Out of forty-five pictures, there was only one of his parents: it was the frame in the centre, the one of the three of them, with Zaid as a boy, at their place in Marbella. So if his mum and dad had been so remarkable, where were they? Zaid had just one portrait of them, and yet I could see lots of photos of the same, less important faces – friends, colleagues, business partners, someone who had probably been a nanny. Other than the one of him with his parents in Marbella, there were four shots of Zaid as a boy: at the age of one or two, at his fifth birthday party, at about ten, and in his early teens.

I stepped in closer again, trying to get a better look at one of the shots nearest to me, but the moment I did, I saw something else at the very margins of my eyeline.

It was right in the corner of the room, wrapped in shadow and fixed as high up the wall as it could conceivably go, ensuring that – without a ladder – it was impossible to get at. I moved away from the photos, glancing along the hallway at Zaid’s closed door, and stopped beneath the object on the wall.

It was about the size of a credit card, and looked like a cross between a wireless router and an electric key fob. There were three small antennae on top of it.

My stomach dropped.

I looked at my phone, still in my hand – still with no bars showing, no hint of a reception – and then back up to the object on the wall.

Zaid had installed a signal jammer.

56

I spun on my heel, panicked, looking at Zaid’s closed bedroom door, my heart pounding in my chest.

Moving towards the hallway, I kept my eyes on the door, then stopped again, listening. Over the sound of my heart, all I could hear was the hum of the central heating and the wind pressing at the windows.

I started inching forward again, approaching the doorways on the left and right. In one was a bathroom with a Jacuzzi, a wet room and two marble basins. In the other was an office, modern and immaculately decorated like everywhere else. There was a computer, shelves of books, files. On the desk beside the computer was an in-tray. My eyes were drawn to what looked like a printout on top, something typed across it in bold.

G76984Z.

I quickly moved into the room and picked up the printout. It was an email that Zaid had received from someone called Carson Connolly. G76984Z was the subject line, and Connolly worked for a company called Parsonfield. I vaguely recognized the name of the company, but couldn’t remember where from.

The email itself seemed short and trivial.