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Coming to me, even if her employers never found out, was a clear act of rebellion.
    Grabbing my phone, I scrolled through my address book until I got to the letter S. S was for Spike. He was an old contact from my days as a journalist, a Russian hacker living here on an expired student visa. Back when I’d been on the paper, I’d used him all the time: with a single call, he could get you inside any network and smuggle out as much as you needed to know. I only used him to help me find missing people these days, but I wasn’t under any illusions about the nature of his work – or the illegality of me asking.
    ‘David,’ he said, as he picked up.
    ‘How’s things, Spike?’
    ‘Good, man. How are you?’
    ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘I need some help with a phone.’
    ‘You need me to get you a bill?’
    ‘No. I’ve already got the bill. What I need is names and addresses for the numbers on the bill. If I scanned some statements in and emailed them to you, do you reckon you could get me the details on every incoming and outgoing call made to these numbers?’
    ‘Names and addresses for each? Piece of cake.’
    ‘That’s the correct answer.’
    He laughed. ‘How much we looking at?’
    ‘Thirteen months, in two chunks. Chunk one is November and December 2012, January and February 2013, up to 3 March. The second is the period after my guy goes missing, so that’s 4 March through to … well, I guess today: 12 December.’
    I didn’t expect there to be many incoming calls after his disappearance on 3 March. Most would be from friends who didn’t yet realize he was missing, and were calling up to chat, maybe to organize some sort of social event. What I was certain of was there would be zero outgoing calls. Whatever had happened to him, he’d left his mobile phone behind.
    ‘I’ll give you the code for my bank when we’re done,’ Spike said.
    Spike’s bank was a locker in his local sports centre. I thanked him, hung up and immediately went to my address book again, searching for a second name: Ewan Tasker.
    ‘Task’ was another old contact from my paper days, a semi-retired police officer who’d worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Agency, its successor SOCA, and now the organization’s latest incarnation, the National Crime Agency. At the start, we’d built our relationship on a mutual understanding: he’d feed me stories on organized crime that, for whatever reason, he wanted out in the open; in return, I got to break them first. Over time, though, we started to hit it off, and when I left journalism to nurse my wife through her last year, we’d stayed in touch. These days, I didn’t have much to negotiate with if I wanted his help, so my reparation was a charity golf tournament he forced me to attend once a year, where he took my money, then got to laugh at how badly I hit a ball.
    ‘Raker!’ he said, after picking up.
    ‘How you doing, Task?’
    ‘Well, the good news is, I’m alive.’ But even in his mid sixties, Task was big and strong, and still one of the smartest men I knew. ‘Wow, it’s been a while, old friend.’
    ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m balls-deep in casework, so it’s as much my fault as yours. I’m only supposed to be working three days a week – but that seems to have gone south pretty quickly.’
    ‘Your handicap must be suffering badly.’
    ‘Like hell it is! I’m still unbeaten on the nineteenth hole. Talking of which, I hope you haven’t forgotten the twenty-eighth. Rain, sleet or snow, you’re playing, Raker.’
    This year’s charity tournament was just after Christmas.
    ‘I haven’t forgotten, Task.’
    ‘I know you haven’t,’ he said. ‘So what’s new?’
    I filled him in on the disappearance of Leonard Franks and how the case had landed with me, and then zeroed in on what I needed: ‘I’ve got his missing persons file here, and there’s nothing in it. Nothing in his financials, no anomalies, no red flags.