By the time we’d made it back to town I was already feeling a bit better, but they weren’t about to set me free. Instead they took me to the local medical centre, where a kind nurse gave me a mug of hot onion soup. After a long wait, during which I slowly warmed up, a doctor with a ginger beard examined me from head to toe. I was fine, and kept telling him so, but all he said in reply was, ‘I’ll be the judge. Wait here.’ Then he left me in the consultation room.

  I wasn’t alone for long. Amelia and Xander soon came in. Xander had already begun cutting his drone film with the footage I’d taken on my helmet-cam and, while we waited, we watched it back on his phone.

  The film showed me spearing down a slope that gave way as I went, the snow slab detonating and sliding and rushing to engulf me, while Amelia, still in shot, jinked left through a stand of firs, shooting to safety with – I have to admit it – superb skill. The drone then zoomed in on me, a slam-dunked doll, smacked left and right by tumbling chunks of snow until the powder, surging like white water, overtook everything. I was just visible after the first rush of snow stopped, but the second rubbed me out completely. Although I knew I’d survived, the footage of the avalanche burying me was hard to watch.

  Xander – quick-thinking as always – kept the drone hovering above the spot where I’d disappeared. The film showed Amelia and Xander zigzagging towards me. Cut through it were snatches of the view through my helmet-cam. Once I’d been buried, all it filmed was the awful blueness of the snow, but it had been recording sound as well as visuals. I’d shouted for help more times than I realised.

  And help had come. The drone footage showed Amelia and Xander methodically sweeping the broken snow-slope, searching and stopping and probing and shovelling, a picture of focused activity. I sat in the medical centre and watched my friends dig me from the brink of death. They’d been my back-up when I needed it most, and I knew, if I asked, they’d back me up with Jonny Armfield – the Leopard – too. Was he for real, or was he a threat? With their help, I’d find out.

  4.

  When Mum turned up at the medical centre, she hugged me so hard that it hurt. She thanked the ginger-bearded doctor profusely and he finally declared me fit to go. I could tell she didn’t know how to feel: furious at me for getting myself caught in an avalanche, or relieved that I was OK. Her response was to call Sylvan and arrange to meet him that evening.

  Did she intend to blame him somehow? I had to head that off.

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I said as we waited in the chalet lobby. ‘He briefed us well. I must have missed something. Without his instructions, Xander and Amelia wouldn’t have got to me so fast, if at all. You have to remember that.’

  ‘I just want him to see the footage,’ she replied.

  Sylvan arrived, wearing jeans and a thick knitted jumper. I’d only ever seen him in ski gear before. Without his ski goggles on, the tan-line across his sharp cheeks made him looked panda-eyed. He peered at Xander’s film, right through to the end, biting his lower lip all the while. When it had finished, he puffed out his cheeks. Then he scrolled back to the start and tapped forward, pretty much frame by frame, scrutinising the intercut drone and helmet-cam footage we had recorded before committing to the slope. I waited for his verdict. What danger sign had I missed?

  ‘It was fresh powder, but not too much, and the slope looks steep.’

  ‘Way steeper than the 30–45 degrees you warned us about,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, more sluff than slab avalanche territory, and there’s been no rapid temperature change. Also, you had tree cover to one side.’

  ‘It wasn’t a gully,’ I said. ‘No cornices or pillows … that I could see, at least.’

  ‘No.’ Sylvan sat back and ran a hand through his black curls. ‘And yet, avalanche. It can happen. Very bad luck.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Amelia.

  I realised that I’d been hunched over waiting for his opinion, and squared my shoulders now that he had delivered it.

  ‘That was some nice skiing you did to get out of the way,’ Sylvan said to Amelia.

  She shrugged. ‘Instinct, plus technique.’

  ‘Textbook search-and-dig. Most impressive from the pair of you. And you, Jack, you deployed the inflatable backpack promptly. If not, you could have been buried deeper still.’

  I didn’t like to think about that.

  Sylvan nodded at Xander. ‘You also got what you came for. If at a cost.’

  Xander looked confused.

  ‘Dramatic film for the competition thing.’

  ‘Ha. I suppose so.’

  ‘A silver lining.’ Sylvan patted me on the shoulder. ‘You’re a fortunate guy to have got away with it.’

  ‘That doesn’t quite stack up with the “very bad luck” you just mentioned,’ said Amelia, ‘but I know what you mean, I suppose.’

  There were only a couple more days of the trip left. Although I did ski, I had no appetite for going off-piste. We took it easy, stuck to mostly red runs with the occasional black to keep things interesting. On our last evening, after eating more cheese fondue than you’d think possible, I slumped down on the reindeer-skin covered armchair in the chalet’s pine-panelled lounge and said, ‘I’ve got something on my mind,’ to the only other people there, Amelia and Xander.

  ‘I’ve never understood that expression,’ said Amelia. ‘Why isn’t it something in my mind?’

  Xander ignored her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You remember that dodgy Leopard guy in Somalia?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ Xander replied.

  Amelia rolled her eyes. It had been a stupid question; the man had saved us from a band of child soldiers run by a psychopath called General Sir, though he’d apparently done his share of business with the General before that. None of us would ever forget him.

  ‘Well, his real name is Jonny Armfield, and I want to find out more about him,’ I said.

  My friends exchanged a knowing look. Amelia said, ‘Yeah, we wondered if you might.’

  I think to steer me away from wondering why they’d been talking about me behind my back, Xander said, ‘I want to get to the bottom of what he was doing out there too, for Mo’s sake.’

  Mo was the Somali boy pirate and solider without whose help we’d still probably have been hostages, or dead. Though Mo had subsequently managed to escape the camp himself, Armfield had apparently been prepared to let him rot there.

  ‘In fact, we’ve already begun digging,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Just a bit of online research,’ said Xander. ‘Nothing too involved.’

  I knew this wouldn’t be true. Amelia doesn’t do anything by halves, and Xander prides himself on keeping a step or two ahead of everybody else on tech stuff. I let my silence speak for me and eventually he went on, as I knew he would.

  ‘Armfield doesn’t exactly do social media. And his name doesn’t crop up on any government or corporate websites.’

  ‘You’ve tried all the aliases?’

  ‘Leopold, Leopard, et cetera,’ said Xander. ‘And every variant.’

  ‘Plus his real name,’ Amelia added. ‘Nothing comes up.’

  A log shifted in the open fire, sending sparks up the chimney, bright against the blackened brickwork. Again, I kept quiet, leaving a gap one of them would sooner or later fill.

  ‘But there’s a web behind the web, isn’t there?’ Xander said.

  ‘For the unsavoury and untrustworthy,’ Amelia added.

  Xander shrugged. ‘If you know where to look, the dark web exists. And I’ve made a bit of progress there. Not much, though it’s a lead.’

  This time I couldn’t hold back. ‘A lead pointing which way?’

  5.

  Xander fired up his laptop to show me what he’d found out. The first website he clicked on was for an outfit called GreenSword Investments. It was about as boring as it sounds. A cursory look through the ‘Mission Statement’ and ‘About Us’ pages revealed that the company did what its name suggested. It invested money. What it invested in was all a bit vague, but the gist of it seemed to be energy projects. The good sort that generate power responsibly from renewable sources. They were keen to emphasise that.

  There were lots of stock photographs of wind turbines and dams, and headshots of smiling men and women in suits and high-vis and hard hats, and the text accompanying them was all about commitment to sustainability and protecting the environment while delivering blah blah blah. Mum would have approved. There didn’t seem to be much detail about which projects the company had invested in, but the web designer had used a fair few photos of rainforests and icebergs to give a general sense of what was important to GreenSword.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But what’s this got to do with Armfield? I don’t see him anywhere.’

  ‘No,’ said Xander. ‘But the reason I looked up the company at all was because his name came up in an encrypted chain of messages I unearthed.’

  I knew Xander wouldn’t explain what ‘unearthed’ had entailed. He’s too modest for that. I checked his face and, sure enough, it was as deadpan as ever, his expression showing neither pride nor need of praise.

  ‘Yeah, he’s been in touch with these guys. I haven’t been able to dig back to who contacted who first, but it seems he’s recently agreed to act as some sort of consultant for them.’

  ‘How do you know it’s him?’

  Xander turned to me. ‘There’s such a thing as a digital footprint. If you hook into it, until the target gets wise you can follow pretty much every virtual trail they go down. Whoever I was following trashed their links just after I locked on. Could have been a routine clear-out, or they might have deliberately blocked me. Either way, I think I’m on to something.’

  ‘Can you get another hook into him?’

  ‘I’ll keep trying, but the trail has gone cold for now.’

  ‘What else have you been able to find out about this GreenSword outfit?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘Not much. The website is pretty new. As far as I can see, they haven’t been mentioned on social media.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Amelia. ‘You’d think a new business would want to announce its arrival.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Xander shrugged. ‘It looks to be a privately backed investment fund. They’re not trying to raise money; they’re just on the hunt for good ways of spending it. I’m sure they’ll publicise the deals they do when they do them.’

  That sounded reasonable. The screen lit Xander’s even features with a bluish tint, at odds with the warm glow of the fire. I got up and added a log to the flames, collapsing the husk of ash beneath it. ‘What do the emails say, exactly? Is there any detail about what sort of “consulting” he’s agreeing to do for them?’

  ‘Not much. They mention “reconnaissance” and “security”, though what or who he’s supposed be investigating or protecting is a mystery.’

  ‘For now, you said,’ said Amelia.

  Xander smiled. ‘Yeah, I’m working on it.’

  Mum came into the room as Xander said this, and asked, ‘Working on what?’

  Xander didn’t reply, but Amelia instinctively drew breath to explain. Luckily, she caught my eye and saw me imperceptibly shake my head. I surprised myself doing that. In general, I don’t keep secrets from Mum. But for some reason I didn’t want her to know that I was interested in this Armfield guy. She had wanted me to meet him after he’d helped to end our nightmare in Somalia, but I’d refused. She’d been hoodwinked by the man I called ‘Dad’ but she clearly trusted this Armfield bloke; it had hurt her when I wouldn’t meet with him. I didn’t want to get her hopes up until I was sure he was legit.

  ‘The film,’ said Xander smoothly. ‘Although it’s not quite the On the Brink angle we’d hoped for, it’s undeniably dramatic. I’m going to edit it properly and we’re going to submit it to the competition anyway. It’s worth a shot.’

  Though I didn’t like him lying to her, what he said was partly true. We had talked about producing a proper edit of the film. Since I was still kneeling beside the fire, I prodded a swarm of sparks from it with the poker. They disappeared up the chimney, taking my guilt with them: at least I hadn’t lied to her myself, I suppose.

  6.

  As it happened, it was Amelia who found out more about GreenSword Investments ahead of Xander, and not by snooping online. She read it in a newspaper. The Financial Times, no less. She wasn’t even looking specifically; she speed-reads that most boring of papers – as well as most of the other broadsheets – in her local library all the time, and has done since she was about eight. Less than a week after we got back to England, she came upon a short article mentioning the new company, buried among the other stultifying business news on the paper’s pink pages.

  We were in my kitchen drinking banana and blueberry smoothies when she told us this news. Mum was out, so I’d not washed the blender or binned the banana skins yet. The mess was spread between us on the kitchen island we were sitting at.

  ‘It doesn’t say much; the company’s name is just mentioned among a number of prospective investors in next-generation energy projects that are being considered by the Nordic states,’ she explained, tilting her phone so that Xander and I could see the photo she’d taken.

  She was right – the article itself was little more than a paragraph and the words ‘GreenSword Investments’ were buried in the middle of it, with a bunch of other company names. How she spotted it turning the pages at the rate she does, I had no idea.

  Xander jabbed his straw into the bottom of his glass, sucked up the last of his smoothie and sat back. ‘It’s something to go on, at least,’ he said. ‘I’ll look into all the companies mentioned and see if I can find out what these “next-generation projects” are all about.’

  ‘The more detail the better,’ I said. ‘I want to know as much as I can before I meet the guy. That way, I’ll be able to tell if he lies to me.’

  ‘Back up a bit,’ said Xander. ‘You’re meeting him?’

  I looked out of the window at the willow; it’s always the first tree in the garden to sprout leaves, but the buds hadn’t developed yet. The tree’s thin bare branches were lashing about in the wind. It was a harsh day. Trying to sound as nonchalant as I could, I said, ‘Yeah, I thought I would.’

  Amelia narrowed her eyes. ‘That doesn’t compute.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought the idea was to see what he gets up to when he doesn’t know he’s being watched. If you let on that we’re cyberstalking him, he’ll get more secretive still.’

  ‘I’m not about to let on though, am I?’

  ‘If you turn up asking questions, don’t you think he’ll guess?’

  I hadn’t told Amelia or Xander my deeper reason for wanting to know more about Armfield. Like them, I was keen to find out what he’d really been up to among the child soldiers of Somalia. We all felt for Mo and the other kids we’d been held alongside in the training camp. Armfield had helped us get out – for a fee, we assumed, though Mum later disputed that. Either way, because of him, many more kids had gone to the frontline. We’d seen him buying them for the war with our very own eyes. On the face of it, the guy was pure evil: he needed exposing.

  Amelia and Xander knew he’d delivered us to Mum. But they didn’t know what she’d tried to tell me: that the man was in fact my biological father. They didn’t know he’d written to me asking to meet, either. And I wasn’t about to tell them. Not unless he turned out to be for real. I’d tell them everything then.

  For now, I just said, ‘Look, I may not have your speed-reading skills, Amelia, or your ability to navigate the dark web, Xander, but I have a brain. Armfield got in touch with Mum when we were being held hostage. She’s no idiot either. She’ll have kept a record. I know the password for her laptop and I can check her contacts file. I’m pretty sure I’ll find a number for him.’

  In the pause that followed this little speech, Amelia and Xander looked at one another. Before either of them could say anything, a hollow whump sounded outside the kitchen window. It was just the empty wheelie bin being blown over by the wind, but it made me jump. I was wound pretty tight. And I knew why. It wasn’t just that I was going behind Mum’s back with my plan; I’d only been half truthful to Amelia and Xander as well, and that didn’t feel right either. It was what it was though. I got up from the island and headed for the back door, saying, ‘Better sort that before the wind blows it out into the road.’

  7.

  I didn’t actually have to snoop around Mum’s laptop for Armfield’s contact details; they were on the note he’d sent me when we returned from East Africa. I’d kept it, of course. That evening I texted him: if the offer still stands, I’d actually be on for meeting. He wouldn’t necessarily recognise my mobile number so I added jack courtney.

  Sure: London, Thursday? came his instant reply.

  narrow it down a bit I texted back.

  Steps in front of National Gallery, 14.00.

  i’ll be there

  It takes less than an hour to get into Central London from where Mum and I live in the Surrey hills, but the train I boarded was one of those rattly local ones that stopped frequently and seemed to have a problem getting back up to speed every time it pulled out of a station. It was another bleak day: purple-brown clouds dumped heavy rain on the grey fields as we inched along. The wind, thrashing the rain against the train windows, made it feel rattlier still.

  I reread the message Xander had sent me that morning. He’d uncovered some more detail about the Nordic next-generation power project thing. I’d been through it all carefully already; I wanted to have the details at my fingertips before my meeting with Armfield. At the rate my train was going, I started to worry that I’d miss him. But I’d built in some extra time for the journey, and not just in case I got delayed; I wanted a chance to get to the National Gallery ahead of Armfield to find a spot where I could wait and watch for his arrival.