Chasing the Dark by Sam Hepburn Page B

stay up too late, but I’d been so engrossed in Doctor Who I hadn’tlooked up. Don’t go there, Joe . I leant my head against the wall and swallowed hard.
    â€˜So this courier . . . when are you sending him?’ I said.
    â€˜Whenever suits . . . unless . . . well, if you had time to bring Ivo’s things to Cambridge I’d be delighted to give you lunch in college. I’d pay your travel costs, of course.’ His voice was getting gruffer and I knew what was coming. ‘It might help you to talk to someone who understands what you’re going through.’
    No, it wouldn’t. No way. But if I went to Cambridge I could go on picking his brain about Ivo.
    â€˜OK. Yeah. Thanks. How about tomorrow?’
    â€˜Unfortunately I’m teaching all day. How are you fixed for the day after?’
    My breathing got calmer as we discussed normal stuff like train times. But my brain was still playing up – flooding one minute, stalling the next.
    â€˜Excellent, that’s settled then. But Joe …’
    â€˜Yeah?’
    â€˜The sooner you forget these crazy notions, the sooner you’ll begin to move on.’
    He rang off. I tapped into Ivo Lincoln’s files.
    What? That couldn’t be right.
    Lincoln had only got six saved documents. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and opened the first one. It was an insurance claim form, downloaded on 4 March, the morning of the crash, for stuff he’d had stolen the day before. I scrolled through it.
    Name: Ivo Horatio (you’re kidding me) Lincoln
    Place of theft: Oselya Guest House, Strizhavka, Ukraine
    Items stolen: Apple Mac laptop, Samsung camera, leather bag, books
    I was gutted. Everything he’d written in Ukraine would be on the stolen laptop. He must have bought this one as soon as he got back. The other documents were all letters to banks, building societies and credit card companies, trying to sort out his money. Not a whiff of any heavy-duty investigations. Not a mention of Mum or Yuri.
    I tried the Bitsy password on his emails, felt my heart speed up when it worked and started scrolling through his messages. Now I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but Jes-us this guy was boring – and so were his mates. No jokes, no funny YouTube clips, just dreary press releases about nuclear energy and the ‘struggle for justice’ in places I couldn’t pronounce.
    Maybe I was crazy. Maybe Mum getting killed in Ivo Lincoln’s car and Yuri having Lincoln’s number was just one of those wacky coincidences you read about on the internet, you know – random man answers public phone on crowded station and it’s his long-lost brother calling. For all I knew, Yuri could turn out to be Polish, Hungarian or Swedish, which would blast the Ukrainian connection to rubble. I picked up the scrap of newspaper with Ivo’s phone number on it. There was a tiny line of print above the scribble. I squinted hard, trying to make it out.
    Ð¤aKTЫ И KOMMeHTapИИ.
    Letter by letter, I checked the words against a site listing foreign alphabets. It was Russian all right. Spelled out in English it said Fakty i Kommentarii – which, according to Wikipedia, was the biggest-selling tabloid in Ukraine. I was right. Yuri was Ukrainian! It might not sound like much of a breakthrough but I felt like I’d bought a winning scratch card.
    Tyres crunched on the drive. Doreen was home. I logged off, scooped up Lincoln’s stuff and bolted to my room. Halfway there I realised I’d left his notebook behind and I was heading back to get it when the phone rang. I heard Doreen come in the back door and pick up in the kitchen. I’d thought it might be the Professor calling back but it was obviously someone for Doreen. She was putting on her poshest voice and letting out chirps of fake laughter between comments like, ‘Yes, indeed, Mr