by Lee Child
The guy glanced up.
“Twice in one day,” he said. “Your Mr. Taylor is a popular person.”
“What do you mean?”
“A man telephoned directly from New York with the same inquiry. Wouldn’t give his name. I imagined he was trying all the London agencies one by one.”
“Was he American?”
“Absolutely.”
Pauling turned to Reacher and mouthed, Lane.
Reacher nodded. “Trying to go it alone. Trying to bilk me out of my fee.”
Pauling turned back to the desk. “What did you tell the guy on the phone?”
“That there are sixty million people in Great Britain and that possibly several hundred thousand of them are called Taylor. It’s a fairly common name. I told him that without better information I couldn’t really help him.”
“Can you help us?”
“That depends on what extra information you have.”
“We have photographs.”
“They might help eventually. But not at the outset. How long was Mr. Taylor in America?”
“Many years, I think.”
“So he has no base here? No home?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“Then it’s hopeless,” the guy said. “Don’t you see? I work with databases. Surely you do the same in New York? Bills, electoral registers, council tax, court records, credit reports, insurance policies, things like that. If your Mr. Taylor hasn’t lived here for many years he simply won’t show up anywhere.”
Pauling said nothing.
“I’m very sorry,” the guy said. “But surely you understand?”
Pauling shot Reacher a look that said: Great plan.
Reacher said, “I’ve got a phone number for his closest relative.”
CHAPTER 58
Reacher said, “We searched Taylor’s apartment in New York and we found a desk phone that had ten speed-dials programmed. The only British number was labeled with the letter S. I’m guessing it’s for his mother or father or his brother or sister. More likely a brother or sister because I think a guy like him would have used M or D for his mom or his dad. It’ll be Sam, Sally, Sarah, Sean, something like that. And the sibling relationship will probably be fairly close, or else why bother to program a speed dial? And if the relationship is fairly close, then Taylor won’t have come back to Britain without at least letting them know. Because they’ve probably got him on speed dial too, and they would worry if he wasn’t answering his phone at home. So I’m guessing they’ll have the information we need.”
“What was the number?” the guy asked.
Reacher closed his eyes and recited the 01144 number he had memorized back on Hudson Street. The guy at the desk wrote it down on a pad of paper with a blunt pencil.
“OK,” he said. “We delete the international prefix, and we add a zero in its place.” He did exactly that, manually, with his pencil. “Then we fire up the old computer and we look in the reverse directory.” He spun his chair one-eighty to a computer table behind him and tapped the space bar and unlocked the screen with a password Reacher didn’t catch. Then he pointed and clicked his way to a dialog box, where he entered the number. “This will give us the address only, you understand. We’ll have to go elsewhere to discover the exact identity of the person who lives there.” He hit submit and a second later the screen redrew and came up with an address.
“Grange Farm,” he said. “In Bishops Pargeter. Sounds rural.”
Reacher asked, “How rural?”
“Not far from Norwich, judging by the postcode.”
“Bishops Pargeter is the name of a town?”
The guy nodded. “It’ll be a small village, probably. Or a hamlet, possibly. Perhaps a dozen buildings and a thirteenth-century Norman church. That would be typical. In the county of Norfolk, in East Anglia. Farming country, very flat, windy, the Fens, that kind of thing, north and east of here, about a hundred and twenty miles away.”
“Find the name.”
“Hang on, hang on, I’m getting there.” The guy dragged and dropped the address to a temporary location elsewhere on the screen and opened up a different database. “The electoral register,” he said. “That’s always my preference. It’s in the public domain, quite legal, and it’s usually fairly comprehensive and reliable. If people take the trouble to vote, that is, which they don’t always do, of course.” He dragged the address back to a new dialog box and hit another submit command. There was a long, long wait. Then the screen changed. “Here we are,” the guy said. “Two voters at that address. Jackson. That’s the name. Mr. Anthony Jackson, and let’s see, yes, Mrs. Susan Jackson. So there’s your S. S for Susan.”
“A sister,” Pauling said. “Married. This is like Hobart all over again.”
“Now then,” the guy said. “Let’s do a little something else. Not quite legal this time, but since I’m among friends and colleagues, I might as well push the boat out.” He opened a new database that came up in old-fashioned plain DOS script. “Hacked, basically,” he said. “That’s why we don’t get the fancy graphics. But we get the information. The Department of Health and Social Security. The nanny state at work.” He entered Anthony Jackson’s name and address and then added a complex keyboard command and the screen rolled down and came back with three separate names and a mass of figures. “Anthony Jackson is thirty-nine years old and his wife Susan is thirty-eight. Her maiden name was indeed Taylor. They have one child, a daughter, age eight, and they seem to have saddled her with the unfortunate name of Melody.”
“That’s a nice name,” Pauling said.
“Not for Norfolk. I don’t suppose she’s happy at school.”
Reacher asked, “Have they been in Norfolk long? Is that where the Taylors are from? As a family?”
The guy scrolled up the screen. “The unfortunate Melody seems to have been born in London, which would suggest not.” He exited the plain DOS site and opened another. “The Land Registry,” he said. He entered the address. Hit another submit command. The screen redrew. “No, they bought the place in Bishops Pargeter just over a year ago. Sold a place in south London at the same time. Which would suggest they’re city folk heading back to the land. It’s a common fantasy. I give them another twelve months or so before they get tired of it.”
“Thank you,” Reacher said. “We appreciate your help.”
He picked up the guy’s blunt pencil from the desk and took Patti Joseph’s envelope out of his pocket and wrote Anthony, Susan, Melody Jackson, Grange Farm, Bishops Pargeter, Norfolk on it. Then he said, “Maybe you could forget all about this if the guy from New York calls again.”
“Money at stake?”
“Lots of it.”
“First come, first served,” the guy said. “The early bird catches the worm. And so on and so forth. My lips are sealed.”
“Thank you,” Reacher said again. “What do we owe you?”
“Oh, nothing at all,” the guy said. “It was my pleasure entirely. Always happy to help a fellow professional.”
Back on the street Pauling said, “All Lane has to do is check Taylor’s apartment and find the phone and he’s level with us. He could get back to a different guy in London. Or call someone in New York. Those reverse directories are available on-line.”
“He won’t find the phone,” Reacher said. “And if he did, he wouldn’t make the connection. Different skill set. Mirror on a stick.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not entirely. So I took the precaution of erasing the number.”
“That’s called taking an unfair advantage.”
“I want to make sure I get the money.”
“Should we just go ahead and call Susan Jackson?”
“I was going to,” Reacher said. “But then you mentioned Hobart and his sister and now I’m not so sure. Suppose Susan is as protective as Dee Marie? She’d just lie to us about anything she knows.”
“We could say we were buddies passing through.”
“She’d check with Taylor before she told us anything.”
“So what next?”
“We’re going to have to go up there ourselves. To Bishops Pargeter, wherever the hell that is.”
CHAPTER 59
Obviously their hotel didn’t even come close to offering concierge service so Reacher and Pauling had to walk down to Marble Arch to find a car rental office. Reacher had neither a driver’s license nor a credit card so he left Pauling to fill in the forms and kept on going down Oxford Street to look for a bookstore. He found a big place that had a travel section in back with a whole shelf of motoring atlases of Britain. But the first three he checked didn’t show Bishops Pargeter at all. No sign of it anywhere. It wasn’t in the index. Too small, he figured. Not even a dot on the map. He found London and Norfolk and Norwich. No problem with those places. He found market towns and large villages. But nothing smaller. Then he saw a cache of Ordnance Survey maps. Four shelves, low down, against a wall. A whole series. Big folded sheets, meticulously drawn, government sponsored. For hikers, he guessed. Or for serious geography freaks. There was a choice of scales. Best was a huge thing that showed detail all the way down to some individual buildings. He pulled all the Norfolk sheets off the shelf and tried them one by one. He found Bishops Pargeter on the fourth attempt. It was a crossroads hamlet about thirty miles south and west of the Norwich outskirts. Two minor roads met. Not even the roads themselves showed up on the motoring atlases.
He bought the map for detail and the cheapest atlas for basic orientation. Then he hiked back to the rental office and found Pauling waiting with the key to a Mini Cooper.
“A red one,” she said. “With a white roof. Very cool.”
He said, “I think Taylor might be right there. With his sister.”
“Why?”
“His instinct would be to go hide somewhere lonely. Somewhere isolated. And he was a soldier, so deep down he’d want somewhere defensible. It’s flat as a pool table there. I just read the map. He’d see someone coming from five miles away. If he’s got a rifle he’s impregnable. And if he’s got four-wheel-drive he’s got a three-sixty escape route. He could just take off across the fields in any direction.”
“You can’t murder two people and steal more than ten million dollars and just go home to your sister.”
“He wouldn’t have to give her chapter and verse. He wouldn’t really have to tell her anything at all. And it might only be temporary. He might need a break. He’s been under a lot of stress.”
“You sound sorry for him.”
“I’m trying to think like him. He’s been planning for a long time and the last week must have been hell. He must be exhausted. He needs to hole up and sleep.”
“His sister’s place would be too risky, surely. Family is the first thing anyone thinks of. We did, with Hobart. We tried every Hobart in the book.”
“His sister is a Jackson, not a Taylor. Like Graziano wasn’t a Hobart. And Grange Farm is not an ancestral pile. The sister only just moved there. Anyone tracking his family would get bogged down in London.”
“There’s a kid up there. His niece. Would he put innocent people in physical danger?”
“He just killed two innocent people. He’s a little underdeveloped in the conscience department.”
Pauling swung the car key on her finger. Back and forth, thinking.
“It’s possible,” she said. “I guess. So what’s our play?”
“Taylor was with Lane three years,” Reacher said. “So he never met you and he sure as hell never met me. So it doesn’t really make much difference. He’s not going to shoot every stranger who comes to the house. He can’t really afford to. It’s something we should bear in mind, is all.”
“We’re going right to the house?”
Reacher nodded. “At least close enough to scope it out. If Taylor’s there, we back off and wait for Lane. If he isn’t, we go all the way in and talk to Susan.”
“When?”
“Now.”
The rental guy brought the Mini Cooper out from a garage space in back and Reacher shoved the passenger seat hard up against the rear bench and slid inside. Pauling got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. It was a cute car. It looked great in red. But it was a handful to drive. Stick shift, wrong side of the road, wheel on the right, early-evening traffic in one of the world’s most congested cities. But they made it back to the hotel OK. They double parked and Pauling ran in to get her bag. Reacher stayed in the car. His toothbrush was already in his pocket. Pauling got back after five minutes and said, “We’re on the west side here. Convenient for the airport. But now we need to exit the city from the east.”
“Northeast,” Reacher said. “On a highway called the M-11.”
“So I have to drive all the way through the center of London in rush hour.”
“No worse than Paris or Rome.”
“I’ve never been to Paris or Rome.”
“Well, now you’ll know what to expect if you ever get there.”
Heading east and north was a simple enough proposition but like any major city London was full of one-way systems and complex junctions. And it was full of lines of stalled traffic at every light. They made halting progress as far as a district called Shoreditch and then they found a wide road labeled A-10 that speared due north. Too early, but they took it anyway. They figured they would make the lateral adjustment later, away from the congestion. Then they found the M-25, which was a kind of beltway. They hit it clockwise and two exits later they were on the M-11, heading north and east for Cambridge, Newmarket, and ultimately Norfolk. Nine o’clock in the evening, and getting dark.
Pauling asked, “You know this area we’re going to?”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “It was Air Force country, not army. Bomber bases all over the place. Flat, spacious, close to Europe. Ideal.”
England was a lit-up country. That was for damn sure. Every inch of the highway was bathed in bright vapor glow. And people drove fast. The limit was posted at seventy miles an hour, but it was widely ignored. High eighties, low nineties seemed to be the norm. Lane discipline was good. Nobody passed on the inside. The highway exits all followed the same coherent grammar. Clear signs, plenty of warning, long deceleration lanes. Reacher had read that highway fatalities were low in Britain. Safety, through infrastructure.
Pauling asked, “What’s Grange Farm going to be like?”
“I don’t know,” Reacher said. “Technically in Old English a grange was a large barn for grain storage. Then later it became a word for the main building in a gentleman’s arable farm. So I guess we’re going to see a big house and a bunch of smaller outbuildings. Fields all around. Maybe a hundred acres. Kind of feudal.”
“You know a lot.”
“A lot of useless information,” Reacher said. “Supposed to fire my imagination.”
“But you can’t get no satisfaction?”
“None at all. I don’t like anything about this whole situation. It feels wrong.”
“Because there are no good guys. Just bad guys and worse guys.”
“They’re all equally terrible.”
“The hard way,” Pauling said. “Sometimes things aren’t black and white.”
Reacher said, “I can’t get past the feeling that I’m making a bad mistake.”
England is a small country but East Anglia was a large empty part of it. In some ways it was like driving across the prairie states. Endless forward motion without much visible result. The little red Mini Cooper hummed along. The clock in Reacher’s head crawled around to ten in the evening. The last of the twilight disappeared. Beyond the bright ribbon of road was nothing but full darkness.
They bypassed a town called Thetford. Much later they blew through a town called Fenchurch Saint Mary. The road narrowed and the streetlights disappeared. They saw a sign that said Norwich 40 Miles. So Reacher switched maps and they started hunting the turn down to Bishops Pargeter. The road signs were clear and help
ful. But they were all written with the same size lettering and there seemed to be a maximum permitted length for a fingerpost. Which meant that the longer names were abbreviated. Reacher saw a sign to B’sh’ps P’ter flash by and they were two hundred yards past it before he figured out what it meant. So Pauling jammed to a stop in the lonely darkness and U-turned and went back. Paused a second and then turned off the main drag onto a much smaller road. It was narrow and winding and the surface was bad. Pitch dark beyond the headlight beams.
“How far?” Pauling asked.
Reacher spanned his finger and thumb on the map.
“Maybe nine miles,” he said. The motoring atlas had showed nothing but a blank white triangle between two roads that fanned out south of the city of Norwich. The Ordnance Survey sheet showed the triangle to be filled with a tracery of minor tracks and speckled here and there with small settlements. He put his finger on the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then he looked out the car window.
“This is pointless,” he said. “It’s too dark. We’re not even going to see the house, let alone who’s living in it.” He looked back at the map. It showed buildings about four miles ahead. One was labeled PH. He checked the legend in the corner of the sheet.
“Public house,” he said. “A pub. Maybe an inn. We should get a room. Go out again at first light.”
Pauling said, “Suits me, boss.”
He realized she was tired. Travel, jet lag, unfamiliar roads, driving stress. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We overdid it. I should have planned better.”
“No, this works,” she said. “We’re right on the spot for the morning. But how much farther?”
“Four miles to the pub now, and then five more to Bishops Pargeter tomorrow.”
“What time is it?”
He smiled. “Ten forty-seven.”
“So you can do it in multiple time zones.”
“There’s a clock on the dashboard. I can see it from here. I’m practically sitting in your lap.”
Eight minutes later they saw a glow in the distance that turned out to be the pub’s spotlit sign. It was swinging in a gentle night breeze on a high gallows. The Bishop’s Arms. There was a blacktopped parking lot with five cars in it and then a row of lit windows. The windows looked warm and inviting. Beyond the dark outline of the building there was absolutely nothing at all. Just endless flatness under a vast night sky.
