Sleep Tight

by Rachel Abbott

  ‘You don’t watch the news? How do you know what’s going on in the world? Do you read the papers?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just Robert. He wants me to be happy, and he thinks bad news upsets me. He sort of filters it – tells me the good stuff, keeps the bad stuff from me. It’s his idea of taking care of me, but I have a quick catch-up every now and then when he’s not around. Never mind that. Just tell me.’

  So Sophie had told her about Iraq, Afghanistan and her career in the Intelligence Corps. She had kept the emotion out of her voice, but hadn’t tried to hide the fact that she loved her job. She had known she was gabbling, but she’d wanted to get her story out of the way before her mother came back in the room. She’d told Liv about the day of the bomb, and the carnage. She was being lauded as a hero, but so many had died and she had only managed to save a few.

  When she heard her mother opening the door, she’d quickly changed the subject.

  ‘Do you remember the day we met? You were doing a happy dance in your room, skipping round upended suitcases, kicking clothes, picking them up, throwing them in the air. You were a maniac.’

  Liv had turned to Sophie’s mum, trying to look indignant. ‘Your daughter just barged into my room without knocking, and stood there watching me.’

  ‘You should have seen her, mum. A real slob, she was – and blamed it all on her dad for being obsessively tidy. I had to fold everything up and help her put it all away. Even when we lived together I had to tidy up after her every few weeks.’

  ‘Yes, and you always left me a charming note saying “Lazy Cow” or “Messy Mare” or something equally derogatory, if I remember rightly. But we did have a great time, didn’t we?’ Liv had laughed, almost looking like the girl Sophie had first met.

  ‘You did.’ Sophie had said, pointing an accusing finger. ‘I felt like your minder. You were so daring - up for absolutely anything. You volunteered for every hare-brained stunt going, and dragged me into it too, if I didn’t keep an eye on you. I think every man in Manchester was in love with you. I sometimes felt like your bodyguard, fighting them all off.

  Liv had grinned. ‘Rubbish. And anyway, once I’d met Dan, I never even looked at anybody else.’

  Liv’s face had fallen at the mention of Dan.

  ‘Poor you. I know it must have hurt like buggery at the time – sorry, Mum. But look at you now. Happily married and three kids. Did you ever find out what happened to Dan?’

  ‘No. I never heard another word.’

  Sophie had nodded and looked down at her clasped hands. She hadn’t known whether it was an appropriate time to tell Liv what she had found out, but she’d never been one for keeping quiet.

  ‘I met Danush’s brother – Samir,’ she’d said in a soft voice.

  ‘What?’ Sophie had suddenly known she shouldn’t have started this. She had thought her friend would be over Dan by now but, judging by the eagerness with which she leaned towards Sophie, her eyes wide with expectation, that was far from the case. ‘What did he say? Where did you see him?’

  ‘In Dubai. I caught a nasty bug when I was in one shit hole or another – can’t really remember which. Anyway, I was airlifted to Dubai and taken into hospital. When they said I’d be treated by Doctor Jahander, I did wonder. I remembered you telling me that Samir was a doctor, although I’m sure it’s a fairly common name. But as soon as I saw him I recognised him. I’d met him before – don’t you remember – when he came over to read his brother the riot act for shaming the family by living in sin with an un-chaste white woman, when he should have been marrying his cousin, or something?’

  She could tell by Liv’s face that she remembered it well. But it was only weeks later that Liv had found out she was pregnant, and so if Danush had had any thoughts of leaving Manchester after his PhD, they were quashed.

  ‘Samir has a job at the hospital in Dubai, which is where he makes his money, and then he spends a few weeks every year working on a voluntary basis in some of the poorer areas of Iran. I liked him.’

  In Sophie’s opinion, Olivia had the right to know what Samir had said about Danush. So she’d told her. Maybe this would finally put an end to any dreams she was clinging on to.

  By the time Sophie had finished, Liv was clearly fighting back the tears and it was only a few minutes later that she’d said she had to go. Sophie hadn’t known whether she would ever see her one-time best friend ever again. She hadn’t mentioned the fact that Liv had never responded to her letters – that conversation had come much later and with far more tears.

  But it was all a long time ago. The months had passed quickly, and so much had happened between then and now.

  Sophie shook herself out of her reminiscences. It was time she started to think about the future. She would soon be back on active duty. She had undergone endless operations on her leg, but the final round seemed to have been successful, and she was just waiting for the wound to heal. More importantly, she’d completed a course in Pashto, the language favoured by the Taliban, while she had been recuperating. And she’d been here for her mum, whom she was getting desperately worried about. Her arthritis was getting steadily worse, but at least they’d had the stair lift installed, so she could get up and down to her bedroom.

  When she’d first come back from Afghanistan, Sophie had had some savings, and she’d wanted to put money aside to make sure her mum could afford the help she needed. But her mother was having none of it. She was adamant. She wouldn’t let Sophie spend a penny of it. It was perhaps just as well now, because in the last twelve months nearly all of those pennies had gone, and she’d have a hell of a job explaining that to her mother.

  Sophie pulled her car into the short drive behind her mum’s silver Fiesta, a car that hadn’t been driven in the last two years but which her mum insisted on keeping for ‘when I’m ready to drive again’. Everybody knew that would be never but nobody had the heart to tell her.

  Sophie’s mind was spinning with all these different worries as she retrieved the first of the shopping bags. Balancing it on her knee as she put her key in the front-door lock, she called out to her mother.

  ‘Only me, Mum.’ There was no response. Perhaps she was sleeping.

  Sophie went back out to the car and collected the rest of the bags and took them through to the kitchen to start unpacking them. Maybe she should check on her mum first.

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs. The stair lift was at the top, so there was no point looking in the sitting room.

  ‘Mum,’ she called again softly, not wanting to wake her if she was sleeping. ‘Would you like a cup of tea and a biscuit?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘That would be lovely, Sophie. Thank you.’

  Every hair on her body stood on end, because the voice that answered from the upstairs landing was definitely not her mother’s.

  25

  As soon as Becky reported that Robert Brookes was missing from the house but his car was still there, Tom told her to call the crime scene team. Given the state of the bedroom as described by Becky, it was far from clear whether there had been some major disturbance at the house, or even a break-in. It was the perfect opportunity for getting their guys in, even if it turned out that Robert had simply gone out for a run and left by the back door. Not that Tom believed it for one single moment. He’d gone. Scarpered.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Tom muttered under his breath. He really should have seen this coming. But they’d had no basis up to now to carry out anything more than a standard search of the house. It had been too early to start pulling the place apart, and whatever his growing suspicions about Robert Brookes, he had planned on bringing him in for formal questioning before he made any decisions about calling in a full forensic team.

  What about the woman impersonating Olivia at the guest house? Could Robert have paid somebody to go in his wife’s place in an attempt to conceal the real date that she went missing? But this was the third time this ‘Olivia Brookes’ had stayed there, or so they had bee
n told by Mrs Evans. They needed to find out who the woman was, and quickly. Something about her was niggling at him, but he couldn’t for the life of him think what. And then there was the overnight visitor. Was he just another pawn in Robert’s game?

  Tom knew his driving was erratic as he made his way towards the Brookes’ house. His head was all over the place this morning with the whole Leo situation, the burglary in Cheshire and now bloody Robert Brookes, but when he realised he had almost mowed down a cyclist, who admittedly was on the wrong side of the road, he pulled his thoughts back round to the job in hand – driving with due care and attention. That lasted all of about five seconds until his phone rang. He touched the button on his console to answer.

  ‘Tom Douglas.’

  ‘Tom, it’s Leo. I’m at the cottage. Are you free to talk for a moment?’

  ‘You must have made an early start, Leo. Thanks for going. I appreciate it.’

  ‘Well, I set off before eight. I didn’t sleep too well.’ Tom decided not to mention that made two of them. ‘Tom, do you think…’ Leo paused and Tom waited. He heard her take a deep breath. ‘Never mind. It’s probably a conversation for another day. Anyway, back to the house. Max and Ellie managed to tidy up most of the mess and get the house secure again, but it does look as if the intruders were interested in your papers. One of the cupboards in the study has been completely torn apart – they’ve even taken up the floorboards in there. I’ve no idea why. Nowhere else seems to have been damaged.’

  Tom could understand it perfectly. The study was the only part of the house that had floorboards, being a slightly later extension. The rest were flagged floors.

  ‘And they’ve been in the loft,’ Leo continued. ‘All the boxes there had been turned upside down. Max and I went up to have a look, but I didn’t want to root through your papers or anything, so it was a bit difficult.’

  ‘Feel free to root away, Leo. I don’t have any secrets hidden up there, so do whatever you need to or want to. I’m not expecting you to tidy it all up, you know. I’ll get there as soon as this case has finished and do all that. But it might give us a clue as to what they were looking for. Seriously, I don’t mind you looking at anything at all, love.’ Tom bit his bottom lip and screwed up his face. Had he really just called her ‘love’? He just hoped she would put it down to his northernness, and not read too much into it. Not that she could read any more than was already there.

  In typical Leo fashion, she didn’t miss a beat. ‘Fine. I’ll see if I can work out what was of particular interest to them, and get back to you. Are you busy today?’

  ‘I certainly am. Our mate Robert seems to have done a bunk, so it’s all systems go here.’

  ‘Will I see you later?’ Leo asked, a slightly tentative note to her voice.

  Tom wasn’t sure how to respond. It wasn’t like Leo to sound unsure of herself. She hated to show any vulnerability.

  ‘It depends how the rest of the day goes.’ He wasn’t intentionally playing it cool, but he really didn’t know if they were going to be here all night or not.

  ‘Okay. You know where I am, but if it’s late and you’re too tired you don’t need to call. I’ll see you when I see you. Hope you manage to solve your mystery.’ With that Leo hung up, leaving Tom wondering whether she was finally beginning to trust him. She wasn’t the only one who was vulnerable, though. The break-up of his marriage had ripped him to shreds, and then a couple of years ago he’d become too close to somebody he could never be with. Of course, Leo knew nothing of that.

  He was slightly surprised to find himself turning into the Brookes’ road, having very little memory of how he got there, but he was pleased to see Becky had done her stuff. The road was full of vehicles, and he knew a thorough search would be under way. At least now they might actually begin to find out what had been going on with the Brookes family.

  26

  Although he had already been inside this house more than once and traces of him might be found anywhere, Tom decided to don the requisite outfit to protect the scene from further contamination before stepping into the house. His disposable polypropylene suit and shoe covers crackled as he walked, and he noisily made his way towards the kitchen where he was sure he would find Becky. She was talking to the crime scene manager – a huge black guy with a perpetual grin on his face. As Jumoke Osoba, commonly known as Jumbo, would tell anybody who asked, he’d always loved the sense of the unknown, of a surprise waiting round every corner. A new crime scene to him was the equivalent of a six-year-old delving into their Christmas sack of presents. With each new piece of evidence that he discovered his grin widened, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Naturally, he toned it down if there was a body, but this was the perfect scene for him. No obvious evidence at all, and no bodies to worry about.

  Tom couldn’t help thinking that the word ‘yet’ was hanging in the air, but he pushed the thought to the back of his mind. He noticed Becky was drinking from a bottle of water and she looked a little flushed. He’d have a quiet word later to check she was okay, but first he needed to talk to Jumbo.

  ‘Hey, Jumbo – good to see you. We’ve got the A team today, I see.’

  Jumbo let out a bark of laughter.

  ‘Yeah, Tom. Only the best for you, my friend. I am so looking forward to this.’ He laughed again, a slightly high-pitched sound that seemed so incongruous coming from a large black man. Tom couldn’t help smiling as Jumbo continued, rubbing his enormous gloved hands together in barely suppressed glee. ‘There’s nothing obvious. We’re going to get cracking now, and see what we can dig up for you.’ Jumbo’s eyes drifted towards the terrace and he turned back to Tom with eyebrows raised in a silent question. Neither saw the necessity to speak, but Tom was sincerely hoping that it wouldn’t come to an excavation.

  As Jumbo strode purposefully out of the kitchen to brief his troops, Tom made his way over to Becky.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked. She looked at him vacantly and then appeared to shake herself.

  ‘Yes, sorry – I’m fine. I’m being unusually fanciful, that’s all. When I came into the house, I got this weird feeling, as if I were entering a morgue, for some reason. The quiet was almost deadly, and I genuinely expected to stumble over a corpse at any moment. It was quite a relief when the crime scene boys got here, although Jumbo himself was a bit of a turn up for the books. Where did we find him, then?’

  ‘He’s the best there is, just wait and see,’ Tom said, walking over to the window and peering out into the garden. ‘Do you think Robert’s really done a runner, or has he just gone for a long walk?’

  Becky shook her head. ‘He’s gone. I can feel it. We’re pretty sure he went out the back way, and it seems a bit extreme to climb over a fence if you’re just going for a walk. There’s a shoe print in the soft earth, and he dragged one of the kids’ plastic chairs from their play area over to the fence too.’

  ‘So why did he do it now? What piece of information have we got that made him so afraid that he had to up sticks and go? Was it that we know Olivia wasn’t where he said she was? Was it the photo of the other woman? Are we getting too close? I bloody hope we are – we need to find these kids.’

  ‘He’s running scared, Tom. He knows we’re on to him,’ Becky answered. ‘We just don’t know what he’s done with her – or the kids.’

  Tom shook his head. It had made more sense when they’d thought Olivia was having an affair with her dark-skinned visitor at the B&B, but the fact that this other woman had been pretending to be Olivia for the last three holidays suggested duplicity of some considerable magnitude. But on whose part? Had Robert known before this week that Olivia had never been to the new guest house in Anglesey?

  Becky held up her empty bottle of water. ‘I’m just going to dump this, and check where we’re up to. There’s a hell of a mess upstairs. It looks like there was a fight in the bedroom, but when I showed Jumbo round he didn’t think so.’

  As Becky walked off towards the front of the house, Tom
heard the unmistakeable sound of Gil Tennant’s voice, obviously here to do some investigating into Robert Brookes’ computer before it was carted away.

  ‘DCI Douglas, good morning,’ he said as he walked into the kitchen. Tom was pleased to see that Gil hadn’t disappointed on the shoe front once again. Despite the overshoes, Tom could just make out the edge of some dark red trainers, and was certain that once the coverall was removed these would be a perfect match to either his shirt or trousers.

  ‘Morning, Gil. Sorry you’ve been dragged out on a Sunday. Did you catch Becky on your way in?’

  ‘I most certainly did. She told me Mr Brookes normally keeps his study door locked, so I’m looking forward to finding out what secrets are lurking in there.’ Gil rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Brookes told us his computer was password protected. Is that likely to be a problem?’ Tom asked.

  Gil simply raised his chin and looked smug, which Tom guessed was all he was going to get for an answer.

  ‘At least the power’s back on. I gather the plonker next door cut through the electricity cable yesterday afternoon, so let’s hope he restricts his digger activity today,’ Gil said.

  ‘Tom? You got a minute?’ Jumbo’s voice penetrated the general hubbub of the house. Everybody instantly fell silent – certain that something significant had been found. Tom dodged around Gil and took the stairs two at a time with Becky in hot pursuit. The voice led them to the master bedroom.

  ‘That was quick, Jumbo, even by your standards. What have you found?’

  Jumbo clearly had something in his hands, but for a moment Tom was stunned by the total chaos in the room.

  ‘Christ, was there a tsunami and I missed it?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah, yes. That’s the first thing. Becky – okay if I call you Becky, DI Robinson?’ Jumbo didn’t pause for permission, but carried on. ‘Becky wondered if there had been a fight in here, but I think this has all been created by one person. I would guess he stood here,’ Jumbo took a massive step to his left, ‘and pulled out drawers, flinging them round the room. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of anything being thrown back. There’s one imprint of somebody sitting on the bed, and only the women’s clothes have been ripped off their hangers. I would say that this is our Mr Brookes having a bit of a paddy.’