Chapter Ten
Sid
Sid said goodbye to Paul and watched as he walked away. The man looked broken.
He was unsure where to go. If he believed everything he’d heard, he had to consider the possibility that the cottage was under
surveillance and his and Anya’s devices were, too.
He checked his phone. Anya had sent a slightly cryptic message: You wouldn’t believe how my day is going. I’ll call later. He wrote back: Same! He was dreading telling her what he’d learned. It felt more important than ever to do it in person.
The possibility of surveillance at the cottage was a problem he didn’t know how to solve, but he knew how to operate online
without leaving a trace. He had a USB with the Tails operating system loaded on it.
He went back to the cottage, changed out of his wet clothes, and decided he didn’t feel like being there at all. Even if he
could evade any online monitoring, the idea that he might be being watched was too creepy. He grabbed his laptop and the USB.
They’d work just as well anywhere else. In Oxford he could have gone to a cybercafé, but he knew there were none in St. Andrews,
so he walked back to the computer science department, deep in his head.
The lab was opposite the Jack Cole building, housed in a low, bunker-like structure on a square plan, constructed from brown brick punctuated with tall, tinted windows, through which it was just possible to glimpse rows of desks and computers.
He used his new pass to get inside and settled down in a discreet corner.
Once he’d inserted the USB into his laptop, and booted into Tails, his fingers hovered over the keyboard. It was important
to be smart and methodical about this. He decided on the question he wanted to answer first: What was the Institute hiding?
He started by reminding himself what they were letting people see online.
From their website he noted the full names of the staff members and their specialties. He ran searches for every name, and
it was just as Anya and his neighbor had said: there wasn’t much to find.
Two scholarly articles by Karen Lynch came up, and a photograph of Diana Cornish at a society event seven years prior. He
tried searching archived pages, just as he’d done for Min, but got nothing. If these women had been scrubbed from the internet,
someone had done a better job for them than they had for Min.
He mustn’t forget Zofia. He needed to get her surname from Paul, and he should probably do that in person. For now, he made
do with searching for “Zofia missing Scotland,” but nothing came up.
Time to change tack. He returned to the Institute’s website, screenshotted headshots of the staff, then ran a reverse image
search on the picture of Sarabeth Schilders.
She appeared on a website linked to Amsterdam University, promoting a conference for academics involved in finance. It had
taken place in 2003. Sarabeth was listed as a professor of economics. The Institute’s website said her specialty was Renaissance
women. So she’d had two decades to make a career change, from finance to medieval history. It was a hell of a coincidence
that she and Min had both made such radical career moves and both ended up with the same specialty and working at the same
place.
He did the same search for Giulia Orlando.
Her photograph appeared embedded in an article about young cryptocurrency dealers.
Giulia was in the background of a picture that had been, according to its caption, shot at a party on a private Caribbean island.
She was standing behind a famous model and looked almost unrecognizable.
Her hair was ironed straight and worn long and loose.
She wore the skimpiest of dresses. Her face was flushed and painted with flowers, which framed her eyes and had tendrils that curled across her temples, circling small, sparkling jeweled dots.
She couldn’t have looked more different from the Giulia he’d met, who dressed conservatively and had given no hint that she was hosting this party animal.
He read the article, noting that it was written in 2018. The “hedonism”-themed party was an exclusive event for cryptocurrency
workers and influencers. The article dropped the names of some high-profile celebrity attendees and described a sumptuous
menu involving enormous amounts of fresh seafood and cocktails that had been specially created to match. Sid could only imagine
the industrial levels of drug-taking going on off camera. This was a universe far removed from the Institute and from the
Giulia he’d met.
He wondered why these images hadn’t been scrubbed. Had someone left them online on purpose? If not, it was a hell of an oversight.
His image search for Karen Lynch returned a lot of results, but they were more what he’d expect. Karen cropped up as long
as a decade ago at medieval history conferences and in previous academic roles, teaching in the history department at King’s
College London, and as a PhD student at Harvard. There was nothing unusual in her history, so far as he could tell.
He moved on to Diana Cornish. That search immediately threw up the photograph he’d already seen, of Diana at a society party, and he found another picture of a much younger Diana, one of a group of four in a graduation photograph.
He zoomed in. The caption told him that the group were graduating from Oxford University.
Diana was recognizable, and one of the other women looked familiar, too.
He scanned the names listed: “Alice Trevelyan (First Class Honors: Medieval Languages).” Alice Trevelyan and Diana had studied together.
It surprised him. So far as he remembered from what Anya had said, Professor Trevelyan had claimed only to know Diana professionally.
He messaged Anya: Did you know Trevelyan and Cornish were at Oxford together as undergrads?
He’d never liked Trevelyan much. She was a strange woman, a little cold. In retrospect, he wondered if she and Anya had become
worryingly close. Sid knew a lot of graduates who formed tight relationships with their supervisors, but no one whose supervisor
paid quite so much attention to them as Professor Alice Trevelyan had to Anya. Had it been kindness, or something else? It
was Trevelyan, after all, who’d strongly encouraged her to consider St. Andrews.
At every turn Sid was hoping to find something that proved his fears were unfounded, but things got more complicated, and
more concerning, as he looked deeper into them. He just wanted everything to be fine, but it was crystal clear that nothing
was, absolutely nothing at all.
Anya
I took another crowded train back to London. Time was tight. My flight was that evening, and I needed to get to the airport.
Diana still hadn’t replied to my message, and I wondered how things would be between us now. I could never trust her again,
that was for sure, but she would be getting what she wanted from me, so hopefully we could work together smoothly enough.
Still, her silence worried me. I thought about sending her another message but decided to hold off. Let her come to me.
Sid had messaged again, asking if I knew that Trevelyan and Diana had studied together. I hadn’t known, but after today, it didn’t surprise me, though it increased my sense of feeling watched and controlled. I wrote back: Makes sense. How do you know?
I got across London on the tube and arrived back at Paddington Station, eyes glazed with tiredness, my foot screaming to have
the weight taken off it. I sat on a bench and was dully watching pigeons pecking at crumbs as I waited to board the train
to the airport when Viv called.
“Anya, love, your mum’s just been readmitted to hospital. She’s got another infection, and they’re worried it’s sepsis.”
“I’m coming,” I said.
I swapped platforms and just scored a standing-room spot on a crowded commuter train heading out west. My phone lit up with
terrifying updates from Viv during the journey.
Her blood pressure plummeted she almost fainted.
She’s having IV ibuprofen and antibiotics, and her temp is down but it still isn’t as low as they’d like.
I’ve told her you’re coming but I don’t know if she’s taken it in. She’s calling for you.
Tell her I’ll be there as fast as I can, I wrote back.
Bristol Royal Infirmary was a mishmash of buildings, old and new, in the city center. The layout and signage were confusing
no matter how often you’d been there. I arrived twenty minutes before the end of visiting hours on the acute emergency ward,
jabbing at the elevator buttons, running down corridors to make it on time.
The ward, for four people, was full, curtains pulled around two of the beds, but not Mum’s.
Viv sat beside the head of the bed. There was a bloody mess around the canula on the back of Mum’s hand, and she was pretty out of it, but she squeezed my hand when I kissed her, and I wiped away the tears slipping down her hot cheek.
As I stroked her hair I whispered that she was going to be fine, that she needed to hang in there, that she could do this, that it was a piece of cake.
It seemed like I’d only been there for moments when the nurse said, “We’ll take good care of her tonight. Visiting hours start
again at ten tomorrow,” and I realized she was telling us to go.
In the multistory parking lot just up the street, Viv momentarily forgot where she’d parked the car. The composure she’d had
on the ward slipped and she looked exhausted. “She was fine,” she said. “We were still celebrating the news about the clinical
trial; she was on such a high. Then she threw up and her temperature spiked. I called her treatment team, and they said to
bring her in. By the time we got here she could barely walk.”
I knew what she needed to hear: “You did the right thing. Thank you for being there for her. I don’t know what we’d do without
you.”
We took the elevator up to a floor of the parking lot that had mostly emptied out. Mum’s car sat all alone in its spot, parked