Meanwhile, I removed Eli Welker’s smartphone from my pocket. First I returned to the photos. Swiped through the pictures of Shauna and Angus Quigg in Glasgow. As far as Shauna went, the ones Ostermann had sent me were the only ones on the phone.
I tapped Welker’s CONTACTS icon and scrolled quickly through the names and numbers. Kurt Ostermann’s number was in his phone, as was my friend Wendy Isles’s, another investigator based in London. There were dozens of phone numbers listed only by code, each a combination of two letters and five numbers. File numbers, I assumed. No doubt correlating with thick folders locked away in Welker’s office. Clearly he went to extraordinary lengths to protect the privacy of his clients. As frustrating as it was for me, I admired his fastidiousness.
Next I opened his e-mail. Within a few seconds I’d found the e-mail Welker sent to himself the day before he died. The photos of Shauna and Angus Quigg in Glasgow. In the text of the e-mail, there was a file number. MP-61371.
MP, I assumed, stood for Missing Persons.
I returned to Welker’s contact list. Searched for MP-61371.
There it was, halfway down the list. Attached to an exchange in the United States.
I swallowed hard. Steadied myself because I suddenly felt dizzy. Then I tapped on the number, initiating the call.
It rang once, then a recording:
“Welcome to Verizon Wireless. The number you have dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.”
I cursed inwardly then placed Welker’s phone into my pocket and pulled out my BlackBerry. I dialed Kurt Ostermann.
“I’ve received a few e-mails from Welker’s clients,” he said as soon as he answered. “I have arranged meetings here in London with three of them and I’m trying to convince a fourth that I’m legit.”
“Where are these clients located?” I asked.
“Two of them—and the one I’m still trying to convince—are located right here in England. One in Manchester, the others in London. The third is coming in from the States. Which state, he wouldn’t say. Nor would he give me his name. But he said he’d get on a flight as soon as he could and e-mail me again once he arrived at Heathrow.”
From the building behind me I heard Todd MacBride howl in grief.
In the darkness, I started walking across the street toward the Grand Cherokee, the hard wind now at my back.
“First thing,” I said, “I need you to phone the Merseyside Police.” I gave him Lennox Sterling’s address. “Tell them there’s a body. Two brothers entered the apartment to burglarize the place. One killed the other.”
Ostermann took down the information.
“And you, Simon? What’s your next move?”
“I’m on my way to London,” I told him. “I guess you could say, I’m coming home.”
Part Four
THE SONS OF LONDON
Chapter 44
There are nearly six million CCTV cameras in Britain, more than a half million in London alone. One for every dozen people or so. Meaning once you enter the largest city in Europe—the capital of England and the United Kingdom—you are under surveillance regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or criminal history.
Advocates for mass surveillance argue it’s necessary to fight terrorism, to protect national security, to prevent social unrest. Critics say such measures violate privacy, infringe on civil rights, limit political freedoms. But there’s precious little public debate. Because on September 11, 2001, many of these legal and constitutional questions flew out the window. Now it seems unlikely that they’ll ever flutter back in.
Regardless of where we stand on the issue, most of us concede that mass surveillance doesn’t necessarily create a totalitarian state like those that existed in the former Soviet Union and East Germany. But it seems at least equally as clear to many historians that such intrusions on privacy sure as hell can pave the way for one.
“If you asked me a few days ago,” I told Ostermann, “I’d have said the more cameras the better. But right now I’m biased. Because those half-million surveillance cameras put us at a distinct disadvantage. Facing those kinds of resources, how the hell can we expect to find Shauna in a city of more than eight million before Scotland Yard does?”
We were seated in a pub called the Sherlock Holmes on Northumberland Street a few steps from the Charing Cross railway station. We’d walked over from Ostermann’s hotel, the Corinthia, after he made a deal with the concierge to hide the illicit Dodge Tomahawk I’d driven down from Liverpool after returning Gilchrist’s Grand Cherokee to Ashdown and Zoey in Kensington.
Ostermann folded his hands beneath his chin. Although he must have been approaching fifty, he appeared much as he had when I first met him over a decade ago. And he actually looked younger than he did the last time I saw him in Berlin while I was searching for Lindsay Sorkin, the six-year-old American girl abducted from her parents’ hotel room in Paris.
“The question, Watson,” he said, staring over my shoulder, “is how do we turn that disadvantage into an advantage?”
I sipped my espresso. “Is that a Sherlock Holmes quote?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said, turning his ice-blue eyes on me. “I’ve never read Arthur Conan Doyle.”
I leaned back in my chair, gazed out the window at three bright red double-decker buses belching out dense black smoke as they sat in traffic.
“Why are we here, then?” I said, motioning toward Holmes’s study.
“I enjoy Moriarty’s Beef Burger,” he said. “Robert Downey, Jr.’s Baked Camembert isn’t bad either. Want to split an order?”
I shook my head, said, “Back to our disadvantage. I can’t exactly walk into the Met and ask for their help. I’m still wanted for questioning in the death of Ewan Maxwell in Scotland. To say nothing of the body I left at Lennox Sterling’s apartment back in Liverpool.”
“British police are none too fond of German private investigators either,” Ostermann said. “But that does leave us with at least one friend I believe we can count on. If you don’t mind calling her, that is. She’s a tad peeved with me at the moment.”
Before I could ask why, the answer came to me. “You slept with her?”
“I did. But that’s not what she’s peeved about. I’d told her I had separated from Magda, which wasn’t entirely true.”
“Or true at all, was it?”
“Technically true. Magda was in Berlin, I was in London. We were separated by over a thousand kilometers, geographically speaking. Including the English Channel.”
“I’ll make the call, then.” I finished my espresso. “No word yet from Eli Welker’s final client, I take it?”
“Not yet. But soon, I’d expect.”
“In the meantime, any chance his widow will cave on giving us a look at his physical files?”
“None. And now the NCA has locked off all access to his offices. Maybe your brother-in-law can get us in, but I certainly can’t.”
It suddenly occurred to me why Ostermann had been so eager to deliver the news to Welker’s widow personally.
“Becky,” I said. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course not. I gave her a shoulder to cry on, nothing more.” He scoffed. “Is that really what you think of me, Simon? That I’d sleep with my friend’s widow before his body had gone cold?”
“I’d hope not,” I said.
“Good.” He lifted his pint with a smug grin. “Because with a woman like Becky Welker, one must take his time to lay a foundation.”
I produced my BlackBerry and dialed Wendy Isles. The call went straight to voice mail so I left a message for her to call me back as soon as possible.
“So,” Ostermann said, “we wait for Wendy to call you so that she can assist us in gaining access to surveillance footage here in London. We wait for Eli Welker’s final client to e-mail me so that we can meet with him, learn his
identity, and find out why he hired Welker to track Shauna Adair to Dublin. That seems to me a fair amount of waiting. What do we do in the meantime?”
“Try to find this so-called ‘father’ of Shauna’s, I suppose.”
“Do we have anything at all to go on?”
“Nothing but a book of matches, I’m afraid.”
“Matches?”
“Lennox Sterling told me that when Shauna comes back from London after meeting with her father, she sometimes has a book of matches on her. From a pub in the East End. He doesn’t know if there’s any connection, but I figure it’s worth a shot.”
“You have an address?”
“No address. Sterling only remembered the name.”
“What’s the name of this pub, then?”
“The Night’s End.”
Ostermann shrugged. “You ask me, the End is always a good place to start.”
Chapter 45
TWELVE YEARS AGO
It’s three A.M. and I’m sitting on a barstool at Terry’s, working on my fourth or fifth pint of Harp. I’m tired. No, more than that, defeated. I’m utterly lost.
“Hand them over,” Terry says. Only in his stubborn cockney accent it sounds like ’and them ova.
I don’t need to ask what he’s referring to. I dig into the front pocket of my jeans and pull out my keys, slide them across the bar. I had no intention of driving anyway.
I’d arrived at the pub only an hour ago after Terry cleared the place out following last call. I’ve no desire to interact with people. There are enough of them still camped out in front of my house, day and night. Enough of them still inside my home as well. Though that number has greatly dwindled. A sure sign that Rendell’s hopes continue to dwindle as well.
Terry opens the register and places my keys in the drawer. “You have your house keys?” he asks.
My laugh sounds more like a grunt. “You think Tash and I are locking our doors these days, Terry? What the hell would we do that for? The only thing we had to protect is gone.”
“Missing,” he says. “They’ll find her, Simon.”
I know better than to respond, than to engage my only real friend in that senseless circular conversation yet again.
I lift the pint to my lips. These are my first drinks since Hailey was taken. That I’m drinking at all is a sure sign to everyone, Terry included, that I’ve all but given up hope myself. I never drink more than a pint or two. Never enough to get drunk. And if there were any reason at all for me to wake up early tomorrow morning, sober and ready to take on the day, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be home. In bed. With Tasha. Where I belong.
“Is she faring any better?” Terry says. Except that glottal stops replace the letter t so that better sounds a hell of a lot more like be’er.
“She gets worse every day. We both do. But Tash, I barely recognize her anymore.”
In the past two weeks my wife has gone from being a vibrant young mother to a desolate shell of flesh and bone. She’s lost at least ten pounds, and she didn’t have even five to spare. She spends her days in a chemical funk, popping benzodiazepines like they were sunflower seeds. When she isn’t eating tranquilizers she’s snacking on muscle relaxers, hoping to fall asleep. She’s been to the emergency room twice for extreme lower back pain and been prescribed powerful opioids, which she keeps in her pocket at all times. When this began, I tried to talk to her about it. But as with everything else, I’ve since thrown in the towel.
“I take it her parents haven’t been helpful?”
“They’ve done what they can. For the first time since I met them, I can’t complain about their behavior.”
“Even your mother-in-law?” Only he replaces the th sound with a v, and the final r vanishes completely, making mother-in-law sound like muvva-in-law.
“Even my mother-in-law.”
“How about your own dad?”
I smirk without meaning to. It’s been ten days now since Alden Fisk was cleared and not twenty-four hours have gone by without his calling, asking whether he can come by to help out. I’ve assured him it isn’t necessary, made clear his presence was something neither Tasha nor I wanted, but he refuses to relent.
“Two days ago, I stopped taking his calls,” I say.
Everything we’d been told had checked out. My father had indeed left Providence for Virginia Beach then gone on to Raleigh to carry on with a married woman not much older than me.
“If he means well,” Terry says, “maybe you should have him by.”
“If that’s the kind of advice you’re going to give, I’m going to take my business elsewhere.”
“Do you think there’s any chance he’ll just show up?”
“Enough,” I say, louder and angrier than I mean to. “I don’t want to discuss Alden Fisk. Not with you, not with anybody.”
“I apologize,” he says.
But I’ve known Terry long enough to know he’s offended. Thing is, with all this beer in me, I’m having trouble caring.
“I’m just making conversation,” he adds. “Trying to understand the situation.”
“Well, don’t.” I immediately regret saying it but it’s as though someone or something else is controlling my tongue. “There is no understanding it, Terry. It’s the Ninth Circle of Hell. Unless you’ve lost a child, you can’t comprehend the first thing about it. So just don’t bother trying, all right?”
An uncomfortable silence hangs over the bar.
“I have lost a child,” he says finally. “A daughter, in fact. Every bit as beautiful as Hailey.”
I look up at him, study his pained expression, wondering how in all this time he could possibly have been harboring such a secret.
He says, “I’ve told you, I believe, of me boyhood mate, Avery.”
I nod. “The one who became a solicitor.”
“A solicitor, right. Avery York his name was.”
I recall him telling me about Avery, the London lawyer who reminds me a lot of my father. Terry and he grew up together in London during the forties and fifties. They’d had everything in common, even having been born in the same month of the same year. Both boys came from working-class families. Both possessed an absent father and a mother who wasn’t entirely stable, mentally. They lived in the same neighborhood, attended the same schools for both their primary and secondary education. Both were good students who maintained top marks. They were equally athletic, equally competitive. They had the same color eyes, same color hair. When they reached full size, Terry was slightly taller at six one, Avery slightly more muscular. In their mid to late teens they’d dated twin sisters for several years.
Only when they were in their twenties did their paths finally diverge.
Terry and Avery had both been attending the law school at Newcastle University. One night while at an on-campus party thrown by undergraduates, they’d gotten into a row with a pair of rugby players from Northumbria University. Avery, drunk as an Irishman as Terry puts it, started the row, but it was Terry who finished it. Terry broke one rugby player’s cheekbone with a fist and fractured the other’s jaw with a kick, the latter coming well after any potential threat had been thwarted.
Both Terry and Avery were arrested but only Terry was charged. Only Terry was convicted of causing grievous bodily harm. Only Terry was sentenced to two and a half years. Not terribly long considering what he faced; the judge had used his discretion to go below the guidelines. But long enough that it spelled the end of his law-school career.
They remained friends throughout the ordeal and well beyond. But Terry’s life had taken a decidedly different turn from Avery’s.
Avery continued on at Newcastle and graduated with honors. He took a job with a large full-service London law firm and received a healthy signing bonus and an even healthier annual salary.
Meanwhile, Terry, as he tells it, used the connections he’d made at HMP Isis, a Young Offenders Institution in southeast London, and became “a pharmaceuticals salesman.” Primarily
selling cocaine-based products.
Avery York, the big-time solicitor, went on to marry a young woman of some means.
Terrance Davies, the small-time gangster, impregnated a heroin-addled harlot.
He’d previously told me she’d lost the baby in her fifth month of pregnancy.
Confused, I say, “The fetus, you mean?”
Terry shakes his head and lets out an audible breath.
“No,” he says. “I’ve never been entirely honest about this because it’s something I’ve never really wanted to talk about, Simon. But the child was born healthy.”
His chin sinks into his chest and tears cloud his eyes.
“Once upon a time,” he says, “I had a little girl.”
Chapter 46
A Google search for “Night’s End” in London didn’t turn up any relevant hits. But before I could become too frustrated, I received a call back from Wendy Isles, who agreed to meet with me in the main lobby of the Corinthia.
“Needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to describe the uselessness of London’s surveillance cameras in finding missing persons,” Wendy said. “Or in catching criminals, for that matter.”
Wendy ran a hand through her lustrous blond hair. Seated on a plush yellow sofa in the Corinthia Hotel’s opulent lobby and dressed in an impeccably tailored black Burberry suit, she could well have passed for a fashion model. In just the brief time we’d been sitting here, she’d turned more heads than Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the finals match on Centre Court at Wimbledon.
“Only the Borough of Newham even trialed facial recognition software,” she continued, “and it was an unmitigated failure. They inputted photos of countless local criminals over a period of years and the software failed to recognize a single one. This despite the fact that a number of those same convicted individuals were known to be living and lurking in the borough during all that time.”
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