Chapter 101
Bradshaw returned to her office. She pulled out her ergonomic chair and switched on her computers.
She bit her lip. She needed all the Wi-Fi’s bandwidth.
But that meant disabling every other computer, every smartphone, every tablet in the building.
Poe had told her she shouldn’t do that. That other people were allowed to use the internet as well.
She decided it didn’t count this time, though. Poe and Estelle needed her help. Esmerée needed her help. She logged on to a program of her own making and cut off everyone else’s access to the Wi-Fi.
The ghost-hunting idiot next door immediately shouted, ‘Not this bullshit again.’
She heard him open his office door and stomp across to theirs.
She heard him remonstrate with either Poe or Towler.
She then heard the ghost hunter say, ‘Oof’, so she guessed it was Towler.
He tended to hit first and not even ask questions after.
She liked Towler. His daughter, Abi, was very polite, and he had a springer spaniel just like Edgar.
It was also about time Poe had a male friend.
It was good for him. Estelle thought so too.
It had been on the agenda at their bi-monthly Poe meeting.
Poe didn’t know about these meetings, but that was OK; Poe didn’t know about most things.
Estelle said it was the trick to keeping him happy.
On the computer to her right she opened a tasking document. A way to list and prioritise the things she knew. On the computer to her left, she opened ten research windows. Her eyes flitted between the two screens like a nervous bird. Without looking down, she began to type.
Hearsay: Océane Blue wanted to start a beekeeping business with the money she thought she was getting from the Red Chamber contract.
Hearsay: she wanted a farm on the South Downs.
Not yet proven: she murdered Vincent du Buk and fled the United States of America.
Fact: between Esmerée last seeing her mother, and Chance Ryzcek starring in a yucky pornographic film with her, Océane Blue had another tattoo. Almost certainly honey-related.
Conjecture: Océane Blue still wanted a beekeeping business.
Conjecture: Océane Blue HAS a beekeeping business but without her Red Chamber start-up capital she is forced to supplement her income until it becomes profitable.
Conjecture: due to her unique training, she feels her main sellable skills are sexual. She therefore chooses to supplement her income by making pornographic films.
Conjecture: she wore a mask in the pornographic movie with Mr Ryzcek so is aware both the Red Chamber and the police are searching for her.
Conclusion: Océane Blue has a beekeeping or honey-related business in or around the South Downs.
Bradshaw blew an errant wisp of hair from her eyes and got down to work.
She thought Océane Blue’s business would be classified by HMRC as a micro-entity; a business with an annual turnover of ￡632,000 or less.
Ninety-five per cent of businesses were classified as micro-entities.
There were more than five million registered with Companies House.
Ordinarily she would have backdoored her way into their system and used their search engine.
She had no way of narrowing that search down, though.
Océane Blue wouldn’t be using her old name or her Red Chamber name, and micro-entities could be vague when it came to the stated purpose of the business.
This was so they weren’t constrained. The government didn’t want to stifle innovation.
They wanted micro-entities to grow into small businesses and they wanted small businesses to grow into medium, then large.
She thought she could probably find Océane Blue if they had time, but time was the one thing they didn’t have.
She mentally corrected herself. Time wasn’t the only thing they didn’t have. They didn’t have Esmerée either.
She decided she needed to learn the honey business.
She would also learn about micro-entities.
See what was in the Venn diagram’s overlapping circles.
She logged into Oxford University’s dissertation library and found one that seemed to cover both.
It was written by someone called G. Kelly.
She read the summary and decided Kelly was an idiot of the first order.
She quickly found another. This one was written by an entrepreneur called Miroslav Orsag, and although it was about traybakes – Poe ate far too many traybakes, she thought – it seemed to cover what she needed.
The average reading speed for adults was 250 words per minute.
This rose to 400 when the person was reading fast. And most speed-readers could hit 700 words per minute without losing comprehension.
Expert speed-readers could reach 1,000. Bradshaw thought expert speed-readers were almost as slow as a frigid atom cloud – atoms cooled down to one tenth of one millionth of a degree above absolute zero – and a frigid atom cloud was the slowest thing on earth.
The last time she’d bothered to time her reading speed, she’d clocked it at over 3,000 words per minute.
Poe had said that wasn’t possible and she must have skimmed the important points and ignored everything else.
When she repeated a nine-hundred-word passage verbatim, he’d dropped his corned-beef sandwich, much to Edgar’s delight.
She read the 15,000-word dissertation in five minutes.
When she got to the end, she understood one thing: promoting a micro-entity wasn’t about the product; it was about the person.
Everyone thought their product was the best in the world and they couldn’t all be correct.
The trick was making a connection with customers.
This put Océane Blue at a distinct disadvantage.
Her honey could be the best in the world, but if she couldn’t get out to promote it, no one would ever know.
And she couldn’t get out to promote it because a bunch of nasty-pasty triads wanted to kill her.
Unless you had manuka honey – Bradshaw took time to smile when she thought about Esmerée calling it verruca honey – selling honey online wasn’t viable.
The cost of postage made it prohibitive and the kind of people who bought organic honey were the kind of people who liked to meet the producer.
That meant Océane would have to sell her honey in-person, at farmers’ markets and craft fairs and village fetes and agricultural shows.
The occasional artisan deli. And she couldn’t be in any of the promotional photographs.
Her honey could. So could her logo and website. But she couldn’t.
Which Bradshaw thought probably made her unique. The owner of a micro-entity who couldn’t show her face. And unique was good.
Unique was searchable.
She closed the dissertation and opened a program she had been working on.
It was still in its beta phase, but that didn’t bother her – she knew it worked.
It was a search engine she’d designed specifically to find things that wished to stay hidden.
It had access – not all of it legal, but that didn’t matter; Esmerée was missing – to all the major and most of the minor social media platforms and, if she wished, all government websites including Parliament and the Ministry of Defence.
She had told Alastor Locke all about her new search engine – which she’d called Peeper Potts (a very clever play on the Marvel character Pepper Potts) – after which he’d gone pale and said he needed to lie down.
She’d asked Poe why that might be, and he’d laughed so hard Estelle had come rushing in with her doctor’s bag.
She typed in keywords to search for and keywords to exclude. She reviewed what she had, then applied it to what she thought she knew about Océane’s specific circumstances.
The South Downs was an expensive place to buy property, so she refined her parameters to include the surrounding areas.
She didn’t exclude towns and cities, as according to one article, apiarists were getting interesting results with urban bees.
Something to do with the wider variety of garden plants available.
When she was finished, she leaned back and read what she had.
INCLUDE//:HONEY/ORGANIC/BEES/SOUTH-DOWNS/HAMPSHIRE/EAST-SUSSEX/WEST-SUSSEX/ALL-TOWNS/HONEY-LOGO/37FHW8*HEG2FJQN7
EXCLUDE//:WEBSITE-WITH-OWNERS-FACE-MARKETING/SHCI2E^*HF2L
She added lines of code to both the include and exclude boxes.
Made sure Peeper Potts would differentiate between a business owner’s photograph and one taken from stock images.
She had assumed that would be how Océane put the much-needed human touch to her website. She would use someone else’s face.
She reviewed and refined her search parameters one last time, then hit the enter button.
Sent her command out into the world. An egg timer appeared on the screen.
It said her search would be back in thirty-nine seconds.
Enough time to turn on the printer and make sure Poe hadn’t used all the paper printing off his emails.
She loved him like mad, but boy was he a dinosaur when it came to reading things.
She’d bought him a Kindle for Christmas last year and the next day she’d caught him using it as a bookmark.
But the printer was full. The ink cartridges had plenty of ink.
Her computer pinged.
Her search result was in.
Bradshaw read it and smiled.
She went back to Poe’s office and told them what she’d found. Poe looked at his watch, then he looked at Estelle. He said, ‘Eight minutes, Tilly; you’re slacking.’