Daniel Sark had sent documentation somewhere. He had recorded it in the notebook. He had sent the notebook to me as a secondary copy, a backup, a safeguard — in case the first transfer failed, in case the documentation didn’t reach whoever he meant it to reach, in case something happened to him before it could.
Which meant the original documentation — whatever he had transferred, wherever he had sent it — was either already in the right hands, or it wasn’t. And I had no way of knowing which.
What I did know was this: Marcus Hale’s name was in that notebook. Marcus Hale’s company had been connected to investigations that were discontinued before they concluded. And Daniel Sark, who had been logging something carefully for eight months, was missing.
I had photographs of forty-seven pages. I had eleven years of experience with financial irregularities and the patterns that people used to obscure them. And I had, for the first time in six months of independent work, a reason to pull a thread that someone had previously told me to leave alone.
I opened my laptop. I made tea. I sat at the table where the package had been and I started at page one of the photographs and I began to read properly.
It took me until two in the morning to reach the end. When I did, I closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a while.
Then I opened it again. Not to read — to write. A name, an address, a series of figures I now understood the significance of. An email drafted to a financial crimes journalist whose work I had followed for years and whose encrypted contact address I had noted once without quite knowing why.
I did not send it that night. I saved it as a draft and went to bed and lay in the dark and thought about Daniel Sark’s bicycle, still in the bike store by the entrance, and about what it meant to send a notebook to a neighbour you barely knew and write, in a different pen at the end: if you’re reading this, it didn’t work.
It meant he had known it might not. It meant he had planned for that possibility. It meant that whatever he had been trying to do, he had wanted someone to be able to continue it.
He had looked at the names in his building and chosen mine.
I sent the email in the morning.
I don’t know yet whether it will work either.
But I know that Daniel Sark was careful and methodical and thorough, and that he chose me because he believed I was too.
I intend to make sure he was right.
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