“Because it’s important. And that’s why I want you. I’m sending the address over now. Be there in five minutes.”
Yuri walked straight back to the Sloane Square hub and went out along a radial to loop, then around that to the Hackney hub at the end of Graham Road. As he went, Boris started loading instructions into the Olyix Monitoring Office G7Turing. He wanted a record of Horatio Seymore’s travels through the Connexion network for the last four days. Bank search for financial status. Facial recognition search through Hackney’s public surveillance cameras, going back three days. A request routed through the Connexion Metropolitan Police liaison office for gang activity in Hackney.
Those would do for a start.
Eleanor Road, on the edge of London Fields, was half old brick terrace houses with tall slate roofs that had all undergone conversions to add a loft room for the budget middle classes still inhabiting London’s suburbs. The remainder of the buildings were newer, purpose-built tenements, narrow and tall to fit in as many one-bedroom flats as possible, with the rent and management optimized for a fast turnover of young low-wage workers with service jobs in the city. Exactly like Horatio.
Jessika’s heels clattered on the pavement behind Yuri as he approached the front of Horatio’s building.
“Good timing.” He smirked as she caught up with him. She was wearing a smart cherry-pink office suit and white blouse, with slim five-centimeter heels; her face flushed even through her perfect makeup. Her normally immaculate jet-black hair was ruffled from hurrying along the street.
“And you blend in so flawlessly.”
“Hey!” she protested. “I’m strictly an office meetings and cocktails kind of girl.”
“Right.” He told Boris to let them in; Gwendoline had given him the code.
The hallway and stairs were bare concrete, shaped by onetime printed molds and formed by civic construction bots—cheap and coldly utilitarian. Horatio’s flat was two rooms: a slim shower and toilet suite; and the living room equipped with a tiny galley kitchen, a built-in wardrobe, and a sofa sleeper. With two stools standing beside the kitchen bar, there wasn’t even room for a chair.
“Depressing,” Jessika said as she glanced around.
“No sign of a struggle,” Yuri said. “So he wasn’t taken from here.”
“Outside then.”
“Boris, what have you got for me on Wednesday morning?”
“Connexion has no record of Horatio Seymore using the hub network since twenty-one-seventeen hours on Tuesday night, when he left the Hackney hub on Graham Road. That is a global negative, not just London.”
“Did I ask for a global search?”
“No, but the G7Turing deduced it was relevant.”
“Crap. If it gets any smarter, we’ll be out of a job. Okay, what about Gwendoline?”
“Her record is complete and current. She entered the Hackney hub at six fifty-eight on Wednesday morning and went straight to Sloane Square. After a day at work in the City, using her usual hubs, she returned to Hackney on Wednesday evening at nine forty-nine. She left this morning at seven fifty.”
“Right, get me a visual record of Eleanor Road on Wednesday, starting at six thirty that morning. Let’s see where Horatio went.”
“Confirmed,” Boris said.
Jessika opened the wardrobe door. “Not much in here,” she said, eyeing the clothes.
“He doesn’t have any money.”
“Then why are we interested?”
Yuri gave her an apologetic shrug. “Super classified: He’s the boyfriend of one of Ainsley’s granddaughters.”
“Ah.”
“There is no visual record of Horatio leaving his home address on Wednesday morning,” Boris reported.
Yuri and Jessika exchanged a glance. He went over to the window at the rear of the flat, which gave him a view of the tiny gardens backing onto the houses of Horton Road, which ran parallel to Eleanor Road. The window was locked from the inside. “Okay, check Horton Road for me. If he jumped out here, he had to go through a house. Maybe he knows his neighbors well enough.”
Jessika frowned and went back into the narrow shower room, checking the frosted glass cubicle. “Well, he’s not here.”
“You’re looking in the shower cubicle?” he asked skeptically.
“Check out an old movie called
“No visual confirmation of him on Horton Road on Wednesday or today,” Boris said.
“What is this, the case of the vanishing magician?” Jessika asked.
“No,” Yuri said, not liking where his thoughts were going. “Boris, run a visual recognition for Gwendoline on Eleanor Road Wednesday morning.”
“There is none.”
“How can that be?” Jessika grunted.
“Confirm she entered Hackney hub at six fifty-eight on Wednesday, please?”
“Our files have visual confirmation of that.”
“Right, use public surveillance files. Backtrack her from entering the hub.”
“There is a discrepancy. The visual record can track her back to the point where she emerged from the end of Eleanor Road onto Wilton Way.”
“So the records for Eleanor Road are corrupted?”
“The Turing is running a diagnostic.”
“What are you thinking?” Jessika asked.