Karma:Long reiki session this morning to promote healing and guide the flow of T’s life force energy. He has decided to pay to stay a couple more days to complete a gonging course and crystal healing. He is so receptive to therapy.
This was bloody agony.
Karma:T & S forming a beautiful bond. What a blessing it is to witness two souls that clearly recognise each other from a past life reunite like this. We feel he was meant to find us.
It was like watching one of those TV shows where they build up the big reveal, then cut to an ad break. I was ready to jump on a train to Derbyshire and strangle Karma with my bare hands, and I didn’t care how it buggered up my chakras.
Karma:Nothing else to report.
The good news was that we now had a couple more days up our sleeves for Summer to find out the information we needed. Assuming Summer was still on our team, which I was starting to feel unsure about. I needed a backup plan. It was time to deploy another time-honoured tabloid trick.
* * *
Bin day was a Tuesday in the part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea where Jemima Carstairs and Dirk Windhoek lived. Which was how I found myself parked up just off Gloucester Road in Jumaane’s battered and cold Vauxhall Astra on a drizzly Monday night, working my way through a box of Tesco Express Krispy Kremes, waiting for the lights to go off in the Carstairs-Windhoek household. It was one in the morning before the windows finally plunged into darkness and I got my chance to go dumpster-diving in search of incriminating documents.
Half an hour after lights out, dressed in latex gloves and an old black hoodie, I was in full cat burglar mode, trying to silently get the lid off the first bin. It was an old-school metal trash can. Who even owned one of these except Oscar the Grouch? I found chicken bones, potato peelings, and plastic wrappers, but no documents. I abandoned it, leaving the bin on the side and the lid off so it would look like foxes had done the damage. The second bin was filled with recycling, but no papers. My last chance was a black bin liner, top tied in a knot, resting against the fence. When I picked it up, it was suspiciously light—and squishy like a pillow. I tore a little hole in the side. It was filled with shredded paper.
“Bingo.”
Chapter51
Ludo
“This jigsaw puzzle is pants,” I said. It was Tuesday evening, and thin strips of white paper were strewn across the summer house floor. The soundtrack toYentltinkled away softly in the background. I find Barbra helps me concentrate. I was sitting on the rug, trying to sort together any strips of paper that looked like they matched, based on font, paper weight, or ink colour. “When you said you had a surprise for me, I thought you might be taking me out to dinner or something.”
“I brought you curry,” Sunny protested. He was sitting at my desk (where our laptops were now more or less permanently set up side by side), glue stick in hand, studying a handful of strips of paper.
“Correction. You went to the house and brought out two bowls of the curry Father made.”
“Did I lie?”
“Stop trying to wind me up.”
“But you’re so cute when you’re annoyed.”
“Don’t upset me in front of Babs. She doesn’t like it.”
I spotted a flash of red on a strip of paper and extracted it, adding it to a pile of similarly marked strips.
“I think I’ve just about got all this logo on this letterhead,” I said.
Sunny jumped up and joined me on the floor, his shoulder leaning into mine as we studied the pieces. My heart still raced whenever his body touched mine. Like it was illicit. Like someone might tell us to stop it at any minute. He smelt of glue and spices.
He picked up the pieces and shuffled them around, being careful to flatten them against the rug so they didn’t tangle or tear.
“That’s it. We’ve got it,” Sunny said.
“I’ve never heard of Prometheus Power, have you?” I asked, but he wasn’t listening. He was running his fingers down the length of the portion of shredded page we had managed to piece together. “Dear Mr Windhoek… This prospectus for… investors to raise… a more renewable…”
“No mention of Newton Bardon, nuclear power, or ZephEnergies,” I said. “It looks like an ordinary covering letter for an initial public offer to me. Prometheus Power must be about to list on some stock exchange or other.”
“Maybe,” Sunny said. “But I’ve seen this logo before. In VladPop’s office. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just caught a glance of it.”
“Does it mean anything?” I nuzzled my head into Sunny’s shoulder and kissed the soft, freckled skin of his neck.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But this letter isn’t addressed to Carstairs; it’s addressed to her husband.”
A text message pinged Sunny’s phone, and he pulled it out of the pocket of his hoodie. The screen illuminated his face as he studied the message, his green eyes growing wider with every passing second.
