From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Ref – G76984Z

Hi Mr Zaid –– just to let you know that I’ve managed to move your slot forward, as requested, to 10 a.m. tomorrow. I’m not in, but it should all be absolutely fine. Just in case, though, why don’t you bring a copy of this email with you?

It was sent four hours ago.

I grabbed my phone, took a picture of the printout, then put it back where I’d found it. As I did, I noticed something on the next shelf down.

A photocopy of a driving licence.

I reached in and took it out, then realized it wasn’t a photocopy but a fax. There was a machine behind me, on a desk in the corner, but it wasn’t connected to the Internet, running instead off an old-fashioned phone line. Using technology this old only had one real benefit: it couldn’t be intercepted digitally. It couldn’t be hacked. If Zaid put the faxed document through the shredder tomorrow, there would be no record of it left.

I looked at the black-and-white licence.

The face of a woman in her sixties looked back at me: shoulder-length hair cut into a bob, an elegant mix of black streaks and natural greys; green eyes, glasses. In the bottom right, it listed her height as five nine and her weight as 140 pounds. In the top right was a bear icon.

The driving licence was Californian.

Her name had been circled in black pen, and an arrow went from that to a note at the side of the sheet. It was in Isaac Mills’s handwriting:

Source at North Yorkshire police says she’s been in touch. She’s ex-LAPD. Been asking questions about Patrick Perry.

I froze.

Patrick Perry had talked to Freda about having one more call lined up. He’d said he was going to use a payphone and a pre-loaded calling card, ensuring there was no record of the conversation at home. So was this who he’d called? An ex-cop in Los Angeles? Most pre-loaded cards were for making international calls, so it wasn’t a stretch, and the woman was from the same city as Adrian Vale. So had she known Vale? Had their paths crossed? And did she know that Patrick was now missing?

I took another look at the woman’s face, her name, took a photograph of the licence, then put the photocopy back and moved out into the hallway. I stepped to my right, trying to get a better angle on the staircase in front of me, but wasn’t able to see much more than a couple of paintings, so I kept my eyes fixed on Zaid’s door as I approached the next rooms along.