Joe Country полностью

“And what about Hannah herself? How’s she bearing up?”

“I think she rather enjoys it.”

He knew he did.

“Okay, thanks, Richard. Good meeting.”

Not ten minutes later, back at his desk, Richard Pynne watched Oliver Nash, Chair of the Limitations Committee, working his way across the floor, heading for Lady Di’s office.

She called Clare Harper while driving home, that final comment in the coffee shop—You were fucking Min, weren’t you? I’d have hoped that counted for something—carefully unmentioned, as if it were an elderly relative’s flatulence.

“Okay,” Louisa said. “Tell me about Lucas’s recent movements.”

Like she was a private detective, or a GP.

“Just the normal. School, friends, his bedroom . . . Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“And he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”

“You know what they’re like these days. He has friends who are girls. But no one special, no.”

These days weren’t so distant from her own, Louisa thought; not in real terms. But hell. The difference.

“What’s his number?” she asked. “I might be able to get it traced. That’s what you were hoping for, isn’t it?”

“He didn’t take his phone with him.”

She might as well have said he’d left his kidneys behind. Louisa didn’t know many teenagers, but she couldn’t swear she’d ever seen one without a phone in its hand.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s right here. I’m holding it.”

So okay: short of leaving a banner reading don’t come looking, Lucas couldn’t have made his intentions clearer. But still. Abandoning home and mother was one thing, but his phone? If this was adolescent dramatics, it was an extreme case.

She said, “Can you check on his recent activity? Or—”

“I don’t have his—”

“—Password, right.” There were people Louisa could ask, who could crack a phone’s password faster than a teenager could crack its screen, but the most obvious was Roddy Ho, and she didn’t want to go that route. Asking Ho for a favour was like chewing someone else’s gum.

“What about his computer? Or is that passworded too?”

“No. House rules. But they don’t use email much. It’s all texts and Snapchat. And his browser history’s the usual stuff, social media and music sites. He clears it pretty regularly.”

Even Louisa did that, and she didn’t have a mother on the premises.

She said, “Send me the list of sites he’d been looking at?”

“I’ve told you, there’s nothing unusual there.”

“And yet I’m the one you asked for help.”

She heard a noise in the background, a boy’s voice. That would be . . . Andrew.

Clare said, “I’m sorry.”

“I understand.”

“You can’t. You don’t have children.”

No, but she’d noticed most mothers were fond of them. Why was that so difficult for Clare to get her head round? But Louisa simply recited her email address so Clare could send her Lucas’s browsing history, then fretted at a traffic light, hating the stop-start of her commute. But at least that was over for the next week. Because she was going to do this, it seemed. Whether for Min, for herself, for Clare, even for Lucas: that was background fade now. She was going to do this.

Clare was saying, “Thank you.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“No, but . . . Thank you.”

Louisa ended the call, promising to get back to Clare later.

When she reached home the first thing she did was fire up her laptop and examine Lucas Harper’s online history. Clare had sent his browsing tree as a screenshot, and a quick glance revealed nothing to excite maternal discomfort—Lucas was a cricket fan, like his father; had obsessively checked stats, as if hunting for a glimmer of hope in the recent Ashes debacle; and he spent time on YouTube and Facebook, like everyone else. Also Amazon, and other online retailers: clothes and sporting goods, mostly. Wikipedia. Google.

A couple of sites fit no obvious parameters, though. One was for a catering company, Paul’s Pantry. “For all your party needs.” It was based in Pegsea, Pembrokeshire. That’s in Wales, she remembered Clare saying. The other was for a property in the same county; a place called Caerwyss Hall, which offered all the facilities your company required for a weekend getaway, including conference rooms, swimming pool, assault course, stables, quad bikes, spa and gym. The thought of her company—specifically, of Jackson Lamb—making use of all or any of these momentarily swamped any other consideration, but once she’d banished such images, she commenced wondering why Lucas had been interested. Paul’s Pantry, she guessed, had been where he’d worked over Christmas. Maybe this had been one of their catering events.

She rang Clare again to check. “Does the name Caerwyss Hall ring bells?”

“It’s near Pegsea. One of those big manor house places that’s gone corporate? Weekend retreats and team-building. Where everyone has to pretend they get on, and nobody hates anyone else.”

“Hell on earth,” Louisa agreed. While they talked, she was looking up the Wiki pages Lucas had visited. “Lucas worked for Paul’s Pantry, right? Did he help cater an event there?”