‘What about Max Predator?’
‘He wasn’t there. So I hung around until the gym’s owner turned up. She’s also Max’s manager. Judith Elborough, this tough old broad with a posh accent, sounds and looks like a racehorse trainer from the Home Counties. I checked her background afterwards. She inherited the business from her husband, who skipped out of the country when his investment company turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. He’d bought a share in the cage-fighting business, put in their son’s name, and she took it over—’
Chloe said, ‘But does she know Fahad?’
‘She knew Fahad’s father. But I didn’t get that from her. She wouldn’t talk to me. I said that I was working for Ada Morange. Which isn’t a total lie, seeing as you do. And she said that Professor Morange’s people had already seen her. I said I was doing a follow-up, thinking on my feet—’
‘Wait. She talked to Ada Morange’s people?’
‘They beat me to it. I suppose they noticed that poster too.’
‘What did they ask her?’
Chloe was wondering what else Henry hadn’t told her. She knew that she would have to confront him; also knew that he would tell her only as much as he thought she needed to know.
Gail Ann said, ‘I don’t know. The Elborough woman called my bluff.’
‘Shit.’
Gail Ann said, ‘Luckily, I’d already talked to some of her fighters while I was waiting for her to show up. They aren’t fighters, by the way. They’re, get this, warriors. One of them, a big hairy guy who calls himself the Warewolf, asked me out. Told me that he was going up against his big rival in a couple of days, said I should sit ringside and bring him luck. Only it isn’t a ring, of course. It’s an actual cage. Once you’re inside it, you don’t get out until you win or you’re down. Wolfie has some amazing scars. And fur all over his body. Grey, with a vee of white on his chest.’
‘Sounds like you had fun,’ Chloe said.
‘It was definitely interesting. I might even go see him fight. There’s a story in it. Not my usual thing, but it’s good to be stretched. Anyway, I told him about your runaway artist. Explained why you wanted to get in contact with him, and so forth. And it turns out that Wolfie knew his father. You know how mods work?’
‘I know it’s Elder Culture tech,’ Chloe said, beginning to wonder when Gail Ann was going to get to the point.
‘They’re derived from these like alien creatures, biochines. You take fragments from their hides — proteins, collagen, or whatever — and treat them in various ways and stick them under your skin. Different ones grow different mods.’
‘And Fahad’s father was involved in this.’
‘He supplied antagonists that suppress side effects, and stop the mods growing when they’ve grown enough. Wolfie told me some gross horror stories about mods going bad.’
‘So Sahar Chauhan worked for Judith Elborough at some point. Making these antagonists.’
‘According to Wolfie, he worked for these tasty geezers—’
‘Tasty geezers? He really said that?’
‘Really. He’s an East End boy, his parents have a café in Poplar they’ve owned for like fifty years? Anyway, Sahar Chauhan treated people who’d been given new mods. He’d do blood tests, use them to work up the right mix of antagonists.’
‘And did Sahar ever bring Fahad with him?’
‘Now we’re getting to the good part,’ Gail Ann said. ‘Wolfie said that Sahar used to come to the fights, visited backstage several times with his son. Who was a huge fan of Max Predator. Wolfie claims that the names are deliberately cheesy. The punters love it. So I guess that’s where Fahad got the signed poster you told me about.’
Chloe said, ‘Has Fahad visited the gym recently? Looking for work. Trying to sell some of his art…’
‘Wolfie said he doesn’t know. I think he was telling the truth, too. But here’s the really good part. Are you sitting down?’
‘Why don’t you just tell me?’
‘After I left the gym, a couple of hours later, I got a message from someone who not only claims to know Fahad, but says that Fahad wants to meet up.’
‘With you?’
‘No, sweetie. With you.’
Henry was in the hotel’s restaurant, looking up from his plate of sausage and beans as Chloe sat down. ‘Here’s someone who got out of the wrong side of the bed.’
‘We need to talk,’ Chloe said. ‘Get everything in the open.’
‘Would this be about the fire at Disruption Theory, or your friend’s visit to the gym?’
‘We could start by talking about everything you haven’t been telling me.’
‘We both saw that poster in the fort. We both followed it up. After Sandra and her boys got out, they went to the place where Mr Predator works out and talked to the woman who manages him. Meanwhile, you asked your journalist friend to snoop around. Did she find anything interesting?’
‘I know that Sahar Chauhan was making stuff, antagonists, which cage fighters use. I know he took Fahad to the fights.’
‘And Fahad came into the gym a couple of months ago, looking for work. Janet Elborough told us that she gave him some cash and got rid of him, because she knew that his father’s employers were looking for him. Did your reporter friend tell you about them?’
‘Not yet.’
‘The McBride family,’ Henry said. ‘A long-established criminal firm. They own the shrimp farm in Martham, and the company that sent Sahar Chauhan to Mangala. And now they’re looking for Fahad. The Elborough woman says that she didn’t tell them about his visit to her place. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe not. She relies on them for those antagonists, and they might be into her for other stuff.’
‘But she talked to your people,’ Chloe said.
‘Sandra can be very persuasive. You should be flattered, really,’ Henry said. ‘This thing you started has the Prof’s full attention.’
‘Then why do I feel that I’m being sidelined?’
‘If you were being sidelined, you wouldn’t be here with me,’ Henry said. ‘Listen. The Prof has a profiler working for her. The kind of shrink who works out the home lives of serial killers from the way they operate. He says that you and the kid are a complementary pair. You both lost your mothers, have absent fathers. You have a reputation — the wiki, that move you made trying to protect the Jackaroo avatar. And now you’re actually wanted by the Hazard Police. You’re on the run, just like him. This profiler thinks you can use all of that to get the kid’s trust. So you’re still in this, for as long as you want to be.’
‘But no more secrets. No more withholding information.’
‘Didn’t I just tell you what we found out? And listen, I’m impressed that you were able to find out about that kid’s connection to that gym so quickly, but no more stunts like that, okay? You could have put this thing of ours at risk. Not to mention your friend.’
Chloe said, ‘I found out something else. One of Fahad’s friends has been trying to get in touch with me.’
She explained that the friend had sent a text message to Gail Ann after she visited the gym. ‘She left her contact details with some of the fighters. Either this friend is one of them, or they work there and heard Gail Ann asking about Fahad, heard her mention my name. They sent her a message, asking her to ask me to check my messages.’
‘They sent you a message?’
‘Two days ago. I didn’t see it because my phone has been turned off. Mostly turned off. When I checked, there were about two hundred messages in my inbox. Almost all of them were from reporters, but there was one sent anonymously, asking me to reply to it if I wanted to talk to Mangala Cowboy. That’s the name—’