Callum Dillon is flatly denying all involvement, and without any evidence, they can’t yet charge him with anything. But despite his claim that he was working in his studio all night, he has no concrete alibi, which doesn’t work in his favour. At least if Callum had been the one to kill Caroline, it would make a bit of sense. But why take the baby? It isn’t as if a one-year-old would ever be an incriminating witness. Alex thinks about the wife, Siobhan. Callum claims she was out at her book club on the evening of the 10th, but Alex still wants to check this out. He thinks it over – clearly, she’d be upset to learn of her husband’s affair, the betrayal of it. But would it lead to murder? Statistically, it feels unlikely that she’d have hurt baby Eve, but they cannot rule it out. Then there is the daughter, Emma, in the family home that night with only her father to verify her whereabouts. Just sixteen but by all accounts, a troubled girl. Could she be covering for one of her parents?
The only other option is a random attack – a kidnapping with Caroline as an unfortunate bystander who got in the way. But there has been no contact, no sign of a ransom. Jenny and Rick’s phones have been wired, in case whoever has Eve gets in touch, but as the clock ticks on, the possibility of it becomes more and more unlikely. DS Bolton has pulled up a list of sex offenders in the area, but so far all are still in prison, or dead. Best place for them, Dave had said unpleasantly. And then there is Caroline’s phone, missing from the scene and untraceable via the masts. Why take the phone unless it was something personal?
Alex flips again through the photographs of the scene, wincing at the splatters of blood, the angle of her body. The images are vivid and unrelenting. The fifth-floor flat, now sealed behind crime-scene tape and crawling with SOCOs, is very small. He imagines Jenny Grant pushing open the door to that awful sight, the panic she must have felt as she raced through the tiny rooms. Compared to what they’ve seen of Callum Dillon’s house, Caroline Harvey lived in a shoebox.
He turns to the photograph of the deceased. Shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes. Attractive-looking woman. Thirty-three. Lived alone; no siblings, one elderly father living alone in Stowmarket. They sent a family liaison officer over to the father – a Christopher Harvey, in his eighties now. His wife, Elsie Harvey, died in a car accident along the A12 years ago – one of the PCs pulled up the old report. Jesus, what a life. Alex feels a shudder run down his back. By all accounts, Caroline Harvey was pretty lonely – no children, no husband, no mother, no wife. They have considered the idea that it was some sort of break-in, or a planned abduction with Eve the target and Caroline as collateral damage. Now, Alex is wondering if it was the other way around. Nobody seems too heartbroken at the loss of Caroline Harvey, despite Callum’s claims of devastation.
Pissed off would be the overriding emotional state to describe him now – he’s a big-shot exec, used to getting his way, and being questioned about a messy murder case, not to mention a baby that seems to have vanished into thin air, isn’t exactly good for his profile. Alex doesn’t like him – doesn’t like the way he left the country the morning after Caroline’s death, doesn’t like the way he kept their affair a secret from his own wife for eighteen months, doesn’t like the angry way he’s reacted to being questioned. Someone like Callum could’ve had very good reason for wanting Caroline dead – perhaps she’d threatened to go to his wife, or worse, go to the press. Ultimatums are thrown around in love affairs more often than you’d think.
Alex thinks Callum Dillon might crack soon enough. In his experience, cases like this are often fairly cut and dried, more so than you’d imagine. He’s having an affair with her; she starts to want more than he can give. She gets obsessive, maybe – what was the word Rick Grant used to describe her – maybe a bit unstable. She puts pressure on Callum to leave his wife and daughter, break up his marriage. Maybe she starts threatening to tell Siobhan Dillon the whole thing. And Callum doesn’t want that to happen. So on the night of August the tenth, he walks over to her flat – it is only a twenty-minute walk, they have paced it out – and he tries to talk to her. She’s resistant. And then he loses his temper. He picks up a knife. A knife they still haven’t found.
Alex groans under his breath and runs a hand through his hair. It’s all fine, he thinks, it’s all fine, but what about the sodding baby? Where does little Eve Grant fit into the equation? And more to the point, where is she? They have to find her. Time is running out.
‘The press are onto Callum Dillon’s family. Someone must have leaked it.’
Alex is momentarily taken aback at Dave Bolton’s words. ‘What, they’ve named him?’ Callum is still in custody; they have applied for an extension. Soon enough, his lawyer will arrive – no doubt some expensive-looking twat in a suit that the TV exec is paying through the nose for.
David shakes his head. ‘No, course not. They’re not that stupid, not yet. But the Twitterati are catching on now too. They had the wrong end of the stick earlier, lots of folks saying we had Rick Grant in. Keen to pin it on a family member, like that Amy Willis case in Norfolk a few years back. Remember the one?’
Alex nods. ‘Course. Parents covered the whole thing up.’
‘Exactly. The good people of the internet want Rick Grant banged up.’
Alex sighs. ‘The CCTV puts him at the hospital, fair and square. Unless someone else was acting on his orders, I think we can rule him out. To my mind, anyway.’
David nods. ‘The search team have been out all night looking for Eve. A search of Christchurch Park has brought up nothing, and we haven’t got CCTV from the back of the Woodmill Road flats either – turns out the cameras were smashed by kids last year and nobody’s got round to doing anything about it. Council cuts, happens all the time in little old Suffolk. So anyway, I’m thinking it’s time to do an appeal from the parents. OK by you? The DCI is keen.’
‘Are they up for it?’
‘Seem to be. Jenny is, anyway. Rick less so. I think he knows he might come under fire. On that note, I’ve got the warrant here – finally – to search the Dillon house top to bottom. And I want to talk to the wife, as well. See how much she knew about her husband’s affair. In my experience, it’s pretty rare for the other half to be completely in the dark.’
Alex nods, pulls up the photograph of Siobhan Dillon that they have on file. A beautiful woman, there is no doubt about it – long brown hair, almond eyes, pale Irish colouring. He wonders how she must be feeling, now that the speculation about her husband is out there. Pretty shitty, he imagines. He glances to the door, back down the corridor to where Callum Dillon will now be ensconced with his lawyer, a London guy who David says arrived ten minutes ago. Callum Dillon doesn’t deserve a woman like Siobhan, and he certainly didn’t deserve poor Caroline Harvey as well. Why don’t women ever fall for the nice guys, Alex thinks to himself, then remembers Joanne’s smiling face, pictures her waiting for him back in their bed. Sometimes they do, I guess.
Chapter Fifteen
Ipswich
15th August
Siobhan
I cannot stop myself from reading the articles, over and over, as though they are going to suddenly tell me something new, something that will make all of this nightmare go away. But of course, they never do. Each one makes it slightly worse.
POLICE SEARCH MARINA IN HUNT FOR MISSING BABY
Police searching for missing one-year-old Eve Grant this afternoon began the process of dredging the Ipswich marina. Eve was last seen on the night of 10th August at a flat in Woodmill Road, Ipswich, where she was in the care of a woman who was found dead at the scene. Eve’s parents, Mr Rick Grant and his wife Jenny, will tonight make an appeal on BBC One to anyone who might know the whereabouts of their daughter.
Christ, the marina. I imagine baby Eve floating, the sight of a little body bobbing beside the boats, that blonde hair dragged through the water like weeds. My stomach turns. I am filled with a sudden, bizarre urge to go out there, join one of the search parties, wade through water to try to find that little girl
. How will she survive out in the world at such a young age? Defenceless, alone, or worse? Tears prick my eyes and I swallow hard, try to control my breathing. Panicking isn’t going to help anyone.
‘Mum, look.’
I glance up from my phone at the sound of my daughter’s voice, and see immediately what she’s gesturing at.
Jenny Grant’s face fills the television screen. She is younger than I thought she’d be; I suppose she’s Caroline’s age. At least ten years younger than me.
The three of us, Maria, Emma and I, sit huddled together on the sofa in our living room. Maria is holding Emma’s hand, her thumb gently stroking the back of my daughter’s knuckles in slow, comforting movements. Again, I feel left out – I have swapped Callum for Maria, usurped once again as the favourite parent. How has it happened? What is it I have done? I wish someone would stroke my hand, calm the anxiety that shifts and stirs inside my stomach day in, day out.
The street outside our house is, for once, quiet. Only two reporters remain, lingering in the hope that one of us will emerge. The rest of them are at this press conference; as the camera pans over their faces I actually recognise a few of them – they’ve been camped outside here for the last twenty-four hours. Pale, sharp faces; they remind me of racing dogs, whippets. God knows what it’s like outside the Grant home – it must be hell. I imagine being separated from Emma, not knowing where she might be, not knowing whether she is alive or not, and the thought is so viscerally terrifying that I feel my vision tip and blur. I force myself to take deep breaths, in and out. My daughter is right here, safe and sound. I am not the one having to go through this.
But then we are going through our own form of torture, aren’t we?
A couple of police officers visited this morning, told us Callum was still being held at the station, that he’d requested a lawyer. The thought made me feel worse, not better. Innocent people don’t need lawyers, do they? I wondered if I was supposed to perform some sort of wifely duty and contact lawyers for him, but they told me he’d already done it. Callum knows lots of lawyers through his work. I’ve never met any of them.
‘Mrs Dillon,’ the first officer had said this morning, a woman with short blonde hair and sharp, wolf-like features. ‘I’m DCI Gillian McVey. We apologise for cutting short your holiday.’
I’d almost laughed at her – as if that was what I cared about. But I could already see the impression they had of me, of us all – rich spoiled family, husband playing away. It was the wife in the pinny thing all over again – they’d probably even dredged up that article. I’d stood strong, back ramrod straight, whilst Maria made the officer an unnecessary cup of tea.
‘Mrs Dillon, you were at your book group on the night in question, that’s correct, isn’t it?’ the DCI had asked, and I’d nodded, swallowed hard.
‘And your daughter was here.’
‘Yes, that’s right. I checked in on Emma when I got home.’
‘And your husband, was he in when you came back that night?’
As she was speaking, Emma appeared in the kitchen, at the side of my vision. I felt my body tense up under her gaze.
‘He was working that night,’ Emma said, her voice clear. ‘He was in the studio in the garden. I was upstairs, but I heard him come in and out, the sound of the door. And the TV, for a bit. He gives himself little breaks from work. But he never left the garden. I’d have heard the gate.’
‘Is that so?’ the DCI said, and my daughter nodded. Maria handed her the cup of tea, steam curling up into the room, adding to the heat. The policewoman accepted it without much of a thank you.
‘And he was upstairs when you got in a bit later?’ Her gaze was back on me. I could feel Emma watching me too.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I got into bed alone, but – Callum came up later, slept in the spare room. I was already asleep, he didn’t want to wake me. But I heard him come in from the studio.’ The words had felt strange in my mouth.
‘Right, thank you. Well, we’ll be asking you to come to the station to answer a few more questions this week, Mrs Dillon,’ Gillian McVey had told me. ‘I’m sure you won’t be opposed to assisting our enquiries.’ She raised her voice at the end of her sentence, as though she was asking me a question, but I knew she didn’t really need my answer.
Her companion, a younger, male police officer who looked almost too young to be on the job, had been scanning our kitchen as Gillian and I talked, his eyes darting around. I don’t know what he was looking for, but I doubted he was going to find it in amongst my toaster and kettle or Emma’s stash of Haribo.
‘And we are in the process of obtaining a search warrant for your property,’ DCI McVey had continued, taking a sip of her tea. ‘We will aim to keep this as non-intrusive as we can, Mrs Dillon, but it’s necessary for us to complete a search as part of the official investigation.’ She’d paused, reached a hand into her jacket pocket. ‘If you want to talk to me at any point, Mrs Dillon, this is my direct line. I hope you’ll give me a call.’ She’d put the tea back down onto the table, barely touched. I saw a flicker of annoyance pass across Maria’s face; she’s never liked being rejected, not even in tiny ways like that. ‘We know you want to protect your husband, Mrs Dillon,’ the officer said, softening her voice a little, ‘but if you do think of anything that we ought to know about, it’s in his best interests if you ring us at once. In a case like this, time really is of the essence.’
I’d nodded at her, taken the card without looking at it. My fingers felt cold and numb, as if I’d been sitting on them for too long and got pins and needles.
‘Don’t you think you ought to be out looking for the baby?’ I asked suddenly, the words bursting out of me, too loud in our kitchen. ‘A one-year-old can’t survive all this time without her mother. You should be out looking for her, not wasting time here.’
The officers had exchanged glances, and embarrassment had flooded my face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I’d said quickly, ‘this is an upsetting time.’
My daughter disappeared after that, shying away from any more attention. I went up to see her after they’d left, stroked her hair for a bit.
‘This is all going to be over soon, Ems,’ I told her, ‘you’ll see.’ She and I haven’t mentioned Callum’s affair since the night I confirmed it – sometimes I think I dreamed that entire conversation, but of course I didn’t. My dreams now mainly consist of Eve, of that little face, those conker-coloured eyes. They haunt me. Every hour that ticks past, every minute makes things worse. I’ve seen the TV dramas. I know how these things so often end.
‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked me, and I didn’t answer, couldn’t think of the right words.
‘Did you actually see Dad in the studio that night, Ems?’ I asked her, and she paused before answering.
‘I saw the light on,’ she said, ‘which is almost the same thing.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just want us all to stay together,’ she’d whispered, ‘I want to stay a family.’
‘We will,’ I promised, bending down to kiss her on the top of her head, much closer than she usually lets me get, ‘we will.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘She’s scared,’ Maria told me, ‘she’s too young for all this. She doesn’t know what to think.’ My sister had looked at me reproachfully, as if I’d been forcing Emma to stare at pictures of Caroline Harvey’s dead body for hours on end. There aren’t any, of course. I’ve looked online. I am desperate for news of little Eve.
‘God, they’re making a meal of this,’ Maria says now, and I refocus on the TV screen, where Jenny Grant is speaking, cameras flashing in front of her, distorting the image a little with white spots of light.
‘All we want,’ she is saying, her voice filling the living room, ‘is for our baby to come home.’ A picture of Eve fills the screen and I lean forward; she really is a beautiful child. That curly hair, the cherubic features. I steal a sideways glance at Emma but she too is rive
ted, her eyes fixed on the screen. In her lap, her phone vibrates, and I catch sight of Twitter updates along with the green roundel of WhatsApp. I don’t know whether Emma’s spoken to anyone about what’s been happening. Her friendship circle seems to have dwindled over the last few months. She goes out occasionally, but tells me nothing about where she has been or who with.
Thank God we’re in the summer holidays, I think, not for the first time. I cannot imagine Emma going into school at the moment, I cannot imagine what people might be saying. Well, that’s not true. I can imagine, I just don’t want to. I still haven’t called work back, ignored the email asking me to phone. I’ve messaged Bridget, one of the HR girls, telling her to redirect any correspondence to a senior colleague for now. She didn’t ask questions – I find HR tend not to, despite it being part of their role. Callum would say that’s me being cynical.
‘It’s as if everyone’s forgotten that that woman is dead as well,’ Maria remarks. She’s drinking vodka and tonic, the glass cupped in her free hand. She’s on her third top-up. My sister doesn’t usually drink spirits, but we’re out of wine and nobody wants to risk going to the shop for fear of being accosted.
‘It’s like being under house arrest,’ Emma mumbled earlier, then seemed to regret her choice of words. After all, Callum is under actual arrest, and with every hour that goes by when he isn’t released, the stakes grow higher.
‘Eve is the light of our life,’ Jenny is saying, tears beginning to form in her eyes. One of them escapes and makes its way down her cheek, tracking through her foundation. I wonder if they made them up especially, as though they were celebrities about to go on camera. Next to her, her husband puts an arm around her shoulders, squeezes her gently. He’s a thick-set man, not as attractive as she is, and not as attractive as Callum either. His voice, when he speaks, is strangely gruff, and his eye contact with the camera is nowhere near as good as hers. I lean forward, closer to the television, watching to see if there is any chance the noise on Twitter could be right. Could the police think the whole thing is a cover-up, engineered by the parents crying on the TV screen?
The Babysitter: From the author of digital bestsellers and psychological crime thrillers like The Girl Next Door comes the most gripping and addictive book of 2020! Page 11