Chapter 20

I stared at those two words until the letters lost their meaning and turned into an abstract tangle of ink lines.

If someone else had left that line, I wouldn't have hesitated a second. Any warning from another person in an investigation like this is just a marker of fear, someone else's version of the truth. But my own hand had made these letters. I knew the anatomy of my own handwriting too well to look for shelter in self-deception. Heavy pressure, pressing into the paper. The nearly vertical stroke of the letter D. The disproportionately long crossbar of the T. I only wrote like that in two situations: when I was in a mad hurry, and when I was absolutely, rock-solid certain of what I was doing.

Five years ago I'd left myself a direct, unambiguous message.

And now, for the first time in this whole investigation, I faced not a technical problem but a deeply intuitive one: should I trust the man I used to be? Did that past Michael Lawson have any right to dictate terms to the one I was now?

Helen and I barely spoke. She made coffee in silence, set a heavy earthenware mug down in front of me, and sat across from me, legs tucked underneath her. The yellow plastic of the disposable Kodak lay right in the middle of the table. Neither of us touched it. The camera no longer looked like a piece of evidence or a key to the mystery. More like an unexploded shell that would detonate at the slightest careless movement.

"You still want to develop it, don't you?" Helen asked quietly, watching my face over the rim of her cup.

I was quiet for a long time, listening to some car engine turning over lazily outside the window. Then, to my own surprise, I said:

"No."

"No?"

"Not yet."

"Why, Michael? The answers to everything are in there."

Carefully, trying not to smudge the old ink, I turned the photograph face-up again. Two figures looked back at us: a smiling, thriving Michael, and the unfamiliar man in the red circle.

"Because the man in this photograph knows an order of magnitude more about what's happening than I do today. Imagine, Helen, that five years ago I had to choose between two opposite options. Develop this film and set off an avalanche. Or lock it away in the dark forever. If I chose the second option, back then, in my right mind — then I had a reason. One strong and frightening enough to write myself an order. Not a request, not advice. An order. And I don't want to break it until I understand who I was up against."

Helen looked at me for a long time. Then nodded slowly.

After breakfast, for the first time in days, I went out not to chase a lead. I went out to buy stationery.

An ordinary little shop in a residential block near Paddington. Cramped shelves of school exercise books, envelopes, cheap markers. An elderly shop assistant behind the counter lazily re-tagged price stickers with a gun that clicked, monotonous and irritating, through the whole store.

I picked out a thick notebook with a hard black cover. The plainest one, no logos, no lines or squares — just clean, thick white pages. I added an ordinary black ballpoint pen to it.

"A gift for someone?" the woman at the till smiled amiably, packing the purchase into a rustling bag.

"No," I shook my head. "For myself."

"My, that's a big one. Starting your memoirs, are you?"

I smiled grimly back at her:

"I want to get down what I still remember, while I still can."

The woman handed me my change and sighed knowingly:

"Good habit, young man. These days it's all phones, clouds… people trust everything to screens. But paper — paper's more reliable. It remembers a long time."

That casual, throwaway line hit me far harder than she could have imagined. Paper is more reliable. Paper doesn't update digital certificates. Paper doesn't change names in a database with a snap of someone's fingers.

Back at the flat, I sat down at the table, opened to the first page, and wrote a single line: "What I remember today."

Then I stopped.

It turned out this mental investigation — inside my own head — was the hardest thing I'd faced yet. I remembered my childhood in vivid detail. Remembered my first serious job, my internship, moving to London. But the moment I tried to consciously approach events from five years back, logic started to stall.

There was no black hole there. No sense of a cut-out fragment, no phantom pain. There was fog. Thick, matte, perfectly uniform fog. The memory existed — I could feel its physical presence — but someone had very carefully, with jeweler's precision, covered this one particular layer of my life with frosted glass.

I got angry and started writing down everything, without order or chronology. Names of London streets, names of old business contacts, database passwords I'd changed three years ago, random smells, favorite coffee blends, music, old phone numbers. Anything that surfaced from the bottom of my mind.

An hour and a half later I'd filled nearly twenty pages. I read them back from start to finish. And my breath caught.

In this enormous, chaotic stream of personal memories, there wasn't a single mention of the stranger from the photograph. Not a single hint of Harris & Croft. My mind had painstakingly recorded a thousand mundane details, but had completely, sterilely skipped over the man I'd stood arm in arm with in that photo. That, in itself, was already irrefutable evidence. My memory had been deliberately deformed.

Around noon, the phone on the table buzzed briefly. A text message from Helen lit up the screen:

"I checked your handwriting."

I dialed her number instantly.

"Remember those government payroll ledgers for Harris & Croft?" Her voice was drawn tight as a wire. "Four months, empty fields instead of a name."

"Of course."

"I went back and compared all the sheets again in detail, under magnification. On the very last one, for December… on that same line without a name, no digital duplicate of the signature was placed. But right next to the empty field, on the grey margin of the page, someone made a short, barely visible note in ballpoint pen."

I went still, feeling my heart give a heavy, painful thud.

"What note?"

A long pause hung on the other end of the line.

"It's in your handwriting, Michael. Your pressure. Your D."

I sank slowly back into the chair, staring at the open black notebook in front of me.

"What does it say?"

Helen answered almost in a whisper, and for the first time I heard in her voice not paranoia, but deep, genuine pity for me:

"It says: 'It's too late already.'"

I hung up without even saying goodbye. The phone dropped from my fingers onto the table.

I stared at the five-year-old photograph. Then at the plastic camera lying next to it. Then at the fresh ink in my open notebook. And for the first time in this entire insane investigation, a thought crossed my mind that had never even come close before.

What if, all these five years, no one had been trying to erase me by force — from outside, with someone else's hands? What if I myself, with my own hands, had deliberately made sure I'd never remember this past?