Thinking a lot about Uncle Freddy, about what a laugh he'd been and how much I was going to miss him and the occasional invitation to Blysecrag.  Probably next time I wanted to go I'd have to pay, and there would be a National Trust shop, and lots of those carmine-coloured ropes with brass hook-ends attached to brass stands that corral visitors into the accepted circular route in your average English stately home.  Ah, well.  It would mean more people would get a chance to see the weird old place.  For the good, in the end.  No grouching about that.

Uncle Freddy was another matter.  Another one dead.  My real mother, Mrs Telman last year (her husband — technically my adopted father, according to the legal paperwork — ten years earlier, not that I'd seen him more than once); now Freddy.

I wondered if my biological father was still alive.  Probably not.  The truth was I didn't want to know, and if I was honest with myself I'd have to admit that I'd be relieved to discover he was no longer in the land of the living.  Guilt about that.  Was this the same as actually wishing him dead?  I didn't think so.  If I'd had the choice, if somehow I could make him alive by thinking him so, I would.  But I didn't want to meet him, didn't want some bogus emotional reunion, and anyway it didn't seem fair that he might have survived when the people I'd cared about most, my mother, Mrs Telman and Uncle Freddy, were dead.

What had been his contribution to my life?  One drunken ejaculation.  Then he'd slapped my mother around, gone into prison for theft, come out to pursue his career as an alcoholic and turned up at my mum's funeral to shout names at me and Mrs Telman.  At least he'd had the decency not to contest the adoption.  Or he'd been bought off, which was more likely.  And — if he knew I'd become, by his standards, disgustingly rich — he'd never bothered me for cash.

I supposed I ought to make enquiries, find out if he was still alive or not.  One of these days.

The drive went on; the weather came and went, sending rain and sun and sleet and slush.  The high roads across the moors were wild and grey one moment, then sun-bright and fresh with purple heather the next.  I stopped at Hexham to put some four-star into the Aurelia's tank and was reminded of the calibratory nature of travelling in a covetable car: if guys in garages start to admire the car more than you, you're getting old.  Honours even, then.  I drove on into the north.

David Rennell arrived in a dark blue Mondeo.  I bought him a burger and a soda and we sat in the steamed-up Aurelia, for all the world like a married-to-others couple having a clandestine meeting towards the end of the affair.  Rain beat on the roof.

David Rennell was a tall, wiry-looking guy with short auburn hair.  Bless him, he'd brought a couple of Polaroids of the desks they'd moved out of the mysterious, no-longer-top-secret room in the middle of the Silex plant.  Not ordinary desks.  Too many shelves.  Lots of holes in the flat surfaces for cables.  He'd brought a handful of the connectors and plugs that had been lying around the place.

'That one looks like a phone jack, except not,' he said.

'Hmm.  Did you come up with anything else?' I'd asked him to have a think while he drove down here.  The usual no-matter-how-trivial stuff you see in cop shows.

'I talked to somebody who saw one of the trucks that took the stuff away.'

'Any haulier's name?'

'No, they were just plain.  They didn't have any markings, but the person I was talking to thought they looked like Pikefrith trucks, though he wasn't sure why.  Means nothing to me, I'm afraid.'

Pikefrith was a wholly owned subsidiary of ours, one of the few European companies that specialised in shifting delicate scientific instruments and sensitive computer gear.  Come to think of it, their trucks did appear slightly different from your average lorry, if you looked carefully enough or were into the subtleties of truck design.  Air suspension.  I just nodded.

'Oh, yes, and the Essex kids have all disappeared.  They all seemed glad to see the back of them up there.' (He pronounced it 'oop there', which was really rather cute.)

'Who the hell are the Essex kids?'

'It's what the Silex people called this lot that have just left.  They mostly worked in the room and they kept themselves to themselves.  Bit brash, though, so they say.  Had a big party on the Friday and then never showed up on the Monday.  All transferred.'

I felt confused. 'Were they really from Essex?'

'I think they were from down south.  Don't know about Essex.'

'And Freddy said you saw Adrian Poudenhaut there, at the factory?'

'Yes, just last week.'

I felt my eyes narrow as I looked at him. 'You're absolutely certain it was him?'

David Rennell nodded. 'Positive.  I've met him a few times; helped him get some of Mr Ferrindonald's cars started, reloaded for him when he was shooting.'

'Did he see you?'

'No.  But it was him, definitely.'

Things that make you go, Hmm.

We went our separate ways.  I drove back a different route to Blysecrag, still favouring the picturesque B-roads, even when the sun went and night descended.  I had many more miles to think stuff over.

The Lancia really was a hoot to drive.

Uncle Freddy's funeral was in three days.  I had plenty of time to visit London.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Suzrin House stands in Whitehall in London, the only non-governmental building left on that stretch of the Embankment.  It looks out over the river towards the sixties concrete brutalism of the National Theatre complex like an ancient, grizzled gunslinger regarding an upstart cowboy just arrived in town.  It is spectacularly ugly in a brooding, noxious sort of way.

Its main, dark brown rectangular tower-block slopes inward slightly and is set back from the Thames, separated from it by a huge glassed-in section several storeys tall whose roof rises from the Embankment side towards the main block.  Enormous ornamental windows stare from the very top of the main tower.  I used to wonder why the whole thing looked so familiar from a distance until I realised it was shaped like a giant old-fashioned cash register.

The place is part office, part apartment block.  It was where Adrian George worked.  I took the train from York to London the morning after Freddy died, calling AG en route and arranging lunch.

'I was sorry to hear about old Freddy Ferrindonald.'

'Yeah, it was a shame.'

'Do you have anything in particular in mind for lunchtime?'

'I thought Italian.'

'I meant agenda-wise.'

'Not particularly,' I lied.

We met in a fairly swish French place Adrian George favoured in Covent Garden.  He wasn't big on Italian food.  He wasn't big on drinking either, citing a heavy workload that afternoon.  AG was shortish but trim and dark and handsome.  I could remember him when his eyebrows met in the middle, but maybe he'd lost out on too many girls whose mothers had warned them about men with hirsute foreheads, because it looked as if now he shaved that centre line.  We conversed pleasantly enough; company gossip, mostly.  He was one of those people I got on best with through e-mail, just as Luce was somebody I found it better to talk to on the phone.

I only mentioned his reported sighting of Colin Walker, Hazleton's security chief, in London a month earlier, right at the end of our meal.  He tried not to react, laughing it off as mistaken identity.  He insisted on picking up the bill.

I said I'd go back to Suzrin House with him.  The weather was cool, windy and dry and I thought we might walk along the Strand or the Embankment, but he wanted to take a taxi.  He chattered.  I already knew all I needed to.