I HAD HAD ONE FINAL CONVERSATION WITH MY BROTHER, Milo, in the weeks after the incident at Sussex.
He’d come to Switzerland, to Lucerne, where I was living with our mother. She had let him in. She made a small fuss over him—brushing invisible lint off his shoulders, adjusting his collar—and then, those gestures completed to her satisfaction, returned to her desk to complete her onboarding materials for her new employer. She’d found a lab in Switzerland to take her on. A place to disappear into, to forget.
She and I were more alike than most people noticed, initially.
I was left with Milo. I could hardly bear to look at him.
“Get out,” I said to him, and locked myself in my room, where there was, at least, an opaque door between me and the man who had shot August dead.
“Lottie,” he said through the keyhole. “Lottie, you know it isn’t safe, for either you or for Mum. You know you can’t be here. I can take you to Berlin, where you’ll be safe. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Stop talking to me like I’m a cocker spaniel,” I told him. I was a bit out of breath, as I was moving an end table in front of the door. “You’re disgusting.”
“Be reasonable. You know he’ll be coming for you.”
“Let him,” I said, and meant it.
“He can’t travel,” Milo insisted. “Not without my knowing. My hands are tied as to any direct action, but he can’t travel anywhere as himself without my knowing. I have fail-safes in place. Ones that can’t tracked back to me. I’ll make sure he’s taken out. Lucien knows this, of course—”
I had been hauling my bedframe over to the door to reinforce my barricade. I stopped. “Your hands are tied because you’re confessing?” I said. “You’ll be turning yourself in to the police?”
“Lottie,” he said, and his voice was loving, paternal. It was the way our father spoke before he’d hit me. “Don’t be silly. Someone needs to keep an eye on things. We need to talk contingencies. I can’t do anything if Lucien isn’t traveling as himself, the police are watching any new moves I make—”
I jerked at the bedpost again, and this time I put my back into it. With a bang, it slammed the end table into the door. The legs splintered. The door buckled. It wasn’t satisfying at all.
“You’re a murderer,” I said, panting.
To his credit, Milo hadn’t backed away from the door. I could see his eye through the keyhole. “You know full well you’re the one who’s responsible for his death.”
It was true. It was also true that he had pulled the trigger. “Get out of this house,” I said, “you murderous piece of shit.”
The eye blinked. Then it retreated. “It’s your funeral,” he said, and I didn’t see any more of him after that.
WHEN I FINALLY EMERGED FROM BEHIND THOSE RUBBISH bins, I was furious with myself.
I hadn’t done any of the work I’d intended to do, and now the only option I had left was attempting to pick a lock in an apartment stairwell to find documentation that I really didn’t need.
Ultimately, what I wanted—what I needed, I would allow myself that urgency—was a comprehensive list of Lucien Moriarty’s access points in and out of this country. Perhaps I was up my own ass, to steal an expression from Watson, but I had a working hypothesis. I was finished assuming that my suppositions were correct; this time, I intended to test them. Thoroughly.
I knew what would happen if I didn’t. Had my feelings for August been responsible for the actions I took to ruin his life? Yes. Had the steps I took to find my uncle resulted directly in August’s death? Yes. Yes, a thousand times, yes.
The only question, then, was how I could devise myself a punishment while bringing Lucien down in the bargain.
In the months after August’s death, I painted a very deliberate target on my back. I opened social media accounts and tagged my posts with my location. I walked along the river in Lucerne every day for hours, slowly, in bright colors, talking loudly on my mobile. (I told my mother these walks were “constitutionals,” meant to bring me back to full health. Her response was a shrug and a reminder to bring my mace.) I photographed myself walking along the river, and posted it to said public social media accounts.
Lucien hadn’t even feinted in my direction. The last I heard, that bastard was in America. In New York.
I took several months to craft myself a snare, and then I came here myself.
But Watson? I never wanted Watson to be here. And it looked as though he might be again, if he was in fact following my uncle and James Watson on this frankly idiotic search for Lucien Moriarty. Why on earth did they want to find him?
This was my mess, and I would be the one to clean it up.
I waited until I was on the subway to write down the details I’d heard in the stairwell. It was enough to confirm, at least, that Peter Morgan-Vilk was an identity I should keep in mind when I took my next step. I would confirm at least one more, then move on.
We passed through a station with Wi-Fi. My phone buzzed. Tell me you’re there.
There in ten, I texted back, and then I was.
Six bloody flights of stairs again. New York was taxing, though not in any interesting way. The key is in the frog, the text read, as if I wouldn’t immediately know to fish it from the small ceramic animal next to the doormat.
My choice in lodgings this trip was giving me some pause. In the past year, I had undertaken most major travel (trains, planes, et cetera) in the guise of a girl named Rose from Brighton who was traveling on her gap year, filming videos for the YouTube channel she hoped to launch upon her return. Her accent was similar enough to mine to be unchallenging, her interest in film allowed me to carry around recording equipment, and her attention to fashion was easy enough to affect, as far as these things went. I’d built her persona around the nicest wig I owned, an ashy-blond one I’d had made in London. Rose wore a lot of black, as I did, in tailored styles, as I did—but with her hair and cat-eye sunglasses, her clothes took on a purpose. Even though she made me look like a fashion vlogger, I appreciated her.
I thought of her this way, like a person I kept propped up in the corner until I climbed inside. She’d taken short-term sublets in London for the duration of last fall, but this winter in America had proved more expensive. Rose’s finances were limited. My finances were limited, and it was unclear as to when I could replenish them without exposing myself to more attention than necessary in the process.
This is why when DI Green offered me the use of her sister’s apartment while she, the sister, was on holiday, I accepted, though with some hesitation.
You do know you’re funding vigilante work, I told her via text.
She was saved in my phone as “Steve.” I brought you in on a case when you were ten. I don’t think this is the craziest decision I’ve ever made.
The apartment was unremarkable. Before I dropped either character or bags, I swept the room for surveillance. An hour later I had my laptop set up at the kitchen counter, and though I’d had the Wi-Fi base station removed, I still checked to make sure I hadn’t connected to any network. I’d even filled in the Ethernet port myself with glue so that no one could force a connection. This computer had to stay off-grid; here I kept my files, organized in the method my father had taught me.
They held the facts of my investigation thus far.
Lucien Moriarty was entering America often, “on business,” and not under his real name. He flew directly in, oftentimes from London, and once he reached the States he disappeared. He was in effect a ghost, one whose movements I could only really track when he was belted into a plane over the Atlantic.
I had determined this by staking out the most likely airport for three weeks straight. I hadn’t even had to buy a ticket. Heathrow Terminal 5 is rather large, but when you’ve determined that someone is flying out and back every week and then made a color-coded list of direct flights to four major American cities on the Eastern Seaboard, you can be assured of some measure of success. Especially if you set your mind to nothing else.
Besides, no one looks too closely at the girl holding the WELCOME HOME DADDY sign in Arrivals, amongst a half-dozen other girls doing the same.
I had never been interested in where Lucien Moriarty was going to. I wasn’t even interested in where he was coming from. That would come later. I wanted to know on which days he chose to return, and why.
From there things grew very technical, and I spent some time lurking in customs officials’ neighborhood Starbucks, taking temp jobs at their offices, interviewing them for my “high school newspaper.” I learned who he had bribed in England, and from there I made a plan to learn who he was bribing in America.
Why on earth wasn’t he traveling under his own name?
Why he was in America was never a question, not to me. Lucien Moriarty was a British political consultant. He was a fixer, a man who made scandals disappear. And yet for the last year, his client list had grown unwieldy and unpredictable. A Manhattan prep school. A large posh hospital in D.C.
And perhaps most disturbingly, a wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut.
He handled their public crises. He helped them build a brand. He kept a base in England, and he flew back and forth weekly, and still he made no move on me, none at all. But Lucien Moriarty had an idée fixe, and I wished it was something as simple as conceit to know that it was me.
Enough. My navel wasn’t growing any more interesting for all my gazing. Besides, the more I allowed myself abstract thought about this case, the more I found myself wandering to thoughts of what life could be like after. Seafood, perhaps, in a nice restaurant, in my own clothes, with my own face on. Uninterrupted sleep, and making a real go at getting myself off of cigarettes. And after . . . I had a storefront in mind, something in Cheapside, and I had hopes it would still be available once I had finished with the prison sentence I would likely serve when all this was over.
In the meantime, I had a plan.
- Contact Scotland Yard, provide report.
- Contact source at Sherringford, receive report.
- Purchase new bulletproof vest. One with moisture wicking, this time. (I was tired of emerging from Kevlar a sweaty mess.)
- In bulletproof vest, shake loose information from a certain shop in Greenpoint.
- Begin running down remaining specs on Michael Hartwell identity.
- Confirm interview with Starway Airlines.
- Arrange CPR certification for candy-striping credential.
- Text DI Green a photograph of my untaken pills.
- Go ten minutes without thinking about Jamie Watson unwinding his girlfriend’s scarf.
- Five minutes. Three. Any time at all.