“Yes. The day after Boxing Day. It was good money.”
But he’d looked at the site since then, so he hadn’t been checking up ahead of the job, to know what to expect.
The Wiki harvest was a curious collection. Some well-known names. Some obscure companies. What on earth was Bullingdon Fopp? Was this what teenagers did to pass the time: surf below-the-skyline entities from the financial news pages? It didn’t seem likely. She said, “What about his interests? I can see he likes sport. What about politics?”
“Not really. He was interested in causes, all young people are, or should be. He got uptight about the whole Me Too thing. But Labour-Tory politics, no, it turned him off. Each as bad as the other, he reckoned.”
Louisa was scrolling through Caerwyss Hall’s website, scanning their About Us page. The usual puffery, and pull-quotes from users.
“And sport, yeah. He’s a fitness fanatic.”
She nodded, pointlessly. Was feeling unfit herself today, well short of her 10,000 steps. She scrolled back to the top of the page, wondering why Lucas had been so interested in Caerwyss Hall, and what had led him to research the name of one of its corporate clients.
As if she’d been reading her mind, Clare went on, “He logs his daily exercise, and if he’s fallen short during the week, he makes up at weekends. Goes on runs to get his mileage up. That sort of thing.”
Louisa paused. “Does he have a Fitbit?”
“God, yes. He’s obsessed with it.”
“And did he take it with him?”
“I imagine so. I haven’t seen it lying around.”
“Okay,” said Louisa. “I don’t suppose you can lay your hands on the paperwork, by any chance?”
In Slough House, the afternoon was doing what the afternoon did: outstaying its welcome. River had printed the photocopied passport from Southampton, the supposed Canadian called Jay Featherstone, and pinned it to his office wall. This was his father. He had no fond childhood memories to draw on, because he hadn’t met the man until last year, but he hadn’t forgotten how Harkness had dumped him in the Thames on that occasion. More delaying tactic than murder attempt, to be fair, but Frank’s absence during River’s childhood had presumably left certain gaps in his knowledge, such as whether his son could swim, so you couldn’t write it off as horseplay. Then again, River couldn’t swear his mother knew that much. Talk about a fucked-up family. They had enough raw material to float a psychotherapy practice.
He was rolling a pea-sized ball of Blu Tak between finger and thumb, and he flicked it now at Frank’s photo. It hit the paper, hung for a second, then dropped to the floor.
The name Jay Featherstone was all they had. Lamb had vetoed contacting border control: there was no need to alert anyone—he meant the Park—that they were looking. Not that they’d need alerting. Di Taverner had been at the funeral, and would no more expect Lamb to shrug Harkness’s presence off than she’d expect him to fly, or brush his teeth. But that was par for the course; much of life at Slough House was determined by the push-me/pull-you relationship between those two. River would suggest they get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it.
“So what do we do?” he’d asked earlier, when they’d gathered in Lamb’s room once more, pooling what they knew. It had already been pooled by email, of course, but Lamb shunned emails; would have communicated entirely by dead-letter drop if he could. The stack of phone books holding up his desk lamp testified to his analogue preferences. “You can break a man’s ribs with a telephone directory,” he’d once observed. “Try doing that with a rolled-up copy of the internet.”
“I assume we have some idea where our mock Canadian has got to?” Lamb had said. “Not that I approve of mocking Canadians. That’d be like shooting kittens in a barrel.”
River said, “We have a credit card from the car hire firm.”
“He used it to book a room at a Travelodge,” said Ho.
“Classy bastard,” said Lamb. “Where?”
Shirley said, “Stevenage.”
“It’s as if you’re working in harmony,” Lamb said. “Like a fucking Coke commercial.” He belched, possibly a Pavlovian thing. “You’ll be wanting a group huddle next.”
“He’s the reason Marcus was killed,” Catherine said quietly.
“Who was Marcus?” Lech asked.
They all stared at him.
“Jesus,” he said. “Pardon me for breathing.”
“They’re not being unfriendly because you’re new,” Lamb explained kindly. “They’re being unfriendly because you get your kicks watching kiddy porn.”
“We should go there,” River had said. “Stevenage.”
