Page 90 of Carbon

I wanted to protest that somebody had gone into a place I’d adopted as my sanctuary and handled my belongings, my personal items, without obtaining my consent or even bothering to ask for it. But what actually came out was, “What, all of them?”

She smirked a little. “Dev couldn’t believe how much luggage you brought.”

Dammit, I felt all off balance. I shook my head in an attempt to dislodge some of the rocks that had taken up residence in here. “What makes you think I want to stay at this place?”

“There’s a man on the loose taking out girls connected with Ben. We’d prefer you didn’t end up being his next victim.”

When she put it so bluntly, I could hardly argue. “Thank you, I guess.”

“We’re not leaving you unprotected, and if you’re here, it means we can free up the surveillance team that was watching you at the apartment to do more useful things. I’m assuming you can see the logic in that?”

“You’ve been watching me?”

“Too damn right we’ve been watching you.”

She was out of the car before my half-formed words could escape from my mouth. Invasion of privacy. Peeping Tom. Big brother. They all got spluttered at empty air.

My muscles got ahead of my brain as I tried to exit with the seatbelt still on, and by the time I’d slammed the car door, hard, she was already halfway to the lift in the corner.

“You’re welcome,” she called back over her shoulder.

* * *

If the meeting room at Blackwood’s headquarters was the corporate equivalent of a modern art gallery, with its white walls, chrome accents, and designer lighting, the conference room at Emmy’s house was the equivalent of a school classroom. No, scratch that. It was the love child of a school classroom and a branch of Staples, one who’d been shagging a computer lab and possibly a library on the side. The only similarity was the tag on the door: Project Carbon. Only this one had been drawn in biro and attached with sellotape.

Inside, corkboards and post-it notes covered two of the walls, with a digital display taking up the whole of a third. A printer whirred in the corner, spewing out more paper to go with the sheets already littering every surface. I spotted Luke behind two laptops plus a third screen, and when the printer started beeping and flashing a red light, he gave it a dirty look.

“Nye, the damn thing’s jammed again. Give it a thump, would you?”

“Nye’s a bit old school,” Emmy explained. “He likes paper. It drives Luke crazy.”

Nye gave me a wave as he crossed the room to deal with the offending gadget, which I noticed was the same model as mine at home. Yes, I liked printing things too. Editing was so much easier with everything in front of me and a rainbow of pens at the ready.

Nye took Luke at his word and smacked the heel of his hand on the side of the printer, then narrowed his eyes when nothing happened.

“It didn’t work.”

Luke shrugged. “Try turning it off and on again.”

I took pity on them both and stepped forwards. “I bet the paper’s caught in the feeder. Here, let me fix it.”

“Be my guest.”

A little TLC got the rollers turning, and the printer was soon churning its way through a small forest again. “There you go.”

With the crisis averted, I took a step back and surveyed the room. Besides Luke and Nye, I spotted Sofia sitting cross-legged on the huge table in the centre of the room and Xav behind his own laptop at the far end, his face devoid of all expression as usual.

“How are we getting on?” Emmy asked.

Luke took a sip of coffee before answering. “We’ve found Ben Durham on the register at St. Ethelbert’s Prep School at the same time as Augusta attended, and like she said, he left aged eleven. He did one year at Sonham Middle School in Manchester, then attended Hadley Grange just down the road until he turned eighteen. Another scholarship, and it looks like he was a bright boy. Straight As all the way. Then he disappeared.”

“He can’t just have disappeared.”

“Well, he did. He’s never earned a penny under his national insurance number, and his passport expired when he turned twenty. He’s got no criminal record, not even a parking ticket, and he isn’t registered with a doctor. Still working on the bank records.”

“What about the phone call he made to Augusta?”

Nye pointed at a red pin stuck in a map of London on the corkboard. “That came from a shopping centre in Brixton, and the phone’s turned off now. We’ve sent a couple of teams to check for witnesses and cameras, but I’m not convinced we’ll find much.”

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