The fifth or possibly the sixth time he looked through the photographs, he thought to turn them over and look at the other side. Unbranded paper, no photographer’s stamp. No clues there. But on the last picture (tangle of limbs, his face twisted with effort, one of the worst, actually, if you were ranking them), in faintest pencil, there was something. A telephone number in the same writing that had been on the envelope.
He didn’t call it straight away. He wasn’t stupid.
He went across London, to a busy and impoverished area where he found a cramped internet café full of Chinese students playing games, headsets on. He chose a seat where no one would be able to see his screen. First he looked up the number and found nothing: it was a mobile but not connected to any business or named individual.
Then he tried searching every variant on ‘body in swimming pool’ he could think of. There were high-profile cases, celebrities, rumours. Nothing that matched what had happened to him. No mystery twenty-something with blue eyes, fair hair, a tattoo that covered one arm. No missing person appeal. It would have helped if he’d had a name to search for but they hadn’t swapped names, had they? They hadn’t said much.
We don’t have to
I want to
Say if you want to stop
He leaned back in his chair and pressed his hands against his face. I want to stop. Make it stop.
The voice at the other end of the phone was cool, female and neutral.
‘I’m pleased to inform you that situation has been resolved.’
‘What do you want from me? Is this blackmail? Because I don’t have money.’ The cheap pay-as-you-go phone slipped in his hand. He was sweating as if he was in a sauna. He turned in a circle, checking that no one was within a few hundred yards of the spot he’d chosen on Hampstead Heath, with all of London spread out in the distance and the illusion of privacy.
At the other end of the line the woman laughed, and told him who she worked for, and everything made a horrible kind of sense.
‘So what do you want?’
‘Think of this as a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
‘What does that mean?’
There might have been a hint of pity in her voice, or condescension. ‘When we need your assistance we’ll let you know.’