by T. M. Logan
There she was, leaning up against the rental car with her back to him. On her mobile.
Found you.
‘Shh,’ Odette said, her breath hot in Russ’s ear.
Russ nodded and moved off the gravel path, onto the grass. Quieter. He walked slowly and noiselessly across the lawn towards his wife.
She still hadn’t heard him.
Russ turned and winked at his daughter as he carried her on his back. She was grinning hugely, excited to take her mother by surprise: this was a good game. He crept a bit nearer, slowing down now, until he could just about make out her side of the conversation.
‘That’s what I’m telling you,’ Rowan said. ‘I’m asking you, I mean. I want to know what all the options are, when everything is supposed to happen.’
He took another step towards her, straining to hear every word.
‘No,’ she said forcefully, her back still to them. ‘No. Of course I haven’t told him.’
She switched the phone from one hand to the other, tucking her dark auburn hair behind her ear.
‘I know that. I know! How do you think it makes me feel?’ She paused for a moment, listening. ‘When the time’s right, I’ll tell him. When I’ve had enough time to make a decision that’s based on what I—’
Odette giggled, unable to contain herself any longer.
Rowan whirled around to face them, her eyes wide.
‘What the—’
‘Boo!’ shouted Odette. ‘We found you, Mummy!’
Rowan stared at them both for a moment.
‘I’ll call you back,’ she said, ending the call.
She slipped the phone into the pocket of her shorts and crossed her arms.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Who was that?’ Russ said.
Odette shouted over both of them.
‘We’re playing hide-and-seek, Mummy!’
‘Work stuff.’
Russ pulled a sceptical face.
‘Didn’t sound like work.’
‘I’m not having this conversation with you. Not now.’
‘Why not? Worried it might ruin the wonderful holiday atmosphere we’ve got going on?’
Odette jigged up and down excitedly on her father’s back. ‘Mummy—’
‘Because there’s nothing to talk about.’
‘Don’t try to pull your usual bull on me. I see how you are with him.’
‘With who?’
‘Sean. Yesterday at the beach you were all over him.’
‘He was looking out for our daughter while you were sleeping off a hangover. Again.’
‘Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to embarrass me?’
‘I think you’re managing that very well on your own.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Do you have to drink at every single meal?’
‘I’m on holiday! Supposed to be bloody enjoying myself – but I didn’t choose the company, did I? They’re your friends, not mine.’
‘All the same, it would be nice if you played with our daughter instead of passing out in the sun every afternoon.’
‘We’re playing now. You’re the one skulking out here on your phone.’
Odette clapped her hands.
‘My turn to hide, Mummy!’
Rowan reached for her daughter, giving her a smile. ‘Come on then, baby.’ She plucked Odette off Russ’s back, settled the little girl on her hip the way she had carried her when she was a toddler. ‘Let’s find a place.’
‘And then we can both hide?’
‘Yes. We’ll both hide from Daddy, somewhere really clever.’ She turned and headed off down the path around to the back of the house, Odette bouncing on her hip. ‘Somewhere he’ll never find us.’
28
I had done enough watching, enough listening. It was time for action. Time to do something.
I crept along the first-floor hallway on the balls of my feet. No sound, no voices. Pushing the heavy oak door open, I peered inside Rowan and Russ’s bedroom. Like ours, it was decorated in creamy marble and antique wood, with a four-poster bed and beautiful carved bookcases. The sliding glass door out to the balcony was open slightly, gauzy white curtains stirring gently in the breeze from outside.
What was I looking for? What was I even doing in here?
I didn’t really know. But there had to be something, some clue that would help me find my way out of this maze. Where would I hide something, if it was me? If this was my room?
The wardrobe doors were open. I pushed a dozen dresses and tops aside and saw two matching red Samsonite suitcases stacked at the back of the space, one slightly smaller than the other. I selected the smaller of the two and unzipped it, poking through empty plastic bags, charger cables and a grey cotton laundry sack, also empty. The pockets inside the lid of the case had a few papers in them that seemed to relate to Rowan’s company, columns of figures and accounting terms that I couldn’t make head nor tail of.
I crossed the room and pulled open a bedside drawer. An open carton of ten packets of Marlboros, with only six packs remaining. A spare lighter. Assorted pills, a penknife, a plastic envelope stuffed with a thick wedge of fifty-euro notes, a phone charging cable, an iPad and a Google Pixel mobile phone, both switched off. Russ’s side of the bed. That was a bit weird, that his phone was here, switched off. He seemed to be on it all the time.
Creeping around the other side of the bed, I pulled open the drawer there.
Three passports, paperwork for the hire car, flight details in a plastic wallet, more paperwork relating to her company, packets of pills, hair straighteners, scissors, a notebook, pens, lip balm, suntan lotion.
I moved the boxes of pills aside and reached further into the drawer, trying to leave the other contents as I found them.
But none of it was familiar, none of it meant anything. None of it helped.
Hold on.
Wait.
There.
Something I did recognise. Something I knew very well. Perhaps the last thing I actually expected to find in this room.
Without realising I was doing it, without even making a conscious decision, I reached in and picked it up. Held it between thumb and forefinger, shaking my head. Hot tears pricking the back of my eyes.
I felt dizzy, as though I’d been struck in the back of the head. Up until now I’d had suspicion, fear, and maybe a tiny bit of hope that this could all – somehow – be a misunderstanding.
Now that hope was extinguished.
Now I knew.
But if I took it now, Rowan would notice it was gone and she’d know someone had been in here. She’d probably be able to work out who. The smart move would be to put it back where I found it, avoid the danger of being discovered.
I slipped it into my pocket instead.
For a moment I forgot where I was and what I was doing. The room seemed to spin around me, colours swimming in my vision as I fought to hold back the tears. The fact that I’d found this, particularly this, just made everything worse. More hopeless.
Lucy’s voice floated up from outside, from the pool below, snapping me back into the moment. Our conversation on the first night had been revolving in my head all morning, bouncing from one thought to the next as I tried to work out how to help her. My girl. There was so much she kept from me now, so many things she kept out of my reach, that I sometimes felt like I was spying on her. But I only wanted to help. Moving the sheer curtains aside, I pulled the sliding glass door open a little further and slipped out onto Russ and Rowan’s balcony.
This side of the villa was in direct, dazzling sunlight, and I felt the skin of my arms and face instantly start to cook in the heat. From here, I had a good view over the infinity pool and across to the main balcony off the lounge. Lucy was in the pool, doing lengths with her smooth, graceful breaststroke. Back and forth. If she looked up, she’d see me straightaway. I crouched down on the corner of the balcony, peering through a gap between two towels hung from the
railing.
I watched her for a moment, the smooth movement of her limbs hardly rippling the surface of the water.
She had switched to backstroke when my eye was drawn to a flicker of movement in a shady corner under the stone staircase that ran up to the balcony. At first I thought it was a little statue, a stone figure of a cat, but then the head swivelled slightly to look up in my direction. It was a small ginger-and-white cat, more of a big kitten really, yellow eyes blinking slowly at me as I stared back from my vantage point. The cat was as calm and casual as you like, untroubled by the world. Just hanging out by the pool. It must be a stray, or perhaps from one of the neighbouring farms. After a long moment it broke eye contact and dropped its gaze. I followed to see where it was looking now, putting my forehead right up against the vertical bars of the balcony.
Alistair. He was directly below me, stretched out on a sunlounger in what seemed to be his standard poolside attire: Speedos and a vest top, black socks and sandals. Plus mobile phone, of course. I squinted through the bars of the balcony again, straight down at him. What exactly was he doing? I looked closer, holding my breath in case he should hear. As I watched, he shifted the position of the phone in his lap, angling it up slightly and zooming in on something.
He held it up and snapped a picture. Then another. And another.
29
Alistair
Alistair had started the bogus social media accounts for a totally legitimate reason: so he could follow his sons’ activity on Instagram and Snapchat, keep an eye on what they were doing from a respectful distance. Particularly after Jake had his spell of illness, with Jennifer always worrying about what they were getting up to. Initially, Alistair had tried to follow them under his real name – rookie mistake – and the boys had simply denied they had accounts on there. When he tracked down their usernames, they’d just ignored his friend requests.
A subtler approach was called for.
So he made up a couple of fake accounts – username SkyBlueLad99 – using a generic teenage boy profile image downloaded from a picture-sharing website, started populating it with more generic images of cars, food, football players and celebrity tittle-tattle, and sure enough they’d accepted his friend request and followed him back. Jake and Ethan had hundreds of friends on the sites, most of whom they barely knew in real life. It was pretty easy to blend into the background.
It wasn’t long before he’d discovered that the bogus accounts allowed him to see the whole picture, the background of everything the boys were going through, the environment in which they lived and interacted and were judged, the ocean in which they swam. Things were said on social media that they would never in a million years say in front of him and now he followed lots of others on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. As ever, the beauty of it was that he could be on his phone – looking at literally anything, taking pictures – and no one would be any the wiser. They’d think he was just checking his emails or scrolling through Facebook.
So what were the young folks posting on Instagram today? He started with his boys, scrolling through Saturday’s pictures from the cliff edge, Jake standing on the brink with his arms aloft. Always Jake doing the doing, always Ethan daring him. That was an interesting dynamic in itself. He came out of Jake’s profile and went back to his own feed, made up of their schoolmates and friends. There were copious sun-drenched holiday pictures from various spots on the globe, lots of posts about a girl called Lexie, who was having a sixteenth birthday party at the weekend, a shaky video of some boys dancing in a club, posts about someone called B-Boy with sad face emojis and kisses, quizzes, the usual dogs, cats, food and drink pictures, funny memes, diets, and other random teenage things that Alistair didn’t pretend to understand.
After a few more minutes of light stalking, satisfied there was not too much going on with his boys that he didn’t know about, he typed LucyLupin22 into the search box and selected the account. A selfie of Lucy on the balcony of the villa filled the screen, the landscape spread out behind her. Various other pictures of the beach, the vineyard, the gorge from this morning. He scrolled back further. A picture of Lucy and two other girls, all in animal onesies: a sheep, a giraffe and a panda. It looked like they’d been at a sleepover a few days ago.
OK. That all looked OK.
He switched to his real account and pulled up the pictures he’d just taken a few minutes before: a beautiful sleek creature with perfect features and effortless poise – it made him smile just looking at it. He picked the best one and posted it to his Instagram account with the caption Extra guest at the villa #Cats_of_Instagram.
He had always loved photography, the thrill of seeing an image caught forever, of capturing it and keeping it, of holding it in your hand or having it in your pocket so you could look at it whenever you felt like it. He’d once read about a primitive tribe in the Brazilian jungle who didn’t like having their picture taken because they believed it took a part of their soul away. Other people laughed at that kind of thinking, but Alistair didn’t. He understood. Because the tribespeople were right – having a picture of someone was like having a tiny piece of them. You weren’t allowed to have a lock of their hair or an item of clothing, but you could possess their image, in high resolution full colour, forever. And no one had to know.
It helped him, sometimes, when he had had a particularly troubling day at work, to look at the beautiful pictures he’d taken. As a counsellor and well-being therapist, there were good days and bad days. On the bad days, when it felt like a thankless task and people just refused to be helped, it was such a blessed relief – such a pressure valve – to have a little relaxing time with his picture gallery. Alone, behind his locked study door. He had thousands, categorised and indexed, backed up to the PC in his study at home – his own private collection, although he suspected that one of the boys may have found a way into it more than once. He always wanted to be able to add to his collection, wherever he was.
The garden was quiet, just the tick-tick-tick of the water sprinklers as they turned in slow circles, playing lazily over the lush green lawn. It was the way he liked it. He didn’t even mind being fully exposed out here in the sun – even though the heat was merciless – if it meant he could capture some truly spectacular images. Sweat soaked his vest top to his back and gathered beneath the leather twine pendant he wore around his neck.
The camera on a decent mobile phone nowadays was amazing. Not like the clunky piece of junk he’d had on his first phone, back in the nineties. His Samsung S9 had a twelve-megapixel camera, unlimited storage, dual apertures and super slow-mo video that shot nearly a thousand frames per second. The image quality was superb, even in low light, and it had a decent zoom that didn’t lose too much quality if you wanted to go in close.
There were other advantages to using the camera phone as well, of course. You could send images quickly and easily to your other devices, back them up to the cloud easily, filter, edit and stream live video if you wanted to, all on a device small enough to fit in your pocket.
And the best thing? Everyone was on their phones all the time.
It wasn’t an exaggeration: he would often walk down the street, or watch a group of people in a bus queue, or even at the park, and every single one of them would have a mobile in their hand. Ten years ago, hoiking around a big Nikon with a telephoto lens always attracted attention. Everyone knew what you were doing, straightaway. Or even if they didn’t know, they would make assumptions. People were automatically on their guard; not everyone liked having a lens pointed at them.
But nowadays? No one thought anything of it if you had your phone out – because everyone did. Everyone was doing it, all the time, so no one thought it out of the ordinary.
And that meant you could take pictures of literally anything.
Anything at all.
He put the phone down and sat back on his lounger. Lucy was still ploughing up and down the pool, doing length after length of backstroke. The last time he had seen her in a
swimming costume had been at a summer party they’d thrown for Jake’s tenth birthday. She had been a skinny, long-limbed, flat-chested eleven-year-old, running around the garden and jumping through the bright arc of water from a lawn sprinkler. At the age when they were all still totally, wonderfully, blissfully unselfconscious, unaware of the adult world and happy just to play without worrying about who was looking.
But now she looked . . . well, like a different creature entirely, as if she belonged to a different species. The beautiful people were like that. Lucy looked like a woman, and a full-grown woman at that. She was only sixteen but she had curves in all the right places, a tiny waist, legs that went on forever, a chest the bikini top was only just managing to contain. Untouched by cellulite, by age, by wrinkles and lines and all the other stuff that ruined women in the end.
She looked like a character from one of Jake’s graphic novels, DC or Marvel. A young goddess.
But she was a deep one, too. He had observed that much already.
Lucy climbed out of the pool, rivulets of water running off her lemon-yellow bikini. She lifted her face to the sun and smoothed her long hair down her back with both hands. He was pleased to see that in this company – among friends she had known all her short life – she could still be unselfconscious, unguarded. It was good to see. He knew that on her Instagram account she could pout and pose along with the rest of her friends, filtering the image and getting the angle just right to show herself off in the best light. But when she thought no one was watching, she could still be natural. That was a healthy sign from a mental health perspective; there was a lot that troubled him about the deliberate fakery of most social media content.
Izzy came down the steps to the pool in a silk sarong, sitting down on the sunbed next to Lucy and greeting her with a smile.
Izzy was another interesting character. Very honest, no artifice to her at all. No pretence. Well travelled. No kids, none of the baggage, none of the stretch marks and excess weight that women took on board when they joined the motherhood mafia. She was petite, only just coming up to Lucy’s shoulder. Izzy dropped her sarong onto a sunbed and began oiling herself with suntan lotion. After a minute, she handed Lucy the bottle and turned her back. Lucy squirted her shoulders and began rubbing the liquid in.