15.

He waited across the road from the servo. Standing outside a fried-chicken shop, face stinging, eyeballs rolled in ash, watching the petrol station’s digital clock. Fourteen minutes. One more and he’d go back in. A growing fear they shouldn't be waiting for a phone call, that they needed to take control of the situation and hunt for Tilda. Hard to see Frankie letting him help, every spitting word of her anger deserved, but he had to find a way. Couldn’t live with a child’s death on his hands. Anything would be better than that: going to prison, leaving his own child fatherless. And Kat would agree.

‘Most are dead within hours.’

The clock numbers flicked over: 10.30.

She’d been gone fifty-one minutes.

He waited for a break in the traffic and jogged quickly across the road.

The small servo was crowded. People queuing to pay for petrol, teenage boys browsing the snacks, jostling and calling out to each other. Frankie was barging through them towards the door. She pulled up short when she saw him.

A surge of hope. ‘They called?’

‘No, I’m going to look for her.’ She pushed past him and walked outside.

He ran after her, following as she strode around the corner towards her car. ‘Let me help,’ he said. ‘We work well together, you know that. We’ll have more chance of finding her if we do it together.’

She was pulling out her keys, walking to the driver’s side.

‘You can trust me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t live with myself if she – I don’t care about Imogen, or going to jail. Just let me help get Tilda back. Please.’

Frankie opened the door and looked at him, her face hard. This was it. She was going to tell him to piss off, then get in her car and drive away.

‘You’re fuck-all use to me if you get arrested,’ she said. ‘Spin Imogen some story to keep her away.’

***

He retrieved his phone from his car and brought it back to Frankie’s, along with the discarded silver foil and Maggie’s laptop. As he climbed in, Frankie’s eyes went to the computer. ‘What’s that for?’

‘We’ll need it to contact Guy Fawkes if I work out the video.’ He shook his head as she went to protest. ‘It’s not about getting Imogen off my back, it’s about information.’

He texted Imogen, saying Frankie had left but he was on her tail. It wouldn’t win the cop over, but it should put her on hold for a few hours at least.

‘OK to keep the phone?’ he asked Frankie, not quite holding his breath.

‘Despite your fuckhead behaviour with it, yes. It’d be good to have it. Just keep it wrapped and only use it on the move.’

His breathing eased. Gone were the days he’d go hours without checking messages. Texts were forwarded to his email now, and his phone always near him. At night, he hooked it up to his vibrating alarm so Kat’s texts would wake him.

Frankie grabbed her bag from the back seat. Being active seemed to have calmed her a little, but her movements still had a jerky quality; fumbling with the zips on the backpack, fingers slipping. She eventually tugged a camera from an inside pocket and shoved it at him. An expensive piece of equipment, with multiple settings and a large touchscreen to view photos.

‘What’s this for?’ he asked.

‘Maggie’s records. Didn’t want to upload them.’ She pulled a packet of chewing gum from the ashtray and fished out a small memory card.

He inserted the card and swiped through a few photos, then went back to the beginning and zoomed in on each one. A show of trust, letting him see them. Pages of spreadsheets. No names, but a row of recurring digits down the left-hand side that had to be client numbers. Around thirty of them. Transactions showed dates and amounts: money going in and money going out. Lots of zeros after the dollar signs. He did some quick mental calculations, stopped when he got to ten million.

He looked at Frankie. ‘This would make a lot of people very nervous.’

‘Yeah, so don’t go spreading it around you’ve seen it. Tilda’s safer if no one on that list knows we’ve got it. So are we. We hand the originals to the kidnappers and pretend none of it ever happened, OK?’

No argument from him; the thought of thirty well-connected criminals knowing he’d seen their dirty laundry wasn’t a comfortable one.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What now?’

‘Odds are, the same people behind the kidnapping sent the shooter after me. Killed Amon. And if they know about these records, it’s either a client on that list or someone connected to them. But I’ve got no idea how to ID anyone.’ She paused. ‘Any bright ideas welcome.’

He examined the first page. She was right – those account numbers couldn’t be turned into names without more information. Smart move on Maggie’s part. And an explanation as to why she’d risked entrusting Frankie with the key.

‘Any chance of us finding a master list?’

‘No. It’s probably in another damn vault.’

So approach it from a different angle. Laundering that much money would involve a lot of employees. People to pass cash through casinos and small businesses; bookkeepers to create false invoices; lawyers to fudge records.

Lawyers.

The Rhys Delaney mentioned in Maggie’s texts was a lawyer.

—Rhys Delaney on for today

A man with no police record who might have been meeting with Maggie the day she was attacked.

Frankie was watching him, not moving. ‘You’ve got something?’

‘Possible employee.’