Chapter 67
Sunny
Spoiler alert: When I woke up at eight that morning, I did not message Ludo.
Mostly because Summer pulled me into a wrinklies’ yoga class, where I was younger than the average age by at least fifty years and, embarrassingly, about ninety per cent less flexible.
Are metal hips double-jointed or something?
By the time I’d had breakfast, I just wanted to get back to my computer.
I was changing strategy and tackling the layering from the bottom up rather than the top down.
I went searching for information on Carstairs and her husband, Dirk Windhoek.
An hour or two passed, but I’d discovered nothing.
Then I remembered you could buy people’s internet histories and, on a whim, typed in the name of my old “friend” and confidant Vladimir Popov.
“Only twenty quid to see everything he’s ever googled?” I muttered to myself.
It was worth the splash of cash. A bargain. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found.
“Bloody hell. It’s the mother lode.”
I called through to the other room for Karma to come take a look at my computer. My heart was racing like a greyhound after a rabbit.
“Look at this. Popov’s internet history. It’s like a breadcrumb trail. The names of all the companies, the investors—it’s all here.”
She sat on the edge of the chair, reading glasses low on her nose, scanning the screen.
As I reread it along with her, I realised Popov had been using me as a part of this scheme.
I was nothing more than a useful stooge.
I had been to VladPop what Torsten was to Carstairs.
But where she’d used Torsten to find out information, VladPop had used me to disseminate it in the press.
I felt like a proper mug. And I wanted nothing more than to take the bastard down.
“How could he be so indiscreet?” Karma asked.
“I reckon he was looking for dirt on the others, in case it all went tits up.”
Karma smiled, her face as happy as the one on the buddha I’d been using as a paperweight.
“This is our Rosetta Stone,” she said. “You’ve found the key to the entire paper trail.”
She threw her arms around me in a rib-cracking hug, her flip-flopped feet stamping up and down in excitement.
“You clever, clever boy!”
I laughed. A full-bellied, full-throated, uncontrollable laugh. The kind of laugh they make incontinence commercials about. Karma laughed, too, and I feared I might now actually be in an incontinence commercial. She sank back into her office chair.
“We’ve got them,” she said. “We’ve got the lot of them.”
“I need to cross-reference everything, and I have a few more searches to do now to tie it all up in a neat bow. The question is, then what do we do with the information?”
“You’re the journalist, Sunny. You tell me.”