordinary pair of fans, don’t they?’ said Robin.
‘That’s right. They’re assumed to be young, though they’ve never explicitly stated their ages, as far as I know,’ said Yeoman. ‘Everyone also talks about them as male, though obviously we have no idea whether that’s true either.’
‘You tried to find out who Anomie was, too, Allan?’ Strike asked the agent.
‘I did,’ said Yeoman, nodding. ‘I didn’t tell Edie, didn’t want to get her hopes up. I’d been advising her to ignore Anomie. She engaged with him a few times on Twitter, and it didn’t help – in fact, it made things worse. But it’s one thing advising a client to ignore social media, and another making them do it.
‘So yes, six months ago I asked someone at my agency to do what he could. Benjamin does all our cyber-security, he’s quite a whizz-kid. He looked into how Anomie’s game’s being hosted, he even – between ourselves – tried to breach its security, to hack into the administrator’s account and get himself onto the moderator channel, but got nowhere. As Grant says, whoever made the game is very clever.’
The door opened again and the waiters returned with their food. Strike, Yeoman and Grant had all ordered the Wagyu beef, Elgar and Robin salads, whereas Heather had chosen risotto.
‘This is a treat,’ said Heather happily and Robin, who’d been fighting her feeling of dislike, silently stopped resisting. They were here in this sleekly appointed club, eating this delicious food, because of the brutal death of Heather’s niece by marriage. Even if Heather had barely known her, as seemed to be the case, her frank enjoyment of her fancy lunch and her persistent eyeing-up of Strike seemed both inappropriate and distasteful to Robin.
When the door had closed behind the waiters, Robin asked:
‘Did anyone ever try to reach out to Anomie? To reason with them, or fix up a private meeting?’
‘Yes: Edie herself,’ said Yeoman, now vigorously cutting up his beef. ‘She asked Anomie over Twitter to meet her face to face. He never answered.’
‘Couldn’t you have done something with copyright law?’ asked Strike. ‘What’s the legal position, if his game’s using all Ledwell and Blay’s characters?’
‘Grey area,’ said Yeoman, now through a mouthful of steak. ‘You could argue infringement, but as the fans liked it and nobody was making any money, we thought it wisest not to be heavy-handed. If Anomie had started monetising it, then yes, we’d have had a copyright violation. We imagined fans would eventually tire of it, thereby diminishing Anomie’s influence, but that hasn’t happened.’
‘Ordinarily,’ said Elgar, ‘we’d be looking to bring him on side, as an influencer – you know, a superfan with a following within the community. Tickets to early screenings, face-to-face meetings with the writers and actors, that sort of thing. But it wouldn’t be possible in this case, even if we were minded to be generous. Anomie seems to treasure his anonymity, which to me suggests he knows it would hurt him to be unmasked.’
‘This is obviously an uncomfortable question,’ said Strike, turning to Grant, ‘but given that Anomie seems to have a lot of inside information, it must have occurred to you that he might be a family member, Grant?’
‘It definitely isn’t anyone in the family,’ Edie’s uncle said at once.
‘Nobody in the family really knew her,’ said Heather. ‘You barely did, did you, Grub?’
‘I was abroad,’ Grant repeated, glaring at Strike, ‘and my ex-wife was ill. My parents are dead, as are both of Edie’s parents. The only other relatives are my kids and none of them ever met her. It’s definitely not anyone in our family.’
‘I made discreet enquiries at the agency,’ said Yeoman, ‘because it naturally occurred to me that I might be harbouring Anomie, but as far as I could find out, nobody there ever had so much as a coffee with Edie outside work. And while someone might have known about developments with the cartoon, they simply can’t have known all those private details about Edie’s past. In my view, Anomie has to be someone who’s been in Edie’s immediate circle at some point or – more likely – in Josh’s.’
‘Why d’you say it’s more likely to be someone in Josh’s?’ asked Robin.
Yeoman set down his knife and fork, swallowed a mouthful of food, and said,
‘Well, for one thing, Anomie’s never targeted Josh,’ he said. ‘It was always Edie he fixated on and abused and harassed. That’s one of the things that drove a wedge between Josh and Edie: Josh was being treated very kindly by the fandom and Edie was being blamed for everything they didn’t like. But as I’ve said, Josh has a history of drinking far more than he should and smoking a lot of pot. I’m afraid he’s a poor judge of character, too. We had quite a few problems with some of the original cast, who were mostly his friends, which, um, brings us back to Katya Upcott.’
Yeoman glanced at Elgar, who made a small movement with his fork that indicated that Yeoman should go on, so the agent said,
‘I didn’t invite Katya to this lunch because she’s fiercely protective of Josh – which, of course, is an entirely honourable sentiment, especially given his present condition. But we can talk more freely without her here.’
‘Does Katya have her own agency?’ said Strike.
‘Er… no. She’s a – a very nice lady who runs a crafting supplies business from home. Katya met Josh and Edie a few years ago, at the art collective where they were living. Katya was taking evening classes there. She’d worked in PR before she set up her own business, so she gave Josh and Edie advice on how to handle themselves when The Ink Black Heart started attracting fans.