Chapter Three — The Paper

The paper contained only an address.

There was no name.

No telephone number.

No explanation.

Just a house number and a street in Seacroft.

Frank Salters read it twice.

Then a third time.

He knew Seacroft well enough to understand what the address meant and, more importantly, what it did not mean. It was not a fashionable part of Leeds and it was not a place where Daniel Mercer, judging from everything they knew about him, had any obvious reason to be at that hour. Mercer lived on the other side of the city and worked among people who spent their days discussing investments, property and money. His clothes were expensive without being ostentatious. His shoes were polished. His telephone contained the usual accumulation of business correspondence, photographs and meaningless messages which modern people carry with them as though the contents of a machine might somehow constitute a life.

Yet the address in Seacroft had been hidden inside his coat.

Salters sat alone in the examination room while the rain tapped against the windows.

He placed the photograph of the address beside the photograph of Mercer.

For nearly twenty minutes he did nothing.

Then he smiled.

It was the first smile he had given since arriving.

"The question," he murmured, "is not why did Daniel Mercer have Keith Pennington's address."

He looked at the photograph again.

"The question is why did somebody want us to find it?"