Chapter 17
Shortly before ten o’clock, a new email pinged into the inbox of Craig’s laptop.
Knowing it would be another of the WI ladies, thanking him for his enjoyable and informative talk and hoping he wouldn’t mind if they asked him just one last question about fire safety in the home, he ignored it.
He’d respond to them all tomorrow, politely but briefly.
One more time, he typed the name Logan Quick into the search engine and the same menu sprang up: Logan Quick, CEO of Quick Holdings followed by Logan Quick net worth, then Logan Quick children, Logan Quick wife, Logan Quick Island.
Craig clicked on the top item. He already knew he’d find very little, especially compared to better-known British businessmen like James Dyson, Richard Branson or Jim Ratcliffe.
Not that Logan Quick’s net worth could stand up to any of theirs.
As expected, it was the same as the last time he’d looked, but all sorts of people could access these pages and they were updated frequently, if not always accurately.
The Wikipedia page, too, remained the same: some information about Quick’s various companies, of which he was chairman, not CEO; a bit of personal stuff; still no photographs.
Logan Quick, it seemed, had made a point of staying out of the public eye.
His CEO, a man called Clayton, had been the public face of the businesses for a long time now.
Quick himself had no X account, no blog, no social media presence at all. He was something of a ghost.
Craig closed the site down. There was nothing here he didn’t already know. And nothing to explain why a man he’d never met was leaving him a fortune.
In his pocket was the coin that had arrived with the letter. It was warm from being close to his body for most of the day and felt smooth and comforting beneath his fingers. Google Translate had helped with the Latin motto.
Cuique meritum. To each his deserts.
Craig was startled from his daydream by the sound of metal clanging onto concrete in the adjoining garage.
Annoyed, he got up. He was sure he’d closed and locked the heavy swing door behind him when he’d arrived back, but it wasn’t unheard of for one of the neighbourhood cats to find its way inside in the seconds it took him to get his car in and out.
Even a bird could cause a small measure of havoc.
He unlocked the door between the house and garage and found the light switch.
Nothing happened; the bulb had blown again.
Using the torch on his phone, Craig turned to the garage door.
Shut tight, as he’d thought. Uneasy now, he shone the thin light around.
A half-empty paint can lay on its side, cream-coloured emulsion leaking from it.
He bent to pick it up, listening for the tell-tale scrabbling that would direct him to the animal intruder.
Cat, he hoped; they were easier to deal with than birds.
Except, when had a cat ever been so clumsy as to knock over a paint can?
‘Puss puss,’ he said. Before he had a chance to feel stupid, he noticed the lid was open on his chest freezer.
‘Anyone here?’ OK now he did feel daft. There were no hiding places in the garage, other than the other side of his car and the freezer itself.
He made himself walk all the way around the vehicle, even hunkered down to check beneath it, before gingerly approaching the freezer.
Still at a distance, he stood on tiptoe to peer over the rim.
As he took a step closer to check all the way in, he realised that he should have looked inside his car.
He never locked it when it was parked in the garage.
And the windows were tinted. The vehicle’s interior would make the perfect hiding place.
His heartbeat, already painful against his chest wall, seemed to accelerate.
Freezer or car? Which to check first? He made a decision.
The freezer was empty. Breathing a sigh of relief, Craig reached up to close it.