The work was organized into three folders: “Documents,” “Interviews,” “Drafts.” She went into documents. First up were the police reports, then Moretti’s research papers. The ones in the public domain, which Perryman had accessed, covered performance under stress, visual perception in high-stimuli environments, decision-making, and memory. These finished the year he began at Lake Ravenna. There was a file of Perryman’s correspondence: a lot of polite refusals, a legal threat. Interviews were mostly old friends who hadn’t seen Jack Moretti for years, who said he’d become distant or his work had forced him into distance. One interview was with the police officer who initially dealt with the hanging, who said the area was out of the way, “bums sometimes hung around” but there was nothing to suggest anyone had interfered with the body.

There were self-styled experts among the general public: Lake Ravenna is the site of a lot of experimental work. It’s split between three or four private companies. I had a friend who worked there who says they have their own pilots, runways, factories. Bigger than anywhere else he’s seen. This interviewee provided an old photograph of the site with the windowless blue hangar roughly a square kilometer in size and the height of a tall office block. I know for a fact one company alone has around two thousand people on their books. They control five hundred acres: three separate plants, two hangars, three runways.

Taylor looked for Lake Ravenna employees. Only two had agreed to speak to Perryman. One was a hematologist who said little other than that Moretti was a good man who may or may not have been feeling suicidal. Then Anonymous, who had a different angle entirely:

Someone said his wife was having an affair. She worked there too. Jack found out a few days before he killed himself. I think she married the other guy a few months later. Lake Ravenna’s full of black tech, but I’m not sure there’s anything mysterious about Jack Moretti’s suicide.

That was pretty much where Perryman’s investigation ended. It appeared more conclusive than perhaps it deserved to be.

Was that it, Taylor wondered? Had she woven a grander conspiracy out of some infidelity? A conspiracy of governmental schemes rather than the more personal and mundane story of emotional betrayal? It made sense. It just didn’t explain why Rory Bannatyne started wondering about it on an island in the Atlantic eleven years later.

Taylor checked her doors and windows before going to bed, studying the vehicles parked outside for any unfamiliar ones. It was a few hours before her phone rang. Her body was just releasing itself into sleep and the ringtone dragged her against the weight of dreams.

Her overnight manager, Owen Hayes, sounded anxious.

“You asked to be notified of any events on Ascension Island.”

“Yes.”