But something stuck with me from Julian’s email—Cole’s name. And with it, Cole’s voice in my ear, from our call that morning on Hel’s unicorn phone. Anything you need, okay? Anything. I mean that.
Cole knew as much about computers as Gabe did, and probably more about mobile phone security, which was his professional area. He, of all people, would be able to tell me what I needed to know—how to communicate safely with Hel. The police would have all my friends and family on their list already, but Cole—I couldn’t remember the last time I had rung him before this morning, and even then I’d used Hel’s old phone, not mine. Before today, our communication had always been through Gabe. The police would work their way around to Cole eventually, I had no doubt about that, but they would have no reason to put him top of the list.
Most importantly, Cole was Gabe’s best friend. If something had been going on in Gabe’s head the last couple of weeks, something that he hadn’t felt able to tell me, for whatever reason, Cole was the only other person he might have confided in. I had to find out if Gabe had set up that life insurance policy or not, and there was a chance—not a very high one, but a definite chance—that Cole might know, one way or the other.
But how could I get in touch with him without putting us both on the police’s radar?
I was still trying to figure it out when a deep voice came from in front of me.
“Hey, what happened to your hair, Red?”
The words jolted me back to reality and I looked up, slightly alarmed at the idea that someone was keeping track of my appearance. Then I realized—it was Lucius, the guy from reception. Of course—he had seen me with red hair that afternoon.
I gave a shaky laugh.
“I don’t know… just fancied a change, I guess. You know what they say—blondes have more fun.”
“I hear ya. Though you were looking pretty serious there. Everything all right?”
The question was kindly phrased, but the absurdity of it made a near-hysterical laugh bubble up inside me, threatening to escape. Instead I stared at him, wondering what to say.
Well, I was just wondering how to get in touch with my dead husband’s best friend without being fingered by the police. Any ideas?
“I—I’ve got a tricky email to write,” I said at last. “To a friend. I was just trying to think of how to phrase it.”
“Ah,” Lucius said. He smiled, a kind one that made his eyes crinkle. He was older than he had looked at first, I realized. Probably my age or more. “You know what? My rule of thumb is, if you can’t write it, say it. I always find face-to-face is better for the big stuff.”
Face-to-face. I chewed my lip, wondering if this was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard, or if the man was a genius. Face-to-face. I knew where Cole lived. I knew where he worked. It was highly, highly unlikely he’d be under surveillance—not yet at least. Could I just… find him?
“You know…” I said slowly, “I think you might just be right.”
“I’m always right,” Lucius said with a wink. “G’night… Blondie.”
“Good night,” I echoed. As he disappeared up the stairs to the dorms, I shut down the laptop, threw my Pot Noodle cup in the bin, and stood, with a new sense of… not hope exactly, but at least a kind of purpose. I had a plan—albeit a pretty cursory one.
I was going to get some sleep. Then I would find Cole.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7 MINUS FIVE DAYS
When I woke, it was with a sense of complete disorientation. I was lying in an unfamiliar bed, surrounded by purple curtains, and there was a low, throbbing pain below my right ribs. The room was extremely warm, my hair smelled of bleach and cheap shampoo, and I could hear other people’s breathing.
Then it came to me—I was in the hostel, lying on a thin mattress in a curtained bunk, and my roommates were asleep, which meant it was likely still early.
I pulled myself up against the pillows. My head was aching, my side hurt, and I had the sensation of not having slept at all, although I knew I had. But my dreams had been filled with horrible nightmares—images of Gabe, soaked with blood, lurching upright with a ghastly grin and begging, Please, help me, as his cut throat whistled with every word; sweaty chases through hot shopping centers with a policeman on my tail who looked a lot like Jeff Leadbetter but wore Hel’s coat and pushed the twins in a buggy in front of him—an image that should have been funny, but in the dream had been anything but.
For a long moment I sat, waiting for everything to stabilize, for the sickish feeling of dread to subside and the pieces of the day to sink into place. At last, realizing that this wasn’t going to get any better, I parted the curtains, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and climbed down the bunk ladder to the floor.
Down on the ground, I got dressed as quietly as I could in the semidarkness. The burner phone said that it was 6:34 a.m. Cole was an early riser—he went to the gym before work most days and was usually at his desk at his office in Limehouse by nine at the latest. Which meant I had just enough time to walk across London to intercept him before he got there. The only question was what to do about my bag. It was heavy—heavier than I really wanted to drag with me, and it would be safe in the luggage cage under the bed. But I didn’t know whether I would be coming back—it was all too possible that answering Jeff’s email last night would turn out to have been a huge mistake. In the end I unlocked the cage and dragged the rucksack out, swinging it onto my back with a grimace.
In the lobby, I left the keys on the counter and then let myself out into the early-morning chill of a London February.
* * *
THE WALK TO LIMEHOUSE WAS longer than I had thought, and by the time I began to weave my way through the narrow streets of Wapping, down to the river and Cole’s office, the traffic was humming, and I was getting more and more anxious.
It wasn’t only the ticking clock of Cole’s arrival that was making me concerned. I had never felt so conscious of the hundreds and thousands of CCTV cameras London possessed, had rarely even noticed them before today unless I was on a job. Now, as I ducked down alleyways and walked swiftly past the entrances of Tube stations, I felt painfully aware of them—the little plastic lenses following me as I passed, capturing my image, storing it on disk or passing it remotely to some control room back in Scotland Yard. The only saving grace—and a fact I tried to keep reminding myself of as my paranoia mounted—was the fact that there were so many of them. Looking for one person in the thousands of images churned out by London’s vast surveillance web would be not so much like looking for a needle in a haystack as like looking for one particular grain of sand on a beach. I just had to hope that facial recognition wasn’t yet at a stage where computers could cut out the humans and scan for a particular set of biometric features. They couldn’t do that yet… could they? It felt like only yesterday that I’d been reading sarcastic blogs about iPhones failing to distinguish between Chinese faces.
Well, if they could, there was nothing I could do about it for the moment. All I could do was get to Cole’s office and intercept him before he disappeared inside for the day.
Cerberus Security was a tech company that specialized in privacy and security apps for mobile phones. It had started out small, with an ad-blocking app that had proven unexpectedly successful. Later it had expanded into password managers, antivirus apps, and software aimed at worried parents trying to keep tabs on their kids.
The company was housed in Kynes Wharf, a massive black-painted wooden building right down by the Thames. In its day it had been a cotton warehouse, receiving bales from all over the world off ships that made their way up the river at high tide. Now it had been converted into hipster offices. Once upon a time, Cerberus had occupied just the top floor, back when Cole had joined the firm barely out of university. In the years since, it had expanded to take over the entire building, slowly pushing out the other tenants, and Cole had risen with it.
Now, as I swung around the corner, I saw an intermittent stream of young people coming from the opposite direction. They didn’t look like the office workers at Arden Alliance—most of them were too young, and they were for the most part not dressed in suits and ties. I would have fit in fine here with my blond hair and Converse. But I wasn’t intending to go inside—not yet, anyway. Instead I waited, scanning the approaching workers for Cole’s face and trying not to meet the eye of the boxy CCTV camera mounted on top of a high wall, nestled amid the barbed wire like a strange bird. Jesus. They were everywhere. I moved away, turning to face the Thames and its expanse of stinking low-tide mud, though I knew it was stupid—if the police requisitioned footage from that camera, my image was already captured. Turning my back now wasn’t going to help.