“I know. I just—I panicked when I couldn’t get hold of you. I kept thinking what would you do, stuck in the cottage with no electricity and no way of calling for help. And then I began thinking about the fact that we’d left it with barely any food and stuff. I think I just realized what a stupid plan it was.”
“Are you kidding?” I walked over to him where he was seated at the table and put my hand on his shoulder. “It was a great plan. And I’m bloody grateful—you got me out of London. I just—I suppose I’m worried that if the police had you under surveillance…” I trailed off.
Cole rubbed his face unhappily. “I know. I know. But look—I don’t think I was followed. I mean, I’m sure I wasn’t. Those county lanes on the last bit—they’re single-track roads where you meet one car an hour. There’s no way to follow someone on those without them seeing you. And I got off the motorway at Maidstone, so that’s it as far as automatic number-plate recognition goes. But, Jack, if they really start digging they’re going to find this place. It’s in Noemie’s name, but I pay most of the bills, and I’m pretty sure I’m on the council tax. I come down here practically every weekend in the summer. It wouldn’t take them long. This was only ever a stopgap. If you want to be untraceable, you need somewhere completely off the grid—not connected to either of us.”
I nodded wearily. I knew what he meant. But I wasn’t intending to be on the run for that long. I couldn’t.
“You look tired,” Cole said now. “Have you been eating?”
“Yes,” I said, though it wasn’t completely true. I’d had pasta and pesto last night, a cereal bar for breakfast, and then I’d tried to eat the rest of the cold pasta for lunch, but something about it had turned my stomach. Now I suddenly felt very hungry.
“Well, I bought food,” Cole said, getting up. “And wine. I’m going to cook you a really bloody good dinner. I want you to sit there and do absolutely nothing, and for just a couple of hours we’re going to pretend none of this is happening, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. There was a lump in my throat—maybe at Cole’s kindness, or maybe at the realization of how much, how very much I really did wish that were true.
For the next two hours we did just that. Cole cooked—some kind of amazing, savory dish of fried red peppers, noodles, and a shedload of miso, and I sat at the table and stoked the fire and drank the silky-soft red wine Cole had brought until my head was fuzzy and everything that had happened over the last few days took on a strange patina of unreality.
When Cole served the food, I wolfed down the whole plateful, and then half of the huge portion of seconds he immediately doled out, and then sat back, feeling so full I could barely think, and reached for the bottle.
“God, I just realized, I’ve probably drunk too much to drive,” Cole said as I leaned over to refill first his glass, and then mine.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s your house. You should stay.”
“Are you sure?” He looked doubtful. “I mean, it’s Noemie’s house, technically.” He looked at the hearth rug and I could see him calculating how cold it was going to be, wrapped in his coat, by two in the morning. “I guess I could sleep in the car.”
“Cole, stay. It’s a double couch. It won’t be the first time I’ve top-and-tailed with a friend. Besides”—I found I was smiling for the first time in what felt like days—“I might actually wake up able to feel my fingers tomorrow if there’s someone else to warm the place up.”
“Okay,” Cole said, although he sounded a little reluctant. “I’ll have to leave early, though. I’ve got a meeting at ten in London.”
“That’s okay.” I suppressed a yawn. “I’m shattered. I’ll probably be asleep in about ten minutes.”
“Is your phone charged?” Cole asked, getting up and beginning to clear the plates. I nodded and turned it on, half hoping that there might be a message from Hel, but there was nothing—only four increasingly anxious messages from Cole starting from just after my phone had died, asking me if I was okay and then announcing his intention to drive down.
But thinking of Hel had made me remember something—our conversation of the night before.
“Cole,” I said now, “I’m really sorry, but I need to ask you another favor.”
“Jack.” He put the plates in the sink and came and sat next to me, his face serious. He took my hand in his, his fingers warm and gentle as they wrapped around mine. “Please, for God’s sake, stop apologizing. I want you to ask me—don’t you get that? I want to help. I’d have done anything, anything for Gabe. So please. Whatever it is—just say it. And if I can do it—it’s yours.”
“I don’t know if you can, that’s the thing,” I said, and then I told him about Hel’s theory about Jeff, and my own suspicions about the insurance policy. As I talked, Cole’s face grew more and more grave, and when I finished he looked very worried indeed.
“I don’t like this.”
“But you do think it could be true?”
“Yes, I do. Shit. I mean—this is bad. When it was just a case of mistaken identity, some burglary gone wrong, that was bad enough. But if Hel’s right, Jack, this guy is psycho. You could be in real danger.”
“There’s more,” I said, a little reluctantly, and then I told him about the email from Jeff and my impetuous reply. “Do you think I did wrong? Answering it, I mean?”
Cole shook his head. “I don’t know. God. I mean, replying probably wasn’t the wisest thing if I’m being honest, but if anyone could set up a good VPN it’s Gabe, and if it gets Jeff’s colleagues poking into his background…”
“Do you think Hel is right, then?” I asked.
Cole looked taken aback. “I mean… I guess? Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My head felt thick and stupid, the food and wine making logical thought hard. “I just… I can see her point. It’s like she said: it’s nearly always spouses in this kind of case—spouses and exes. And Jeff is the only really significant ex I have, certainly the only one where we parted on bad terms. But it just… I don’t know, Cole, it just doesn’t feel like something he’d do. And he was there, at the police station, right around the same time I was.”
“He could have hired someone,” Cole said. “I mean, he’s a cop. He must know the right people to talk to.”
“It’s not just that… it’s the whole thing, the setting up of the insurance. It feels too elaborate. I just wish I knew the deal with that—who took it out, whether it’s really connected to the killing. Is there a way of finding out?”
“Maybe…” Cole said. He rubbed his temple. He looked like he was thinking hard. “Shit, this stuff was Gabe’s area, really. The easiest step might be to try to get hold of the policy documents, work out if there’s any mistakes, something that might indicate someone other than Gabe took it out. If that’s the case, it might be enough to get the police to take a look at the back end. If they could get the IP address of the person who set the policy up… Would Jeff have known enough to use a VPN, d’you think?”
“I don’t know.” My head was aching. “He’s not very techy. I think they did send me the policy documents. Hang on.”
I opened up my laptop, navigated to the email the insurers had sent me, and clicked to view the attachments. The one marked A summary of your policy looked the most hopeful, and I opened it.
A long PDF appeared on my screen, and I scrolled down it, scanning past the legalese for information about Gabe. There was his name, including middle name, all correct. Height. Weight. Occupation. Date of birth, correct. Moderate drinker. Nonsmoker—well, that last one wasn’t strictly true. Gabe liked the occasional joint. But it was true that he didn’t smoke cigarettes, and anyway, I wasn’t sure that Gabe himself would have admitted to the odd toke on an insurance policy. It didn’t seem that relevant. But there was a lot of information here, all of it correct, and I couldn’t see how Jeff could have known half of it.
“This wasn’t Jeff,” I said aloud. “It can’t be. There’s stuff he couldn’t possibly have known. I mean, how many people know Gabe’s middle name is—” I stopped, corrected myself painfully, “—was Charles?”
“There’s always phishing,” Cole said, a little doubtfully, but I shook my head.
“Jeff’s not savvy enough for that, I told you. It’s not just that he’s not techy enough; I don’t think his brain would work like that. He’s a ‘use your connections to fuck them over’ kind of guy.”
“Wait.” Cole put down his glass. “Hang on. Jeff’s connections. What about the police database?”
“What do you mean?”
“This Jeff guy—he’s a police officer, yes? And Gabe—”
“Was arrested when he was seventeen,” I finished, suddenly seeing where Cole was headed. “Fuck. But he was a juvenile. Do you think it could still be on the system?”
Cole shrugged.