The Society Karen Guyler (best books to read .TXT) 📖

“Which one?” Her question squeaked out. “Can I see the footage?” She nodded at the camera above her.

More boundaries intervened, but the head must have felt something for her distress. She swung the visitors’ book around, pointed at the penultimate entry. “Bernard Stel. . .Shrel, he has terrible penmanship.”

It was all in the ‘B’, winking at her, the B of Buchanan. Eva hung onto the counter, anchoring herself beneath the surge of relief. Charles had got away and made sure Lily was safe.

She hobbled out into the darkening daylight and the uncertainty of how to find her family. Charles would have his and Lily’s phones off, with Lily’s GPS tracking disabled. How, how? And then she had it, one chance, a teeny tiny possibility.

Eva held her breath while the PC in the internet café searched. No matter how she wriggled on the hard seat, she felt she was twisting her knee. She logged into the email address she and Charles had used when they got married. The password—Iloveyou4ever—always used to make her smile. Today everything was harder.

Surprisingly few junk emails had accumulated in the inbox, nothing received today. Eva clicked into the spam folder, into drafts. The last one had been her asking if he wanted to invite anyone else two months before their wedding.

He hadn’t remembered.

Never suppose, her father’s voice instructed her. She knew that. Charles was apparently good at this, whatever this was. Maybe he watched spy thrillers when she worked late, the false name, his paranoia over smartphones and their microphones, their GPS tracking. Maybe he just hadn’t got onto a PC yet. She left the tab open and clicked into her personal email.

Nothing there from him.

One from Per, worrying about not being able to reach her, congratulating her on the success of the ball. He apparently didn’t watch YouTube.

‘You’re just like Mathias, Eva, making the impossible, crazy dream happen, how proud of you he’d be. I’m so proud of you.’

Per, wish you were closer. Would it be so crazy to go there now? He’d invited them, they’d simply be a few weeks early. The break would do them all good.

Eva sipped her peppermint tea, willing the zingy mint to ground her, stop her charging out of the café because where could she go? This was her best, only, shot at finding them.

No family, no home, no Every Drop, everything she cared about stripped away. But not one by the other, that tiny nagging she shushed whenever it raised its voice to be heard over the shouting of her to-do lists, it hadn’t been a prophecy. Her work hadn’t taken her from Lily and Charles like her father’s had taken him from her.

Daddy, what would you do now?

Her fingers were typing his name, the entries loading almost before she realised. Mathias Janssen. Could Google resurrect him enough to guide her? Eva clicked straight into the first entry, which loaded so fast it didn’t give her the necessary warning.

It was there, filling the screen, filling her world as it had for the first few years he was gone, but never enough to fill the Daddy-shaped hole in her heart, her life. Her shaking fingers touched his image on the monitor. The photo of his last moment that had won a Pulitzer and every other award on the planet. Her hero, her daddy, scooping up a terrified child, holding her close as if she were his daughter, turning his back on the maelstrom of shrapnel an exploding building whirled around them, taking the force of man’s brutality to man. Choosing to save the life of a stranger instead of coming home to her.

Daddy. The photo blurred as it always did, as if Eva had never cried herself dry over and over for the rest of primary school and at secondary school at night alone in her room. She swallowed, reached for the mouse.

Then saw it.

She double tapped the cursor over his hand where he clutched the little girl to zoom in over his four fingers. A turquoise band, sun-faded and grubby but unmistakable. She fingered her own brighter, newer-looking bracelet, a time link between them.

In that moment, he’d been thinking of her.

Eva closed her eyes.

“Mummy, that lady’s sad.”

Be polite, don’t talk about people in front of them, the little girl’s mother’s shush was loaded. Eva wiped at her face and smiled at the girl sitting on her mum’s lap a couple of terminals down.

He was still teaching her, her father. She remembered he’d stopped in his rucksack packing and drawn her into a hug when she’d asked once why he had to do his job, why couldn’t someone else? Just for a little while so he could watch her in the nativity play at school.

“Because, my little Evie, everyone else is running away from the bullets. I’m the only one running towards them.”

“You shouldn’t run towards bullets, they’ll hurt you.”

“That’s true, but the bullets I run towards are words, photos, recordings of phone calls. Nothing that can hurt me.”

“Promise?”

He’d squeezed her tighter. “Love you, lilla gumman. Want to fight this zip with me, help me close it?”

Eva had laughed, “Silly, Daddy, I’m not an old lady.”

She closed the browser down. Running towards the bullets, Daddy, I can do that.

And she knew where to start.

22

The non-descript building that stole her husband away nearly every day didn’t look more dangerous to Eva than it had any other time she’d been there. No one around that shouldn’t be, so far as she could tell.

The entry keypad was the same as she remembered; she entered his code. The panel bleeped green.

She let herself into Charles’ hallowed space. The story doesn’t start when you become aware of it, you need to go backwards for the origin, her father’s words that had wrapped themselves around her all the way there dissipated now like so much smoke wafting away.

This was point zero; his office and adjoining lab had to be Charles’ origin. So where would she find something to explain