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‘Because it isn’t over yet.’

‘I want it back. I want to be me again.’

She lit another cigarette. Again they were silent for a while, lost in smoke and thoughts.

‘We haven’t yet woken up, Yoyo.’ He threw his head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘That’s our problem. For three days I’ve been trying to tell myself that I don’t want to have anything more to do with Hydra. Or with Xin and all the freaks that frolic in my head when everyone else is asleep. I furnish my life with knick-knacks, I try and make it look as normal and unspectacular as possible, but it feels wrong. As if I’d ended up on a stage—’

‘Yes, exactly!’

‘And a little while ago, after we spoke on the phone, I understood. We’re still trapped in this nightmare, Yoyo. It pretends we’re awake, but we aren’t. We’re watching an illusion. It’s far from over.’ He sighed. ‘I’m actually obsessed by Hydra! I have to go on working on this case. Clearing out the cellar in which I’ve been burying people alive for years. Hydra is turning into the model of my life and the question of how it’s going to go on from here. I have to face up to these ghosts to get rid of them, even if it costs me my courage or my reason. I can’t, won’t, go on like this. I can’t bear living like this, do you understand? I want to wake up at last.’

Otherwise we will be trapped for ever in an imaginary world, he thought. Then we won’t be proper people, we’ll only ever be the echoes of our unresolved past.

‘And – have you kept on working on the case? On our case?’

‘Yes.’ Jericho nodded. ‘Over the past two hours. When you arrived, I was about to phone Madrid.’

‘Madrid?’

‘An oil company called Repsol.’

He saw her face light up, so he told her about his research, familiarised her with Loreena’s last email and introduced her to his theories. With every word Hydra
slithered further into that dark loft, stretched her necks, fixed her pale yellow eyes on them. In their effort to shake the monster off, they had conjured it up, but something had changed. The monster didn’t come to ambush and chase them, but because they had lured it, and for the first time Jericho felt stronger than the snake. Finally he dialled the number of the Spanish company.

‘Of course!’ a man’s voice said in English. ‘Loreena Keowa! I tried to get through to her a number of times. Why does she never answer?’

‘She had an accident,’ said Jericho. ‘A fatal accident.’

‘How terrible.’ The man paused. When he went on speaking, there was an under-tone of suspicion. ‘And you are—’

‘A private detective. I’m trying to continue Miss Keowa’s work and shed some light on the circumstances of her death.’

‘I see.’

‘She’d asked you for information, right?’

‘Erm – that’s right.’

‘About a meeting in Beijing that Alejandro Ruiz took part in before he disappeared?’

‘Yes. Yes, exactly.’

‘I’m pursuing that trail. It might be the same people that have Ruiz and Loreena on their conscience. You would be doing me a great favour if you would let me have the information.’

‘Well—’ The other man hesitated. Then he sighed. ‘Sure, why not. Will you keep us up to date? We’d very much like to know what happened to Ruiz.’

‘Of course.’

‘So, we’ve gone through the documents here. In 2022 Ruiz had just been appointed head of the strategy department. He was moving heaven and earth to open up new areas of business. Some of the oil multinationals were increasingly looking into joint ventures, so there were discussions in Beijing, for a whole week—’

‘Why there?’

‘No real reason. They could equally well have met in Texas or Spain. Perhaps because the most important was a project between Repsol, EMCO and the Chinese oil company Sinopec, so they agreed on Beijing. The initiator of the joint venture suggested that it should be turned into a business summit. Almost all the big companies agreed to take part, which meant that discussions went on all week without interruption. Ruiz was happy about that. He thought something might change.’

‘Do you have any idea what he might have meant by that?’

‘Not really, to be quite honest.’

‘And where did the summit meet?’

‘At the Sinopec Congress Centre on the edge of Chaoyang, a district to the northeast of Beijing.’

‘And Ruiz was in good spirits?’

‘Most of the time, yes, although it turned out that the train had already pulled out. On the other hand, it could hardly have got worse. On the last day of the summit he called and said that at least the week hadn’t been wasted, and there was one last session that evening, more of an unofficial meeting. A few of them wanted to get together and discuss a few ideas.’

‘And the meeting was also held in the Congress Centre?’

‘No, further out. In the district of Shunyi, he said, at a private house. The next day he looked depressed and unwell. I asked him how the meeting had gone. He reacted oddly. He said nothing had come out of it, and he’d left early.’

‘Do you know who took part in it?’

‘Not explicitly. Ruiz had hinted that representatives of the big companies had come together – I guess we were the smallest fish in the pond. Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, South Americans, Arabs. A proper summit. Not much seems to have come out of it.’

I wouldn’t be so sure of that, thought Jericho.

‘I’d need a list of official participants at the summit,’ he said, ‘if such a thing still exists.’

‘I’ll send it to you. Give me an email address.’

Jericho passed on his details and thanked the man. He promised to get in touch as soon as anything new came in, signed off and looked at Yoyo.

‘What do you think?’

‘A meeting in which senior oil company representatives take part,’ she mused. ‘An unofficial one. Ruiz doesn’t wait for the end. Why does he leave?’

‘He might have felt unwell. That’s the harmless explanation.’

‘That we don’t believe.’

‘Of course not. He left because he’d come to the conclusion that the whole thing was going nowhere, because there was an argument, or because he didn’t want to go along with whatever they decided.’

‘If he’d just been angry, he’d have told his people or his wife the reasons. Instead he said nothing.’

‘He felt threatened.’

‘He was afraid they might hush him up because he didn’t want to play.’

‘As they did, by the look of it.’

‘And who are
they
?’

‘Hmm.’ Jericho pursed his lips. ‘We’re thinking along the same lines, aren’t we?’

* * *

Yoyo stayed with him that night. Nothing happened except that they emptied another bottle of wine together and he held her in his arms, faintly surprised that he only wanted to console her: a girl overtaxed by adulthood, intelligent, talented and beautiful who, at the age of only twenty-five, had already driven wedges of insecurity into the armour of the Party and at the same time preserved the attitude of a teenager, a punishing, immature stroppiness that was every bit as unerotic as her efforts to defy biology and keep from growing up. It seemed to him that Yoyo wanted to stay in adolescence for ever, or until circumstances calmed down enough to grant her a more peaceful youth than the one she had already had. He, on the other hand, wanted only to wipe out this phase of his life, those said transitional years. Small wonder, then, that neither of them felt what they should have felt, as Yoyo had put it.

He thought about this, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he felt lighter.

There was someone else with them in the room. He looked up, and that shy boy who had been hurt so often was sitting in the gloom of the loft, watching his fingers glide through Yoyo’s hair. Numbed with red wine and worry, he stared straight ahead, while the boy’s eyes filled with tears of disappointment that girls like Yoyo only ever used boys like him to talk to. His nose, disproportionately swollen by the beginnings of puberty, was still too big for his otherwise childish face. His hair needed washing, and of course he was wearing the stuff he always wore, a human being who loved everyone and everything more than he loved himself. How Jericho had hated the little bastard who couldn’t understand why that adult man with the girl in his arms, the girl he could have had there and then, wasn’t declaring his love – why he suddenly didn’t desire her, when he had desired her, hadn’t he?

Had he?

Jericho saw the boy sitting there, felt his paralysing, nagging fear of being inadequate, failing, being rejected. And suddenly he didn’t hate him any more. Instead he drew him into the embrace, he granted him absolution and assured him that he wasn’t to blame for anything, anything at all. He expressed his sympathy. Explained the necessity of finally disappearing from his life, since he had vanished from it in a purely physical sense long ago, and promised him that they would both find peace sooner or later.

The boy turned pale.

He would come back, that much was certain, but for that night at least they were reconciled. The world became more tangible, more colourful. Towards morning, when Yoyo lay snoring quietly on his belly, he still hadn’t slept a wink, and yet he wasn’t tired in the slightest. He carefully lifted her shoulders, slipped from the sofa and let her drop back. She murmured, turned on her side and rolled into a ball.
Jericho looked at her. He wondered excitedly who would appear once she had shed the foolish costume of the eternal teenager. Someone very thrilling, he suspected. And she
would
be happy and adult. She just didn’t know it yet. She would be able to feel everything, not what she was supposed to feel, not what she wanted to feel, but just what she actually felt.

Just before nine. He picked up his phone, went into the kitchen area and put on a strong pot of coffee. He knew what he had to do, and how they could nail those bastards.

Time to make a call.

‘I’ve been thinking about your offer,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ Patrice Ho seemed surprised. ‘I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.’

‘Some decisions are quick to make.’

‘Owen, before you say something—’ Ho hemmed and hawed. ‘I’m sorry if I behaved badly in any way. I didn’t mean to put any pressure on you – you must think I’m never satisfied.’

‘I hope you aren’t,’ said Jericho. ‘Not in terms of the results, anyway. So I will go on supporting you in this paedophile case.’

‘You will?’ Short pause. ‘You’re a friend! A true friend. I’m more obliged to you than ever.’

‘Good. Then I’d like to call in some of my credit.’

‘And I’ll be happy to help you!’

‘Just wait. It’s possible that you’re not going to like it.’

‘That’s what I’m assuming,’ Ho said drily.

‘Right, listen. In the last week of August 2022, in Beijing, or more precisely in the Sinopec Congress Centre in the district of Chaoyang, there was a meeting of international oil companies. I’ll send you the list of participants. On the last day of the summit, on the evening of 1 September, some of these people met up unofficially in the district of Shunyi. I don’t know who took part in that meeting, but it seems to have been an illustrious circle. And I don’t know where the meeting took place.’

‘And that’s what I’m to find out. I get it.’ Ho paused. ‘This sounds like a routine investigation. What wouldn’t I like about it?’

‘The second part of my request.’

‘Which would be?’

‘I can only tell you once I’ve got the answer to part one.’

‘Fine. I’ll sort it out.’

Jericho felt the life flowing back into his veins. The prey had become the hunter! In tense expectation he viewed his emails and saw that the Repsol man had sent the whole schedule of the summit, and sure enough, everybody had met in Beijing, representatives
of almost every company that was involved or ever had been involved in the oil and gas business, strategists almost to a man.

He went through the list and gave a start.

Of course! That was only to be expected. And yet—

He quickly passed on the details to Ho, looked in on Yoyo, who was fast asleep, sat back down at the kitchen counter and started coming up with theories.

And all of a sudden everything fell into place.

* * *

Late that afternoon – Yoyo had groggily gone on her way, not without asking to be updated on the latest developments – Patrice Ho called him back.

‘Three years is a long time,’ he said, trying to make it sound exciting, ‘but I may have found something. I can’t tell you exactly who took part in the meeting, but I can tell you with some certainty where it took place and who the host was.’

‘A private house?’

‘Correct. There are no Sinopec facilities in Shunyi, but the strategy manager of the company lives there. Big property. We looked into him just for a laugh, and found out that he lives notoriously beyond his means, but yes, lots of people do that. His name is Joe Song. He represented Sinopec during the summit. Can you do anything with that?’

‘I think so, yeah.’ A name, another name! Now it would all depend on whether he was right. ‘Thanks! That’s all fine.’

‘I get it. Now comes the bit I’m not going to like.’

‘Yes. You have to hack into Song’s computer.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It could be that I’m mistaken and the guy has nothing to hide. But if—’

‘Owen, listen. A promise is a promise, okay? But before I do that, I need more information. I’ve got to know where your investigations are leading.’

Jericho hesitated. ‘Possibly to the retrieval of the Chinese government’s honour.’

‘Aha.’

‘You promise to help me anyway?’

‘As I said—’

‘Okay, listen up. I’ll give you the background. Then I’ll tell you what you need to look for.’

* * *

Twenty minutes later, when he could be certain that the Repsol man had drunk his first café con leche, he called Madrid again.

‘Can I bother you again?’

‘Of course.’

‘You mentioned that the joint venture planned between Sinopec, Repsol and EMCO was based on an initiative. Can you remember who the initiator was?’

‘Sure.’ The man told him the name. ‘By the way, he was the one who blew the whole thing up into a summit and suggested holding it in Beijing. Sinopec liked that. The Chinese like the world being negotiated on their territory.’