I made my way to the restroom and sat inside a stall. I doused my hair with the dye. It stank, but it was supposed to work within a few minutes. There wasn’t much ventilation in the tiny space. With my eyes watering and a chemical taste in my throat, I washed the dye out in the restroom sink, first rinsing out the sour, beer-shot vomit of the drunk who’d just been in here.
My hands on the sink, I raised my head to study myself.
Dark-haired me looked a lot different to blonde-haired me. I looked older, more serious. Even a little bit criminal. Maybe the events of the past few days had made me look that way, or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but still, I was on the run from the police.
I straightened, forcing a friendlier expression.
Moving close to the mirror, I scrutinized my dye job. I had a few dark dye stains smeared around my hairline. I scrubbed the stains and my head the best I could with the soap and then rinsed it again.
Replacing the baseball cap, I walked out, stopping to ask a table of backpackers if they knew where any internet cafés were. They pointed me in the direction of a library. I jogged along the canal and towards the street they’d indicated.
I passed a newsstand with turnstile racks of postcards and greeting cards out in front. I bought a detailed map of Greece. I caught sight of a news item on the front page of a newspaper. The story was in French, but I recognised my face easily enough. Below the picture of me were images of Evie’s blackened car and the rope and knife. The only word I understood was Interpol. And I could guess that this meant there was now a warrant out for my arrest. No doubt, police had found my fingerprints on things that proved that I’d been at the scene of Evie’s burned-out car. The police already had my fingerprints from my misdemeanours as a teenager.
Taking my change, I quickly headed away, adjusting my cap to sit lower on my forehead.
Anyone reading that story would think I was dangerous, someone who’d murdered his own wife and was on the run in Europe. I recalled Constance’s response to me in our last conversation. Had she seen a story like this and started to believe I killed Evie? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced. Every time I’d seen a news story, I’d believed it without question. Now I knew that the other side of the story might not be so clear-cut.
After a few turns and backtracking, I found the library.
Sitting at a library computer, I typed in the word Yeqon.
That brought up a chaotic assortment about angels being sent to earth, Yeqon being one of them. But he wasn’t a good angel.
This wasn’t helping.
Next, I tried searching for the historical society. They had chapters in a list of different countries. No specific locations or contact details. A pretty secretive society that certainly wasn’t welcoming to new members.
But Rosemary the investigator had been able to find out a bit more about them and so could I.
I needed to reverse engineer this. Set off a pinball and see how many targets it could hit. And then zero in on each of those targets. At my job, I’d often had to reverse engineer code. And sometimes I had to search for the needle in the haystack that was screwing up the code. When code when wrong, you had to go back and find out if the program was terminally screwed or if there was just a comma in the wrong place. A wrong comma could destroy everything.
I used the internet’s Wayback Machine and other snapshots of web pages that were dead and buried. Were there any old pages of the historical society I could find here?
There wasn’t much. I found an old Geocities website with no text but a few photographs, taken from a distance. The pictures immediately struck me as odd. They weren’t snaps of a meeting. These were more like surveillance photos. Multiple pics snapped of a group of people walking and close-ups of faces—all blurry. Who’d put up this website? Maybe the person had tried and failed to capture the interest of the police, and in desperation they’d put the information out there online, like a beacon. But this was fourteen years ago. And there was no context to any of it.
I paid the library extra for access to a Photoshop module and started working on reversing the blur of the photographs. Motion blur could be fixed if all the information was still in the picture. You could get it back to a pretty sharp image. Verity had once been shocked when I’d fixed a couple of blurred photographs that had been the last ones taken of her son, Ben, making them clean and sharp. It’d been the only time I’d ever seen her cry.
I was in luck. Within minutes, I had the pictures fixed. Maybe the person who took the shots was nervous as hell they’d be discovered by the society, and they’d forgotten to keep the camera steady.