I See You (36 page)

‘We’re not doing anything wrong. He doesn’t know we’ve found the receipt. We have to stay cool.’

Cool is the last thing I feel.

‘We’re getting the Christmas decorations down,’ I say suddenly.

‘What?’

‘If he comes home and asks what we’re doing. We’re up here to get the decorations out of the eaves.’

‘Right, okay.’ Katie isn’t interested, but I feel better, knowing I have an excuse ready.

The door at the bottom of the stairs swings shut with a bang that makes me jump. It’s the only door that does; the only one with a fire regulation compliant closer. Simon wanted to take it off: he said he liked having the door open, so he could hear the hustle and bustle of life below him. I insisted it stayed, worrying about fire, worrying about anything that might threaten my family.

All
that time, is it possible the real threat has been right there in front of us?

Living in our house?

I feel nauseous and I force the bile down, trying to capture an ounce of the strength my nineteen-year-old daughter is now showing. Katie stands in the middle of the room and takes a slow, careful look around. There’s nothing on the walls, which slope from ceiling to floor at an angle that leaves only a narrow strip of full head height, along the centre of the room. The single Velux window lets in a paltry amount of winter sun, and I turn on the main light.

‘There.’ Katie points to the filing cabinet, on which Simon’s Samsung tablet is resting. She hands it to me. She’s decisive, almost snappy. I wish I knew what she was thinking.

‘Katie,’ I say, ‘do you really think Simon’s capable of …’ I don’t finish.

‘I don’t know, Mum. Look at the search history.’

I open the case and enter Simon’s password, then open the browser. ‘How do I see what he was looking at?’

Katie looks over my shoulder. ‘Tap there.’ She points. ‘It should bring up a list of sites visited, as well as what he’s been searching for.’

I breathe a sigh of relief. There’s nothing obvious. News sites, and a couple of holiday brokers. A Valentine’s weekend break. I wonder how Simon can even think about booking a holiday when he’s so much in debt. Window shopping, I suppose, thinking of the evenings I spend looking on Rightmove at million-pound properties I could never hope to afford.

Katie is looking again in the filing cabinet drawer. She pulls out a piece of paper. ‘Mum,’ she says slowly, ‘he hasn’t been telling the truth.’

The nausea returns to the pit of my stomach.

‘“Dear Mr Thornton,”’ she reads, “further to your recent meeting with Human Resources please accept this letter as formal
notification of your redundancy.”’ She looks at me. ‘It’s dated first of August.’

The relief is instant.

‘I know about the redundancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I only found out myself a couple of weeks ago.’

‘You knew? Is that why he started working from home?’ I nod. ‘And before that? Since August, I mean. He’s been wearing a suit, going out every day …’

I feel too loyal to Simon to admit that he spent those weeks pretending to be at work, lying to us all, but I don’t need to; I can tell from Katie’s face she’s already worked it out.

‘You don’t know for sure, though, do you?’ she says. ‘You don’t know what he was doing – not what he was
really
doing. You only know what he told you. For all you know, he spent that time following women on the Underground. Taking their photographs. Posting their details on the Internet.’

‘I trust Simon.’ My words sound hollow, even to me.

She starts searching through the filing cabinet, throwing files on the floor. The top drawer is filled with Simon’s paperwork; work contracts, life assurance … I don’t know what’s there. In the middle drawer I keep all the documentation relating to the house; buildings and contents insurance, my mortgage statements, the building regs certificate for the loft conversion we’re in right now. In another folder are the children’s birth certificates and my divorce certificate, along with all our passports. In a third, old bank statements, kept for no other reason than I don’t know what else to do with them.

‘Check the desk,’ she says, just as I ordered her to search Justin’s room. Frustrated by the time it’s taking to look at each document, she pulls out the filing cabinet drawer and tips the contents on to the floor, swirling them around with one hand until everything is uncovered. ‘There’ll be something, I know it.’

My daughter is strong. Feisty.

‘She
gets that from you,’ Matt always used to say, when Katie stubbornly refused the laden spoon I was waving in front of her, or insisted on walking to the shops when her little legs were barely stable. The memory hurts, and I mentally shake myself. I’m the grown-up. I’m the strong one. This is my fault. I’m the one who was taken in by Simon; flattered by the attention, by his generosity.

I need answers, and I need them now.

I open the first desk drawer and pull out the contents, dumping files on the floor and shaking them in case anything of interest lies beneath the pages of otherwise dull documentation. I meet Katie’s eye and she gives me a grim nod of approval.

‘This drawer’s locked.’ I rattle the handle. ‘I don’t know where the key is.’

‘Can you force it?’

‘I’m trying.’ I hold the top of the desk with one hand and yank hard on the handle of the drawer with the other. It doesn’t budge. I look around the chaotic desk to see where Simon might keep the key, tipping up a pen pot but finding only a collection of paperclips and pencil shavings. Remembering how Katie searched Justin’s tallboy I run my hand under the desk in case the key is taped there, and look at the underside of all the open drawers for the same reason.

Nothing.

‘We’ll have to pick the lock.’ I say this with more confidence than I feel, having never picked a lock in my life. I take a pair of sharp scissors from the floor, where they have been tipped out from a drawer, and jam them into the lock. With no real method, I wiggle the blades violently from side to side and then up and down, at the same time pulling on the handle. There is a small crunching noise, and to my amazement the drawer opens. I drop the scissors on to the floor.

I wanted the drawer to be empty. I wanted it to contain nothing more than a dusty paperclip and a broken pencil. I
wanted it to prove to Katie – to me – that Simon has nothing to do with the website.

It isn’t empty.

Scraps of paper, torn from a spiral pad, lie innocently on one side of the drawer.
Grace Southeard
, the first is headed, above a series of bullet-points.

I pick up the sheaf of papers and look at the second.

I feel like I’m going to be sick. I remember how reassuring Simon was, that night we went out for dinner, when I was so worried about the adverts.

Identity theft, that’s all it is.

‘What have you found, Mum?’ Katie walks towards me. I turn the papers over but it’s too late, she’s already seen them. ‘Oh my God …’

There’s something else in the drawer. It’s the Moleskine notebook I gave Simon for our first Christmas together. I pick it up; feel the soft leather beneath my fingertips.

The first few pages make little sense. Half-written sentences; words underlined; arrows drawn from one boxed name to another. I flick through the notebook and it falls open at a diagram. In the centre, the word ‘how?’ surrounded by a hand-drawn cloud. Around it, more words, each in their own clouds.

The
book falls from my hands, landing in the open drawer with a dull thud. I hear Katie’s strangled cry and I turn to comfort her, but before I have a chance to say anything there’s a noise I instantly recognise. I freeze and look at Katie, and I know from her face she’s recognised it too.

It’s the bang of the door at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Coffee.’

‘No,
thank you.’ Kelly hadn’t eaten all day but she didn’t think she could stomach anything. Diggers had hung around for half an hour after dismissing her, before disappearing to do whatever a nearly retired DCI did with an accumulation of rest days in lieu. He hadn’t spoken to Kelly again; only paused by Nick’s desk on his way out, for a muttered conversation Kelly had been certain was about her.

‘It wasn’t a suggestion,’ Nick said. ‘Get your coat, we’re going across the road.’

The Starbucks on Balfour Road was more of a takeaway than a café, but it boasted two high stools in the window, which Kelly commandeered, while Nick got the drinks. Kelly ordered a hot chocolate, suddenly craving its sweet comfort. It arrived topped with whipped cream and sprinkled with chocolate, looking embarrassingly gauche next to Nick’s flat white.

‘Thank you,’ Kelly said, when it became clear Nick wasn’t going to do the talking.

‘You can get the next ones,’ he said.

‘For bailing me out, I mean.’

‘I know what you meant.’ He fixed her with an unsmiling gaze. ‘For future reference, if you fuck up, or you do something stupid, or for some other reason you’re likely to need bailing out, for God’s sake tell me. Don’t wait until we’re sitting in the DCI’s office.’

‘I really am sorry.’

‘I’m
sure.’

‘And very grateful. I didn’t expect you to do that.’

Nick took a sip of his coffee. He grinned. ‘To be honest, I didn’t expect me to, either. But I couldn’t sit by and see one of the best detectives I’ve worked with’ – Kelly looked down at her hot chocolate to hide how pleased she was – ‘get the boot for doing something so monumentally stupid as to use her position for some sort of personal campaign. What exactly were you doing?’

The pleasurable flush Kelly had felt at Nick’s compliment disappeared.

‘I think an explanation is the least you owe me.’

Kelly spooned some of the warm cream into her mouth, feeling it dissolve on her tongue. She tested the words out in her head before she spoke. ‘My sister was raped in her first year at Durham University.’

‘That much I gathered. And the offender was never caught?’

‘Never. There had been several suspicious incidents prior to the rape; Lexi found cards in her pigeonhole asking her to wear certain clothes – outfits she had in her wardrobe – and once someone left a dead goldfinch outside her door.’

‘Did she report it?’

Kelly nodded. ‘The police weren’t interested. Even when she told them she was being followed they just said they’d make a note of it. She had a late lecture on a Thursday evening and no one else walked back the same way as her, so she was on her own. The night it happened she was on the phone to me. She called because she was feeling nervous – she said she could hear footsteps behind her again.’

‘What did you do?’

Kelly felt her eyes burn with the threat of tears. She swallowed hard. ‘I told her she was imagining it.’ She could hear Lexi’s voice, even now; breathless as she walked to halls.

‘There’s someone behind me, Kelly, I swear. Just like last week.’

‘Lex,
there are seventeen thousand students at Durham – there’s always someone behind you.’

‘This is different. They’re trying not to be seen.’ Lexi spoke in an urgent whisper, Kelly straining to hear every word. ‘When I turned round just now there was no one walking, but they’re there, I know it.’

‘You’re getting yourself in a state. Give me a call when you get home, yeah?’

Kelly had been getting ready to go out, she remembered. She’d cranked the music up as she did her hair; threw another rejected dress on the pile at the end of the bed. It never crossed her mind that Lexi hadn’t called, until her mobile had rung with a number she hadn’t recognised.

‘Kelly Swift? This is DC Barrow-Grint from Durham police. I’ve got your sister with me.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Nick said gently. Kelly shook her head.

‘He wouldn’t have attacked her if I’d stayed on the phone.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘If he had, I’d have heard – I’d have been able to call the police straight away. It was two hours before Lexi was found – she’d been beaten up so badly she could hardly see – and by that time the offender was long gone.’

Nick didn’t contradict her. He turned his coffee cup around in its saucer until the handle was facing him, cupping both hands around it. ‘Does Lexi blame you for what happened?’

‘I don’t know. She must do.’

‘You haven’t asked her?’

‘She won’t talk about it. Hates it when I do. I thought she’d be affected for months – for ever, even – but it was as though she just drew a line under the whole thing. When she met her husband she sat him down and said “There’s something you need to know”, and she told him the whole story then made him promise never to mention it again.’

‘She’s
a strong woman.’

‘You think so? I don’t think it’s healthy. Pretending something didn’t happen isn’t the way to deal with a traumatic event.’

‘You mean, it’s not the way
you
deal with traumatic events,’ Nick said.

Kelly looked at him sharply. ‘This isn’t about me.’

Nick drained his coffee and set the cup carefully on the saucer before looking Kelly in the eye. ‘Exactly.’

Kelly’s mobile rang as they returned to work. She hung back at the top of the stairs, avoiding the noise of the busy MIT office. It was Craig, from the CCTV hub.

‘Kelly, have you seen BTP’s internal briefing today?’

She hadn’t. It was hard enough to keep up with the volume of emails relating to this job, without reading her own force’s daily missives.

‘The CCTV room here has been compromised. Given what you told me the other day about your Met job, I thought I should give you a ring.’

‘A break-in?’

‘Worse. A hacking.’

‘I thought that was impossible?’

‘Nothing’s impossible, Kelly, you should know that. The system’s been sluggish for a few weeks; we called an engineer and when he came to take a look he identified some malware. We’ve got a firewall in place which makes it nigh-on impossible to be hacked over the web, but doesn’t stop someone physically introducing viruses to the system.’