Lucas Harper

Who they are

Lucas Harper is seventeen, the son of Clare Addison and the late Min Harper, and he has been missing three days when his mother cold-calls Louisa Guy out of the blue in a Soho café. He took a few hundred pounds from his savings and a small rucksack; he left his phone at home and kept his Fitbit. He has run off before, after his father left and died, and there was trouble once over cannabis. He has a brother, Andrew, two years younger, and the family has holidayed in Pembrokeshire since Lucas was two, where he has done cash-in-hand catering work over Christmas.

The detail that should have worried everyone is what he said before he went: that he was no longer worried about a student loan. That is a boy who believes he has money coming. What he had was something he had seen at a corporate party at Caerwyss Hall shortly before New Year, and a plan to sell his silence for fifty thousand pounds — a plan that reached the men he was selling it to, who passed the problem upwards to a nation state and a crew of hired professionals.

He is not a spy, and the book never makes him one. He is a teenager who knows a town from childhood holidays, knows which garage leaves a customer’s keys on a rear wheel, and spends most of his page-time cold, hungry, and certain that people are dying because of him.

What they want

First money, then not to be found, then to be believed. By the shed above the estuary what he wants is to tell someone what he saw and be told it was not his fault; the nearest he gets is Louisa saying it would not have gone well, because there were five of them and they were drunk.

Book 6 — Joe Country

• C02 — His disappearance is what pulls Louisa off her leave: three days gone, savings withdrawn, a rucksack, and a remark about a student loan that his mother repeats without being able to explain it.
• C05 — The one piece of technology he would not leave behind starts working against him: he abandoned his phone but kept the Fitbit, which is internet-enabled and still on his wrist.
• C07 — The other side of his story arrives before his own does: a catering boy at Caerwyss Hall saw too much, asked for fifty thousand pounds, and the problem was referred to people who kill for a living.
• C09 — In his own head at last: the handover at the crossroads went wrong, the man knew his name, a car tried to run him down, and he breaks into the family’s old holiday cottage to hide.
• C11 — He tells it in the shed: five men in evening dress, a crossbow in a cobbled yard, a girl in a silver dress tied to the target with a pumpkin taped to her head, a bolt taking flesh from her arm, and a royal watching. Louisa supplies the reason he never went to the police.
• C13 — Emma Flyte’s body ends the flight: he sees her under the bushes, bolts into town, steals a car from a garage lane and puts it through a craft-shop window.
• C14 — He is alive and on the phone to Louisa; officially the deaths in Wales never happened, and Peter Judd reports that the boy has “memory-wiped himself” — the last word the book gives on what he now remembers.

Tells

• The Fitbit. Everything else he leaves behind; the wristband he keeps, and it is what finds him.
• “He knew my name. The guy at the crossroads.” His account of the failed handover is delivered as one fact, and it is the fact that undoes him.
• Local knowledge as tradecraft he did not know he had: the lane that leads nowhere, the key on the rear wheel, the shortcuts between houses.
• “The thought Emma was dead kept time with his feet; he believed she had died because of him.” Guilt is the thing that makes him run in the wrong direction.

Open questions

• What became of the girl in the silver dress, shot in the arm and led away weeping, is never answered.
• Whether the fifty thousand pounds was ever paid, and by whom, is left open; the sum exists only as a demand.
• The memory-wipe is reported by Judd and never staged. What Lucas actually remembers by the end is not shown.