“Shit,” Lewis growled. “They went up a side street.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
The police officer nodded. “He was following us.”
Morgan pulled back onto the road. “At least we shook him.”
He called in to Private London’s headquarters. “What’s the ETA on our security team?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Morgan,” the operative in the personnel department replied, “but all our agents are in the field.”
“What about freelance contractors?” Morgan asked, confused. There were dozens of personal security companies that could be hired in these situations.
“I’m afraid none of them are bidding on the contract,” the operative explained. “It’s really quite unusual, Mr. Morgan. I’ve never come across this before. I have no idea why no one is taking the job.”
But Morgan had.
The reason’s name was Michael Gibbon.
Chapter 21
MORGAN HUNG UP the call. He looked into the mirror, and Jane Cook’s eyes meet his.
“It’s Flex, isn’t it?”
Morgan nodded. Michael “Flex” Gibbon was a former SAS soldier who owned and operated one of the biggest private security companies in the country.
He had also taken an embarrassing beating two years earlier at the hands of Morgan and Cook as they’d searched for Abbie Winchester. Flex had broken no laws when he’d facilitated the hiring of the men that carried out the kidnapping, but he had broken Morgan’s code. For that, he had suffered a ruptured knee, and now Morgan could see that Flex was enacting his revenge.
“He’s blacklisted us with the other companies.”
“Can he do that?” Cook asked.
“Enough of the bigger companies are run by former SAS that he only needs to bring a few onside. The others will fall in line because they don’t want to piss off the big boys.”
“We can do this without their help,” Cook assured him.
“We can,” Morgan agreed, no trace of doubt in his voice as he pushed the subject from his mind and addressed Lewis. “You have anything more to tell me about Sophie?”
Lewis did not.
“So tell me about the Princess. Tell me who would want to hurt her.”
“The Princess?”
“Right now, we have no reason to suggest why someone would want to hurt Sophie. My guess is that there are plenty of people who want to hurt the Princess.”
Lewis nodded. There was a pistol in her shoulder holster for a reason. “Terrorists are the biggest and most obvious threat. They’d love to take out a politician or a royal.”
“But they’ve stopped going after hard targets,” Cook put in.
“That’s true,” Lewis agreed. “Recent terrorist attacks have been more focused on soft targets—driving into crowds of defenseless civilians and so on. They know their chance of success is small if they come after high-profile targets. We’re bloody good at what we do.”
“The best,” Cook acknowledged, deeply proud of her country’s security services.
“Then who else?” Morgan asked.
“There are anti-royalists, but they don’t tend to be violent,” Lewis explained. “Of course, there are always lone wolves. Weird little bastards who just get obsessed with the Princess, try to sneak into places to see her, or steal her laundry.”
“You’ve seen that?” Cook asked.
“I’ve seen bloody everything. There are some very strange people on this planet.”
“It’s the dangerous ones I’m concerned about,” Morgan told her.
“As you well know, there are plenty of those too. So where do we start?”
Morgan had no concrete idea. He only knew that, in a missing-persons case, time was everything.
And theirs was running out.
Chapter 22
PETER KNIGHT RUBBED at his eyes. It had been a long night, and the stress of having to deliver bad news to a family member always sapped his energy levels. Now he was in Hooligan’s lab, and hours of staring at bright computer screens was threatening to turn his eyes the color of tomatoes.
“I don’t know how you can look at these all day,” he said to the man beside him.
On the screens in front of them were long lists of numbers, files, and all kinds of digital code that Knight could only guess at. He was an intelligent man, but Hooligan’s explanations went over his head.
The men—mostly Hooligan, Knight admitted to himself—were looking into the digital records of Sir Tony Lightwood. As next of kin, Eliza had granted them permission, and now they were searching the man’s digital footprints for anything that could be useful—contacts, payments, patterns. In the modern world, it is impossible to live a life without leaving a trail of digital data behind, and Hooligan followed the path like a bloodhound. It was down to him to find the patterns in the data, and it was what he was most brilliant at.
“Here’s another one.” Hooligan pointed at the screen.
Knight leaned forward. He was looking at a receipt. It was the sixth one they’d found for the same boutique hotel—the Mistral in Kensington.
“Four hundred quid a night?” Hooligan snorted at the price. “Do they pay someone to sleep for you?”
“It’s another Wednesday,” Knight noted. “They’ve all been Wednesdays.” Then something in what Hooligan had said triggered a thought in his mind. “Do you think you can access their CCTV footage from those nights?”
“You mean steal it?” Hooligan exclaimed in mock horror. “Yeah, no problem. You’re the boss. I was just following orders, your honor, that was all…”
It took Hooligan less than twenty minutes to find what he was looking for. “Didn’t even have to do anything illegal.” He shrugged. “The Mistral needs to fire whoever runs their security. OK, here it is.”
CCTV footage came up onto one of Hooligan’s screens. Using the check-in time shown on the receipts, they were able to quickly find Sir Tony’s arrival. For Knight it was a bizarre, eerie feeling to see the now-dead man run up the steps, all smiles as he shook the hand of the hotel’s porter. That he could go from this bag of joy to dead by his own hand within weeks…
“I’ll take close-ups and screenshots of everyone who enters,” Hooligan told him, freezing the frame on a pair of wealthy-looking men. “Who are you expecting?” the East Ender asked, stopping the film to screenshot the next person.
Knight opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out.
Because on the screen was the face of Sophie Edwards.
Chapter 23
THE RANGE ROVER moved at speed along the winding Welsh roads.
“You know we have speed limits here?”
Jack Morgan ignored Sharon Lewis’s comment.
Peter Knight’s caller ID appeared on the car’s system.
“Peter. What’s the ETA on the chopper?” Morgan asked.
“Thirty minutes, Jack, but I’m not calling about that. Am I on speaker?”
“You are.”
“Then you may want to take me off.”
Morgan looked for a quiet stretch of road to pull over. Leaving the engine running, he told Cook to get behind the wheel. “If you see that black BMW, hit the horn.” He left the back door wide open so he could jump inside if they needed to make a quick escape.
He walked away from the car and held his phone to his ear. “What is it, Peter?”
When Knight told him about who had followed Sir Tony into the plush London hotel, Morgan thought that he’d misheard.
“Sophie Edwards,” Knight confirmed. “We went over the footage for every night Sir Tony stayed there. Sophie arrives after him within thirty minutes, every time. We even checked the nights that Sir Tony wasn’t a guest. There’s no sign of her unless he’s there.”
Morgan thought over the inevitable conclusion. “It has to be her. She’s our blackmailer.”
“I agree,” Knight told him. “There are seven instances. It isn’t a coincidence.”
“And she’s been missing longer than Sir Tony’s been dead. He killed her then couldn’t live with the guilt.”
“Ties up nicely, doesn’t it?” Knight agreed.
Morgan looked out over the rolling hills and mountains. The highest of them was now in cloud. The rain was coming. A British summer could never be perfect.