‘Your downstairs neighbour, Freddie Patel. Does he have that gift?’
Mrs Archer’s smile went away. ‘Someone else came here yesterday, asking the same questions. As I told him, I really don’t know anything about the boy.’
Chloe had a falling sensation. She was losing her edge. She’d let Eddie Ackroyd beat her to the prize. She said, ‘Was that a man wearing a hat and an old leather jacket, smells funny and won’t look you in the eye? He isn’t any friend of mine. Was he causing trouble? Did he have something to do with Freddie leaving?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Mrs Archer said, and started to close the door.
Chloe said quickly, ‘Do you have a relative or a friend who won the emigration lottery?’
‘Not today, thank you,’ Mrs Archer said, and the door snicked shut.
Her neighbours didn’t know anything about Freddie Patel or weren’t prepared to tell Chloe. Several had the shiny-eyed look of the meme-struck.
‘Either he did a deal with one of my rivals,’ Chloe told Neil, ‘or he got spooked by the breakout, or by my interest in his pictures…He was definitely nervous when I talked to him. And when I called the letting agents, I found out that his real name is Fahad Chauhan. They had a photocopy of his ID card in the lease documents. Fahad Chauhan, eighteen years old.’
She’d pretended to be from the immigration services, but there was no need to tell her brother that, he’d only get upset.
‘I’m pretty sure he’s hiding from someone,’ she said. ‘On the run from some kind of trouble.’
‘Perhaps you should talk with this rival of yours, ask him what he knows,’ Neil said.
‘Even if he knew anything about it, he’d probably lie.’ Chloe didn’t want to say Eddie Ackroyd’s name. If she did, he might appear in a puff of stale kif smoke. ‘There’s something else, too. Apart from his tumblr, Fahad seems to be totally off grid. I did the usual Googling and found plenty of Fahad Chauhans, but none of them seem to be the one I’m looking for. There’s a pop star in Pakistan called Fahad Chauhan. A film director in India…They’re either too old or too young, or living in the wrong place. My guy doesn’t do Facebook or Friendster or Snapchat. He isn’t listed on TownSquare or AsianCafé. Maybe he’s on one of the walled networks, or maybe he lurks in the darknets, but as far as his public profile goes he doesn’t have one. It’s as if he’s purged every reference to him. There are worms that do that. Erase your profile, or improve it by hunting down and deleting those embarrassing selfies you took when you were a teenager.’
‘Isn’t that illegal?’
‘Only if you try to use it on a government site, attack your police records. The kid’s a ghost. But I did find something about his family, and his history. To begin with, his father is some kind of biochemist, moved here from Pakistan seven years ago.’
Gail Ann Jones had pointed her towards a news snippet buried in an industry newsletter. A brief paragraph about Professor S. A. Chauhan, formerly of the University of the Punjab, taking up a new job at the GlaxoSmithKline R&D site in Uxbridge.
‘And you know this Professor Chauhan is your man’s father because?’ Neil was smiling: he liked to read thrillers, derived vicarious pleasure from Chloe’s stories about tracking down alien artefacts.
Chloe said, ‘Because about a year after Professor Chauhan moved here, there was an article in the Hillingdon Times about a tropical garden that his wife created. And one of the article’s photos showed Professor and Mrs Chauhan and their son Fahad. It’s one of those sad stories with a sweet ending. In their home country, the father was caught up in a government campaign against universities. Labs and libraries burned down, denunciations, student strikes…A bit like the anti-intellectual riots we had here, but with assassinations and mass arrests. Anyway, Professor Chauhan was arrested, Mrs Chauhan and Fahad came here, and the family was reunited some years later, after the new government released the Professor from prison. So one of my questions is, if Fahad and his sister are on the run, where are their parents?’
‘Oh dear. I think I can see where this is going.’
‘You’ve done it before.’
‘And the last time I did it we agreed it would be the last time.’
‘Fahad and his little sister are in bad, serious trouble. They’re on the run because something has got hold of them. Some Elder Culture thing. An active artefact, an eidolon…It’s already caused a breakout. Next time it could be something that puts them in real danger. All you have to do,’ Chloe said, ‘is search the DVLA database for their father and mother. A quick peek. In and out.’
‘Suppose they don’t have driving licences?’
‘There was a photo of the front of the house, with two cars in the drive.’
‘Just one quick look.’
‘You’re a star. Just one other thing—’
‘Just the one thing, Chloe. Otherwise I might find myself having to answer some hard questions.’
‘This isn’t about the DVLA. I’m wondering how Fahad got hold of an artefact. I’ve already checked the emigration lottery winner lists, no luck there. So I thought,’ Chloe said, ‘you could ask your old university pal David, over in the Foreign Office, if he could check the lists of shuttle passengers whose tickets were bought by companies and governments. See if Professor Chauhan was sent up and out by his employers.’
6. The Hotel California
Petra | 24 July
Back in the day, the Hotel California had been a camp for scientists employed by the UN. The original building, a chain of modules perched on A-frame stilts, now housed the hotel’s reception and administration offices; guests were accommodated in cabins scattered across a landscaped park of terrestrial trees and plants cupped beneath a geodesic dome.
It was dusk inside the dome — a scattering of window lights amongst clumps of trees and bushes, fairy lights twinkling along the paths — as the manager led Vic Gayle and Skip Williams to the cabin rented by the late John Redway and his colleague, David Parsons. A clapboard cabin with a corrugated-iron roof, perched above a mossy pool fed by a little waterfall and approached by a humpback wooden bridge. No lights showing at the windows.
The manager had printed out scans of the passports of the two men, and made a copy of CCTV footage of them leaving the hotel at around four p.m. Parsons was older than Redway: a forty-two-year-old white male according to his passport, brown eyes, cropped black hair, one metre ninety. Clearly the boss, the manager said.
Both men were British. Parsons had paid for their cabin with a card drawing on credit deposited with the Petra City Bank in an account apparently opened by Cybermat Technologies.
The manager, a brisk young Spanish woman, stood back as Skip took out his gun and gave a good police knock, three hard raps with the side of his fist, and announced that the police were outside. No reply. Frogs peeped everywhere. They’d been introduced to control an infestation of flies, and had multiplied enormously. Vic sweated inside his suit. The warm air was heavy with the scent of the honeysuckle that curtained one end of the porch. A line from the old song which had given the hotel its name ran through his head. The one about checking out but never leaving.
Skip knocked again, exchanged a look with Vic, and ran the key card through the slot. The pinlight changed from red to green and Skip turned the handle and shouldered through the door, leading with his gun. Vic followed, into a living space under a slanting ceiling, lights coming on when Skip found a switch by the door. A leather sofa and leather armchairs, a big stone fireplace, a flat-screen TV on a sideboard. One wall was covered by a blow-up of the famous photograph taken by Marianne Hækkerup as the first shuttle flight had approached Mangala. A half-globe banded like an Easter egg: ice cap, desert, the bitter equatorial sea, desert, ice cap.