6

IT TOOK HIM A LONG TIME. He’d pause every few seconds, his face screwed up with concentration, as if he were playing back in his own head what he’d just told me, in case he’d made a mistake, or was letting himself off too lightly. Sometimes, too, he’d suspend operations until Montserrat had signaled—with a nod, or an uh-huh—that he should keep going. But what I eventually managed to glean was this:

After their first semester at Stanford, Crothers was bored. It was the best university in the world, but he was such an arrogant little shit (his words) that he thought none of the professors there could teach him anything. So he left to found his own company, predicting risk in the stock market.

Evan Bone was bemused. For him (Bone), to be in an institution with clear rules, discovering objective, verifiable truths about the universe, was—after life in the commune—as close as you could get to perfection in an imperfect world. At that point—“people change”—he’d had no interest in money or power. When Crothers floated the idea of Global Village, he’d been outraged.

“‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s a smart idea. But nobody ought to have that kind of control.’ So I told him, ‘No one’d have control. That’s the whole point.’ But he just shrugged, like Who are you trying to kid? and said, ‘Someone always gets control in the end.’”

In fact, Bone’s only ambition at the time—or so he said—was to do well enough to stay on at Stanford and make a career as a professor there. Technology was at a critical moment, on the cusp of being able to transform human life for the better. Problems that had plagued us since the dawn of homo sapiens—sickness, poverty, ignorance—were, in principle, finally becoming soluble. And he wanted to be part of the process of solving them.

Soon after the start of the next semester, Crothers—by now installed in New York—heard that Bone had a girlfriend. He was incredulous. “The guy was the ultimate geek, a walking punch card. Punch cards don’t have relationships.” On an impulse, Crothers flew back to San Francisco, hired a car and drove down to Stanford. “I guess it was an alpha male thing. I wanted to take him by surprise. Show him how much I was earning. Enough that, whenever I wanted, I could just take off and fly business class across the country to give him a hard time.”

When he got there, Evan Bone was barely recognizable. Gone were the ill-fitting clothes, the unkempt hair, the out-of-control acne. In their place was a modish ensemble of jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, neatly coiffed locks, an unprecedented enthusiasm for shampoo and nail-care. Crothers was impressed. But when he asked to meet the miracle-worker who’d wrought the change, Bone was strangely evasive. Her parents were in town. She had errands to run. She had a paper due the next day.

Eventually, only hours before he had to leave to fly back to New York, Crothers told Bone he didn’t believe she existed. “You just made her up to look like a big guy on campus.” Bone shook his head angrily. “OK, show me,” said Crothers. “I want to see her with my own eyes. If I don’t, I’m going to tell everyone you’re a liar.” Of course, he didn’t mean it: he was just venting his frustration at having had a wasted journey, his humiliation at being given the run-around—him, whizz-kid Stewart Crothers, not yet twenty, and well on his way to making his first million. But Bone took it at face value. He was furious. He said, “You can believe whatever you want,” and stormed out.

Crothers changed his airline reservation from that evening to the next morning. At about the time he would have been checking in for the original flight, he stationed himself inside the entrance to Evan Bone’s dorm. After half an hour or so he saw Bone approaching with a girl. She was wiry and athletic-looking, with short curly fair hair and an outdoorsy complexion. “Not this mysterious beauty I’d imagined. Kind of ordinary. But with the nicest face. Smiling, laughing, like everyone she saw was her friend. That’s what saved her from being homely.”

Crothers kept out of sight until they were through the door, then ambushed them, hand outstretched. “Hi, I’m Stew,” he said. “Mr. Bone here’s been mighty coy about you. Didn’t want to introduce us. And man, now I can see why.”

She laughed. Bone was speechless. “Took him a moment to process all the data. First, I was where I didn’t ought to be. Second, I was coming on to his girlfriend. When he finally figures it out, he grabs her arm and starts hustling her towards the stairs. But Beth, you know, hangs back. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ she says. ‘Let me just say hello.’ And she takes my hand. ‘Hi, I’m Beth.’”

It wasn’t much of a conversation: a few pleasantries, an exchange of basic personal information. Beth was studying sociology; she’d met Evan Bone when he’d retrieved her frisbee from a tree; her roommate was a philosophy major, who kept talking about stuff Beth pretended to understand but didn’t. Beth asked Crothers about New York. She wowed gratifyingly when he mentioned his household-name clients and (by none too subtle implication) the trouser-busting size of his bank balance. He said she should come visit. She said she’d like that. And while all this was going on, silent Bone was standing a little apart, scowling like a kid whose toy has been taken by one of the bigger boys and who’s watching for the right moment to try to snatch it back.

“Let’s just stay with that toy for a second,” said Crothers. “Think something precious, fragile, that could get broken if you handled it roughly or dropped it.”

Finally, as Crothers was writing down his email address for her, Bone took her hand and said, ‘Can we go now? Please?’ And she said, “All right,” and let herself be dragged away. As they reached the stairs, she called over her shoulder, “Don’t worry about that. Evan can give it to me.”

But Evan didn’t. Or at least, if he did, she didn’t use it. Crothers never heard from her or saw her again. Nine months later, a rumor reached him that her relationship with Bone was finished. Over the summer, apparently, they had gone to visit his family at Coyote Fork. While they were there, she had met—and fallen for—another man. When Bone went back to Stanford, she had stayed behind—and shortly afterwards, she and her new beau left together, without telling anyone where they were going. It was generally believed that they were planning to start a new life in the Canadian wilderness. But that was just hearsay, based on a few random snippets of conversation. All that was known for certain was that she never returned to Stanford.

Crothers wrote to Bone, saying how sorry he was. There was no reply. A mutual acquaintance told him that Bone seemed to have undergone a personality change—or, rather, to have reverted to a kind of grotesque caricature of his old self. He had become completely withdrawn, going days at a time without talking to another person. If someone in passing asked him casually how he was, he would hurry off without answering. On one occasion, after he hadn’t been to class for more than a week, a member of the university counselling service went to his room to see if he was ill. She found him wired to his computer, so totally caught up in whatever he was doing that it seemed to take him a few seconds to register she was really there, and not simply an image that had spilled over from the virtual world.

And then, out of the blue, Crothers heard that Bone had “raised a shitload of money” to start Global Village. “Man, I’m telling you, I was so mad, I thought for a while there I was actually going crazy. I mean, he didn’t just steal my baby, he didn’t even take the trouble to think of a different fucking name for it. It was like I never existed. How insulting is that?”

Crothers sued. The whiff of big money brought swarms of lawyers—for both sides—scrambling on to the bandwagon. By the time the case was actually close to coming to court, the success of Global Village had already made Bone a billionaire. On the eve of the hearing, Crothers finally settled for a large enough sum to ensure that he could have “a dream lifestyle” and never have to work again. “On condition,” he said, “that I never spoke publicly about Evan Bone or Global Village.” He looked up towards the unseen satellites orbiting above us. “So—sorry, guys.”

“So that was that,” he said. “I should have thought about it. About what happened to him. Why it made him do that to me. But it was easier just to keep on telling myself the same old story. I was the victim. He was the bad dude. Period.” He smiled at Montserrat. “And then this person showed up. And that, kind of late in the day, gave me a clue. ’Cause I thought, how would I feel if some guy walked in here and started hitting on her? Let’s say, some shit-hot journalist from London who talks real fancy and won the Pulitzer. You won the Pulitzer?”

“I don’t think I’m eligible.”

“Hear that? I don’t think I’m eligible. So you going off with this guy?”

Montserrat laughed. “Maybe.”

“I’m telling you, man, if she did, I’d want you dead. I’d have to meditate twenty hours a day just to keep myself from taking out a contract on you. So I’m thinking, maybe that’s it. He was punishing me. He couldn’t reach the guy who had actually taken her, he was off in the middle of Canada someplace. But he could reach me. And maybe that was the next best thing. Because I was the one started it. Or that’s the way he could have seen it, anyway.”

“You mean, even though, in the end, she left with someone else, it was you who unlocked the door?” I said. “Just by flirting with her?”

He nodded.

“Surely he’d have to be pretty crazy to think that, wouldn’t he?”

“He is pretty crazy. He thinks Beth is the one person who’ll never betray him. And then she does—thanks, probably, to me. So he takes my idea and uses it to makes sure no one ever betrays him again.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Well, I suppose it does have a certain poetic justice to it.”

He smiled but resisted the temptation to mimic me. “So there’s your story.”

There was my story. Anne and Hazel Voss and Carter Ramirez were all dead, Global Village was the most powerful company in the world, all because, one evening more than fifteen years ago, Stewart Crothers had sweet-talked Beth McGregor and tried to give her his email address.

“And how do you suggest I write it?”

He shrugged. “That’s your department, man.”

“This is what Stewart Crothers thinks happened?”

He shook his head. “You said this’d be off the record, remember? I’m just giving you a lead. You want to take it, it’s your job to go after the facts.”

“Starting where?”

He pulled a face. “Find Beth, I guess. Get her side of the story.”

“Canada, as I recall, is bigger than western Europe.”

“There have to be people who know where she is.” He was silent for a moment. “Trouble is, I don’t think I know any of them.”

“The roommate?” said Montserrat. “The smart philosopher lady?”

He frowned, then slowly raised a finger: Good thinking. “Yeah. I do know where she is. She teaches college now, someplace in the Midwest. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.” He hesitated. “So there you go. You’re all set. If you fuck up, it’s on your karma and”—pointing at Montserrat—“hers, not mine.” He laughed. “Shit, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Trying to get myself off of the hook. I guess it’s on all our karma now.”

Her name was Ruth Halassian. She was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Whitrow College in Ohio. The picture of her on the college website had the functional look of a passport photo. It showed a slender, fine-featured woman in her forties, with wavy brown hair and a say cheese expression. There was an email address for her, but Crothers told me not to try to contact her in advance. “The moment you press send, they’ll be on to you. If it was me, I’d just find out what her office hours are and show up in person.”

Her office hours were two to five, Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I knuckled down to it, I could get myself there in time for the Thursday session. But could I justify the expense? I was already starting to be out of pocket. Christmas: A Turkey Writes was as good as dead. Time was when I could have pitched the new story to an editor, and—if he or she had approved—been given per diem expenses. But those days were gone. The giant digestive system of the press had drawn what nourishment it could from me. All that was left now was a tiny pellet of shit, which it was in the process of expelling into the void.

But I’d already managed to notch up an exclusive interview with Stewart Crothers. And he was right: there was a story here. It wasn’t the kind of story I was used to writing. But if I could dig a bit deeper—and there was still an independent paper left to publish the result—it would put me firmly back on the map. A different part of the map—but the map, nonetheless. An Explosive Investigation into the World’s Most Powerful Man, by Robert Lovelace.

I googled Coyote Fork. There was a short Wikipedia article about the commune: no more than a piece of topiary, really, giving the date it was established (1972), the names of the founders (among them, one Jim Bone, presumably Evan’s father), the year it closed (2002), and very little else. No mention of Evan himself or Beth McGregor. But that in itself was revealing. Someone must be monitoring the site regularly, to ensure that it gave only the minimum information. Which suggested they had something to hide.

I searched for Evan Bone. Again, the entry was carefully edited, to avoid anything contentious. The name Coyote Fork appeared only once, as his birthplace. There was no reference to Beth McGregor at all. But there was one short sentence at the end that confirmed what Crothers had told me: Bone hadn’t been seen in public for the past few weeks, and his exact whereabouts were unknown.

I thought of ringing Graham to ask his advice. But even the most cryptic phone call at this stage would be a hostage to fortune, another speck of evidence that might alert Evan Bone to my movements.

And anyway, I knew what I was going to do. I was more or less a free agent. My ex-wife was in France, running her own—very lucrative—business. We had no children. A modest pension—if I chose to take it—would just about keep the wolf from the door. And I had savings. Not a fortune, but enough to cover a standby airline ticket or two and a few nights in cheap motels.

I returned the hire car and booked myself on a flight to Cleveland.

Time concertinas when you fly from San Francisco to Cleveland. As the day collapsed, my body couldn’t decide whether it should be awake or asleep. It compromised by stranding me on the tide-line between the two. As soon as I closed my eyes, a churn of memories and sensations and dream-images sluiced around me. At the same time, occasional little gusts of conversation blew into my consciousness from the row ahead of me, where a woman and a man, both in their early twenties, were sitting together. From the tentative comments they traded as we taxied towards the runway, it was obvious that they’d never met before. But by the time—according to our gravel-voiced captain—we were over Salt Lake City, they’d become Andrew and Anjali, and were laughing, talking, teasing each other, like old friends. And when I came to again, they’d pulled their window blind down against the advancing night, and were huddled close, whispering and giggling.

I must have made a noise, because Anjali abruptly pushed Andrew away for an instant and flashed me an anxious glare. To avoid embarrassment, I feigned sleep. She relaxed. Soon I was watching through nearly-closed eyes, as they resumed their—their what? How would I describe to a reader—it was no good: I just couldn’t stop myself—what they were doing?

And suddenly I had my answer: their doveing. I hadn’t thought of that word in twenty years—and now here it was, washed up from the deep. It had been Anne’s, to begin with, in the first days of our romance: other people might smooch or neck or snog or make out—“they’re such hideous expressions, aren’t they, all of them?”—but we doved. She liked the softness of it, the elegance. She liked the rhyme with love.

“Ah,” breathed Anjali into Andrew’s ear, “that’s nice.”

An electric jolt went through me, like a jump-lead sparking a sclerotic old engine. How long was it since I had doved with anyone? So long that I’d almost forgotten what it was like. It belonged, like my career, to some mothballed part of my life that I’d more or less resigned myself to never—barring a miracle—seeing active service again. Its sudden, swaggering reappearance now was unsettling. I found Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on the in-flight entertainment system, and—closing my eyes firmly—abandoned myself as best I could to Spring.

It was almost midnight when we finally landed in Cleveland. After swapping phone numbers, like a couple of businesspeople who’d met at a conference, Andrew and Anjali left separately as if nothing more exciting had happened than an exchange of pleasantries over ginger ale and peanuts. I had an infantile urge to rush after them, ask if they were going to meet again, or even perhaps envisaged the possibility of a future together. Then they were gone.

I took the shuttle to an airport hotel. For seven hours I drifted in and out of sleep, haunted by Anne and Hazel Voss and the fragments of some nebulous geometric shape that I had to try to reassemble and couldn’t. I was roused by the low rumble of jets through double-glazing. I showered, then selected the day’s wardrobe. I didn’t want to look as if I were trying to sell Professor Halassian something—but equally I didn’t want to come across as an ageing scruff making a vain attempt to be trendy. In the end I settled for the same discreet get-up I’d worn to meet Corinne Ramirez. But of course this was patriotic Ohio, not California, so—when I got to the car hire office—I picked a dark blue Ford, just the right side of flashy.

Whitrow was a picture-postcard little community: a collection of neo-colonial red-brick-and-white-painted-wood buildings laid out on either side of a shallow valley. Parallel with the river ran a half-hearted attempt at a main street, sparsely populated with small businesses: The Village Bookstore; the Whitrow General Trading Company; the College Tavern; a couple of craft-and-gift shops, with signs in the window saying Whitrow Stands United Against Hate. At the far end, on a slight rise, was a white clapboard church.

I parked in front of the tavern. As I got out, a student emerging from the bookshop stopped and stared at me. He looked like a Jeff Lamarr in the making: wan and bony, wearing the uniform du jour: t-shirt and jeans, and battered trainers sporting—the only touch of color, this—a mauve streak apiece. I asked him the way to the philosophy department. He went on staring, sucking his gaunt cheeks. Then he pointed at a building lying in the lee of the church and hurried off before I could question him any further.

On my way I passed several other people, all similarly dressed—and all apparently equally startled by my appearance. Had I spilled coffee on my shirt, or left my zip undone? The zip was easily checked: no cause for concern there. When I reached the department, I paused in front of a window to give the rest of me the once-over. The reflection was a bit watery, but, from what I could see, nothing appeared to be amiss. I smoothed my hair, just for good measure, and went up the steps.

Professor Halassian’s office was on the third floor. I knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again, then pressed my ear against the door. No voices, no sound of movement. I tentatively tried the handle. No joy.

According to my watch, she should definitely be there. I checked that I hadn’t come to the wrong room, or missed a note saying Back in ten minutes. I hadn’t. I went down to the department office. A heavy blonde woman sat behind the enquiry desk. She was dealing with a student, so I waited inside the entrance, looking round the room. Amidst the standard-issue jumble of filing cabinets and photocopiers, little congeries of posters advertised talks on Kant and Hume, Decolonizing Philosophy, The Myth of Nature. Through the window on the far wall you could just make out a line of trees sauntering gracefully over the brow of a hill, oblivious to whether they were a myth or not.

The enquiring student turned, clutching a blank form. He was even ganglier and more spider-limbed than the kid who’d given me directions. When he saw me he did the by now customary double take, staring at me through round owl-eye glasses.

“Yes? May I help you?” said the woman.

“I was hoping to see Professor Halassian. But she doesn’t seem to be in her office.”

“Professor Halassian is on leave right now.”

“On sabbatical, you mean?”

She shook her head. “On leave.”

“Really? It didn’t say anything about that on the website.”

She looked at me mutely, as if she hadn’t been programmed to give a response.

“Do you know where she’s gone?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“But she’s not at home?”

“I’m sorry. I really couldn’t say.”

“And you don’t know how I could contact her?”

“No.”

“Or when she’ll be back?”

“Uh-uh.”

I hesitated, hoping that a crack might suddenly appear in the façade and save me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the spidery student, still watching me.

“OK,” I said finally. “Well, thanks for your help.”

If she caught the sarcasm, she didn’t show it. “You’re welcome.”

I started back to the car, trying to control a summer-lightning flicker of paranoia. What if Stewart Crothers had tipped Professor Halassian off that I was coming, and she’d decided to make herself scarce before I got there? Or, even worse—for some reason I couldn’t guess—he’d told Evan Bone about me, and Bone or his Global Village thugs had intimidated her into refusing to see me? I was almost at the Main Street before I’d managed to persuade myself that the likeliest explanation was the most obvious one: Professor Halassian was really on leave, and nobody had bothered to update her entry on the college website to say so.

I unlocked the car. As I bent to open the door a voice behind me said,

“Excuse me.”

I spun round, to see the boy in the owl-eye glasses. He stepped back quickly to avoid the flail of my arms.

“You wanted to speak to Professor Halassian?”

There was something odd about him that I couldn’t put my finger on. I didn’t reply.

“I may be able to help,” he said.

His shirt, that was part of it: white cotton, with a button-down collar. And his hair, too: cut close on the sides, long and wavy on top, giving his head the shape of a giant muffin.

“Why do you want to see her?” he said.

“That’s a personal matter.”

He made a winding gesture with his hand: Tell me more.

“It’s about her roommate when she was at Stanford. That’s really as much as I can say.”

“And you are?”

“My name is Robert Lovelace. I’m a journalist.”

“A journalist?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated, sizing me up, making a calculation. “OK,” he said finally. “Get in your car. When you leave the campus, make a right. First place you come to is Wicket’s Farm. It’s abandoned, but you can still see the sign. Meet me there. Twenty minutes.”

He turned and started walking back the way he’d come.

It took me less than ten minutes to find Wicket’s Farm. The entrance was barred by a chain, with a scratched metal notice hanging from it: Private Property. No Trespassing. At first sight, there didn’t seem much to attract a trespasser: a deserted farmyard, rutted like a frozen sea; a row of sagging buildings; a four-square wooden house, tired of life and sinking slowly to its knees. But if you were looking for a place where you could quietly dispose of someone—or even just beat him up, without fear of interference—I could see it might have something to be said for it.

I pulled the car off the road and stationed myself behind a tree. After a few minutes the owl-eyed boy appeared on a mountain bike, his legs so thin that it seemed impossible they could actually push the wheels round. There was no one else with him, and no evidence that he was carrying a weapon. He got off the bike and leaned it against the gatepost.

“Hello?” he called.

I stayed where I was. He peered in through my car window, checked again that I was nowhere to be seen, then gingerly opened the passenger door and reached inside—hoping, presumably, to find something in the glove-box that would tell him more about me. When he discovered it was locked, he withdrew quickly and shut the door again.

I emerged from my hiding place. “I was just having a pee.”

He reddened. “I called Professor Halassian. She says she’ll meet you.”

“Thank you.”

He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “I wrote down the address for you.”

I opened it. Elaine’s Restaurant, 2117 Main Street, Brownville. 6:00 p.m.

“Where’s Brownville?”

He pointed along the road, away from the college. “About a half hour that way.”

“Is that where she lives?”

He shook his head and retrieved his bike.

“Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?” I said.

“Why are we meeting here, you mean? No cameras. No students.” He settled himself in the saddle. “Ask Professor Halassian. She’ll explain.”

And he set off back towards Whitrow, throwing a trail of gritty dust behind him, as if to conceal his movements even from me.

Of course I speculated. But I was perfectly aware that my mind was overheating, a machine straining to produce bricks out of nothing but straw. So I tried to concentrate on the landscape instead.

To begin with it was just more of the same: run-down little farms, some of them boarded up, others—to judge from the clusters of outsized agricultural equipment besieging them—still functional. But as I got closer to Brownville, the air of desolation increased: the fields became drier and weedier; the buildings smaller, and in more urgent need of repair. And then, as the road crested a low hill, I saw ahead of me a scene from a post-apocalyptic dystopia: a chaos of black broken shapes—chimneys; cranes; factories; a huge wheel, disconnected from whatever it was meant to drive, and left to its fate, like some superannuated circus animal—strewn along the bank of a river. From a distance the whole town looked completely deserted; but as I reached the outskirts there were a few desultory signs of life: a bar, a drugstore, a church half-hidden by a giant billboard: Who cares? Jesus does. And then, here and there among the closed-up buildings and empty lots, defiant groups of still-lived-in houses.

Elaine’s was halfway along the main street. Like its neighbor—a redbrick town hall clinging stubbornly to the last tatters of Victorian grandeur—it seemed to be making a spirited effort to keep up appearances. A neon sign in the window advertised Cocktails and Fine Dining. Inside, I could see tables with white tablecloths, each sporting a fake flower in a long-stemmed glass. Only a few of them were occupied.

As I went in, a blonde waitress came towards me with a bright hopeful smile.

“Hi. Welcome to Elaine’s.”

“Thank you.” I glanced round the room, searching in vain for someone who might be the woman in the college website photograph. “I’m supposed to be meeting somebody,” I said.

“Lady with dark hair, cut yay long?” She tugged a strand of her own hair and scissored it with her fingers.

“That sounds about right,” I said.

“She’s waiting for you in back. I’ll show you.”

She led the way into a small room. Ruth Halassian was sitting at a corner table, watching for my arrival. She wore a light jacket and a billowy green-and-blue silk scarf that half-hid her chin. Lying in front of her was a Samsung phone.

“OK, here he is,” said the waitress. She glanced from Professor Halassian to me. “This some kind of a special occasion for you guys? An anniversary or something?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Ruth Halassian.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the waitress. She ran a hand down her front, imitating the drop of my tie. “You’re both dressed up kind of spiffy, aren’t you?”

“He is.”

“And plus, you asked to be in here, all by yourselves.”

“We’ve never seen each other before in our lives,” said Ruth Halassian.

“Oh, OK,” said the waitress neutrally, backing away from disaster. “Well, my name’s Daly, and I’m going to be looking after you this evening. Would you care to see the cocktail menu?”

“Just a large orange juice for me,” said Ruth Halassian, “with lots of ice.”

“Same for me,” I said.

Daly hurried off, looking as happy as if we’d ordered a bottle of champagne.

“I’m Robert,” I said.

I held my hand out. She gave it a token squeeze. “Ruth.”

“Thanks for doing this,” I said, sitting down. “Things are obviously a bit—”

“What?”

“I was going to say, tricky for you at the moment. So I appreciate your taking the time.” I nodded towards the front of the building. “Are you doing some kind of a project here?”

“I’m a philosopher. Not a social scientist.” Subject dismissed. She swiped the screen on her phone. “Just so as you know, I’m recording this, all right?”

“Why?”

“Security.”

She waited, eyebrows raised, for my assent.

“OK.”

She pressed record. “You wanted to talk to me about Beth McGregor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No. I was hoping you could tell me.”

Her shoulders sagged with disappointment. “So you haven’t seen her? Or heard what she’s doing now?”

“I’m afraid not. And you haven’t either?”

She shook her head. “And your interest here is what, exactly? You’re a reporter, is that right?”

“A journalist.”

She pulled a face, as if I were hair-splitting. “So you’re writing something?”

“That’s the idea.”

“About what?”

Daly reappeared with our orange juices. I waited until she was out of earshot again. Then I said,

“Evan Bone.”

Ruth Halassian flinched, as if I’d pinged her with a rubber band. Then she recovered herself and sat looking at me steadily with an expression I couldn’t decode. I held her gaze, taking in, for the first time, the intelligence of her brown eyes, the complexity of the lines on her unmade-up face—a map of humor, warmth, sorrow, the constant battle to pull her experience into a comprehensible shape.

“In that case,” she said finally, “I think we’re done here.”

“Why?”

“Because it wouldn’t be smart for me to talk about that.”

She stood up, hunching forward to retrieve the Samsung. My hand got there first.

“Please,” I said. “Anything you say will be in absolute confidence. I promise.”

She made a sound like a punctured tire. “Let me have my phone, please.”

I removed my hand. In five seconds, if I did nothing, she would be beyond my reach. And at that point, I had absolutely no idea what I would do.

“I can give you a guarantee,” I said.

“What?”

“Sit down again. It’ll take a couple of minutes. Then you can decide whether you still want to leave.”

She sat down and started fiddling with her phone.

“No,” I said. “Keep it running.”

She settled back in her chair, fingers still hovering close to the Samsung.

“Let me explain why I’m here,” I said. “I used to be the Travel Correspondent for the London Daily Post. When Evan Bone bought it, I was fired. Why pay for a travel correspondent, when people are queuing up to contribute their ignorant, illiterate opinions for nothing on Trip Advisor?”

A tiny smile, as fleeting as a subliminal image on television.

“I tried to get another job. That didn’t work. I tried selling a proposal for a book. That didn’t work either. Then my agent suggested this. A trip to Silicon Valley. An article about our new masters, and what they’re doing to my profession. To be called Christmas: A Turkey Writes.”

“Oh, God.”

“So last week I flew over and went to Global Village, in time to hear a presentation about some new product called TOLSTOY—which, it turns out, will make writers even more redundant. I found it so depressing that I left halfway through. And when I got out to the car park and I was looking for my car, I saw something. Someone.”

My throat tightened—a pre-emptive strike from my body, warning me against my own recklessness. Professor Halassian’s eyes widened. I ploughed on.

“It was somebody I knew. Or at least I thought it was: a woman called Anne Grainger. She’d been my girlfriend at university. And then a colleague at the Post. Seeing her out of the blue like that—I was just completely—well, you can imagine.”

Professor Halassian nodded. She rummaged in her bag for a pen.

“I couldn’t understand why she was in California, eight thousand miles from where she ought to have been All I could think of was that she’d lost her job too, thanks to Evan Bone, so maybe she’d come to confront him? But when I said, What are you doing here, she just ran off. I followed her as far as the gate—at which point she suddenly disappeared.”

Professor Halassian scribbled something on her napkin, shielding it with her hand.

“There were some people there holding a vigil for a Native American man called Carter Ramirez. I asked if they’d seen Anne, or whoever it was. They hadn’t.”

Ruth Halassian slid her phone out of the way, then leaned forward on the table, watching me intently.

“The next morning, I heard that Anne Grainger had died. At exactly the time I thought I’d seen her.”

She let out an almost silent whistle. “In England?”

I nodded. “And that she’d left a message for me, telling me to investigate Carter Ramirez.”

Professor Halassian stared at me for a few seconds. Then she turned her napkin to show me what she’d written: Death Coincidence.

“Ah, you’ve heard of that?” I said. “I hadn’t.”

“I heard of it. But you’re the first person I ever met it actually happened to. Or the first person I ever met who’ll admit it happened to them, anyway.” She hesitated. “How did she die?”

“Suicide.”

“Oh, God. You know why?”

“She’d made the mistake of attacking Evan Bone. Saying he shouldn’t have been allowed to buy the paper. Which provoked a concerted online campaign against her.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. It was pretty much just a pack of hounds ripping a fox to pieces.”

She shook her head, her face blank with anguish, as if she’d known Anne, and felt the pain of her last hours personally. After a few seconds she said,

“You ever have an experience like this before?”

“No. And you could argue that in this case there was a purely psychological explanation.”

“Guilt, you mean? You should have stood up for her, and you didn’t?”

I nodded.

“So what did you do?”

I gave her a quick résumé of my encounters with Corinne Ramirez and Ginny Voss and Stewart Crothers.

“And have you seen her again? Anne Grainger?”

“No. Just after it happened, I thought I heard her a couple of times. But that might have been auto-suggestion. And since then, there’s been nothing. The world seems to be behaving perfectly normally again.” I waved at her phone. “But there’s your hostage. If I fail to keep my word, just release that. No one would ever take anything I say seriously again. They’d think I was completely mad.”

She looked at me, mulling over what I’d said, testing it against some thought of her own. Then she switched off the phone recorder.

“I don’t think you’re completely mad,” she said. “Not crazy mad. But I do wonder why exactly you’re doing this? Is it just to make yourself feel better, by taking Evan Bone down? Punishing him for her death? Or—”

I said nothing. She stared at me curiously.

“Are you hungry?”

“A bit.”

She hesitated a moment, then stood up. “Let’s go to my place.”

“I’d be only too happy to buy you dinner here, if—”

She shook her head. “It’ll be safer at home.”