The Hard Way

Health and Social Security. The nanny state at work.” He entered Anthony Jackson’s name and address and then added a complex keyboard command and the screen rolled down and came back with three separate names and a mass of figures. “Anthony Jackson is thirty-nine years old and his wife Susan is thirty-eight. Her maiden name was indeed Taylor. They have one child, a daughter, age eight, and they seem to have saddled her with the unfortunate name of Melody.”
    “That’s a nice name,” Pauling said.
    “Not for Norfolk. I don’t suppose she’s happy at school.”
    Reacher asked, “Have they been in Norfolk long? Is that where the Taylors are from? As a family?”
    The guy scrolled up the screen. “The unfortunate Melody seems to have been born in London, which would suggest not.” He exited the plain DOS site and opened another. “The Land Registry,” he said. He entered the address. Hit another
submit
command. The screen redrew. “No, they bought the place in Bishops Pargeter just over a year ago. Sold a place in south London at the same time. Which would suggest they’re city folk heading back to the land. It’s a common fantasy. I give them another twelve months or so before they get tired of it.”
    “Thank you,” Reacher said. “We appreciate your help.”
    He picked up the guy’s blunt pencil from the desk and took Patti Joseph’s envelope out of his pocket and wrote
Anthony, Susan, Melody Jackson, Grange Farm, Bishops Pargeter, Norfolk
on it. Then he said, “Maybe you could forget all about this if the guy from New York calls again.”
    “Money at stake?”
    “Lots of it.”
    “First come, first served,” the guy said. “The early bird catches the worm. And so on and so forth. My lips are sealed.”
    “Thank you,” Reacher said again. “What do we owe you?”
    “Oh, nothing at all,” the guy said. “It was my pleasure entirely. Always happy to help a fellow professional.”

----

    Back on the street Pauling said, “All Lane has to do is check Taylor’s apartment and find the phone and he’s level with us. He could get back to a different guy in London. Or call someone in New York. Those reverse directories are available on-line.”
    “He won’t find the phone,” Reacher said. “And if he did, he wouldn’t make the connection. Different skill set. Mirror on a stick.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Not entirely. So I took the precaution of erasing the number.”
    “That’s called taking an unfair advantage.”
    “I want to make sure I get the money.”
    “Should we just go ahead and call Susan Jackson?”
    “I was going to,” Reacher said. “But then you mentioned Hobart and his sister and now I’m not so sure. Suppose Susan is as protective as Dee Marie? She’d just lie to us about anything she knows.”
    “We could say we were buddies passing through.”
    “She’d check with Taylor before she told us anything.”
    “So what next?”
    “We’re going to have to go up there ourselves. To Bishops Pargeter, wherever the hell that is.”

CHAPTER 59
    OBVIOUSLY THEIR HOTEL didn’t even come close to offering concierge service so Reacher and Pauling had to walk down to Marble Arch to find a car rental office. Reacher had neither a driver’s license nor a credit card so he left Pauling to fill in the forms and kept on going down Oxford Street to look for a bookstore. He found a big place that had a travel section in back with a whole shelf of motoring atlases of Britain. But the first three he checked didn’t show Bishops Pargeter at all. No sign of it anywhere. It wasn’t in the index.
Too small,
he figured.
Not even a dot on the map.
He found London and Norfolk and Norwich. No problem with those places. He found market towns and large villages. But nothing smaller. Then he saw a cache of Ordnance Survey maps. Four shelves, low down, against a wall. A whole series. Big folded sheets, meticulously drawn, government sponsored. For hikers, he guessed. Or for serious geography freaks. There was a choice of scales. Best was a huge thing that showed detail all the way down to some individual buildings. He pulled all the Norfolk sheets off the shelf and tried them one by one. He found Bishops Pargeter on the fourth attempt. It was a crossroads hamlet about thirty miles south and west of the Norwich outskirts. Two minor roads met. Not even the roads themselves showed up on the motoring atlases.
    He bought the map for detail and the cheapest atlas for basic orientation.