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37
I have Phin in my eyeline for a full thirty seconds before he gets swallowed up by a group of young men loitering outside a music venue. By the time I get to the other side of the group, Phin is gone. I look right, I look left, I look upwards. To the right of the music venue is a pair of ornate wooden doors with brass art nouveau curlicues and a stained-glass fanlight. Through the stained glass, I just catch the shadow of a figure leaping up a staircase. I step away from the building to improve the angle of the view and see that I am looking at a grand apartment block that flows in both directions over the bars and shops below, all with leaded, bowed windows topped with swagged ribbons of sage-green Portland stone.
I see a figure pass across the stained glass of the central window on the first floor. I watch the windows in the apartmentson that floor until one lights up. I see the suggestion of movement, but I do not see a figure. Across the street is a bar with a decked terrace. I sit here and I order a glass of champagne and I stare and I stare but I see nothing and who even knows what I’m looking at. But my gut tells me that it is Phin up there. That he is unpacking his organic groceries, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of organic wine, making small talk with some shadowy imagining of a person who may be a friend or an Airbnb host, chopping up vegetables, cubing tofu. (I assume that Phin is vegetarian as he loves animals. And of course we were all forcibly vegetarian in our house of horrors; to this day I have a phobia of dhal.)
The champagne arrives and I smile at the waitress and thank her.
‘How’s your day been?’ she asks as she places the glass in front of me.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘it’s been … nice.’
‘Great,’ she says. ‘Are you just visiting?’
‘Yes, I am. I’m trying to track down an old friend.’
‘Wow.’ Her eyes grow wide. ‘Any luck?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Well, keep looking. I’m sure they’ll be so excited to be found!’
‘Yes,’ I say, my eye still firmly on the first-floor apartment across the street. ‘I’m sure they will.’
Then my phone vibrates, and I see a call coming through and I smile at the nice waitress apologetically and pick it up. It’s Kris Doll.
‘Hey,’ he starts. ‘Joshua!’
‘Yes. Hey. Speaking.’
‘Joshua. I have your watch and I’m heading into town first thing tomorrow. I can drop it at your hotel if you’re still there.’
‘Oh, that’s great. Thanks, Kris. I’m very grateful! What sort of time do you think it would be?’
‘Oh, like eight o’clock, I guess?’
‘Eight o’clock. Great. I’ll see you then.’
‘You don’t need to get up. I’ll just drop it behind the desk.’
‘I’m an early riser, Kris, I’ll be up. See you tomorrow!’
I can hear the timbre of his voice change slightly. ‘And oh! Joshua! I meant to say to you, but it completely slipped my mind. I had a strange phone call before I took you out yesterday. From someone called Mike? A British accent. Do you know a Mike?’
‘Oh, probably, doesn’t everyone?’
‘Yeah. That’s what I thought. It sounded kind of fake. But they said they were looking for a guy called Henry Lamb? Does that ring a bell?’
My grip on the stem of my champagne glass tightens. I leave a beat and a half, barely a nanosecond, but still a potential giveaway. Then I say, too fast, with too much emphasis, ‘No. No it doesn’t.’
‘Yeah. I thought it was probably nothing to do with you, it was just that they said something about a Finn? Right before he said his name was Mike. He said it was Finn, and then he corrected himself and I didn’t think much of it at the time but then we were talking about my British friend Finn earlier and it just seemed …weird. You know. Kind of strange. I mean, first off, I haven’t heard anything from Finn for, like, months and months, then within likeforty-eight hours I hear he’s back in town, then I get that phone call from the guy in the UK and then he comes up in conversation with you and it was, I dunno,weird.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That is very weird. What did he want? This Mike guy?’
‘Oh, he said he wanted to tell this “Henry Lamb” that his father was dying and that they couldn’t get a hold of him and that they’d found a search for my bike tour on this guy’s search history and wondered if he’d ever called me.’
My search history.
I blanch. My search history. I have not logged out of Google. That means that anyone with access to any of my other devices would be able to see what I’ve been googling. Including, possibly, although I cannot entirely recall, the hotel I’m staying in.
