Dark Tidings

Chapter 44 - An Information Haystack

The resources dedicated to the manhunt would frighten any sane prey. Agents were assigned to every sighting of the old man and his accomplice; every sighting was fully investigated. They'd already tracked most of the Aethelred coins back to 'Buy your Gold' stores or small antique shops and in each place they'd tried to establish where the old man had gone to and where he had come from. No stone was left unturned but there were stones by the lorry load. CCTV images, witness statements and intuition added to the mix. Gradually Robinson reconstructed the route Tung and Madrick had followed to the Ritz. He also pieced together everything the pair had done during their stay there... booze and beef mainly.

A couple of lucky breaks helped complete the trail back to the beach houses on the coast. Each hut was given the once-over treatment revealing yet more evidence; random magic debris and more Aethelreds.

They thought they'd hit gold when they found an old man hiding in one of the huts. It only took a short interrogation, and four broken fingers, to figure out that the man was just a vagrant taking shelter. He'd nothing to do with the thieves.

That's when the trail went completely dead. Robinson concluded it must have been where the time-travellers had landed. That made sense. Occultus Populous archives showed the huts were relatively near the point where the thieves had disappeared nearly a thousand years earlier.

Every shred of information was gathered and collated. It added up to the mountain of evidence but so what? It was all very well to know where these people had been; what really mattered was where they'd gone. That's why he'd allocated even more agents (and agencies) to follow their route from the Ritz.

He had names, gleaned from the hotel register... Tung and Madrick Tide; father and son apparently. Were these people really related? Were these their real names? As soon as he heard the names he'd suspected they were false.

"Tung Tide. Say it out loud."

"Right, 'tongue tied', that's got to be a joke."

Tung could have told him about the origin of his name. It was a joke but it was also, sadly for him, his real name.

Regardless of whether the names were real or fake, at least he now had labels for his prey. He was sure they were false identities but he ran them through every database he could access nonetheless. There were no matching entries. Nothing. Nada. Nilch. No surprise there.

His agents interviewed all the staff at the Ritz. Like everything else it was time consuming but it helped build a picture of two men who were clearly out of place in this hotel, never mind this century. Only one worthwhile lead emerged from these enquiries. It related to a night when the thieves had partied with another man and woman. The group had retired to their suite and the unknown couple had stayed overnight. Not momentous in itself but the man had returned on a number of occasions and he'd been with them when they checked out of the hotel. Was this man in league with them? This guy was clearly from the twenty-first century; young, modern with a trendy beard and moustache. That meant there'd be records. This guy would have an electronic trail... everyone had an electronic trail. This was the breakthrough he'd been waiting for.

He stared at the pictures of Tung, Madrick and the modern man; images gleaned from the wealth of CCTV coverage from the hotel and various camera systems in the area. Leading experts had sifted and analysed the footage and he held the results of their work in his hands. Top quality photographs of the bad guys, along with accurate heights and weights. Better still, some of the CCTV images showed the modern man using a mobile phone. They'd cross referenced the exact time and location against databases from all the mobile phone companies. Laborious but it had given them a shortlist of potential names which they could filter using the other intelligence which was accumulating. His teams continued gathering information and his analysts kept analysing it. Their perseverance eventually identified Michael Phillips as the third man.