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Thirty-Three

Wednesday 6.30pm

Charlie bolstered himself with more coffee. He needed to think and he felt the need to write things down. That, more than anything else, told him how exhausted he was. Usually, he would lean back in his chair in the ridiculously dark office and let the thoughts do their own thing while Patsy and Eddy squabbled in the outer room. Then it would be down to the whiteboard with the coloured pens to see if his thoughts still made sense when he shared them with the others. Now, every thought seemed to skitter away from him before he could catch it and let it interact with everything else. He felt in his pockets for a pen, and came up blank. What he did find was a small sketchbook with a propelling pencil attached to it by a piece of elastic in Tom’s messenger bag. Charlie flicked through, not surprised to find it full of tiny but exquisite drawings. He saw that most of them were of himself, and a couple of them were not something he would have wanted his mother or his work colleagues to see. He grinned to himself, wondering when Tom had made those particular sketches … It felt mildly sacrilegious to turn to a blank page and make notes about crime.

He put the word Kaylan in the centre of the page, realising that he was taking extra care to form his letters, because it was Tom’s book. Tom would have drawn a tiny picture of Kaylan’s face, then sinuous arrows to show connections between the different players — who would have been represented with a quick sketch. Charlie had watched Tom drawing without apparently even looking at the page, often creating fantastical monsters with the faces of people he knew. By contrast, Charlie would be sticking to mundane words, and his connecting arrows, if there were any, would be merely crooked.

He arranged the names around the paper: Dwyer, Special Agents Mead and Bart, Sabrina Sully, Sully Cybersecurity, “Special Agent” Brody Murphy. Then he added himself. Finally, and with a little grin, Former President Donald Trump. Tom would have added a ridiculous wave of hair to the letters, so Charlie did the same. It didn’t look like hair, but it didn’t matter. It brought Tom into the exercise with him and made him feel warm and fuzzy.

God, I am such a sap when it comes to that man. Get back to work.

He added the words Grandmother (legacy?), Vitruvius and Llanfair College, then (the fake) Deganway and his mother. Finally, he started drawing arrows. Most of the arrows converged on Kaylan and he added dollar signs to them all, except his own. Kaylan had stolen from them all. Everyone on the page, except Brody Murphy and the two FBI agents. But the two agents were investigating cybercrime, and it didn’t come much more cybercrime than Kaylan’s activities. He hadn’t stolen directly from Donald Trump, but if Dwyer was serious about getting into politics, it was going to cost him in terms of big campaign donations.

Charlie looked at what he’d done. He needed another colour, and scrabbled around in the messenger bag, releasing the smell of Old Spice, until he came up with one of those four-colour ballpoint pens he remembered from his childhood. Quite why Tom should have such a thing, Charlie didn’t know. All the colours seemed to work, because of course he had to test them all. And he realised that he was enjoying himself working out the puzzle. Now he had spoken to Tom, the clouds had lifted. Yes, he was still exhausted and yes, he was going to have to keep moving, and no, it wouldn’t be easy to prove his innocence, but he could do it now that he knew Tom was going to get better.

Charlie drew another set of arrows around Andrew Dwyer. Dwyer connected to Kaylan and to himself and to Brody Murphy.

Finally, he added Orianna. She had an arrow to him, and one to Brody Murphy, and to Deganway’s wall of pictures, but it was messy. No obvious cause and effect. Charlie remembered a lecture from Freya Ravensbourne, his immediate boss about Occam’s Razor. If there are two theories pointing to the same result, the simpler one is better . Orianna as a potential victim sounded plausible, except as Charlie had pointed out several times, she wasn’t dead. Kaylan was dead. As a gay man, Charlie was all too aware of how easily ideology turned to violence. But he’d been a policeman for a long time too, and he truly believed that the love of money was the root of much evil. Kaylan was a thief and a damn good one. The list of his victims was long.

The page filled with more arrows in different colours, and scribbles showing relationships until it was a jumble of writing, smeared ink blobs and pencil. But Charlie could see the way forward. He just had to keep himself out of the hands of the police for long enough to pull it off — which would be easy if he could just stay here in Grand Central Station eating cinnamon buns. Rather, he was going to have to go out into the city, find people who didn’t want to see him and tell them a lot of lies. Convincingly.

He drew circles around a couple of names, and leaned back in the chair, the babble around him becoming white noise. He put his hand up to his face, feeling the stubble on his chin and cheeks, being careful not to press too hard on the bruises. There was no need to look down at his clothes to know that they had been though some hard times and were showing the marks. If he was going visiting, he needed to be cleaner and smarter. Tom would put up with sweaty, scruffy Charlie, and love him, but everyone else would take a bit more work. Clothes, shower, sleep, lies. In that order.