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!

by Phoebe Morgan

  But I think I always knew, at the back of my mind, that my pregnancy wouldn’t be like theirs. And I was right, because my pregnancy ended before it had even really begun.

  The positive symbol stared up at me, bold and indisputable, though I took another two tests anyway, just to be sure. When I was finished, I lined them all up in a row and snapped a photo of them on my iPhone. For a split second, I wished I had a mother to call up, but I didn’t, and my father wouldn’t really care too much. He’d aged very quickly over the last few years, and while I cared about him, in a distant way, we’d never had the sort of close father–daughter relationship that Callum seemed to share with Emma.

  I hesitated for a moment, before sending the photo to Callum. I captioned it ‘Surprise!’ and added a party face emoji. To this day, when I think about that emoji, I always want to cry.

  On my lap now, Eve begins to wriggle, snapping me away from that cold April day and back to the present. She does a sort of jig on my legs, her little feet like those of a tap dancer. I bring her close to me, my hands underneath her arms, and kiss her on the forehead like Jenny did, like a mother would. For a minute, I pause, inhaling her scent, that delicious baby scent of Johnson’s shampoo and life.

  I can feel my heart beginning to thud, already thinking about the moment I will have to give her back. I could hold onto baby Eve forever.

  I wonder what would happen if I did?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ipswich

  16th August

  DS Wildy

  The crime scene, Flat 43, Woodmill Road, has the stale, strange air of a space that no one has lived in for a week. Alex makes his way past the blue and white tape, through the corridor into the kitchen, where a glass door opens out onto a balcony which runs along the (admittedly small) length of the whole flat. Caroline Harvey was lucky to have some open space, he thinks, before remembering that in actual fact, Caroline Harvey wasn’t lucky at all.

  Her body is in the mortuary, now; her next of kin identified it with DCI McVey two days ago. The father, Christopher, had come alone apparently, looking completely shell-shocked, but when McVey had asked him when he’d last seen Caroline, the old man had struggled to remember.

  ‘Probably not for six, seven months,’ Christopher Harvey had said at last, which DCI McVey said she’d found odd, considering Stowmarket is only a thirty-minute drive away from Ipswich, if that.

  Alex continues into the flat. The cot is still there but the blankets and pillow inside are gone, concealed in an evidence bag back at the station. They’ve tested for DNA, of course, but the only match showing up is Eve’s. He looks again at Caroline’s things – the bathroom, a collection of shampoos and conditioners lined up on the side of the bath, half empty, the showerhead dangling drearily above. There is a water ring around the tub, as if it has been used relatively recently. An empty toothbrush mug, the toothbrush removed for DNA testing. The kitchen-cum-living room is quite sparse – there are a couple of paperbacks lined up next to the television, a candle – he sniffs it – lemon-scented. An ironing board propped up to the side of the fridge, no sign of an actual iron. Wine glasses in the cupboard, a mug with the letter C on the side, Scrabble-style. There is something sad about the feel of the place, other than the obvious. Orange markers denote the spots where bleach was found on the floor. Another one is placed next to the kettle.

  He tries to imagine the night of the murder, of baby Eve alive and well in her cot. He’s been hoping against hope that Eve is still out there, that whoever came to the flat had Eve as their target and Caroline merely as collateral damage that needed to be got out of the way. But the positioning of the body – he gives a little shiver. It suggests otherwise. It suggests that this was something personal. Perhaps even something planned.

  ‘Wildy?’

  DS Bolton appears behind him, and Alex is surprised. He’d come to the flat for another look on his own whilst the DCI interviewed Siobhan Dillon, wanting to get a better sense of a case that is, quite frankly, baffling him. He doesn’t know why Dave is here; he’d left him helping the duty doctor calm Jenny Grant down after her inadvertent panic attack earlier this morning.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asks, and Dave makes a face.

  ‘I’ve sent Jenny Grant home with another family liaison officer. I couldn’t get any sense out of her after you left. She was a bit of a wreck.’

  ‘OK,’ says Alex, ‘well, perhaps we went in too hard.’

  Dave makes another face. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘well, that’s the thing. Her husband’s come to the station. Seems seeing Jenny in that state has snapped him out of his funk. He’s pretty pissed off. Wants to talk to you.’

  Alex stares at him. ‘Pissed off with us, you mean? For upsetting Jenny?’

  Dave nods. ‘Yep.’ He looks away, rubs the end of his nose, a sure sign that he’s feeling guilty about something.

  ‘What is it?’ Alex presses him, and DS Bolton tells him that Rick Grant has just punched his fist through the station wall.

  There are smears of blood on the white wall of the visitors’ room at the station, accompanied by a bit of a dent in the plaster. A stressed-looking duty sergeant is currently filling in a long-winded form, detailing the incident. DS Wildy finds Rick Grant with one hand bandaged up, droplets of red spotting the dressing.

  ‘Mr Grant,’ he says, not reaching for a handshake, ‘sorry to have missed you. I understand you’d like a chat.’

  The man looks up at him, and the expression on his face is somewhat sheepish. ‘Sorry about the…’ He tails off, gesturing to the damaged wall with his un-bandaged hand.

  ‘Well, it’s not the first time,’ Alex says gruffly, sitting down beside him, giving a nod to the duty sergeant who looks grateful to be relieved of what was obviously some sort of Rick-watch.

  ‘Jenny’s so upset,’ Rick Grant says suddenly, and when Alex looks at him, he can see tears glinting in the man’s eyes. Furiously, Rick wipes a hand under his nose, lets out a grim half laugh.

  ‘I just lost it,’ he continues. ‘She came home in such a state, saying you lot had been asking her all sorts of stuff, accusing her of things, asking about Callum, and I saw red. I’ve been sitting at home the last few days, staring at nothing, wanting to help but not knowing how. Useless. I’ve been crap. I just wanted to do something.’

  ‘Mr Grant,’ Alex says gently, ‘we do understand how difficult this is for you and your wife. Our intention was not to accuse Jenny of anything – she came to the station herself to see what the response to the appeal had been, and my colleague took it upon himself to ask her some questions whilst she was here.’ He pauses. ‘DS Bolton can be a bit – overbearing, at times.’

  Rick doesn’t reply.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, about that night, or about your wife?’ Alex asks, careful to keep his tone measured for fear of another attempt at a hole in the police station wall.

  ‘I shouldn’t have made Jenny come with me to see my mum,’ he says after a few moments. Alex can hear the station clock ticking on the wall, the rustle of papers as the duty sergeant pretends not to listen. They ought to go into an interview room, perhaps, but he is reluctant to break the moment, to risk Rick’s temper reappearing and him choosing not to divulge something that could be important.

  ‘She didn’t want to come,’ Rick continues, ‘she never liked my mum, not really. If I hadn’t made her come with me, none of this would’ve happened.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Alex says. ‘It’s possible that whoever took Eve might have targeted your house, were she at home with Jenny.’

  But Rick is shaking his head, speaking over him. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no. I know that’s not it. We should never have left her with Caroline Harvey. Never. That woman wasn’t right in the head. I can’t stop thinking about it, about her, the things Jenny said about her past. The whole thing is her fault somehow. I know she’s dead, but – but we shouldn’t have let her take care of Eve. Not my Eve. My daughter.’ He
looks at Alex, his gaze suddenly clear. ‘The way she looked at those photographs…’ he tails off. ‘She wanted Eve for herself. I didn’t trust my instincts. And now we’ve lost our baby.’

  The gruff façade the man had when Alex first walked in has faded now, and the policeman watches as Rick Grant raises a bandaged hand to his face and sobs, the sound echoing throughout the room, drowning out the ticking of the clock until it is the only thing Alex can hear.

  Rick Grant’s words echo in DS Wildy’s head as he sits back in his chair, staring again at the images of Caroline Harvey’s body. He accepts the possibility that the poor woman was unstable, but she’s dead, for Christ’s sake – she isn’t hiding Eve up her jumper. But Rick seemed so convinced that it was her fault, that somehow, despite her death, she was to blame. Alex sighs. Could Caroline have paid someone to take Eve away, before she died? Could Callum or Jenny have killed her for that?

  The wound on Caroline’s chest is deep; disturbingly so. The angle of the knife is straight on, implying she was stabbed before falling forwards over the cot, but Luminos tests of the floor in Caroline’s kitchen show blood splatter there as well – a small mark near the door of the fridge, and one near the doorway. He wonders whether someone might have moved her, or whether she was stabbed in the kitchen and made her own way to the bedroom in an attempt to protect little Eve. Or to take her for herself.

  Alex groans aloud, runs a hand through his hair. He knows they are failing with every minute that goes by – failing Eve, failing an innocent child. Without evidence, they can’t pin this on Callum, and he can’t help but feel they are missing something, that someone close to this investigation is not telling the truth. The police in Rouen rang this morning, confirmed that the forensics had finished at the villa, found no DNA aside from that of the immediate family. The car belonging to Maria Wilcox was searched too, yielding nothing more than fibres from a rug matching one in the house, and the family’s own DNA. The results were sent over by Adele, the junior officer, and there it all is, in black and white. No further evidence. Similarly, the search of Ipswich Harbour has brought up nothing, and the press are becoming more and more vindictive with every hour that brings no results, no charge, no conviction, and no Eve. Jimmy, the guy running the Suffolk Police Twitter account, has been looking increasingly stressed over the last few days, and a glance over his shoulder confirmed everything Alex had been suspecting about which way the civilian tide was turning.

  @NorwichLad18: What are the pigs doing throughout all of this? Little babby goes missing right on their doorstep and they can’t pull their finger out? #FindEve

  @MB_Goodchild: @SuffolkPolice when are you going to admit that you’ve no clue what you’re doing?

  @Poppy29: Have they searched the Grant house yet? Bet it was them. The mother looks proper shifty.

  @Tom03: Reckon @Poppy29 is right you know, I bet they know more than they’re letting on. Maybe they wanted rid of the baby and saw a way out. Made it look like an accident. Thought they could pin it on someone else.

  @RichGirl1: Nah, it’s that TV guy. They’d have let him out otherwise. It’s his wife I feel sorry for.

  @MB_Goodchild: @SuffolkPolice any updates???

  Alex printed a few of them out, not wanting to tell the DCI that he was turning to social media for the answers. Frustration brims inside him – they have a good amount on Callum Dillon, true: a possible motive if Caroline was going to tell his wife, the relationship with Caroline himself, and his fingerprints in the flat. But none of those things give them any idea where Eve is, and at this stage, the thing he cares about the most is reuniting her with her parents, or at the very least, giving them some closure. A body to mourn, a solution and an end to a nightmare that they probably don’t deserve to be in. He sighs. Unless they do.

  He thinks of the empty harbour, the fruitless searches of alleyways and parks and bins in Ipswich and the surrounding areas, that have all turned up nothing. Could Eve’s body be in France, outside of the house? Surely not. He pictures it, a tiny pile of bones nestled underneath that beautiful villa. The place must be worth at least a million. Who owns a place like that, anyway? What kind of person can afford it in the current climate?

  Well, Maria Wilcox can. The sister-in-law. Maria is an interesting one, he thinks. Very beautiful, unashamedly so, on the few occasions they have seen her. By all accounts she is the one taking care of the daughter, Emma – the daughter who is so obviously struggling under the weight of what her father may or may not have done.

  She splits her time between France and England, it seems, having bought the Saint Juillet holiday villa two years ago. When they spoke to her, she was very forthcoming – the most forthcoming of them all, in fact – detailing her thoughts on Callum and his marriage to her sister. The picture she painted wasn’t exactly rosy.

  In the UK she owns a property in Woodbridge, the pretty market town in Suffolk, but somehow Alex finds it easier to picture her in France, sunning herself by that beautiful swimming pool. He has seen the photos of the villa, sent over by the Rouen police, and he can’t imagine why anyone would bother with Suffolk when they could be over there. Still, it’s good of her to stay with her sister. Siobhan Dillon is having a rough old time of it. Has had a rough old time of it for years now. Enough to push anyone over the edge.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ipswich

  16th August

  Siobhan

  I stand to one side as the police come into the house. Thankfully, it’s not DCI McVey – I have no wish to see her again after the grilling she gave me this morning. Guilt eats at my insides; I wasn’t going to admit to her that I didn’t hear my husband come in that night – it feels like a betrayal of Emma, of everything I promised I’d do to try to keep the family together. Still, I think, they won’t charge him without evidence. My words alone won’t change anything.

  They have an official warrant to search our property now, the property we bought together fifteen years ago, the property in which we’ve raised Emma. Now it is treated like another crime scene; gloved hands riffle through our belongings, fingers flick through my dresses and Callum’s shirts, the ones that we weren’t forced to leave in France. They are thorough, spending a long time out in the studio in the garden, where Callum likes to work, and where he keeps his computer – though they’ve taken that away now – and all our paperwork. I don’t go in there very often, it has to be said. My husband doesn’t like to be disturbed.

  I’ve always felt this house was too big for the three of us. Its space gives us an excuse to be apart – to busy ourselves in separate rooms, to be ships passing in the night. Perhaps if we had managed another child, someone to be a companion for Emma, things might be different. Maybe a sibling would have rubbed off her edges, brought her out from her moodiness and into the world of the living. But then again, maybe it would have made things worse. She might have had to share Callum’s attention, and I don’t think she’d have liked that at all.

  They search Emma’s room too, even though I think this is ridiculous and I tell them so. They’re very interested in the things we took to France, but I explain to them that most of our luggage is exactly where we left it, that the French police were eager to get us out of the villa and back to our own country. Back where we belong. You should know that, I think to myself, wondering not for the first time about the lines of communication between Ipswich and Rouen. But of course I don’t say that, not in so many words. I offer to make them tea and hover in the kitchen whilst it happens, trying not to wince as their clumsy fingers rub up against everything I own.

  The visit from the police only serves to reignite the presence of the press outside. I’ve barely left the house since we got back from France but we’re running out of everything – milk, toilet paper, shampoo, wine – so that afternoon I brave it, putting on my big coat despite the fact that the August sunshine is showing no signs of letting up. It’s not as hot as it was on the French coast, of course, but Suffolk is still muggy. The
air clings to my face, making me feel claustrophobic.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I say to Emma and Maria, who have taken to sitting in front of the television at almost all times of day, watching the news for updates, occasionally doing jigsaw puzzles, shutting themselves away from the outside world. I’ve told my sister that she ought to go back to the Woodbridge flat, have a break from it all.

  ‘You could take Ems with you,’ I said to her, ‘get her away from this circus a bit. It might be good for her.’

  Maria had looked at me strangely, as though I’d suggested something completely absurd.

  ‘I need to be here with you,’ she’d said, ‘I’m worried about you, Siobhan. I want to stay until this gets sorted out. Work are fine with it – I’m my own boss, remember.’

  ‘Have it your way,’ I said, ‘but this could go on forever.’

  I think of all the missing children that have never been found; their names circle in my head. I can’t stand to look at the pictures of Eve Grant that they repeatedly show on the news, I can’t bear to think of the pain her parents must be in. I can’t bear to think that my husband might have caused it.

  Part of me does want them to charge him, or at least that’s the thought that entered my mind around 2 a.m. while I faced down another night of insomnia. For them to find something so insurmountable, so concrete, that there is no other option. At least then Emma and I might be able to move forward, to progress with our lives. Of course, I don’t want Callum to be guilty. But living in this purgatory is fast becoming unbearable.