Reeve remembered something she’d said, about journalists only having sources and competitors. “He wouldn’t have left any of his notes here anyway,” he stated. “Not with another reporter on the premises.”

“Where else would he have left them?”

“Could be anywhere. A girlfriend’s, a drinking mate’s…”

“With his ex-wife?”

Reeve shook his head. “She disappeared a while back, probably left the country. Jim had that effect on women.” He’d tried contacting her, to tell her the news. Not that she’d have been interested; not that he’d tried very hard.

Reeve remembered something. “We’re also looking for the name Agrippa.”

“Agrippa? That’s classical, isn’t it?” Fliss slid a CD into the computer’s CD-ROM slot. “Encyclopedia,” she explained. She went to Word Search and entered “Agrippa.” The computer came up with ten articles, the word appearing a total of twenty times. They scanned all ten articles, but remained none the wiser about what Agrippa had meant to Jim. Fliss tried a few reference books, but the only additional Agrippa she found was in the Oxford Companion to English Literature.

“Dead end,” she said, slamming shut the last book.

“What about mail?” Reeve asked. “Has he had any letters while he’s been away?”

“Plenty. He told me he’d phone and give me an address I could redirect them to, but he never did. Last I spoke to him was when he handed me the front-door keys.”

“So where’s the mail?”

It was in the cupboard above the sink in the kitchen. There was a teetering tower of it. Fliss carried it to the kitchen table while Reeve cleared a space, moving cups, sugar bowl, and milk bottle. He couldn’t hear the pneumatic drill anymore. He looked at his watch, surprised to find it was nearly five o’clock-the best part of the day had gone, used up on a hunt which had so far failed to turn up anything the least bit useful.

The mail looked similarly uninspired. Much of it was junk. “I could have just binned it,” Fliss said. “But when I come home after a trip, I like there to be a big pile of letters waiting for me. Makes me feel wanted.”

“Jim was wanted all right,” Reeve said. “Wanted by double-glazing firms, clothes catalogs, the football pools, and just about every fund management scheme going.”

There was a postcard from Wales. Reeve deciphered the spidery handwriting, then handed it to Fliss. “Who’s Charlotte?”

“I think he brought her to the pub once.”

“What about his girlfriends? Anyone come to the flat looking for him? Anyone phone?”

She shook her head. “Just Charlotte. She called one night. Seems he hadn’t said he was going to the States. I think they were supposed to be going to Wales together.”

Reeve considered this. “So either he was an unfeeling bastard who was giving her the big hint she was being ditched…”

“Or?”

“Or something suddenly came up in the States. When did he tell you you could move in?”

“The night before he flew out.”

“So he crammed all his stuff into the cupboard in the hall and the suitcases under the bed and off he went.” Reeve gnawed his bottom lip. “Maybe he knew they were going to move the scientist.”

“Scientist?”

“Dr. Killin-he worked at CWC. Jim went to see him once. Next time he tried, Killin had gone on vacation and the house was under surveillance.”

“I got the feeling he’d only had a few days’ notice that he was making the trip. He complained at the price of the airfare. It wasn’t APEX. What’s the matter?”

Reeve was studying an envelope. He turned it over in his hands. “This is Jim’s handwriting.”

“What?” She gazed at the envelope.

“It’s his handwriting. Postmarked London, the day before he flew to the States.” He held the envelope up to the light, shook it, pressed its contents between thumb and forefinger. “Not just paper,” he said. He peeled apart the two glued flaps. He would never use ready-seal envelopes himself; they were too easy to tamper with. He pulled out a sheet of A4 paper, double-folded. A small key fell out of the paper onto the table. While Fliss picked up the key, Reeve unfolded the paper. The writing was a drunken scrawl.

“Pete’s new address-5 Harrington Lane.”

He showed it to Fliss. “What do you reckon?”

She fetched her street guide. There was only one Harring-ton Lane in London-just off the upper Holloway Road, near Archway.

“It’s not that far,” said Fliss. Her car was being fixed at a garage in Crouch End, so they called for a cab.

“Yeah,” said Pete Cavendish, “like Jim said, you can’t be too careful. And I had the garage gutted out, sold my car and my motorbike. I’ve gone ecology, see. I use a bicycle now. I reckon everybody should.” He was in his late twenties, a photographer. Jim Reeve had put work his way in the past, so Pete had been happy to oblige when Jim asked a favor.

Reeve hadn’t considered his brother’s car. He’d imagined it would be sitting in some long-term car lot out near Heathrow-and as far as he was concerned they could keep it.

Cavendish put him right. “Those places cost a fortune. No, he reckoned this was a better bet.”

They were walking from 5 Harrington Lane, a terraced house, to the garage Pete Cavendish owned. They’d come out through his back door, crossed what might have been the garden, been shown through a gate at the back which Cavendish then repadlocked shut, and were in an alley backing onto two rows of houses whose backyards faced each other. The lane had become a dumping ground for everything from potato chip bags to mattresses and sofas. One sofa had been set alight and was charred to a crisp, showing springs and clumps of wadding. It was nearly dark, but the alley was blessed with a single working streetlight. Cavendish had brought a flashlight with him.

“I think the reason he did that,” Cavendish said, meaning Jim’s letter to himself, “was he was drunk, and he hadn’t been to my new place before. He probably reckoned he’d forget the bloody address and never find me again, or his old car. See, Jim had a kind of dinosaur brain-there was a little bit of it working even when he’d had a drink. It was his ancient consciousness.”

Pete Cavendish spoke with a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He had a ponytail and gray wizened cheeks. The holes in his jeans weren’t there by design, and the heel was loose on one of his sneakers. Reeve had noticed some cans of Super Lager on the kitchen counter. He’d seen Cavendish swig from one before they set off. Ecology and dinosaurs. If Cavendish kept drinking, he’d be seeing green dinosaurs in his dreams.

They passed seven garages before coming to a stop. Caven-dish kicked away some empty cans and a bag of bottles from the front of his own private garage, then took the key from Reeve that Jim had mailed to his own home. He turned it in the lock, pulled the handle, and the garage door groaned open. It stuck halfway up, but halfway was enough. The streetlight barely penetrated the interior gloom.

Cavendish switched on the flashlight. “Doesn’t look as though any of the kids have been in here,” he said, checking the floor and walls. Reeve didn’t ask what he’d thought he might find-glue, spray paint, used vials of crack?

There was only the car.

It was a battered Saab 900 of indeterminate color-charcoal came closest-with a chip out of the windshield, the fixings for side mirrors but no actual mirrors, and one door (replaced after a collision) a different color from the rest of the body. Reeve had never let his brother drive him anywhere in the Saab, and had never seen Jim drive it. It used to sit outside the flat with a tarpaulin over it.

“He spent a grand getting it done up,” Cavendish said.

“Money well spent,” Reeve muttered.

“Not on the outside, on the inside: new engine, transmission, clutch. He could’ve bought another car cheaper, but he loved this old tank.” Cavendish patted it fondly.