[DCI Tom Douglas 03.0] Sleep Tight

by Rachel Abbott

  Tom realised that Gil had paused again, looking from one to the other and back again to see if they were keeping up with him.

  ‘Now, let’s start with Mr Brookes, shall we?’ he beamed at them both. ‘Am I right in saying that he claims to have contacted her daily?’

  ‘Yes,’ Becky added. ‘Up to Friday morning.’

  Gil made a clicking sound with his tongue and wagged his index finger in the air.

  ‘Not true, Mr Brookes. We’ve checked his laptop, and he did contact his wife using FaceTime – every night and most mornings. But only until Wednesday. After his Wednesday evening call, there are no more calls from his laptop.’

  Gil had finally captured Tom’s interest. So Robert had lied about when he’d last spoken to his wife. Why did that not surprise him?

  ‘But we’ve checked the log on Mrs Brookes’ laptop too, and the interesting thing is that the log is showing no calls between her and her husband at all in the last two weeks. Which means, if I need to spell it out, that when he called her she definitely wasn't speaking to him from this laptop. She must have been using a different computer, or maybe an iPad.’

  That didn’t make sense to Tom. If Olivia had been in the bedroom, lying on the bed as Robert said, she would have needed something mobile. But, according to Robert, apart from Olivia’s own laptop – which Gil claimed she definitely didn’t use – there was no other suitable device in the house.

  Gil hadn’t finished. His head swivelled from side to side, looking first at one and then the other with a cat-that-got-the-cream expression. ‘However… there are several calls from Mrs Brookes’ computer to a Hotmail account over the last few months, and the IP address appears to be,’ he paused for effect, ‘in Iran.’

  Becky had been scribbling notes as Gil spoke, but at this news she stopped and looked up. Tom intercepted her look, and no words were necessary.

  ‘The next thing we would normally do is contact the Internet Service Provider and do all the paperwork to get them to release details of the precise location where the call was received. But I don’t fancy your chances with an Iranian ISP, frankly.’

  ‘You are absolutely certain this IP address is in Iran, are you Gil?’ he asked. ‘When was the last time contact was made?’

  Gil’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows nearly shot through the ceiling.

  ‘I’m absolutely certain, DCI Douglas. I don’t make mistakes like that. The last contact with the Hotmail account was just over two weeks ago.’ Gil consulted his notes. ‘Two weeks ago yesterday, to be precise.’

  Tom picked up a pencil from the desk and rotated it in his fingers. Was it possible that Olivia Brookes had just decided she was off with her Iranian lover, and that was all there was to it? But it didn’t feel like that.

  Why had Robert lied about when he’d spoken to her? Gil said the last contact was Wednesday – although not on Olivia’s laptop. Robert said she was definitely there, in their house, until Friday – but that didn’t ring true either. So why was he lying?

  ‘Sorry, Gil. I just need a moment to think,’ Tom said. ‘There’s nothing confusing about your explanation, just about this bloody Brookes family and their mix of truth and lies. Is there more?’

  ‘A bit. As I mentioned, we know Robert Brookes was making calls to his wife’s email address until Wednesday. We’ve tracked where the device that received the calls was situated. It appears the calls were received in France.’

  Becky looked bemused. ‘She hasn’t got a passport, so how the hell did she get there?’

  ‘She probably didn’t.’

  Becky sagged in the chair and pulled a face.

  ‘Huh?’ she said.

  ‘We’re pretty sure it’s a fake IP address. She must have bought it on the Internet – it’s easy enough to do. But if you want to find out the real IP address, you’re going to have to do some more paperwork, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why not route it round the world to disguise it, and confuse us completely?’ Tom asked. His own brother had made a fortune out of this particular technology, and it wasn’t the first crime he’d been involved in where locations had been disguised in this way.

  ‘Not much good with FaceTime. The signal wouldn’t be strong enough and the video would degrade. We can get the details of her real location from the provider, but her husband wouldn’t be able to – which I imagine was her intention. It’s going to take time, probably two or three days and, as I said, lots of lovely paperwork.’

  Gil was quiet for a moment, looking eagerly from one to the other.

  ‘I know this may be stating the obvious, but can I just draw your attention to the fact that just because Robert Brookes contacted his wife’s email address on FaceTime, there is absolutely no evidence at all that it was Olivia on the other end of the call. We only have Robert’s word for that. Anybody who knows her email address and password could have answered Robert’s calls. He could have done it himself, come to that, just to make us believe that she’s alive and kicking. So even if we track the location down, there is absolutely no guarantee we will find Olivia at the end of the trail.’

  Great. Just great, Tom thought. So all we know is that Robert lied about speaking to Olivia on Friday. We don’t really know if he ever spoke to her in the last two weeks – it could all have been set up. And that was the only evidence we had that she is actually alive. Maybe Becky had been right all along.

  But if Robert had killed her, where the hell were the children?

  17

  He lay on the bed, his head propped up on four pillows. Having been up all night, Robert needed to sleep but his mind was spinning. He wished he hadn’t involved the police now, but it had seemed the right thing to do. If he hadn’t reported Olivia missing he would have looked as guilty as sin. But oddly it seemed that filing the report hadn’t diminished the suspicions that were already surrounding him. And that was something he needed to deal with.

  It was reaching the point where he was going to have to give the police more – more information than he wanted to – but there might be no other choice. They were going to find out anyway, sooner or later, and so maybe if he were the one to show them the evidence rather than leaving them to find it themselves, it would score him a few points.

  Olivia, why did this have to happen?

  He had always known he was second best and that nobody would ever replace Danush in her eyes, but he had tried so very hard to make her love him. She said she did, but he could sense the void hiding behind the words. She didn’t understand how that had made him feel – how his heart raced with the desire to pump some emotion into her and bring back the laughing, carefree girl he’d first seen all those years ago and instantly fallen in love with. To Robert it seemed as if a spotlight shone on Olivia wherever she was, and everybody around her faded into the shadows. She was all he could see. But back then she hadn’t even known he existed.

  He had known what he’d needed to do. He’d made himself indispensable, an essential part of her life. Without him, she couldn’t function. He had proved it to her over and over again. But still she remained contained within herself, and he was never sure whether the armour she protected herself with was to stop him getting in, or to avoid exposing the gaping wounds beneath.

  His gaze flicked around their bedroom, resting for a brief moment on the dressing table, picturing Olivia sitting there, brushing her hair. When they’d bought this house, he had made sure that the upstairs could be adapted to provide a whole suite for them – a bedroom big enough to hold a comfortable sofa, a dressing room and a luxury en suite bathroom. He wanted Olivia to feel spoiled. It was decorated predominantly in shades of cream and grey with a few accents of plum. It looked like something photographed for a very expensive magazine – but somehow it had failed to create the feeling of an intimate hideaway that he had striven for. His eyes stung as he remembered his initial hopes for their life together.

  Brushing aside all wistful thoughts of what might have been, he focused on his anger and on e
verything he had discovered in Anglesey. He leaned across the bed to where he had thrown his jacket, pulled the creased photo out of the breast pocket, and held it in both hands. Mrs Evans had seen him looking at it, pinned to her noticeboard with a collection of snapshots.

  ‘When was this taken, Mrs Evans?’ he had asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.

  ‘Just last week. Your wife was on her way out of the door as one of our regulars was taking snaps of the house. She always sends me copies. It’s a shame Olivia wasn’t full face to the camera, because she’s such a pretty girl, isn’t she? Would you like the photo, Mr Brookes?’

  Robert had wanted to rip it from the wall and tear it to shreds, but that wasn’t going to help, and he might just need it.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Evans. I appreciate it. Do you have any others of my wife?’

  But she hadn’t. This was the only one.

  He stared at it, but whichever path his mind travelled down, it came to dead end after dead end.

  From where he was sitting against the headboard, he could see the road opposite. He had been watching the police knocking on doors, speaking to all the neighbours and sharing the fact that Olivia was missing. He knew what they would all be thinking.

  Finally they had reached the house of Edith Preston directly opposite, and he was certain she’d have plenty to say. Whether it had any substance or not was another thing. He expected her to invite the policeman in, sit him down, and give him chapter and verse on her thoughts about the Brookes family, so it was a surprise when she stepped outside the front door and started to point.

  Robert sat up further in the bed. What was she saying? She grabbed the policeman’s sleeve and dragged him across to just in front of her sitting room window – probably to indicate where she had been standing, peering through the curtains as always. And then she pointed. First to the road, then to the drive. Then she did a funny twisty action with her finger: point and curl, point and curl. What was that about?

  The policeman took out his notebook, and was clearly asking her to repeat everything, because she went through exactly the same hand movements again.

  Mrs Preston continued to chat with the policeman for another five minutes without further gestures, until finally he walked down the drive grabbing his radio as he did so.

  What the hell had the bitch said?

  Robert was sure it would be something incriminating, and a memory nagged at the back of his mind. It was yesterday evening when he had gone back out to the car to get his suitcase. Mrs Preston had come across to say hello. But there was something else; he just hadn’t been listening. Was it really only yesterday? What was it she’d said that hadn’t made sense?

  He couldn’t remember clearly. His brain was exhausted – not just through lack of sleep, but through an overload of thoughts and feelings.

  Robert swung his legs off the bed. He needed to do something.

  He walked over to his wife’s chest of drawers and randomly started to pull the drawers out and rummage around, not really expecting to find anything. His patience lasted two minutes. With a howl of torment, the rage that he’d been bottling up for hours got the better of him and he ripped each of the drawers from the chest and hurled them one at a time across the room. He moved to the wardrobe and yanked clothes from their hangers to fall in a heap on the floor. He kicked them as hard as he could, meeting no resistance from the soft fabrics. Robert sank to the floor by the side of the bed and wrapped his arms around his bent legs. Resting his head on his knees, he finally gave in to deep wrenching sobs, trying – but failing – to thrust all feelings of guilt from his mind.

  18

  The press release had generated a higher number of responses than Becky had been expecting, but most of them were a waste of time with lots of people phoning to say that a woman with three children had turned up in their street or town. Of course, when questioned in any detail, the children were the wrong ages or ethnicity but it was going to be pretty difficult for this particular family grouping to go unnoticed for long, and it might still prove to be a valuable line of enquiry. Eventually.

  If only somebody had a photograph of these children. They hadn’t had much luck tracking down pictures from children’s parties, and until school was back on Monday it was proving to be a bit of a thankless task. The best they had at the moment was Billy doing a handstand against a wall and pulling a silly face.

  In spite of all the problems, Becky was delighted to be running this investigation. It felt like a great opportunity for her to win the respect of the team, and she was determined not to fail. Telling Tom about Peter had been difficult, but the right thing to do. She wanted him to hear it from her perspective, and not pick up gossip from any of her ex-colleagues and senior officers at some national meeting or other. The pain of it all was starting to fade, and she was beginning to replace the feeling of desolation and self-loathing with one of relief.

  Their affair had felt so wonderful at the time, but when Tom had mentioned the fact that she might have ended up with Peter for life, she had actually felt rather queasy at the thought. He would inevitably have fallen off his pedestal, and then what would she really have thought about him? When he ceased to be the powerful, sexy figure that prowled the corridors of the Met and became the person who left his underpants on the bathroom floor and fell asleep every night watching the news with his mouth open, was there enough in their relationship for it to last?

  Glad to have something better to think about, she dragged her mind back to the here and now. The case was her focus.

  She heard a subtle cough and looked up to see one of the young PCs standing by her desk. She had no idea how long he’d been there.

  ‘Sorry, Nic. I was miles away. Trying to get inside Olivia Brookes’ head. What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s about the passports, ma’am. Mr Brookes said they – that’s his wife and children – don’t have any, but we decided to check anyway. He was lying. Both Mrs Brookes and Jasmine have passports, both acquired in the last eighteen months. There’s nothing for the younger children, though. I thought you’d like to know.’

  Becky frowned. Was Robert lying, or did he know nothing about these passports? And if Olivia had gone abroad, what about the other two children? She bit her bottom lip in concentration.

  Noticing that Nic was still standing in front of her, she looked up.

  ‘Something else?’

  Nic nodded, an enthusiastic smile on his young face. She was beginning to wonder if she had finally reached the age when policemen look as if they should still be in short trousers. This one definitely did.

  ‘We’ve had some feedback from the house-to-house. Mostly dull and uninteresting, but the lady who lives opposite had plenty to say on the subject. There are two items that might be relevant. First of all, she swears Robert Brookes came home in the early hours of Thursday morning. She says it was at about two o’clock. According to her, something must have knocked the Brookes’ security lights askew, because in the last couple of weeks she’s been woken a few times by the full beam shining into her bedroom instead of on to their garden. The first time it happened, it was a fox. But on Wednesday night – or rather Thursday morning – it was definitely Robert Brookes’ car. The car’s fairly distinctive, and she says he left it on the drive and went into the house. She was just going to sleep when the light came on again, but she ignored it that time. When it went off for a third time, though, she got up again to see what on earth was going on – just in time to see Mr Brookes driving his car into the garage. It happened again last night when he went on his little jaunt to Anglesey, but we know about that.’

  Becky made a note on her pad. This was very odd. Robert had been adamant that he hadn’t left the hotel in Newcastle. Originally they had been interested in his movements during the first week – the week that it was claimed he had visited his wife in Anglesey. But now it was the second week that Nic was talking about, and this put a new spin on things. They would have to look again. It
would be better to check if his car left the car park on Wednesday night before accusing him of anything, though. That CCTV footage had to be a priority.

  ‘Go on, Nic. What else was there?’

  ‘It appears Mrs Preston is a nosey old soul. The week before, when Mrs Brookes was in Anglesey, Mrs Preston had gone round the side of the Brookes’ garage. There’s a narrow path there that she pointed out to us. She said she was putting the Brookes’ dustbin back. It had been by the gate since Friday night; presumably Mrs Brookes had put it there for collection while she was away, and Mrs Preston said it was making the road look shabby. Anyway, there’s a small window in the side of the garage, and she looked in. The car – the little Beetle Mrs Brookes has – was there. Mrs Preston had seen no signs of life in the house for the previous few days, so she knocked on the door and nobody answered. She said she checked the garage every day after that, and the car never moved. When she looked on Thursday morning, she expected to see Robert Brookes’ car there too – but it had gone.’

  Becky steepled her fingers and rested her chin. ‘Do you know if the bin was left out for collection this week?’

  ‘No. Mrs Preston says she didn’t see it, but it doesn’t mean much because she was out all Tuesday morning, so Mrs Brookes could have wheeled it out and back herself.’

  ‘Okay, that’s good work. Tell me what you make of it, Nic?’ Becky had her own ideas, but she was from the Tom Douglas school of thought: no such thing as a bad idea.

  ‘Well, ma’am, if Mrs Brookes was in Anglesey for the first week, how did she get there without her car?’

  19

  The annoying sound of his phone vibrating on the desk jolted Tom out of his meandering thoughts. He was struggling to find any direction to follow in this case. But his irritation evaporated when he saw who was calling.