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“Mark my words. You’ll see.”
“Have a good rest of your day,” said Z, leaving us at the elevator. “Keep me posted on the workplace.”
“What do you have in mind?” Cayman asked.
I told him about the cabin in Canada Lake. “We were able to accomplish a lot more on the investigation while being away from the command center.”
“Are you thinking a house, then?”
“Maybe. Not quite sure. All I know is I doubt operating out of Vauxhall Cross is going to work.”
“Our family has a place in Shere we never use. It’s about fifty kilometers outside London, not far from where we intercepted the containers, if you’re interested in taking a look.”
“This is a medium-sized port.Large enough for a small shipment to go undetected, but not as stiffly regulated as the bigger ones,” Cayman said when we arrived at Purfleet.
“Were you able to obtain records from the dockmaster?”
He hesitated. “Affirmative.”
“I take it there’s more to it.”
Cayman sighed. “The containers’ manifests are so convoluted it’s difficult to believe their accuracy.”
“I see. Is that what Puck’s working on?”
“Affirmative,” he repeated.
After exhausting every potential information source, we left the docks and traveled forty kilometers south to the industrial complex, where Cayman confirmed everything I’d learned from Nem.
“We’ve got eyes on the complex. However, I doubt they’d use this as a rendezvous spot again. If that’s what it was.”
Nor did I believe the traffickers would make use of Purfleet again.
“Whoareyou?”I asked Cayman when he pulled into a drive flanked by two stone walls.
He chuckled. “Not me, my parents. Actually, my father’s ancestors. The property goes back several generations. The farmhouse was rebuilt five hundred years ago, after the original burned to the ground. However, it’s been modernized several times since, including a couple of years ago.”
“You said no one uses it?”
“It’s the smaller of my family’s two farmland estates, which means, by default, it’s the one I’m expected to utilize.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Not a lot of nightlife out this way.”
I doubted a man who looked like Cayman would have any trouble attracting plenty of “nightlife.”
He was slightly shorter than I was, maybe six feet two, had short dark brown hair, a skin tone that I considered Mediterranean more than British Isles, and movie-star good looks. He was leaner than me too, but equally muscular.
“How big is this place?” I asked as we continued down the long, paved drive.
“The main farmhouse has seven bedrooms. There are four cottages dotting the property, all with at least two bedrooms. If you mean the property itself, somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred hectares.”
He parked in front of the “farmhouse’s” entrance, but when we got out, he walked in the opposite direction.
“Outside is what’s truly stunning.”
The grounds around us were meticulously maintained but in more of a rambling way rather than manicured, which I vastly preferred.
