*
Becky had asked PC Mitchell to go off and find Robert Brookes, and the young policeman had reported back that Robert was lying on his bed.
‘He said he’d be down in a minute, ma’am, but he was muttering about school – says he knew nothing about them being taken out and home schooled.’
‘Did you believe him?’ Becky asked.
‘I don’t know. He never looks you in the eye, does he? I can’t get a handle on him. Sorry, ma’am.’
‘That’s you and me both, I’m afraid.’
They heard a door slam upstairs and guessed Robert was on his way back down, so they took their seats and waited. He entered the room and moved back towards the sofa, his face pale but with a red flush staining his cheekbones like an angry rash.
‘Sorry, but I just needed to take a moment. I don’t know what to say in response to the news from the school. I…’
‘That’s okay, Mr Brookes. We’ll come back to it, I’m sure. But for now we need to think about how we can find your wife and children. Are you certain you have no photos at all?’
Becky was watching Robert Brookes closely. He was shaking his head as if he was totally bewildered. She couldn’t decide if it was real or if he was acting a part.
‘I’ve never liked photos around the house. I prefer a few tasteful pieces of art.’ Robert indicated the paintings that adorned the walls, although Becky couldn’t quite reconcile the word ‘tasteful’ with what she was looking at. Not that she would have the first idea, as she had to admit to herself.
‘I used to take photos of Olivia, but she didn’t like it. She hated pictures of herself, although I don’t know why. My wife was very beautiful.’
Becky was silent but she risked a glance at Tom. Had he picked up on the same interesting use of tense? They both waited for Robert to continue.
‘I thought we had pictures on our phones and on the computer. There was a box of photos in the drawer too, but I can’t find any. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what’s happened to them all. Olivia must have had a sort out.’
Much as he wanted to labour the point of the photos, Tom could see that he wasn’t going to get any more sense out of Robert on that subject, so he decided to change tack.
‘You said your wife had been on holiday recently, Mr Brookes – for the first week that you were away at this conference in Newcastle.’
‘That’s right. We went several times a year, always to the same place in Anglesey. Well, that’s not entirely true. We had always been to the same place, but when Olivia tried to book for October last year, it was closed, so she found somewhere else. I checked out the new place online obviously, and it looked okay from what I could see. I had a word with the landlady, to make sure she sounded a responsible type of person. Given what happened to Olivia’s parents, we’re doubly cautious when it comes to staying in other people’s houses, so I wanted to be clear about security, alarms, that sort of thing. I didn’t have time to go myself, but we were due to go again in July, as soon as school broke up.’
‘Can you give me the details and dates, so we can get somebody on the phone to the landlady to check that your wife was there?’
Robert pursed his lips in obvious irritation. ‘Of course she was bloody there. I spoke to her. She turned the computer round in the room so I could see what it looked like. She even showed me the beach out of the fucking window. There’s no doubt at all that she was there.’
Tom looked completely unperturbed by his outburst and Becky remembered him telling her that by far the best way to take the sting out of minor tantrums was to ignore them.
‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Brookes, but just give me the details anyway, please. PC Mitchell will write them down, and we’ll get on to the landlady to check a few things out.’
Robert Brookes grudgingly passed on the information and, closing his notebook, PC Mitchell made his way into the kitchen.
Tom leaned forwards. ‘Mr Brookes, when DI Robinson spoke to Mrs Stokes, she mentioned there had been some problems with your wife from time to time, forgetting to pick the children up from school being an example. And you say you didn’t know she was taking them out of school. I’m sorry to have to ask this – but in the light of everything we’ve heard tonight, I need to know whether your wife has any mental health issues. Please be honest with us. It may be important.’
Robert put his head in his hands, but not before Becky had noticed his eyes cast down and his shoulders slump in a classic pose of shame.
11
Tom couldn’t ignore the warning bells ringing loudly in his head. He was sure Robert wouldn’t admit to there being anything wrong with his marriage to Olivia – whether or not that was the case – but Tom had to try to understand her state of mind, to assess whether she had left voluntarily or whether she had been the victim of a crime.
Robert had finally recovered himself and answered the question about Olivia’s mental health by saying that he’d had a few concerns, but she was just a bit forgetful sometimes. He said they’d managed to create strategies to make it easier for her to remember what she should be doing. Did that mean she could have taken the children somewhere and literally be lost, or have forgotten where she was going? Tom knew that the Manchester and Cheshire police were on the lookout and the hospitals were all being checked, so hopefully if that were the case, they would all be found quickly.
Tom could see that Becky’s gentle probing was falling on deaf ears as Robert’s eyes had glazed over, his mind apparently somewhere else entirely.
One other thing was bugging Tom. The house was very orderly. Given that there were three children living here, it was more or less immaculate. Everything seemed to be defined by the word ‘tasteful’, and yet there was something clinical about its perfection. So why then, if Olivia had been here until this morning, was there a fine layer of dust over every piece of furniture?
The lack of photos was a serious concern. If they had been a family that just didn’t take photographs at all, it might make sense. But the fact that there had been some and now they were missing was difficult to explain. Tom needed somebody to look at the two laptops, and as soon as PC Mitchell had finished talking to the landlady, he could get on to organising that.
No sooner had this thought crossed Tom’s mind than the door opened and the PC beckoned him into the kitchen. He seemed a little nervous, and Tom guessed he hadn’t long been allowed out on his own. Poor lad. Not the most straightforward of cases.
‘Sir, I’ve spoken to the landlady in Wales. She’s confirmed that Mrs Brookes and her three children were there for a week, and left last Saturday. She said they all seemed fine, and were looking forward to their next holiday in the summer.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ Tom responded, his attention diverted by a large cork noticeboard on the wall. A couple of metres long, it was completely empty, apart from a few drawing pins.
PC Mitchell was talking again, and Tom turned to him.
‘Sorry, what were you saying?’
‘I was saying that, according to the landlady, Mr Brookes paid his wife a visit while she was staying there. She said,’ he consulted his notebook, ‘I was sorry not to meet Mr Brookes when he visited this week. We’ve spoken on the phone, of course, but I was disappointed he didn’t give me a knock to say hello. He was gone by the time I got up in the morning.’
Tom looked at the policeman. ‘Are you sure that’s what she said?’ He immediately felt guilty, because the young constable looked alarmed and stood up a little straighter, his long lanky arms ramrod stiff at his sides.
‘Yes sir, I’m sure. I wrote the whole thing down.’
‘So what the hell is going on?’ Tom asked, a rhetorical question aimed at nobody but himself. ‘Right, we need to get the local police in Anglesey to pay the landlady a visit – tomorrow morning will be fine – but first thing – and we need them to question her. Tell them to jog her memory and extract as many details as possible, no matter how trivial. I’m going back in there
to talk to Mr Brookes; find out why he lied to us. We need to canvass the neighbours starting early tomorrow morning, before they all bugger off to do whatever they’re doing over the weekend. You know the procedure?’
PC Mitchell nodded slowly.
‘Good lad, but if you get stuck just ask us. Okay? We’ve all been new, you know. And it’s better to ask than to cock it up.’
Tom walked across to the noticeboard and peered at it intently. He turned his head.
‘Come and look at this, and tell me what you see,’ he said.
PC Mitchell looked puzzled for a second, then he pointed to the top left corner of the board.
‘One of the drawing pins has a scrap of paper attached. It looks as if something’s been ripped off.’
‘Well done.’ Tom looked down and pointed. ‘There’s a drawing pin on the floor too. Something was here. So what would you do next?’
‘Check the bins?’ PC Mitchell suggested.
Tom nodded.
‘Get some gloves on, and see what you can find. I’m interested in the bins anyway. If Olivia Brookes and the children have been here all week until this morning at least, I’d like to know what you find.’
Tom gave the policeman a reassuring nod, turned on his heel and pushed open the door from the kitchen to the living room.
Becky was still asking questions, but she was running out of steam. Tom took over. He wasn’t going to ask Robert about his trip to Anglesey yet. He had a feeling that Robert would clam up completely once he was aware of how much they knew.
‘Mr Brookes, we’d really like to take your wife’s computer to check it out. Would that be okay with you? We might be able to find something on it that gives us a clue about where she might be. We’d like yours too, so we can check your FaceTime records.’
‘What for? It will only show you when I called her. I don’t record the conversations.’
‘We can check where she was speaking to you from.’
Robert was shaking his head in frustration.
‘She was here. Don’t you think I recognise my own bedroom when I see it on a screen?’
‘Well, that will help us to set a time frame. According to your neighbour who spoke to the school head teacher, Olivia hasn’t been seen all week. When you had your calls with her, what exactly did you see in the shot – just a pillow behind her head, or more?’
Robert lifted his hands and put them on his head. It seemed to Tom that he was literally trying to hold back steam from escaping.
‘I don’t know how many times I need to repeat this. She was here, speaking from our bedroom with our cushions propping her up. Here. In this house.’ Robert said each word slowly and distinctly, punctuating them with a stab of his finger. ‘And not just today, but every fucking day this week. Just because the nosey old bat across the road didn’t see her doesn’t mean she wasn’t here. That woman might spend a fair proportion of each day by the window, but she’s not there twenty-four seven.’
‘Okay. Can you tell me if there are any other computers that Olivia had access to? A home computer, perhaps? Or did the children have anything with an Internet connection?’
Robert shook his head. ‘It’s the only computer she used, and we didn’t agree with children accessing the Internet at all. They weren’t allowed near our computers.’
Tom bit back a response about school and homework. This was none of his business, but his daughter Lucy, who was only a little older than the Brookes’ eldest girl, used the computer all the time. He hoped that he and his ex-wife had instilled an awareness of all the right safety measures into their daughter, but to forbid her to use it would surely have put her behind her classmates at school.
‘So there are no more computers in the house, then?’ Tom asked.
‘Only the one in my study, but she wouldn’t have used that. It’s password protected.’
‘Can you show me, please?’ Tom asked.
Robert sighed as he pushed himself up from the sofa. He bent down to pick up a bunch of keys from the coffee table and led the way from the room. As he inserted a key into the lock, Tom glanced at Becky, whose brow was furrowed in a puzzled frown.
‘Why do you keep this door locked, Mr Brookes?’ Becky asked.
Robert tutted, as if the answer were obvious.
‘Because I work in here. I don’t want the children getting in, and I don’t want them touching the computer. I opened the door for your constable, but it’s a habit to always lock the door behind me.’
‘Does your wife have a key to this room?’ Tom asked, suspecting he knew the answer before he even posed the question.
‘No, she doesn’t need one. She cleans in here when I’m at home, not when I’m away.’
Tom nodded his head, as if this were a perfectly normal state of affairs.
‘Just one last question, Mr Brookes. You say you were in Newcastle for the whole of the last two weeks – is that correct?’
‘Yes, of course it’s correct. I already told you.’
‘Well then, can you explain how – according to the landlady of the guest house in Anglesey – you visited your wife in the middle of last week?’
Robert Brookes spun round on his heels.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked you whether you did, in fact, visit your wife in Anglesey during her holiday with the children last week.’
‘No. I’ve told you. I never left the hotel in Newcastle during the whole two weeks. I was snowed under with work, and there was no way I could leave. Ask anybody.’
‘We will, Mr Brookes. Thank you.’
*
It seemed to Becky that they had learned a lot, and they had learned nothing at all. They had questioned Robert Brookes for another half an hour about everything from the conference venue to his conversation with Olivia that morning, and had nothing more to show for it than a list of people who could apparently verify that Robert was in Newcastle.
She looked across at Tom, who was exchanging contact details with Robert Brookes, and she couldn’t help comparing the two men again. Tom’s calm and relaxed demeanour somehow accentuated Robert’s nervy behaviour. His fidgeting and constant flicking of the eyes from one person to another without ever making eye contact was disconcerting to put it mildly.
PC Mitchell poked his head around the door and, not wanting to disturb Tom, Becky went to see what he had found.
‘DCI Douglas asked me to check the bins,’ he explained. ‘The waste bin in the kitchen was empty, and appeared to have been cleaned and disinfected, judging by the smell. So I had a look in the dustbin. That was empty too, except for two things. A John Lewis carrier bag, which had nothing in it, and this.’
PC Mitchell unrolled a large sheet of paper and spread it on the kitchen table.
‘I think it used to be on the wall, because the tear in the corner matches the scrap that’s attached to the drawing pin.’
Becky looked at the chart and took out her phone, thinking a few photos might be a good idea.
‘It looks like a schedule of some sort,’ PC Mitchell said.
A schedule of some sort was the understatement. Covering about two metres wide by one high, it was a half-hourly breakdown of each day for the past month, and a blank one for the month ahead.
Becky bent over and peered at it closely. The level of detail was staggering. ‘3.20 pm – going to pick children up from school. 3.40 pm – back from school with the children.’ This was the last entry, and for that very day. Each element of Olivia’s day was mapped on here. Not the children’s timetable – she had noticed there was a separate small blackboard for that, with reminders clipped neatly to the bottom. But this sheet of paper detailed every time Olivia left the house and every time she came back in again. It also listed any phone calls she’d received, however trivial. ‘Phone call at 10.13 am. Wrong number.’ What was that all about?
When questioned about his wife’s mental health issues, Robert had implied that they had set up solutions to help Olivia, whic
h would suggest there was a forwards-looking plan she had to follow. This schedule appeared to be written in retrospect – either what she was about to do or what she’d actually done, rather than what she planned to do. Sometimes there were remarks like ‘Returning to Sainsbury’s – forgot the eggs. Back in 20 minutes’ as if it was a message to somebody. And she’d written on the board today – or yesterday, as it was now well past midnight – that she had returned from school with the children. But the children hadn’t even been to school.
She looked more closely at the chart. Most of the entries used pencil, red pen, blue pen – even children’s crayons. But the entries for the last few days were all in the same pen, and she couldn’t be absolutely sure they were the same handwriting as the previous ones. She needed to get somebody else to look at this. Not that it meant anything. Olivia could have written those entries days ago. As could Robert, for that matter.
12
Saturday
Robert waited fifteen minutes after the house was emptied of bodies with their relentless questioning and the beeping of their mobile phones. He grabbed a bottle of water, his car keys and his wallet, and made his way out of the front door. The security light came on, but the beam wasn’t shining on their drive, as it should have been. It was shining straight across the road into Mrs Preston’s window. It must have been knocked out of alignment somehow, and he could see a shadow standing back from the bedroom window opposite. He knew the light would have alerted his neighbour and she would be watching with interest. Well, no doubt she would get the opportunity to have her say, because he was fairly certain the whole street would be questioned as soon as they were up and about.
He’d planned to leave as quietly as possible, but as the nosey old bat was watching anyway, he revved the car and was about to speed off down the road with a squeal of tyres, just to wind up the silly bitch, when he noticed a car parked further down the road. Not a car that was normally on this street. It didn’t take him long to work out what it was. Bastard police. He eased his foot off the accelerator and, with his car emitting the gentle hum of an expensive engine, he slowly and almost silently made his way off the drive. If he was followed, he would just have to have another think.
Tom Douglas Box Set Page 86