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34
It’s five o’clock on Monday afternoon and Alf has just arrived at Henry’s apartment after an after-school club. They bump fists at the front door and Alf follows Marco in.
‘Yo. What’s going on?’
‘Fam. I cannot tell you. But bottom line: Henry’s gone and he won’t tell us where and he’s blocked me and he’s blocked my mum and we need to find him. Like, really badly. Can you do anything?’ Marco spreads his arm out across the display of Henry’s tech on the dining table.
Alf unloops his schoolbag from his torso and puts it on the back of a chair which he pulls out and sits on. He looks around the apartment. ‘Where’s your mum?’
‘Out with Stella.’
He shrugs and turns his attention to the devices. ‘These all his?’
‘Yeah.’
He tries switching them on in turn. Two of them are dead and he sends Marco to get the chargers. The other two come to life and he starts tapping at their screens.
‘Want anything to eat?’ Marco pulls open the fridge and looks at all the food that was left there before Henry disappeared which has not been replenished because his mum hasn’t been to the shops and is starting to look a little sad after four days. But there’s some unopened ham and a bag of grated cheese with no green bits and some eggs and Marco makes an omelette for each of them while Alf taps at Henry’s devices.
‘I’m in,’ he says. ‘His password is 0000. Can you even believe that? I mean, that’s, like, psychopathic.’
Alf taps and swipes and Marco brings the omelettes, a packet of fancy tortilla chips and two cans of Coke to the table.
Alf has accessed Henry’s email and is scrolling through it. ‘What is it you’re looking for, exactly?’
‘I dunno. Searches for flights, I guess. Hotel bookings. That kind of thing.’
‘Hold on.’ He double clicks on something and turns the screen towards Marco. ‘Look. He was chatting to someone on Tripadvisor. Someone called Nancy.’
They join heads to read the message. It seems to be a friendly chat about the woman’s experience at the game reserve where Libby’s dad Phin was working. But as they read the message thread, Marco sees that Henry has been asking her leading questions about Phin – or Finn, as the woman spells it – and that she has told Henry that Phin may have gone back to Chicago, where he has family. Marco and Alf shoot each other a look. Marco’s heart is pounding.
‘He’s gone to Chicago, hasn’t he?’ says Marco.
Alf nods.
‘Chicago is big.’
Alf nods again, then zooms up and down Henry’s inbox, but there’s no confirmation emails from hotels or booking engines.
‘Fuck,’ says Marco. ‘Where else could we look?’
‘I dunno. I dunno.’
Marco turns his attention back to his omelette and Alf puts his hand into the tortilla bag and pulls out a handful, which he throws into his mouth and crunches loudly.
‘Um, um, um,’ says Marco. ‘Let’s think.’
‘Browsing history? We could see which hotels he’d been looking at?’
‘Yeah. But he’d have been browsing on his main laptop. Not on this iPad.’
Alf shakes his head. ‘Doesn’t matter, if he’s logged in on both devices. Which it appears he is. So, let us have a look.’
And there it is. Henry’s browsing history. Bang up-to-date. The last thing he’d googled was a company that offered motorbike tours of the Magnificent Mile and Lake Michigan. Alf clicks on the contact link, where there is a phone number for a guy called Kris Doll.
‘Shall we call him?’
Marco shakes his head. ‘No. Shit. No. Don’t.’
