Molly follows the bald man in the pinstripes out West. It takes a minute to convince her driver that it isn't some kind of a prank; in the end, with her target disappearing down the street, she has to pull out her purse and peel off a couple of twenty pound notes from the roll she's been carrying since last night. The money she'd got for Danny.
When they stop at the lights, a few cars behind the first cab, she catches her cabbie's quizzical eye in the rear-view mirror. "He's my uncle - it's kind of a surprise party thing," Molly says. "It's not going very well." She can tell he knows it's a lie, but it seems like it's just enough that she made the effort. He switches on the easy listening radio and leaves her alone with her thoughts.

She's thinking about the man in the raincoat. She has a good idea who he is; she just needs to confirm it. Her phone has an internet connection, and she finds him on an image search engine in less than a minute. She had typed in: "Martin Drake police".

He's with Scotland Yard. Going by the search results, he's a success. Most of the pictures on the net are connected with newspaper stories about his triumphs - high-profile cases that he's cracked. £20M DRUG RING SMASHED. GUILTY PLEA IN CANAL MURDER. A series of promotions and commendations from his approving bosses.

Molly thinks he's working for someone else. She puts it together: he's sending coded emails to a mystery man somewhere, talking about documents that need to be recovered. He's spending his Sunday doing deals with hackers, trying to get them back. Now he's handed what he thinks are those files to a third party, and Molly doesn't think that third party is with the police.

It's possible he's after Damocles – as far as Molly can tell, nobody else knows that Danny was the whole of the group. He could be working undercover to trap the rest of the phantom hacker network, trying to draw her out. But the pattern doesn't feel right to her.
I just need to find out where the files are going, she thinks. That's going to tell me who I'm dealing with. She needs to know just how scared she ought to be.

* * *

The black cab carrying the bald man ends up in Ealing. He gets out in front of an office building on the Uxbridge Road: a perfectly ordinary four-storey block, not obviously different from the others that flank it on either side. Molly asks her driver to cruise a little way past before stopping. She jumps out, thanks him, and waves away her change. She watches as her quarry walks up the steps into the lobby and disappears from view, then follows.
The brass plate by the door says she's come to a solicitors' office: HARRIS, RENFIELD & CHURCH. Looking through the glass she can see a desk with a uniformed receptionist behind it. She's not going to be able to snoop around without some good reason to be there.

I suppose I'm going to need a lawyer, Molly thinks.

She's spent the last couple of years trying to run a computer games business, which as a minor isn't particularly straightforward - everything has to be in her dad's name, for one, and her dad isn't usually in a position to give her advice on tax law. He's much more interested in how pieces of clockwork fit together, which is something Molly honestly can't blame him for. So Molly has a cheerful and extremely competent solicitor of her own, a semi-retired man in Hertfordshire called Alfred Lewis, who keeps everything running smoothly. Molly's his only client, these days. About the only problem Alf hasn't been able to sort out for her was the trouble last year; and for that, there was Danny to help.

She sits at a nearby café with her phone and checks the Harris, Renfield and Church website. It looks like they handle the same kinds of business that Alf does, so she calls and makes an appointment for tomorrow, explaining that her solicitor is retiring and that she needs to find someone to take over. She's in luck: they can see her first thing in the morning.
On her way back to north London, Molly contemplates burglary.

* * *

Later, around midnight, she's lying in bed, still turning the problem over in her head. What she's going to do is dangerous. She's going to need help. The question is where to find it.

She likes her own company; she likes to sit at her desk in her beautifully-ordered black-and-white space and chew over puzzles. She has a few good friends at school, but she can't actually remember the last time she met up with any of them in the evenings or weekends. She doesn't go to the movies with them, doesn't go shopping with them – she buys her plain, monochrome clothes off websites and out of catalogues. They meet up in school corridors and bus stops, and as friendly as they are with each other, there's always distance between them. Molly's got three A levels already: no matter how normal she seems, she has to wear that like a brand.

The reason Molly liked spending time with Danny was that they were both freaks, birds of a feather. She didn't have to apologise for geeking out, or pretend that she's interested in the X Factor. She hates Martin Drake, and the people she suspects of running him, for taking him away from her.

Danny had found her through Acenet, so Molly thinks the answer is to put the word out there. She's looking for people like her - people with specific, expert skills. People who won't mind doing something a little bit dangerous, if it means avenging one of their own. When she has had a little look around Harris, Renfield and Church, she's going to need them to help her break their security.

The best way to get into someone's systems, Danny once told her, was just to ask. It was amazing, he'd said, the number of people who would simply give you their password if you asked for it. He used to spend hours on the phone calling up people at the companies he'd targeted. Hi, this is Joe in IT. There's a problem with your computer - it's not showing up on the network, he'd say, doing his best to sound like he wasn't fifteen. Let's see if we can log you back in . . . And your password is? Almost everyone simply rattled it off.
Molly's not sure that will work with Harris, Renfield and Church; it's a smallish company, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone who works there. She'll need to get access to their computers some other way; luckily, Danny has left her with a suite of cunning tools that might well do the job. But if they don't, she is will need a Plan B, and that will mean going places in their offices that she isn't allowed to be. She doesn't want to do that alone.

First thing in the morning, I'll get in touch with Legba, see who he has on the books, she thinks. The Acenet administrator had always been useful in the past. Molly has her plans, now; there's nothing left to worry about for one day. She relaxes a little, reaches out to pet Stanley, who is snoozing beside her on her pillow, and before she knows it, she's asleep.

The next instalment of Root will be available on Wednesday
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