by S J Grey
Geoff fussed over them, as they loaded up Sandra’s car with cleaning materials and bin bags. He wanted to go too, but had business to take care of at home this morning. Emma’s parents ran a successful mail-order board-game company, and he had a number of orders to package and ship, and a meeting with a rep for a new game. He’d probably join them this afternoon, and help to secure doors and windows.
Emma didn’t know how much damage had been done, or if it was all just mess. She’d been in a state of panic when she last went in there, and not paying much attention to the details.
There was a text from Mark, sent at seven this morning.
Hey. I’ve got a replacement phone now, so I can text you again. Hope you slept well. I missed you. I’ll update you later about the lights n cameras. Love you.
Just the one replacement phone, huh? What about the one in the glovebox? More than anything, Emma hoped she was wrong about Mark. In the ideal world, Si would find a mistake in his algorithm, and Mark’s history would go back to normal. The mistake about the cellphone in his glove box would have a plausible explanation, and Caleb would remember him from Uni after all.
If she was making wishes, she’d uncover a vital piece of evidence that would prove Joss had been murdered, and also exonerate Caleb from killing his stepfather. Yeah, that was all she had to do. One step at a time.
She replied to Mark.
Good morning. Miss you too. I’m spending today with Mum. Love you xx
She hugged the phone to her chest. It hurt to conceal things from him, but until she knew how much he could be trusted, she had to be careful.
“How bad is it, darling?”
Emma recapped Mum’s question in her head. For a moment, she thought Mum was asking about Mark. “Sorry. Did you mean the house?”
“Yes. But I know this business with Caleb is playing on your mind.”
“I want to help him, Mum. It’s all so wrong.”
“My poor girl. You can only do so much. You have to be careful and protect yourself. He’s a fugitive, and if you help him, you’ll be breaking the law too.”
Her mother talked about normal, everyday stuff for the rest of the journey. The board-game business and the expansion into live-action role playing events. How Geoff had roped her into the local amateur drama group and the upcoming production of Blithe Spirit.
Emma didn’t need to do more than grunt in the right places. Mum’s chat washed over her, as warm and soothing as a relaxing bath.
Sure enough, a police car was parked outside the front of the house. A uniformed officer got out and came to meet them. He peered into the car. “Will you open the boot, please?”
Mum flicked a catch, and it auto-opened. The policeman took a cursory look inside. There were no prizes for guessing what—or whom—he was searching for.
“You’re fine to go,” he said and stomped back to his car.
They unloaded their stuff and carried it through the front door. The lock was smashed, and the door hung oddly, suggesting one of the hinges was broken. The door was old fashioned, made of thick wood. Something must have hit it hard.
Emma pushed it shut and surveyed the hall, Mum silent at her side.
It looked worse than last time. White powder lay on all the surfaces and was tracked across the floor. Fingerprint powder?
“You know,” whispered Mum, “if there’s only one officer on guard, he can’t possibly watch the front and back at the same time.”
Did she mean what Emma thought? That Caleb might be able to gain access unseen?
“Right.” Mum continued in her normal voice. “I’ve brought my Bluetooth speakers, so we can have some music while we work. I always find it easier to do messy jobs with something noisy playing in the background. Don’t you agree?” Her mother set a Shihad track playing from her phone, the volume very high.
O-kay. This was new. And unexpected.
Mum leaned close and spoke into Emma’s ear. “Call me paranoid,” she said, “but Joss thought someone was watching her every move, right?” Emma nodded. “If there are cameras and microphones in here, they’ll find it difficult to hear us.” Her smile was wicked.
Emma snorted a laugh. “You’ve been watching too many spy movies.”
It was a brilliant idea. And it looked as though Caleb had another ally, after all.
“Let’s start at the top and work down.” Emma headed upstairs, one of the Bluetooth mini-speakers in her hand. Shihad continued to blast out and fill the house with noise.
She and Mum went up to the attic, to Caleb’s old room. It was chaotic.
Mum sucked in her breath. “You said it was a mess, but this is awful. Do you suppose Joss was here while they were doing this?”
It was something Emma couldn’t think about. “I hope not.” Joss would have been beyond terrified. Which would be worse? To be out somewhere and come back to this, or to be here while everything you held dear was trashed?
Something nudged at her memory. DS Miller said Joss had been in the water over two hours before Emma found her. Did they kill Joss first, and then attack the house? If Emma had arrived a half hour earlier, she might have caught the raiders in the act. And she might have ended up in the river too.
It was pointless to carry on with the what-ifs. She and Mum had a job to do.
Emma had to find the electrical socket under the window. Getting to it was a problem, due to the upended bed and the bookcase lying on the floor, books and CDs scattered underfoot.
“Do you suppose there is a home-contents insurance policy?” Mum gestured to the CDs, their cases smashed. It looked as though they’d been stomped on. “We need to throw most of these away, but I’ll take pictures, in case Caleb can make a claim at some point.”
“Good idea. And watch out for broken glass.”
“I’ve brought thick gloves for us both.” Mum dug into her tote and pulled out two pairs of leather-palmed gloves. “I use these for pruning the roses. They’re quite sturdy.”
It was official—Mum was amazing.
Shihad segued into AC/DC, and they began the process of setting the room back to rights. An hour later, they’d barely made a dent in the mess, and Mum went downstairs to make tea. She’d brought mugs and all the fixings, of course.
Emma had a few minutes alone. She needed to find the data stick.
Why did she wait until Mum was out of the room? If she could trust anyone, it would be her mother, but for whatever reason, this was staying a secret. At least for the moment.
There was only one electrical outlet under the window, and the plug was indeed connected to a lamp, as Caleb said. She flicked the lamp switch, but it didn’t come on. That was promising. She’d never taken a socket apart before, and on closer examination, she needed a screwdriver. Damn. Of course she did. She felt like smacking herself in the face. She could either ask Mum if she carried one in her tote-of-everything, or waste valuable time searching for one here.
Or improvise.
A small pair of scissors lay on the floor. They might do instead.
Emma crouched by the socket and aligned one of the scissor blades to the screw-head. It was fiddly work, and the blade kept falling out, but she got it moving. The screw turned. And a little more. She tackled the second one, and then tugged at the cover plate.
Mum would be back any minute.
The plate fell away, and sure enough, instead of a bundle of wires, there was a tiny open space, the size of a cigarette packet. And a data stick.
Caleb was right. She grabbed the stick and shoved it deep in her back pocket, then reassembled the cover plate, jamming the screws back into their holes. She worked quickly, faster now that she understood how to use the scissor blade, and she finished and moved away just as Mum came back into the room, a steaming mug in each hand.
“I just talked to your dad. He’s coming over soon, and he’ll fix the front door.”
It was a reminder for Emma to check her own phone, and she found a missed text from Mark. She hadn’t he
ard it over the music.
Hey. What are you up to today?
How best to reply? She tapped out her answer.
Spending some time with Mum. All good. How about you? X
He replied quickly.
Doing anything fun?
She hated concealing the truth from him, but she needed to be sure she could trust him. She kept it vague.
Helping with some cleaning and tidying.
There was no reply to that, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“You got me thinking when you told me Joss thought someone was spying on her”—Mum picked up her phone and swiped the screen—“so I downloaded an app. It’s supposed to identify hidden surveillance systems. We could give it a try?”
Wait… What? “You can download an app to do that? Mum, you are full of surprises.”
“I may be over fifty, but I know how to use Google and the App Store.” She beckoned Emma closer. “Look. This one is called SpyCamDetector. It scans for infra-red and electromagnetic radiation. All I have to do is walk around the room, and if there is a hidden device and I get close enough, the screen on my phone will glow red. It’s that easy.”
“Let’s do that. We can take turns, scanning the room.”
First there was loud music, to block their voices, and now scanning for hidden devices. It had an element of crazy to it. “Who are you,” Emma said, “and what have you done with my mum?”
“Very funny.” Mum walked slowly the length of the room, sweeping her phone up and down the wall. When she stood underneath the smoke alarm, she paused. “Oh my. It’s gone red.”
Emma scrambled to her feet. “You found something?”
“Yes. I think so. Look.” Mum held out the phone. A circle in the middle of the display pulsed bright red. Mum swung the phone to the side, and the flashing stopped.
There had to be a mistake. “Maybe it’s the way the smoke alarm works? Like a false positive?”
“Or maybe not. Bring me that stool, darling. I need something to stand on.”
Emma dragged the heavy, wooden stool to where Mum stood, and watched as her mother climbed on and reached up to the ceiling. She fiddled with the cover of the alarm. “I need a screwdriver. Have a look in my bag and pass me the Swiss Army knife, please.”
After all the trouble Emma went to with the scissors… She should have just asked. She passed the knife to her mother and waited while she unscrewed the cover. Emma didn’t know whether she felt spooked or nervous or amused at this side of her mother she’d never seen before.
“Voilà.” Mum whipped away the cover and peered at the innards of the smoke alarm.
Emma stared up at it. She’d never looked inside a smoke alarm before, but her gut instinct told her the black plastic box with the winking red light didn’t belong.
Mum swept the phone over the device, and the screen pulsed again.
Holy Shit. If that was really a camera, it had watched her removing the data stick from its hidden safe. It saw her and Mum taking the alarm apart. What should Emma do? Destroy it?
And how many other cameras were in the house?
Chapter Fourteen
Should Emma and her mother cover the device up and pretend they didn’t know what it was?
Unless Joss or Caleb had installed it—beyond unlikely—it shouldn’t be there. Who was behind it? Were Emma and her Mum in danger, too?
She couldn’t panic. She had to think clearly. “If we disconnect it, it’s going to alert whoever was watching Joss. If they still are. She’s gone. They might not be monitoring it anymore.”
Mum stared at her, eyes wide, and Emma made a decision. “Let’s go talk outside.”
They went to the car and sat inside. The enormity of what they found hit Emma, and she slumped into the seat. “Joss was right,” she whispered. “And nobody believed her.”
“Why was someone spying on her in the first place? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“What if they weren’t?” Emma felt as though she’d been smacked in the face. “What if they were watching Caleb?”
Her mum looked doubtful. “You mean in case he comes back? That seems like a lot of effort by the police, to track one runaway prisoner.”
His programme. The dark web tool. “Caleb had these mad hacking skills. Υou know that, right?”
“I’ve heard of white-hat hacking. I know that’s what his business was.”
“He developed a tool. Αn application everyone wanted to get their hands on. Good guys, like law enforcement, and bad guys too. If they were trying to find his programme, anyone might have planted that camera. And I bet there are others.”
“So let’s go look for them.” Mum sat up straight. “We could take them all out of action. It’s a bit like setting a trap. If you’re right, as soon as they realise we’ve removed them, they’ll have to act. They might come back to fit more. In the movies, they drop things like that into a bucket of water. We could do that. Or even drop them into the toilet.”
“You really have been bingeing on Netflix, haven’t you?”
“What can I say? I like to keep well informed.”
“The first thing we need to do is find them all, and then we can decide what to do with them.”
They returned to the house and systematically scanned each room. Emma scribbled down the locations where the app thought it found something. It was staggering. Caleb’s room had another three devices, Joss’s bedroom had two, and the lounge, kitchen and spare bedrooms had one each. There was one in the entrance hall, and two in the garage.
Either the app was reporting multiple false positives, or Joss’s house was full of bugs. Emma and her mother were in agreement—they needed confirmation. They needed to remove one and take a look at it.
With music still blaring out from the Bluetooth speakers, they set about dismantling the smoke alarm in the hallway. Same as the one in Caleb’s room, it included a round, black component that didn’t look part of the detector. Emma dug the Swiss Army blade underneath it and prised it out. It was small—only two or three centimetres diameter—and surprisingly thin. No bigger than the lid of a standard pill bottle, it had a distinct lens in the centre. There was no discernible writing on it.
She held it lens-down in the palm of her hand. “There are no wires. It has to be WiFi, and for all we know, it’s still transmitting.” Emma felt savage, as she looked at the spying device. Nobody believed Joss, but she was right. “Whoever did this, it’s totally illegal. We have to tell the police.”
“Definitely,” said her mother. “And we should leave the rest in place. We don’t want to contaminate the evidence.”
“Should we drown this one?”
Mum found a saucepan in the kitchen and half-filled it, and Emma consigned the camera to the water. It was a satisfying feeling.
“I’m going to see how long your dad’s going to be, while you call the police,” said Mum. “And we should tell Mark.”
Emma’s instinctive answer was no to Mark. She tried to unpick her thought process. “He’ll be worried if he finds out I’m here. Let’s keep it to ourselves for the moment.”
“Okay.” Mum didn’t look convinced but went outside to phone Emma’s father.
Emma called DS Miller, and when it went to voicemail, left a message. “Hi. This is Emma Blackthorne again. We’ve found something interesting in Joss’s house. Could you please come and take a look? Thank you.”
She disconnected as Mum came back in. “I left a message. I’ve no idea how long he’ll be.”
“Your dad will be a couple of hours,” said Mum. “We’ve found more traces than there are smoke alarms, so they must be hidden in other places too. Let’s start disabling them.”
It was as good a plan as any. They moved to the lounge, and Emma said, “there’s no smoke alarm in here, so where is it?”
Mum scanned the room again, section by section, and they pinpointed the bug to one of the recessed lights in the ceiling. As before, Mum climbed onto a stool and p
eered at the light fitting. “This one looks different. Hang on.” She removed the light bulb, and then probed the gap with her fingertips. “It’s a tight fit, but it’s moving.”
“Can you manage? Do you want me to have a go?”
“What the hell are you doing up there?”
Emma spun on her toes. Mark stood in the doorway. She didn’t hear him come in.
He was dressed in jeans and a shirt, sneakers on his feet. Why wasn’t he at work? Was he watching the images from the hidden cameras? Did he know what they were doing?
She reeled at the implications. No. She had to be wrong. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you both the same question.” He took a step into the lounge and raised his phone. “You said, and I quote, helping with some cleaning and tidying. You didn’t say anything about being here.” He was calm and controlled, icily so, and that was more nerve-wracking than if he’d been angry.
He looked around, a frown on his face. “The house is a disaster area, and you’re starting with cleaning the light fittings?”
Mum opened her mouth to speak, but Emma shook her head, and Mum stayed quiet.
“We have permission from the police to be in here, cleaning up the mess.” Emma hated the defensive tone that crept into her voice. “What about you?”
Mark stepped closer. “I asked DS Miller if anyone had fixed the lock on the front door yet, and he told me that you were working on that today. So I sent you a text and got a bullshit answer in reply.
Her cheeks burned under his stare. “I didn’t lie to you.”
“No, you didn’t. But you missed a few important details.” He shoved the phone in his back pocket and then held out his hands to her. “For Christ’s sake, Em. I just walked right in. You didn’t hear me over the music. If I can do that, anyone can. The front door doesn’t even close, let alone lock. How can that be classed as keeping yourself safe?”