Lewis did not.
“So tell me about the Princess. Tell me who would want to hurt her.”
“The Princess?”
“Right now, we have no reason to suggest why someone would want to hurt Sophie. My guess is that there are plenty of people who want to hurt the Princess.”
Lewis nodded. There was a pistol in her shoulder holster for a reason. “Terrorists are the biggest and most obvious threat. They’d love to take out a politician or a royal.”
“But they’ve stopped going after hard targets,” Cook put in.
“That’s true,” Lewis agreed. “Recent terrorist attacks have been more focused on soft targets—driving into crowds of defenseless civilians and so on. They know their chance of success is small if they come after high-profile targets. We’re bloody good at what we do.”
“The best,” Cook acknowledged, deeply proud of her country’s security services.
“Then who else?” Morgan asked.
“There are anti-royalists, but they don’t tend to be violent,” Lewis explained. “Of course, there are always lone wolves. Weird little bastards who just get obsessed with the Princess, try to sneak into places to see her, or steal her laundry.”
“You’ve seen that?” Cook asked.
“I’ve seen bloody everything. There are some very strange people on this planet.”
“It’s the dangerous ones I’m concerned about,” Morgan told her.
“As you well know, there are plenty of those too. So where do we start?”
Morgan had no concrete idea. He only knew that, in a missing-persons case, time was everything.
And theirs was running out.
Chapter 22
PETER KNIGHT RUBBED at his eyes. It had been a long night, and the stress of having to deliver bad news to a family member always sapped his energy levels. Now he was in Hooligan’s lab, and hours of staring at bright computer screens was threatening to turn his eyes the color of tomatoes.
“I don’t know how you can look at these all day,” he said to the man beside him.
On the screens in front of them were long lists of numbers, files, and all kinds of digital code that Knight could only guess at. He was an intelligent man, but Hooligan’s explanations went over his head.
The men—mostly Hooligan, Knight admitted to himself—were looking into the digital records of Sir Tony Lightwood. As next of kin, Eliza had granted them permission, and now they were searching the man’s digital footprints for anything that could be useful—contacts, payments, patterns. In the modern world, it is impossible to live a life without leaving a trail of digital data behind, and Hooligan followed the path like a bloodhound. It was down to him to find the patterns in the data, and it was what he was most brilliant at.
“Here’s another one.” Hooligan pointed at the screen.
Knight leaned forward. He was looking at a receipt. It was the sixth one they’d found for the same boutique hotel—the Mistral in Kensington.
“Four hundred quid a night?” Hooligan snorted at the price. “Do they pay someone to sleep for you?”
“It’s another Wednesday,” Knight noted. “They’ve all been Wednesdays.” Then something in what Hooligan had said triggered a thought in his mind. “Do you think you can access their CCTV footage from those nights?”
“You mean steal it?” Hooligan exclaimed in mock horror. “Yeah, no problem. You’re the boss. I was just following orders, your honor, that was all…”
It took Hooligan less than twenty minutes to find what he was looking for. “Didn’t even have to do anything illegal.” He shrugged. “The Mistral needs to fire whoever runs their security. OK, here it is.”
CCTV footage came up onto one of Hooligan’s screens. Using the check-in time shown on the receipts, they were able to quickly find Sir Tony’s arrival. For Knight it was a bizarre, eerie feeling to see the now-dead man run up the steps, all smiles as he shook the hand of the hotel’s porter. That he could go from this bag of joy to dead by his own hand within weeks…
“I’ll take close-ups and screenshots of everyone who enters,” Hooligan told him, freezing the frame on a pair of wealthy-looking men. “Who are you expecting?” the East Ender asked, stopping the film to screenshot the next person.
Knight opened his mouth to reply, but no words came out.