Read Chapter 13: Aftermath

The flat smelled of dust and somebody else's life. Jack's brother kept it spare—a sofa that had seen better decades, a kitchen table with a wonky leg he'd propped up with a folded coaster, and nothing on the walls except a faded poster for a band Elena vaguely recognized from her university years. It wasn't much, but it was theirs for now.

Jack set two bottles of beer on the table, condensation already beading. He twisted the cap off his own and drank deep before speaking.

"Sarah wasn't just the club doctor," he said, voice rough from the night's earlier shouting. "She was my source."

Elena stopped mid-reach for her bottle. "Your source on what?"

"Player health." He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Three years ago, I started getting these headaches. Training days, match days. Blurred vision sometimes, like the world had gone soft around the edges. The club physios kept telling me it was dehydration, fatigue, stress—standard footballer nonsense. I went to Sarah privately, off the books, and she ran real tests."

"And?"

"And it was a concussion protocol violation from two seasons back that someone had quietly buried in my file." His jaw tightened. "The club had known about a second impact I took in training and never reported it properly. If I'd kept playing without treatment, I could have done permanent damage."

Elena's fingers tightened around her bottle. "Jesus."

"Yeah." Jack finally looked at her, and she saw something raw in his eyes—not fear, exactly. A kind of exhausted anger. "Sarah flagged it. She threatened to go to the FA if they didn't correct the record. They corrected it fast enough, but she never trusted the club's medical wing again after that. She kept her own files. And she kept an eye on things other people didn't want watched."

"Like Adam Foster's sale."

"Like that." Jack nodded slowly. "Adam came to her six weeks before the transfer window. He was having heart palpitations, shortness of breath. She ran a full cardiac workup—found nothing conclusive, but she was worried enough to flag him for further testing. That's when she noticed the file had been accessed. The original one, from his youth academy medical."

"Accessed by who?"

"She never got a name. Just a timestamp and a system log showing someone with admin clearance had pulled it and made an edit." He drank again. "Two days later, the transfer was fast-tracked. Adam's agent started talking about 'medical issues' that had to be resolved before any deal could go through. Someone was setting the table for a discounted sale, and they needed a paper trail to justify it."

Elena pulled out her phone, scrolling to the notes she'd taken from Frank's USB. "The money trail Frank found—it goes through a shell company in Jersey, and from there to a holding account that traces back to someone connected to you."

"Connected to me. Not to the club."

"Right. Which is why I thought it might be Ricky." She said it gently, watching his face. "He's your agent. He controls your image, your contracts. He has access to your schedule, your private conversations, everything."

"And he'd sell me out for what? Adam's transfer fee?" Jack shook his head. "Ricky's greedy, sure. All agents are. But he's been with me since I was seventeen. He took me on when nobody else would touch a kid from a council estate with a temper problem. Whatever else he is, he's not stupid enough to torch his biggest client over one transfer."

Elena thought about the recording again. The way the audio captured Jack's voice so cleanly, no background noise, no distortion—as if whoever had recorded it had been sitting right there in the room with him. "Who else could have gotten that recording? You said you only discussed quitting with three people."

"Ricky. Marcus—"

"Wait." Elena sat forward. "Marcus? As in my editor Marcus Webb?"

Jack blinked. "Your editor's called Marcus?"

"Yes. Marcus Webb. The man who's threatening to run the recording in the morning unless I prove it's fake."

They stared at each other across the table. The wonky leg wobbled as Jack shifted his weight.

"Your Marcus is a different person from my Marcus," he said slowly. "Mine's Marcus Feld, the club's head of communications. Been there for years. He's the one who handles media fallout when I do something stupid."

Elena's pulse quickened. Two Marcuses, both connected to the same story, both handling the flow of information around her. It could be coincidence—the name was common enough. But her journalist's instincts were screaming now, the same way they'd screamed when she first saw Frank's grainy photographs.

"I need to check something." She pulled up her phone's call log, scrolling to the missed call from earlier that evening. "I had a voicemail from my editor around eight. I never listened to it—everything went sideways after the break-in."

She hit play and put the phone on speaker.

*"Elena, it's Marcus. Look, I know we agreed on twenty-four hours, and I want to give you that, I do. But I've had a call from a colleague at the Mail who's sniffing around West London FC. Says he's got a source inside the club feeding him information about a missing staff member. I need you to tell me you're closer to a story than you were this morning, or I'm going to have to make some hard decisions about the piece."*

The voicemail clicked off. Elena let the silence hang for a moment before setting the phone face-down on the table.

"A source inside the club," Jack repeated. "Feeding information about Sarah."

"To a tabloid." Elena's mind was racing, connecting dots that shouldn't connect but stubbornly did. "Someone's been leaking to the press from day one. The recording, my hotel break-in, now this. Whoever they are, they're not just trying to discredit you—they're trying to control the narrative entirely."

Jack ran a hand through his hair, messing it further. "We need to find Sarah. Before whoever's out there does."

"You said she was meeting your mother."

"Charlotte." He nodded, something complicated passing over his face. "They'd become close over the past year. Sarah was helping her with some health issues—private consultations, nothing on the official record. My mother trusted her completely."

"Did Sarah tell your mother why she was going missing?"

"No. Charlotte only said Sarah had called her in a panic two weeks ago, saying she'd found something she needed to report but couldn't go through official channels. She said she needed a few days to think, to organise her evidence, and then she'd come back and talk to Charlotte properly."

"And then she vanished."

"Without a trace." Jack's voice cracked slightly. "I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure out where she'd go. She doesn't have family in London—she moved here from Lagos eight years ago for the club job. Her closest friend is a GP in Birmingham who hasn't heard from her. Her flat's untouched, mail piled up, lights still on timers."

"Timers?" Elena latched onto the detail. "You've been to her flat?"

"Once. After the first week." He looked guilty. "I know it was stupid. I should have told someone, filed a report, done it properly. But I was scared that if I went to the police, it would surface publicly, and then—"

"Then whoever's behind this would know you were looking." Elena finished his thought. "You were protecting yourself. Protecting the investigation."

"And protecting her." Jack's voice was barely above a whisper. "If they knew she'd told me anything, they might have hurt her before I could find her."

The words hung in the air between them. Outside, a car passed on the street below, its headlights briefly sweeping across the ceiling like searchlights.

"Sarah told me something in her last message," Jack said finally. "She said the answer wasn't in the club. It was in the money. That if I followed the trail far enough, I'd find the person everyone trusted most." He met Elena's eyes. "She knew who it was. She knew the whole time. And she kept it from me deliberately, because she knew I'd try to handle it alone and get myself killed."

"Or she knew you wouldn't believe her." Elena said it softly, carefully. "If it was someone close enough to you that revealing the name would make you defensive, she might have wanted to present you with proof first."

Jack's expression flickered—surprise, then understanding, then something that looked almost like grief. "She wanted to protect me from the truth."

"Until she was sure you could handle it."

He laughed, a hollow sound. "And here I am, hiding in my brother's flat with a journalist I barely know, trying to solve a mystery that's been building for months." He picked up his beer, studied the label. "Some protector I turned out to be."

"You found me," Elena said. "You trusted me. That's not nothing."

Jack was quiet for a long moment. Then he set the bottle down and reached for his phone.

"There's a place Sarah used to talk about. A seaside village in Cornwall—Polperro. She said it reminded her of home, when she was a girl. That she went there sometimes to think, to get away from the club's noise." He scrolled through his messages. "She sent me a postcard from there eighteen months ago. Just a picture of the harbour and a note saying 'come find me here if the world ever gets too loud.'"

"You think she'd go back there?"

"I think if she needed somewhere to think through something dangerous, she'd go somewhere nobody would think to look for a Nigerian doctor from West London." He looked up at Elena. "I think we need to go to Cornwall."

Elena weighed it. Her deadline with Marcus loomed—by morning, the recording would run unless she'd proven it was fabricated. Going to Cornwall meant leaving London, leaving the story's epicentre, trusting that Sarah Okafor would still be there—if she was there at all.

But the trail in London had run cold. Ricky wasn't talking, Marcus Feld wasn't answering, and the surveillance van outside Jack's flat had vanished the moment they'd staged their public argument. Whoever was watching them knew they'd moved locations, and that meant the clock was running faster than ever.

"Okay," she said. "Cornwall."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Just like that?"

"Just like that." She picked up her beer and took a long drink. "We've got twelve hours before Marcus runs that recording. If Sarah knows who's behind this, she's the only one who can get us ahead of it. And if she's in Polperro, hiding out and waiting for the storm to pass—" She set the bottle down with a decisive clink. "Then that's where the answer is."

Jack almost smiled. It was the first time she'd seen anything close to hope on his face since the night had begun.

"One problem," he said. "I don't drive."

Elena stared at him. "You're a Premier League footballer."

"With a chauffeur," he said matter-of-factly. "And a ban from a speeding incident in 2019 that I'm not proud of."

She shook her head, a reluctant laugh escaping her. "Four hours to Cornwall. In the dark. In a borrowed car."

"Scenic route."

"You're impossible."

"So I've been told." He stood, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. "But I'm also right. Sarah's out there, Elena. And I think she's been waiting for someone to come find her."

Elena looked up at him—this stubborn, secretive, impossible man who'd spent weeks burying a conspiracy to protect his club, his mother, and now her. Whatever lay in Cornwall, whatever Sarah Okafor had discovered, they'd face it together.

"Then let's not keep her waiting."