Read the opening chapter free. The Vantage team takes a case on a private island off Devon. A stolen algorithm. Twelve guests. One file that should be twelve pages thick and contains exactly one.
The brief was simple. The brief was wrong.
What follows is the opening of Nothing To See Here, the first case in A Vantage Mystery. Twelve guests. A private island off the Devon coast. A stolen algorithm worth billions. And a host who has been planning this six months longer than anyone knows.
If this is the first you’ve heard of Vantage: read the prologue. Then read Chapter One. By the time the boat arrives at the island, you’ll understand why readers finish the book in a sitting.
Prologue
The flat was rented under a name that didn’t matter. Third floor, east-facing, a view of nothing worth describing. The furniture had come with the lease. So had the curtains, which were closed.
She worked at the kitchen table because the desk in the second bedroom was positioned near a window, and windows were a habit she’d broken years ago. The table held a laptop, a phone with no contacts saved to its memory, and a manila folder containing eleven pages of documentation on a man named Marcus Hale.
She had been watching Hale for four months. Not personally. She didn’t watch anyone personally anymore. But the system she maintained, the network of alerts and public filings and financial monitoring that she ran from this flat and two others like it, had flagged him in November. His company’s Q3 filing contained an acquisition disclosure that didn’t match the public narrative. A data science firm called Lumen Analytics had been absorbed. The founder, a Dr Maren Lund, had been compensated at a figure that was either generous or insulting depending on whether you believed the algorithm Parallax subsequently launched was Lund’s work or Parallax’s own.
She believed it was Lund’s work. She had read the original research, published under Lund’s name in an academic journal eighteen months before the acquisition. The Parallax patent application filed six months later contained seventeen passages identical to Lund’s methodology section, changed only in terminology.
Corporate predation was common and none of her concern. Algorithms were stolen the way land was stolen: slowly, legally, with paperwork that made the theft look like a transaction. What concerned her was what had happened since.
She opened the folder. Page six. A name she had circled in red: Theo Kazan.
Kazan was a specific kind of problem. He had been a journalist. Now he was a consultant, which meant he had stopped telling the truth publicly and started selling it privately. He had discovered the provenance of Hale’s algorithm and was using that knowledge as leverage. The payments were quarterly, large enough to matter, never so large they forced action.
Kazan had leverage on at least three other people in Hale’s orbit. She had identified two with certainty and suspected a third. The web was dense enough that someone would eventually do something irreversible.
She turned to page nine. Hale’s annual retreat. A private island off the Devon coast. Twelve guests. Five days. No external communications. The guest list included Kazan.
Hale was planning something. The retreat had been moved forward by two months from its usual September date, and the guest list had been revised three times. The final revision added Kazan, who had never attended before. You didn’t invite your blackmailer to a private island unless you intended to change the terms of the arrangement.
She closed the folder. Sat with it.
She had been maintaining the system, waiting. The team had handled six routine cases without her involvement. Corporate disputes, insurance investigations, the ordinary work that paid the bills and built the reputation. Competence she trusted. This case needed to test something else: their willingness to dismantle a premise they’d already accepted. To look at a completed investigation and recognise it as a shell around a different investigation entirely.
She picked up the phone. Not the one on the table. A second phone, from the drawer beside the stove. She would use it once and then destroy it. She dialled a number she had memorised and not written down.
It rang four times.
“Yes?” A man’s voice. Cautious, in the way of someone who had given this number to very few people and was trying to determine which of them was calling.
“Mr. Hale. You don’t know me. I’m calling because you have a problem you haven’t solved, and I know a firm that can help you with the problem you’re going to tell them about, and the problem you’re not.”
Silence on the line. She let it hold. Silence sorted people. The ones who filled it were trying to control the conversation. The ones who let it sit were trying to understand it.
Hale let it sit.
“Who is this?” he said.
“A friend of the firm.”
“Which firm?”
“Vantage.” She spelled it. He wouldn’t need the spelling, but he would use it anyway. Men like Marcus Hale checked everything twice when they felt they were not in control, and she had taken his control the moment she used a number he hadn’t given her. “They handle situations like yours. Discreetly. Before the situation becomes a different kind of situation.”
“I’m not aware of any situation.”
“You’ve moved your retreat forward by two months. You’ve added someone to the guest list who has no professional reason to attend. You contracted a private security firm to monitor your island’s perimeter during the event, then cancelled three days later because you realised perimeter monitoring wouldn’t solve the problem you actually have.” She paused. “You need someone inside the retreat. Someone who can find what was taken and understand why it was taken. Vantage does that.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“How do you know about the security firm?”
“I know about the security firm the same way I know about the algorithm. The same way I know about Kazan.” She said the name cleanly, without emphasis. “You’re managing a situation that has more moving parts than you think it does, Mr. Hale. Vantage will see the parts you can’t.”
She heard him breathe. Once. Twice.
“If I contact them,” he said, “what do I say about this call?”
“You say a friend of the firm recommended them. Nothing else. They won’t push for more.”
“You seem very certain about what they will and won’t do.”
“I am.”
She ended the call. Placed the phone on the table beside the folder. In the morning she would remove the SIM card, break the handset, and dispose of both in separate locations. Procedure. The difference between a system that lasted and a system that was discovered.
She stood. Went to the window. Did not open the curtains but stood beside them, close enough to feel the cold radiating from the glass. Outside, the city continued. Traffic. Streetlights. The ordinary assumption that the things it was told were true.
The folder on the table held eleven pages on Marcus Hale. In the drawer beneath it, in a locked box she opened once a month, were other folders. Other names. Cases that would come in time, when this first test had been passed and the next capacity needed building. The system required faith in a design drawn by someone else, years ago. The person who had drawn it was dead.
She returned to the table. Closed the folder. Wrote a single word on the cover in the same red ink she used for everything: Sent.
Then she turned off the light.
In the morning, Hale would call Vantage.
She slept.
Chapter One: A Friend of the Firm
The intake file arrived at eleven minutes past nine on a Tuesday, which meant someone had paid for urgency.
Vantage’s standard intake took seventy-two hours. Emergency intake took twenty-four. The kind where the file landed on her desk before she’d finished her first coffee, with a departure time already printed on the brief, took serious money. Money that expected the world to rearrange itself around its schedule.
She opened the file. Read the brief.
Private island. Tech billionaire’s annual retreat. Twelve guests, skeleton crew, boats moored offshore. A proprietary algorithm, the foundational technology of a data analytics company called Parallax, had been stolen. Exported to an external server from inside the island’s private network sometime in the past forty-eight hours. The host wanted it found before the retreat ended and the guests returned to the mainland with their phones, their laptops, and the ability to contact anyone.
Standard sealed-environment corporate crisis. She’d done a dozen of these. But something in the brief snagged. The file included a casualty addendum. One of the island’s skeleton crew had been found unconscious near the server building two nights ago. Head trauma, consistent with a fall. Medevacked to the mainland. The addendum described it as “unrelated to the data breach.”
The host’s name was Marcus Hale. Nadia had heard of him the way you heard of people who existed several tax brackets above your own experience: as a fact rather than a person. He’d built Parallax from a research lab in Shoreditch into something discussed at Davos and valued in the low billions. The photograph in the file showed a man who looked like his own press release: silver-streaked hair, a jaw described as “decisive” by a profile writer who should have been embarrassed, and the expression of someone who had been photographed so often they’d stopped having a face and started having a presentation.
She looked up. James was at his desk, already reading a copy of the same file. He read with a pen in his hand, which was how she knew he was taking it seriously. James Osei-Mensah took everything seriously, but the pen was the tell. It meant he was already building the architecture of an investigation in the margins, numbering questions, drawing the small neat arrows that connected observations to hypotheses.
“Thoughts?” she said.
James didn’t look up. “Three things. First, the algorithm is genuinely valuable. I’ve read about the Parallax system. It’s not vapourware. Someone stealing it would have a buyer.” He turned a page. “Second, the island has its own encrypted network, which means the breach was either internal or someone brought hardware capable of penetrating military-grade security to a wellness retreat.”
“And third?”
Now he looked up. Removed his glasses. This was the James equivalent of someone else slamming their fist on the table. “Who referred this to us?”
Nadia glanced at the intake page. The referral line read: Referred by: a friend of the firm.
“A friend of the firm,” she said.
“That’s not a referral. That’s a placeholder.” He turned back to the intake page. “And look at how it came in. The client says the referral arrived by phone. An unsolicited call to his private line. Someone he’d never spoken to before.”
Nadia read the passage James was pointing to. Marcus Hale’s own account, in the intake notes: “Contacted by unknown caller who demonstrated detailed knowledge of our situation. Caller identified themselves only as ‘a friend of the firm’ and recommended Vantage by name.”
“It’s a billionaire on a private island with a stolen algorithm worth more than most people’s postcode. Does it matter who told him about us?”
“It might.” James replaced his glasses. He didn’t pursue it. But he opened a second notebook, smaller than the case file, and wrote something in it before closing it again.
The door to the office opened and Rowan Sharp entered carrying a takeaway coffee in each hand and a phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear.
“No, I said the blue dress, not the navy one. They’re different things. The navy one makes me look like I’m attending a sentencing. Yes, I know they’re both blue. That’s like saying all dogs are wolves. I’ll call you back.” She ended the call, set both coffees on her desk, picked up the intake file that was waiting for her, and scanned the first page in approximately four seconds. “Oh, fun. Rich people on an island with a stolen algorithm. Is the algorithm actually valuable or is this a crypto bro with delusions?”
“Parallax,” Nadia said.
“Ah.” Rowan’s expression shifted from performance to interest. “That’s real money. That’s buy-a-small-country money. Who’s the host?”
“Marcus Hale.”
Rowan pulled out her phone. By the time Nadia had finished the sentence, Rowan was already scrolling through social media, news archives, the constellation of sources she navigated the way James navigated spreadsheets, with a fluency that looked instinctive but was actually a system disguised as chaos.
“Marcus Hale. Third marriage, no children from the first two, one from the current. Wife is Genevieve, art collector, philanthropy circuit, the kind of woman who gets described as ‘elegant’ by people who mean ‘terrifying.’ He did a TED talk in 2019 about ‘ethical data’ that has aged like milk in a sauna.” She looked up. “His annual retreat is legendary in the tech world. Invitation-only, phones surrendered at the dock, five days of what he calls ‘aligned thinking’ and everyone else calls ‘an expensive cult retreat with better catering.'”
“Guest list?” James asked.
“I’ll have it before we’re on the helicopter.”
“Boat,” Nadia said. “He’s sending a boat.”
Rowan considered this. “Of course he’s sending a boat. They always send a boat.”
She said it flatly, without her usual performance. Then she turned back to the intake file and read the casualty addendum. Read it again. Her phone went back into her pocket.
“The crew member,” Rowan said. “The one who hit his head near the server building.”
“Unrelated to the data breach,” Nadia said. “According to the file.”
“According to the file.” Rowan looked at her. The wit was gone from her face. What remained was something older, a stillness that didn’t belong in someone who normally moved like a question mark. “Nadia. Someone got hurt. On the island. Near the servers. Two days before someone stole the algorithm. And the file says ‘unrelated’ like it’s describing the weather.”
“I noticed.”
“Good.” Rowan picked up her coffee. The performance slid back into place in sections, like armour being put on piece by piece. “Twelve suspects on an island. Very Christie. I approve.”
“Twelve guests,” Nadia corrected. “Not suspects.”
“Give it time,” Rowan said.
The boat was, as Rowan had predicted, the point.
It was a sleek forty-footer sent to collect them from a private marina outside Plymouth, the kind where the parking alone cost more per month than Rowan’s rent. The captain was a young man in a white polo shirt who said “welcome aboard” as though he meant it in a legal sense and offered sparkling water before they’d cleared the breakwater. He checked their names against a clipboard. Nadia glanced at it as he ticked them off: Rowe, N. / Osei-Mensah, J. / Sharp, R. The booking had her surname wrong. She didn’t correct it. There was a case to focus on.
Rowan accepted the water. James declined. Nadia stood at the rail and watched the coastline thin to a grey-green line, then disappear entirely. Everything sharpened at the beginning of a case. The colour of the water. The light on the boat’s wake. James’s silence, which was different from his usual silence in a way she couldn’t have explained but recognised the way you recognise a change in atmospheric pressure. He was thinking about the referral. She knew this because she was thinking about it too, and had decided to stop.
Twenty minutes out, the captain’s radio crackled. He stepped into the wheelhouse and had a conversation Nadia couldn’t hear. When he came back, his face was the same, but his shoulders had changed. Tighter, held slightly forward.
“Mr Hale asks that you come directly to the main house on arrival,” the captain said. “He’d like to brief you before you meet any of the guests.”
“That was always the plan,” Nadia said.
“Yes, ma’am.” The captain paused. “He wanted me to emphasise the word ‘directly.'”
James looked at Nadia. She looked at Rowan. Rowan looked at the horizon.
“Something’s changed,” Rowan said quietly. “Since they sent the file.”
The island appeared after forty minutes, a dark shape on the horizon that resolved into something designed to make nature feel expensive. Manicured paths wound up from a teak dock. Landscaping that cost more than the vegetation it replaced. A main house, all glass and stone and architecture that announced itself as humble while being the most assertive thing for miles. Solar panels on the roof, because Marcus Hale believed in sustainability the way people who owned private islands believed in sustainability: as a concept that applied to everyone else’s carbon footprint.
A man was waiting at the dock.
Nothing To See Here is available now in ebook, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited.