by C. J. Cooke
Cressida is lying flat on her back with her head turned to one side, her lips puckered and her fists bunched at either side of her head. Her hair has thickened over the last week, a little downy Mohican forming on her head. She has dark hair, like me, and the familiar Shelley dimple sits in the middle of her chin. I hadn’t noticed this until Eloïse went missing. I tried to tell myself that’s it’s only recently appeared, until I spotted Eloïse’s Facebook pictures of Cressida in the hospital, barely a day old, and the dimple is there.
I tiptoe out, letting her sleep as long as she needs.
Oddly, from the ashes of this nightmare has risen a renewed relationship with my younger brother, Wes. We haven’t really spoken in about six years, give or take the odd grunt at a family do. Wes is the black sheep of the family, my parents’ late-in-life child who wreaked havoc from being knee-high to a grasshopper: expelled from primary school for biting another kid, expelled from high school for drugs and fighting, then locked up for the same things in his early twenties. He drives far too expensive a car for someone without a job. My dad blames it all on my mum leaving when Wes was only a baby. He was four, so not technically a baby, but the age that Max is now. The thought of my wee lad turning out like Wes has added a new layer of fear to the present situation.
Anyway, Wes phoned me this morning and asked how everything was, and I did the very manly thing and broke down on the phone. I told him about the baby monitors and he asked all kinds of questions which I attempted to answer. Then he said, ‘Don’t talk to the police, mate. The police’ll do nothing. You find out anything, you come to me. No one else. I’ll get this put right, trust me.’
I told him I would, but my gut feeling is that if I took Wes up on his offer, several people would end up with their throats cut and I’d be locked up as an accessory to murder.
At ten, one of Eloïse’s babygroup pals, Niamh, a polite Irish woman with dark curly hair and glasses, comes over to take care of Cressida and Max while her own kids are at school. I spend a couple of minutes showing her how to sterilise a bottle and explaining how important it is to do it properly, otherwise Eloïse will go mad, until Niamh places a hand on my arm and looks at me with unveiled pity. ‘I’ve done it a few times before,’ she says.
The plan is that Niamh will look after Max and Cressida in the family room while Canavan and Welsh brief us on the latest developments in the living room, but Cressie develops a dire need to practise her finest yelling voice. We all take turns trying to decipher the reason – Gerda cuddles her, Magnus bounces her against his shoulder and sings the Swiss National Anthem, I change her nappy and let her kick her legs against the mat. She lies there waving her clenched fists, her mouth wide open and her tiny chest heaving out pitiful yells. Max lies down beside her at one point and mimics her. It almost makes me smile.
Niamh eventually sets up the double buggy and discreetly wheels Max and Cressida through the front door to, presumably, the park a few streets away. I watch them disappear down the street through the living room window, my heart in my mouth.
When Welsh and Canavan arrive, they bring a guest. The woman in the navy suit walks towards me with an outstretched hand. She’s black, tall and slender, a look of sympathy on her face. I don’t look her in the eye in case that sympathy makes me emotional.
‘Call me Lochlan,’ I tell her, returning her handshake briskly.
‘I’m Sophie Ojukwu,’ she tells me, lowering on to the sofa as I sit in the armchair opposite. ‘I’m the Family Liaison Officer. I’ll be helping you while the police carry out their investigation.’
‘Good to meet you,’ I say, tempted to ask if by ‘helping’ she means that she has a special ability to find my wife.
We take our seats; I ask if anyone wants tea, but no one does. Gerda looks shrunken into herself, and although Magnus greets the detectives in his characteristically brusque manner, I notice he’s quieter than usual, and when he sits he bounces one knee until Gerda places a hand on it, forcing him to stop.
Canavan goes about setting up a laptop on the coffee table, which I presume is to show us the footage they’ve managed to download from El’s phone. But then he says,
‘Our tech team has found evidence of “tampering” with the baby monitors they’d taken during the search.’
I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing. ‘Tampering?’
Welsh nods. ‘Unfortunately, the kind of baby monitors you owned are vulnerable to hacking. It appears that someone has hijacked them.’
Gerda says, ‘What do you mean, “hijacked” them?’
Canavan explains that their technical guys located several IP addresses that had been used to download data from the babycam. It’s no easy feat, he says, not like a channel or website someone could stumble upon by accident. In fact, the tech team say that our babycams were installed with firewalls to protect them from possible intrusive activity, but this had been circumvented. Whoever has done this has significant technical skills and would have had to search out our own IP address in order to access the footage. It was a deliberate, calculated effort to spy on our family.
‘How long have you had the monitors?’ Canavan asks. I’m still processing everything he’s said, so it takes me a moment to realise he’s asked me a question. The irony. When Max was born, Eloïse insisted on getting top-spec baby monitors. Despite my suggestion that we go for the standard audio-only versions available in the likes of Mothercare or Mamas and Papas, El purchased four wireless monitors with high-quality video cameras. And whereas ordinary people might place the monitor on a cabinet or sideboard and point it in the direction of the crib, our monitors were set up Eloïse-style: mounted high on the wall, connected to the mains so they wouldn’t switch off, synced together by a technician to provide one continuous video stream throughout the house, all the way from the children’s bedrooms, right down the stairs, into the hallway and reception rooms and the kitchen.
Eloïse was able to link the footage to her phone and record it. Completely unnecessary, I told her, but she had planned to hire a nanny for Max and wouldn’t dream of leaving him without surveillance. She argued that the monitors made it possible to check on Cressida and Max at night without having to get out of bed: all she’d have to do was turn on her phone. The monitors also synced to some kind of heartbeat-monitoring app, a preventative against cot death. If Cressida stopped breathing for more than fifteen seconds, the phone would sound an alarm.
‘I guess we had the cameras for four years,’ I tell Canavan.
He looks grave. ‘Then I’m afraid it’s possible that whoever was hijacking the babycams could have been watching you for that length of time.’
‘But what does this mean?’ Magnus shouts. ‘Are you saying that someone was spying on Eloïse?’
‘Why would anyone do that?’ Gerda cuts in, her hands at her mouth.
‘That’s precisely what we intend to find out.’
‘So – you’re saying that whoever hijacked the cameras is likely to have taken Eloïse?’ Magnus says, tripping over his words a little. I’ve noticed that his left hand has started to shake.
Welsh and Canavan share a look. ‘It seems highly coincidental, at the very least,’ Welsh says gently. ‘Once we get the address of whoever was spying on your family, we’ll be speaking with them in connection with Eloïse’s disappearance.’
‘How long will that take?’ Gerda asks.
‘We’re working on it,’ Canavan says. ‘For now, though, we’d like you to look very carefully at the footage we’ve retrieved and let us know if there’s anything here, anything at all, that seems out of the ordinary.’
He turns on the laptop. Max’s bedroom appears on the screen, albeit at a slightly convex angle. The image is strikingly clear – I can see Max sitting on his mat, his little legs splayed wide as he rolls a toy train along a small wooden track looped in a figure eight.
After a few moments, Eloïse comes into the room carrying a basket of laundry. The footage is so raw, so real, like Fac
etime. It crushes me that she is behind that screen, in the past, anywhere but here. All of us cover our mouths. The air in the room is suddenly thick with emotion.
‘What you doing, Mummy?’ Max says as Eloïse folds his clothes and puts them in his drawer. He sounds and looks so much younger, his pronunciation looser and awkward. This footage must be from last year, before he turned three.
‘I’m putting your clothes away, darling. Do you want to help me?’
‘No fanks.’
Eloïse laughs. There’s a sound elsewhere in the house that makes both of them stop what they’re doing and glance at the door.
‘I think that’s Daddy, back from work,’ Eloïse says. ‘Shall we surprise him?’
Eloïse stands close to the wall behind the door, as though ready to leap out on to the landing. Max runs towards her and clings to her leg, peeking out from behind the door.
They wait a long time, but I don’t appear. Eventually Max calls out, ‘Daddy!’ and Eloïse tells him gently to be quiet.
‘I think he’s coming upstairs,’ she says. The screen flicks to the camera positioned at the top of the stairs, showing me heading upstairs with the Financial Times tucked under my arm, my free hand tugging at my necktie. I don’t remember this at all.
‘Come and get us!’ Eloïse calls, and Max claps his hands to his mouth and giggles.
‘Not now,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to catch up on some work.’
My heart sinks as I watch myself on the landing camera, heading for the office at the end of the hall. The screen flicks back to Eloïse and Max, who asks: ‘Daddy not coming?’
Eloïse picks him up and kisses his forehead. ‘He’s busy. Why don’t we finish putting away your clothes, eh? You can give Mummy a hand.’
The video cuts to Eloïse and Max in the family room, sitting on the floor singing nursery rhymes. Eloïse is pregnant, about five or six months. I recognise the floaty white top she’s wearing; she bought it shortly after the anomaly scan. She stops singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ and Max continues. Then he says, ‘Why you not singing, Mummy?’
Silence. Then, ‘Mummy feels a little bit sad, Maxie.’
‘Why you sad, Mummy?’
‘I don’t know, Maxie.’
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘’Cos I cry sometimes when I hurt myself.’
She laughs. ‘I know you do, Maxie. But then Mummy always kisses it better.’
‘Maybe I can kiss your ouchie better.’
He leans over and kisses her on the arm with a loud mwah!
‘Now you should be all better.’
‘Thank you, love.’
He starts another nursery song and she tries to join in, but I hear the tremble in her voice. I try to think back: why was she upset?
Other scenes briefly show El and me discussing schedules, work arrangements, family holidays – normal stuff. One scene makes me laugh: Max throws an epic tantrum about getting dressed, and even after Eloïse manages to pull his T-shirt and trousers on him he strips naked and runs down the stairs. When he was potty-training, he went through a phase of several months of taking his clothes off anywhere, anytime: supermarkets, friends’ houses, playgroups … The camera angled down the stairs captures him heading for the front door right as the postman is delivering some letters. He pulls it open and blows a raspberry at the postman before turning and racing back into the family room. Eloïse apologises to the postman, then races after Max and scolds him. He lies face down on the floor and screams his lungs out in protest. I know his tantrums drove Eloïse to tears at times, but it makes me chuckle.
I soon realise, however, that everything that seems to come out of my mouth in the footage is work-related: clients, investment cases, stock. Was I always so dull? I seem perpetually tired and long-faced.
Forty minutes in, Eloïse and I are waltzing in the kitchen late at night, laughing. Her hands are clasped at the back of my neck, her head angled up to mine.
I’m grinning like an idiot and have my gaze fixed on her lovely breasts. ‘What are you thinking?’ she says, smiling up at me.
‘Happy thoughts.’
She turns and loops her hands around my neck from behind, and I slip my hands beneath her swollen belly, cradling it. A few seconds later, Max runs in and wraps his arms around her legs. She picks him up, setting him on her hip, and we all sway to the music together. Welsh passes a box of tissues around and it’s only then that I realise that Gerda and Magnus and I are all in tears.
The next scene shows Eloïse walking across the landing, talking to someone. At first I think it’s me or Max, but then the nursery camera picks her up and she turns, as though someone is standing behind her, and addresses thin air. She is no longer pregnant, but her stomach still protrudes, as though she has very recently given birth. I watch closely, utterly confused.
‘But what about Lochlan?’ she is saying. ‘I don’t know …’
It’s strange, completely unlike her. Her whole manner, I mean. She puts her hands on her hips and looks as though she’s mulling something over, but occasionally she says ‘yeah’ or ‘I guess so’, as though she’s having a conversation with a ghost.
I hit pause to take it in.
‘What do you make of that?’ Cavanan says.
I look to Magnus and Gerda. ‘I’ve no idea. Can you play it again?’
He rewinds it and zooms in slightly closer, rendering El’s silhouette in pixelated fuzz. Eloïse laughs and nods this time, then says ‘thanks’, before walking out of the room.
‘Maybe someone out of shot?’ Welsh says.
‘That’s my thinking,’ Canavan says. ‘I’d like to see if we can get this image enhanced. We might be able to pick up a reflection from that window, there.’
‘Maybe her mobile phone was in her pocket,’ I say, squinting at the screen. ‘And she had someone on speakerphone but the microphone on the babycam didn’t pick it up?’
Canavan nods. ‘Possibly.’
But when we play it again, and then again in slow motion, we all agree: there is no one else in the room. I find myself wanting someone to explain it, for a shadow of another man to appear in the corner. Even if it turns out that she’s talking to a lover, I don’t care: it’s too preposterous for me to ignore.
But Canavan and Welsh are keen to move on, to find more clues. Other scenes show Eloïse getting up during the night and going into the nursery to check on Cressida. Cressida is not crying and remains asleep, but Eloïse paces and paces, going in to check on Max. Then she checks the front door and the back door. The clock in the family room reads two twenty. Several more scenes show the same – Eloïse wandering around the house in the middle of the night while I lie snoring in bed. Cressida was only a couple of weeks old. Why was she up? She must have been exhausted. Why didn’t she ever say anything about not being able to sleep?
Fifty-four minutes in, the footage cuts to the sound of shouting and a child screaming in the background. We are both walking between the kitchen and the family room. It is late – the large round clock on the wall reads half past twelve. I know it’s February from Max’s hand-drawn Valentine cards on the mantelpiece. Six weeks ago. Eloïse is barefoot, her hair loosely gathered up, a long white nightdress brushing her calves, Cressida in her arms producing such a loud shriek that the laptop speakers vibrate and I have to turn the volume down.
‘What’s your problem?’ I seem to be saying, angrily gathering up clothes and toys and throwing them into corners. ‘It’s only a week! That’s all!’
‘It’s not about the conference!’ she shouts back. ‘I understand you have to work long hours six or seven days a week, but you don’t have to go to the conference! Cressida’s not going to know who you are at this rate.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘It’s like you’re determined to be away from us as much as possible.’
‘And that’s fair, is it?’
The anger retreats from her voice,
turning into a plea. ‘I need you, Lochlan. I need you and you’re never here.’
I’m mortified at how I come across, and there’s this strange feeling nagging at me that this is not how it happened, or that the cameras are somehow making me seem angrier than I really was. I didn’t go to the conference, and Lincoln Kavanagh got the Pinco deal. But no, I shouldn’t have resented El for it.
‘Mummy, what’s all the shouting about?’
Max isn’t visible but his voice carries all the way to the microphone, and I remember him then, standing in the doorway in his Gruffalo pyjamas, bleary-eyed and yawning.
Cressida’s wailing reaches vibrato; Eloïse pulls a dining chair from the table and sits down, awkwardly positioning Cressida to her breast for a feed. She gives a loud gasp as Cressida latches on, and I recall how painful breastfeeding was for her. I see her curl up her toes, her face tight with agony. In my worst moments, I wondered if she was exaggerating, trying to make me feel bad.
I am barely visible at the corner of the screen, still in the kitchen, still shouting.
‘Why don’t I do what you did, eh? Why don’t I damn well jack in the job and move us all into a council house? Though I’ve a feeling you wouldn’t like that very much, El.’
She stares at me. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying you’ve been used to better than what I’ve got to give, haven’t you?’
‘You’re saying you’ve got something to give, Lochlan?’
At this I slam my fist into a door, making Eloïse jump and the baby start to cry. I feel Magnus and Gerda’s eyes turn to me. On the screen, El continues breastfeeding, one hand covering her eyes, biting her lip and making whimpering sounds. Cressida unlatches and starts to scream again. El swipes the tears from her face and lifts Cressida to her shoulder as she makes for the kitchen.
As she moves out of shot, there is a loud slapping sound, followed by a yell.
The screen flicks to Eloïse entering Cressida’s bedroom and settling down into the nursing chair, where she continues to feed Cressida with a bottle. She is crying.