Finn turned a corner and stopped. Ahead of him, only twenty yards off, they’d reached an impressive-looking townhouse and were piling inside. Tilberg was clearly a wealthy young man, given that he’d just bought dinner for ten people, so it made sense that he might live somewhere like this instead of in regular student accommodation, but Finn wanted to be sure.
Once the door was closed and the lights came on inside, he walked along and stood on the corner of a narrow side street facing the house. As it did at home, the snow gave everywhere a deceptive look of coziness, but he didn’t need to stand for long before the cold started to bite.
He heard a burst of laughter from within the house, then music, but only faintly. He looked up and down the street, checking there wasn’t a bar or coffee shop that might provide a better surveillance post, but he was drawn back to the house by another light coming on.
It was on the second floor, what looked like a large bedroom. Hailey walked into the room, threw something that might have been a coat onto a bed or chair, then crouched down. When she stood again she was holding a cardigan that she put on, quickly checking her appearance in a mirror. Finn smiled, recognizing it as one of the items she’d bought at Fate.
She turned, in response to someone, and Anders Tilberg came into the room. They kissed, briefly at first but serving only as a trigger for something more passionate. Perhaps someone called from downstairs, because they broke apart then and laughed, and Tilberg called something over his shoulder. They kissed again, a promise, and left the room, turning out the light.
Finn returned the way he’d come, confident now that he would get Hailey back in the morning, and hopeful that in the process he’d find out why they’d had him under surveillance for two years.
Yet something about the evening had left him in surprisingly low spirits. His mind flitted about, trying to identify the cause, thinking of Sparrowhawk, the USB stick, his threatened career. The catalyst, though, had been something simultaneously more mundane and more profound, and he felt ludicrously forlorn when his memory landed on it again.
It had been nothing more than that simple act of intimacy between Hailey and Tilberg in the restaurant: the fleeting kiss, the two bodies moving seamlessly together toward the door, his hand finding the small of her back. It was just one more thing that made him want to call Adrienne, albeit with little idea of what he would say to her.
Perhaps they had once appeared like that to onlookers, a couple comfortably wrapped up in each other, but at some level he now felt that it hadn’t been true, because he had been a fake. He’d held back more than he’d ever given to Adrienne, taking for granted that it would be enough—maybe it had for a while, but he supposed four years was a long time for anyone to live with a shadow.
Of course, despite appearances, Hailey was also holding something back, and though it was probably of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, he doubted her fledgling relationship would survive that revelation when it came. Finn imagined the kitsch little heart being removed from their Facebook pages, his immediately in horror and embarrassment, hers more reluctantly.
It was too bad. He’d had little sympathy for Hailey Portman so far, and at some level he knew he should still have none, but after seeing her tonight, after seeing the appeal of the lie she’d constructed for herself, he regretted that in the morning he would have to bring that idyll to an end.
Chapter Seventeen
It was just after seven when he had the taxi drop him at the end of the street. Fresh snow had fallen during the night, and the dawn light was muted by the blanket of cloud that still hung low and uniform over the city.
The house, as he’d expected, was shut up and full of sleep. He’d guessed all eight of their fellow diners probably didn’t live there, and he saw now that one had dropped a beer bottle as they’d left—it had landed in the snow on the step and been partially covered by the fresh fall, left looking like some ancient, fossilized artifact.
Finn looked at the lock, refreshing his memory of the methods for opening various simple mechanisms. But the first method was successful as often as not, and so it was this time—he tried the door and found it open.
Stepping inside, he half expected the stale early morning atmosphere that followed any student party, but he guessed none of them smoked, and the only smell here was coffee. It was as if the place was on the market and they were expecting prospective buyers.
The coffee smelled fresh enough that he wondered if someone was already in the kitchen. He didn’t wait to find out, moving quickly up the stairs, across the landing, stopping for a second outside the door before knocking. There was no reply and he knocked again, a little harder.