Chapter 12

If Thomas Harris wasn't the central figure in this conspiracy, then why had someone worked so hard to cut him out of my life? Why had a stranger's hand circled his face in red marker on an archive photograph?

On the overground train heading toward south London, we sat in silence. Neither of us brought up the old photographer's last words. A woman with a bright, dry laugh, whose face had dissolved out of a stranger's memory and left only a sonic ghost behind — that detail frightened me precisely because it was so intangible. Witnesses' memory was turning into too unstable a swamp. Something was changing it on the fly, right while we were asking questions.

Harris, on the other hand, was tangible. He was flesh and blood. We needed to look for his private, unofficial past — not in the City, where reality had already been rewritten and armored behind corporate bureaucracy.

Helen opened her bag and pulled out a small notebook bound in worn leather. Paper again. No notes app on a phone, no cloud storage. Just her small, cramped ballpoint handwriting on yellowed pages. She leafed through it for a long time, the pages rustling under the monotonous clatter of the wheels.

"I think I found his old address after all," she said, not looking up. "Five years old. From before he moved to Kensington. This house belonged to his family."

We got off at a quiet, sleepy station in Clapham. An ordinary, comfortable residential area. Two-story Victorian brick terraces, clean pavements. Further off, on a patch of park lawn, kids in school uniforms shrieked as they played, a man in a tracksuit lazily walked a golden retriever, and a delivery courier, having parked his van right at the intersection, swore furiously at his sat nav. Ordinary, unhurried life went on flowing as it always did. This whole neighborhood, all this mundane, drowsy normalcy — it knew nothing about what was happening to us, and it was precisely that total obliviousness that offered a thin, fragile hope.

An elderly woman opened the door of the house we were looking for. She wore a woolen cardigan, and from deep in the hallway came the smell of dried lavender and mint tea. A distant relative of Harris's, looking after the house, which Thomas now rented out.

She knew Thomas. Yes. He really had lived here for years, before his business took off.

I couldn't help smiling with relief, feeling the tension drain out of my shoulders. Finally. A living witness whose memory hadn't glitched yet.

And then, straightening the collar of her cardigan, the woman said, in a perfectly ordinary voice:

"You know… it's almost funny. You're the second person to ask me about Thomas this week."

My smile froze instantly. The air in the hallway seemed to turn colder at once.

"Who was the first one?" Helen took half a step forward, her voice quiet but ringing with steel.

The woman frowned, looking somewhere over our heads.

"Oh, I… I don't remember," she spread her hands helplessly. "His face has just gone clean out of my head. You know, at my age… But it was definitely a man. In a dark coat. Stood on the doorstep, asked if any of Thomas's old papers were still here, and left."

Helen and I exchanged a glance. That same grey figure from Camden. He wasn't just following us — he was operating in parallel, checking the same key points, staying one step ahead of us.

"But I didn't give him anything," the woman went on, smiling weakly. "Thomas had asked me to keep something of his. Said he'd pick it up when he moved out for good, and then just forgot about it for five years. And I don't let strangers into the house. You're his colleagues, aren't you? You're from him?"

I nodded quickly, before Helen could get a word in:

"Yes. He asked us to pick it up."

A couple of minutes later she brought out of the closet a small shoebox, coated in a thick layer of grey dust, tied with yellowed string.

There was nothing sensational inside the box. No encrypted drives, no documents stamped classified. Just the ordinary, touching debris of a human life. An old cashmere scarf, a couple of paperback detective novels, a few cassette tapes of old rock records, a stack of yellowed supermarket receipts and electricity bills. It was exactly this mundane, domestic sloppiness that made the box's contents absolutely, irrefutably real. It would never occur to anyone to doctor an old receipt for a carton of milk.

I sorted carefully through the items until my fingers hit something hard and plastic at the very bottom.

A cheap, disposable Kodak camera in a yellow-and-blue plastic body. The frame counter was frozen at "24." The whole roll had been shot. But no one had ever developed it.

I turned the camera over — and felt a roughness under my fingers. On the grey plastic of the battery cover, something sharp had scratched two Latin letters, carelessly.

Small, almost invisible unless you knew where to look.

M. L.

They weren't Thomas Harris's initials.

They were mine. And I knew that uneven, slightly left-leaning hand far too well. It was my own.

I'd scratched those letters into this camera myself.

But I remembered absolutely nothing, not a trace, about when or why I'd done it.

On my palm lay a camera I'd held five years ago. One I'd given to Harris myself for safekeeping — and had no memory of it. Our past with him had been stitched together with a shared thread long before anyone started their cleanup. We'd been at the same point. On the same day. And the price of that day was locked inside this cheap piece of plastic.

Out on the street, Helen stopped, coat in hand. I held the camera out to her. She took it between two fingers, examined the initials, ran the pad of her thumb over them — the way you touch something you want to remember by feel.

"You gave it to him yourself," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," I answered. "I must have known, back then, that I couldn't keep it with me."

We were quiet for a moment. A woman with a double pram passed without looking at us. From the distance came the laughter of children in the park.

"We don't need to go back to the photographer," Helen finally said, tucking the camera into her bag. "Not yet. If you wrote 'don't develop' yourself — we need to understand why, first."

I nodded.

We walked toward the station. In my pocket I carried the shoebox with its stack of old receipts and the cashmere scarf that had once belonged to a man I apparently knew far better than I could remember.