by TM Logan
‘How close?’ Larssen said.
‘Very close,’ Redford replied.
Naylor said: ‘As if the same person was holding both phones, for example.’
‘Or if he was right outside my house! What the hell?’
Redford held a hand up, cutting me off.
‘I’m not finished,’ she said, her soft northern vowels a counterpoint to the hard knot of fear growing in my stomach. ‘On Monday morning we get the exact same thing happening, the same pattern, in a different location. Which is: two texts from you to him, two texts from him to you in reply, apparently to confirm that he was in the park and that he was alone. And again, both handsets within the very narrow range of the same mobile mast.’
‘But he was near to me, maybe fifty or sixty metres away.’
‘Witnessed by you and no one else,’ Naylor said quietly.
‘So what are you saying, that I sent those messages from Ben’s mobile? Why would I do that?’
Larssen put a hand on my arm.
‘Joe, take it easy.’ He turned to the detectives. ‘There was a Facebook post on Saturday evening. Mr Delaney said he was fine, and that he’d been away to think about things.’
Naylor flipped to another page in his black ring binder.
‘OK. The Facebook post next.’
Something in the way he said it made the knot of fear in my guts grow heavier, but I said nothing.
‘Facebook always take bloody ages to turn over location data, so we don’t have much on that front yet. What we do have is a quick and dirty forensic authorship analysis, done by our friends at Goldsmiths College, of the Facebook post and those text messages. They can do an initial analysis in a matter of hours, and they’re always eager to help.’
He snapped the ring binder open and removed two sheets, laying them side by side on the table in front of me. The page on the right was a screengrab of Ben’s message from Saturday:
Needed to get my head sorted; it’s been good to get away. And I’ve always loved it when everything starts falling into place.
‘The truth of the battle is whatever the victor deems it to be . . .’
The page on the left contained multiple screengrabs of previous Facebook status updates. About work, football, cars, the economy, Apple, Google, new films and so on.
‘These are all Ben’s as well, are they?’
Naylor nodded.
‘They’re all from his account. So our pointy-headed friends at Goldsmiths do two things: the first is they run all the text through a piece of clever software they’ve written for the purpose. Then the linguistics bods do something called a subjective comparative analysis of different messages, comparing a set of messages with each other. That sometimes throws up areas of contrast that we might want to look at further.’
‘These all look like pretty bog-standard Facebook updates to me. Why is this relevant to him posting on Saturday that he’s fine?’
‘All right, here’s an example. How many times do you think Mr Delaney used a semi-colon in a Facebook post in the last three months?’
I’d been expecting something else and was momentarily thrown by the question. Ben was a computer guy, a techie, one of those blokes who viewed traditional grammar and punctuation on a par with quill pens and parchment. Which was to say: utterly redundant in the digital twenty-first century.
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes. How many do you think?’
‘Not many, I suppose. Never paid much attention to the stuff he puts on Facebook.’
‘Have a guess.’
‘We’re talking about punctuation while this bloke’s trying to ruin my life?’
‘Humour me, Joe. How many times, do you think?’
‘No idea. Five? Six? A dozen?’
Naylor shook his head.
‘Just once. Just one single time: when he posted on Saturday to say he was OK.’
‘OK.’ I scanned the printouts on the desk, hoping to find something to prove the detective wrong. But there was nothing.
‘And how many times,’ Naylor continued, ‘do you think he used a full stop at the end of a status update in the last three months?’
‘None?’
‘Almost: just one.’
‘The post on Saturday?’
‘Yup. The linguistic analysis shows that he’s not a big fan of punctuation on social media. Never has been. Until this Saturday just gone, when he seems to have had something of a grammar revelation and he’s used a semi-colon, an apostrophe and two full stops in the same post. The five text messages we talked about just now – they also include discrepancies in the use of apostrophes, capital letters and the spelling of certain common words where he’s previously used textspeak abbreviations, but this time types them out in full.’
Larssen’s face was impassive, his unblinking eyes on the detectives.
‘And what preliminary conclusions have your university people drawn?’ he said calmly.
‘Their considered opinion is that Saturday’s Facebook post,’ Naylor tapped a thick index finger on the right-hand page, ‘is very unlikely to have been written by the same person who wrote these previous posts. Likewise these five text messages were very unlikely to have been written by the person who was previously sending texts from this number. In other words, not Ben Delaney.’
‘Well, that doesn’t make sense,’ I said.
‘How about you, Joe? You’re a history teacher, right?’
‘English.’
‘Bet you could teach Mr Delaney a thing or two about grammar and punctuation, couldn’t you?’
I said nothing, not wanting to dignify his tacit accusation with a response.
‘Spelling and full stops, apostrophes and semi-colons,’ Naylor said. ‘You must know all the rules back to front and inside out.’
‘Ben could have written them that way deliberately, to throw you off the scent.’
It didn’t sound convincing, even to me.
Naylor said: ‘Some sort of criminal mastermind, is he?’
‘He’s a very, very clever guy. I wouldn’t underestimate him.’
‘Proof of life, Joe. That’s what we’re about right now. That’s the name of the game. And I’ll be honest with you: this latest stuff is giving me real cause for concern.’
‘What about the message that appeared on my computer at home yesterday? He blames me for everything.’
‘No one saw that apart from you. Ditto your “close encounter” with Mr Delaney at the country park yesterday morning. You’re the only witness. How’s your hand, by the way? Your knuckles all right?’
He indicated the dark bruises and scabbed-over scratches across my right knuckles, where I had stumbled in the woods.
‘Fine.’ I put my hands in my lap. My mouth was dry and my head was starting to ache. I wanted more than anything to be out of this room, out of here, away from this place.
‘Is there anything else, Joe? Anything else you want to tell us?’
Larssen was about to speak, but I cut him off.
‘I’ve told you everything.’
‘Like I said, Joe: the name of the game is proof of life. But it might not be for very much longer.’
I stared at him across the table, my jaw rigid.
‘You want proof? I’ll get it for you. I’ll get it myself.’
40
I sat in my car, sweating and shaking, in a side street behind the police station. The plan had been to convince Naylor that I was being framed, and that had blown up in my face in spectacular fashion. Larssen had told me to go home, stay home and take it easy – but that was easier said than done when your life was disintegrating before your eyes.
I looked again at my last exchange with ‘David Bramley’ on Messenger.
Let’s meet up. Properly this time
And his response:
Lol
But you wouldn’t be laughing if I was standing in front of you right now, mate.
He might be shouting, or arguing, or maybe
even telling me how much he loved my wife and how I was to blame for everything – but I was pretty damn certain he wouldn’t be laughing out loud.
Standing in front of him was exactly where I needed to be. Face-to-face. No social media, no gadgets, no emails, no direct messages, no screens, no internet. No bullshit. Just two blokes having a conversation. An actual, real, conversation.
He had been close on Sunday evening – close enough to my house to fool Naylor with the phone data. And again on Monday, at the park – watching me, stalking me, coming close then disappearing like a shadow. Because he knew the police would interrogate the phone logs, and he knew what they would show. There had been no one else there by the lake. No one but Ben.
I turned the ignition and sat for a moment, listening to the purr of the engine. Turned it off again. I couldn’t go home, not yet.
Proof of life.
The clues were there, I just had to find them.
I got my mobile out. Ben had 389 friends on Facebook, and I started scrolling through his newsfeed, looking for any comments or updates from the last week that might give me a clue as to his whereabouts. But there was nothing to suggest that he had not been in London, albeit keeping a lower profile than usual. We had a couple of dozen Facebook friends in common, but most of his were not familiar to me. So I sent friend requests to the twenty or so people who regularly left comments in Ben’s feed. Some would ignore me, some would delete the request. But others who were less discerning – who just wanted to boost their virtual popularity – would accept, and then I could start going through their profiles too, looking for that one nugget of information that would help me put an end to Ben’s campaign.
Mel commented quite regularly on his Facebook posts, but nothing that would have aroused suspicion. A scroll down her timeline yielded pictures of William, selfies of Mel, pictures of the two of them together. A summer garden party at the Delaneys’ house. Ben tending a huge gas barbecue, a Scotch and soda in his hand, a knowing smile on his face. An album of holiday pictures from Crete this summer. Mel on a girls’ night out with her colleagues from work. Multi-coloured cocktails lined up on a bar.
A picture from March – more than six months ago – made me stop and scroll back. A flash of recognition. Mel had shared a link to a gallery of pictures posted to celebrate twenty years since her GCSEs, entitled: ‘Good times at Claremont Comprehensive’. The title image was from some sort of drama production, a line-up of teenagers in medieval dress, swords and gowns to go with their nineties haircuts. Four men – or, rather, sixteen-year-old boys – and four young women, arm-in-arm, full of smiles, receiving the applause of the audience at the end of a show.
The picture was familiar, but not from March. Much more recently. It was one of the pictures that Beth and Ben had on the wall of their lounge. And there Beth was, in the centre of the shot, beaming at the audience and looking like it was the best day of her life. She looked so happy, with her long hair, huge smile, cheeks flushed with the buzz of a great performance. She looked ready to take on the world. A smiling sixteen-year-old Mel was there too, at the other end of the row. She didn’t look different at all, gorgeous then and now. Both girls looked like innocents, untroubled and unguarded, with no idea of the loathing and jealousy and destruction that one of them would unleash on the other with her infidelity twenty years later, or how many lives would be ruined. How friendship would turn to hate.
My chest ached with the feeling of something lost.
I stared at the picture until I couldn’t stand it any more, then scrolled down to the comments just to get it off the screen.
Jo Knightley
Great days xxx
29 March
Martin Coffey
Had forgotten about this! How young do u look Beth Delaney?
29 March
Ian Howard
Love this. Remember when Charlotte Lowe cracked up on stage when she was supposed to be dying? x
29 March
Charlotte Lowe
Least I didn’t forget my lines Ian Howard!
29 March
Claire Grimble
Nice hair Mark Ruddington xx
29 March
Mark Ruddington
The after-show party sticks in my memory for some reason Melissa Lynch ;-)
29 March
Tim Darcy
Just wish I could remember what play we did . . .
29 March
Nick Pearson-Wood
Shakespeare?
29 March
Chris Billingham
I’m thinking The Tempest???
29 March
Rob Krause
Unless I’m much mistaken it was the Scottish play . . .
30 March
Vicky Mee
Eh? Braveheart?
30 March
Rob Krause
Macbeth!
30 March
Vicky Mee
Lol. Why’s that called the Scottish play?
30 March
And so it went on, more than fifty comments and eighty likes on that post alone. Clearly it stirred a lot of happy memories among Mel’s friendship group on Facebook, or at least those members who’d been at school with her. The cryptic comment about the after-show party was intriguing. Mel had not responded to it, which was a bit weird – she’d shared the link to the pictures, but not responded to a comment directed at her. The guy who’d posted the gallery in the first place – Mark Ruddington – was not a name that was familiar.
I tapped on his profile picture to take a closer look at him, then double-tapped on the school picture to zoom in on the smiling group of young actors. I was ninety-five per cent sure that the black-clad teenager with his arm around Mel was Mark Ruddington: he had aged pretty well considering there were two decades between this school snap and his Facebook profile picture, surfboard and all. There was a certain facial similarity between him and Ben. Both dark-haired, both about the same height, same build. I remembered again the drunken game of ‘stand up if you’ve ever’ and Mel’s single infidelity – which she’d said was at school and therefore didn’t count.
Perhaps Mark Ruddington had been her first infidelity. That first time she had been unfaithful. She had never told me who at the time – she had just pulled me close and given me a drunken kiss – but the more I thought about it, the more there seemed to be a kind of weird logic to it, a parallel. That she had cheated twice in her life, twenty years apart, with men who bore an uncanny resemblance to each other. First this Mark Ruddington guy, then Ben. Maybe that was just the type she went for, when she got bored.
The after-show party sticks in my memory for some reason, Melanie Lynch ;-)
Mark Ruddington was married and living in Enfield. He had an open Facebook profile so I spent ten minutes stalking through everything he’d posted this year. It seemed more important than ever to find out about my wife, to find out who she really was. To know about the experiences that had made her, the teenage infidelity that she had admitted to under the influence of house party tequila. It seemed that lots of people – Ben included – seemed to know her better than I did.
There was a lot on Mark’s timeline, most of it about his dogs, meals he was eating, pictures of his kids, weirdly repetitive selfies he’d taken at the end of his evening run, hangovers, mother-in-law jokes, random shared links of all kinds. Nothing about Mel or their schooldays together. I sent him a friend request anyway. Maybe a chat on Messenger would get a bit more out of him.
Staring at the phone’s small screen was making my eyes ache – an hour had passed with no sign of Ben. It was time to try something else.
The Delaneys’ home phone rang six times then went to answerphone, Ben’s brief-and-to-the-point message carrying just the faintest trace of his Sunderland accent. A while ago he’d explained to me the difference between Sunderland and Newcastle accents, but I still couldn’t really tell them apart. The second time it went to answerphone again. I hung up without leaving a me
ssage. It occurred to me that I could do better than ringing Beth up for a chat. I was a teacher with no one to teach, no homework to mark, no lesson plans to prepare.
Thirty-five minutes later I was parking on a wide, tree-lined street in Hampstead, a slow-curving avenue of high walls and immaculate driveways. It looked exactly like what it was: a street full of multi-millionaires. Immediately opposite me was an imposing Edwardian house that had been tastefully extended several times. Like its widely spaced neighbours, it was elevated slightly from the street at the end of a sloping driveway, so that its considerable size was exaggerated even further to the casual passer-by.
Ben’s house.
He probably wouldn’t be very pleased with me visiting his wife, alone and unannounced, in the middle of the day. Just dropping in out of the blue, asking a few probing questions about our mutually cheating spouses. He wouldn’t be pleased at all. In fact, knowing Ben, he’d probably be mightily pissed off.
Good, I thought. Let him be on the back foot for once. See how he likes it.
41
Ben’s house sat at the end of a gently sloping gravel driveway, bordered by immaculate shrubs and fruit trees. An ornate ivory-painted birdhouse stood on a tall pole halfway up the drive. There were two cars: Beth’s silver Mercedes estate, and another of Ben’s cars, a white convertible Audi TT. All his cars were white. The house itself was huge, a three-storey Edwardian family home built when six kids was the norm and servants lived on the top floor. Additions over the last century had included a tennis court, games room and conservatory big enough to seat twenty. As was the way of things, even as family sizes had grown smaller the house grew bigger still: the Delaneys – who had just one child – had owned it barely a year and were already busy with plans to extend it further.
Watching from the street, I saw the front door open. Beth emerged, slowly, holding something in both hands out in front of her – an upturned pint glass, face down on a postcard. She knelt by the flowerbed beneath the bay window, lifted the pint glass and tapped the postcard gently. A spider. She knelt for a moment longer, then stood up and went back inside the house.