She sat in the van on Thirlestane Road and checked the time. She had to get the van back to Archie by twelve, so this was a gamble. So much of being an investigator was waiting around for things to happen, then everything hit at once.
José left the flat after nine. He looked unworried, wearing his usual post-grunge uniform. What was she expecting, that he would be gnashing his teeth and tearing out his hair?
Another hour went by. She listened to a podcast, Big Picture Science, by the guys at SETI. It was wide ranging, stuff about whale communication, the logistics of terraforming, debunking of pseudo science. These were professors at the top of their fields taking extraterrestrial intelligence seriously. She was into it.
Eventually Olivia Harris left the flat and headed right. Hannah locked the van and followed her down Marchmont Road and through the Meadows. Hannah’s flat was off to the right and she shuddered at the memory of the break-in. The place was secure now, but how could they go back?
Olivia was tall and lithe, blonde hair in a messy bun, black T-shirt and leggings, comfy trainers. Standard student waitress look. She was heading into Söderberg when Hannah caught up with her.
‘Olivia.’
She turned. She was beautiful and healthy, like a well-rounded person with nothing to worry about. But no one has nothing to worry about, and Hannah was about to add worry to her life.
‘I’m Hannah, can I speak to you for a minute?’
Olivia looked confused as she pointed over her shoulder at the glass frontage of the bakery and café. ‘I’m on shift in a minute.’
She had freckles on her nose, small hoop earrings, a delicate gold crucifix on a thin chain around her neck.
Hannah made a show of looking at her watch. ‘I know you don’t start for twenty minutes.’
Olivia’s shoulders went back and she frowned. ‘How do you know that?’
‘José told me.’
That was a lie, Hannah had spent ten minutes on social media, then two minutes on the phone to Söderberg, pretending to be Olivia with a middle-class English accent.
‘He said you’d be happy to chat,’ Hannah said. She pulled out a chair at an outdoor table, scrape of metal legs against concrete.
‘Shall we sit?’
Olivia looked at the Söderberg entrance then back at Hannah, who threw on her kindest smile.
Olivia sat, and Hannah did likewise. Olivia was slightly older but Hannah felt more experienced. The mess with her dad, this grown-up job she had, the fact she was engaged, which she kept forgetting. She chastised herself, holy shit, imagine forgetting about Indy and the wedding. And the thing with Indy’s parents, the exhumation. Was she serious? But Hannah had learned to compartmentalise better than most. What was that Walt Whitman thing she did at school? ‘I contain multitudes’. She understood better than most that if you didn’t separate out that shit, it was impossible to carry on.
‘How do you know José?’ Olivia said.
She said it with a guttural ‘J’, made sense for someone studying Spanish. Her Instagram was full of pictures of her and José smiling in the sun, visiting his family in Seville, shots of a holiday in Gijon and San Sebastian, the pair of them with backpacks doing a section of the Camino de Santiago last year. Hannah was amazed how deep an idea you got of someone from socials. It was obviously fake, their best life, yadda yadda, but it told you what someone thought their best life should look like, and Olivia’s was Spanish.
‘He hired me,’ Hannah said, handing over a business card. The cards were immensely helpful for getting people to take her PI work seriously. You could put anything on a card and people thought you were legit.
Olivia turned the card over in her long fingers.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He thinks someone has instigated a campaign against him.’
Olivia’s mouth turned down. ‘What kind of campaign? He hasn’t said anything to me.’
José didn’t want his girlfriend involved, which was exactly why Hannah was here. She tried to explain it as gently as possible, but there was no easy way to mention a signal from outer space without both of them imagining little green men. Hannah was convinced by the argument that intelligent life existed out there, but the Fermi paradox had made her think more deeply about the likelihood of contact.
She watched Olivia’s face as she spoke, noted her furrowed brow, the strain in her neck muscles, her fingers fiddling as she clasped her hands together. Magpies clacked to each other in the branches of the oak above their heads as morning sunshine splayed through the canopy. Olivia ducked out of one of those beams of light, like she couldn’t handle the attention.
‘Shit,’ she said once Hannah had finished.
Hannah sat back. ‘You don’t seem very surprised.’
Olivia glanced at the bakery building. ‘So, what, he thinks someone is messing with him?’
Hannah nodded. ‘That’s why he hired me, to look into it.’
Olivia spread her hands on the table. She had spindly fingers and pronounced knuckles. ‘I suppose that’s an improvement.’
‘On what?’
Olivia took a moment to size up Hannah, then raised her chin, ready to spill the beans.
‘This has kind of happened before,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Hannah said. ‘In Seville. Microwave Boy.’
Olivia smiled as if she finally had the upper hand in the conversation. ‘No, more recently.’
Hannah leaned forward. ‘He thought he was getting a message from out there?’ She waved a hand into the sky, bright blue, not a hint of alien activity except the magpies flapping from tree to tree.
Olivia sucked her teeth. ‘Six months ago. Nobody else knows. I mean nobody. He took time off his studies. I made him see a doctor, then a mental-health crisis team.’
‘And?’
‘He was sectioned,’ Olivia said. ‘Only for a short time.’
Hannah tried to hide her surprise. ‘Sectioned? Whose idea was that?’
Olivia looked at her hands on the table, then back up.
‘Mine,’ she said as she got up and left.