She nodded, following him into a packed elevator. ‘Hopefully you and I will be able to get somewhere with this Beatrix Steards stuff over the next couple of days – maybe look deeper into the connections between her and Black Gale – and then I’m going to get the train up to York, hire a car and take a drive out to the village myself.’

All of that was true – she’d just left out one thing.

Robert Zaid.

She hadn’t told Quinn what she knew.

She hadn’t told anyone that Zaid wasn’t Zaid.

Someone called David Raker had come looking at exactly the same things she had and now she couldn’t find him anywhere. The phone number she had for him went to voicemail. Her emails to him went unanswered. She’d managed to track down his daughter and she was in a state of absolute panic about where he was. She said her father had been silent for three and a half weeks, and he never went quiet on her for this long. The last time she heard from him, he told her he was back in London from Yorkshire, and was driving to Highgate for a meeting.

Highgate was where Robert Zaid lived.

They reached Quinn’s car and he loaded her suitcase into the back for her, and then asked if she wanted to check into her hotel first or just go straight to the station.

‘Straight to the station is fine,’ she said.

‘Straight to the station it is.’

‘A coffee might be good, though.’

He smiled. ‘The best jetlag cure going.’

They were soon heading east into London. As they drove, he told her there was a service station about ten minutes away where they could get some coffee, so as Quinn asked her about LA, and then started telling her about a trip he’d made to the city with his wife in 2016, Jo allowed herself a moment of peace: no Gabriel Wilzon or Donald Klein, no acid bath, no Beatrix Steards, no Black Gale.

No Robert Zaid.

No Adrian Vale.