Becky was sitting with the heels of her hands propping up her forehead, her fingers gripping her thoroughly tangled fringe.
‘I know it’s what I thought all along, Tom, but it doesn’t always feel that great to be right.’
‘You’re pretty certain about this, aren’t you?’
Becky leaned across the desk towards him, eager to make him see her point. ‘We know Robert tried to take the kids a couple of years ago, whatever nonsense he spouted about his wife knowing all about it. We know that he’s been watching her, waiting for his moment. She’s been hiding passports. All sorts of stuff has been going on. I reckon he’s gone to pick up the kids from wherever he’s got them stashed. He’ll be off to start his new life.’
Tom wasn’t convinced. Would he really have killed his wife to get the children? Maybe he’d killed them too, or were they locked away somewhere?
Resting his chin on his fist, he looked at Becky and debated whether to comment. She had said all along that Olivia was dead, and she could well be right.
‘The blood could be Robert’s, you know,’ he said, knowing what the reaction would be.
‘What?’ Where did that theory come from?’
Tom had to admit that it wasn’t really a theory, but maybe Robert hadn’t gone missing on Saturday night. Maybe he had been killed and his body disposed of? It was a possibility. He hated to say this, but it looked as if that terrace was going to have to come up after all.
Nothing was making sense. Olivia had been there in the house until an hour before Robert had returned home. Had he really had time to kill her, dispose of the body and do God knows what with the children before he called the police a few hours later?
Becky was looking at him as if he’d grown horns, and he was waiting for the next onslaught. Fortunately her phone interrupted the increasingly tense moment.
‘Bugger,’ Becky muttered.
Tom couldn’t resist a brief grin as she picked up the phone.
‘DI Robinson,’ she answered, clearly trying to sound chirpier than she felt. ‘Yes, Gil. What can I do for you?’
Tom could hear no more of the conversation, but Becky started to click on her keyboard.
‘Okay, got it. Now what?’ she asked. Even from where Tom was sitting he could hear a little whoop of glee from the other end of the phone, and Becky hung up.
‘Gil’s ecstatic about his latest brilliance. He’s mailed me a video segment to look at. And then when we don’t understand it, he’s going to come up and show us what he means.’
Tom rolled his eyes. ‘Why can’t the little prima donna just tell us, for Christ’s sake? This isn’t a TV quiz show – it’s a bloody murder enquiry.’
Tom saw Becky’s head whip up. It was the first time anybody had actually uttered those words, although it was what they had all been thinking. And now he’d endorsed their thoughts. Well, it was probably time to formally acknowledge it, even without a body.
Without another word, he made his way round to Becky’s side of the desk and leaned over her shoulder.
‘What are we looking at?’ he asked.
‘It’s the video from the house. Robert’s secret pictures,’ Becky said, scorn and disgust dripping from her tongue. ‘They don’t look any different to me than they did this morning.’
‘What’s the other file he’s sent you?’ Tom asked.
‘More of the same, I think. The time stamp is two months ago, though.’
Becky clicked to open the other video.
‘Fast forward it, Becky,’ Tom asked. Something was flickering at the edge of his consciousness.
‘Open the other one too. Can you run them side by side?’ he asked.
‘On this computer?’ Becky scoffed. ‘You have to be joking. Only if you want frame by frame with a two-second gap between. Why?’
‘Just take me to the kitchen scenes, then.’
At that moment, the double doors were both thrust open by a grinning Gil, making an entrance.
‘Have you got it?’ he asked.
‘Just about,’ Tom answered. ‘You didn’t give us much time, though.’
‘Couldn’t wait to show you. What do you think, DI Robinson?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been too busy buggering about with my computer, trying to get it to function normally. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the screen yet. Just bloody tell me, Gil.’
Looking a little taken aback by Becky’s vehemence, he nudged her out of the way and took control of the mouse.
‘April 13th – nearly two months ago. Footage from the Brookes’ kitchen. Notice the jug of daffodils on the kitchen table. These are the clues. Now, let’s look at the footage for the last week, after Olivia is supposed to have returned from holiday. I’ve chosen last Tuesday as an example. Perfectly good footage of the family throughout the day, although mainly Olivia, of course. Now, check out the kitchen. A jug of daffodils on the kitchen table. Now you may not be able to get these two babies to play in sync, but I can. Look and learn.’
Tom and Becky watched two ten-second segments, running side by side on the screen. Olivia walked into the kitchen with her head down. She was wearing a dark grey jumper. She picked up a mug from the table next to a jug of daffodils, and turned round and walked out again.
The two sequences were absolutely identical.
Tom looked at Gil. He knew there was more.
‘I have, of course, checked all the videos from the period we’re interested in. As you would expect, there was no video for the first week – the week that Olivia was supposed to be in Anglesey. As for the rest – the videos from last week when she was supposed to be at home – they are all fakes. Every single one of them.’
Gil’s eyes blazed with satisfaction as he leaned forwards and pointed to the screen with his pen.
‘They have been very professionally edited together, because they’re not just copies of a whole day from an earlier time. That would have been too easy for us to spot. The sequences either side of the one we were looking at – last Tuesday’s video – are not from April 13th.’
Becky was looking puzzled. ‘Sorry, Gil. I don’t know what you mean.’
Gil tapped his pen on the monitor.
‘Okay, I’ll show you. Let’s look at the video clip immediately before she comes into the kitchen. On April 13th – the original shot – she was dusting the living room. Last Tuesday – the day with the duplicate shot of Olivia in the kitchen with the daffodils – she was vacuuming their bedroom. The bedroom segment is copied from another day entirely, March 29th, I think. It’s a masterful and quite brilliant job. Whoever has done this has selected extracts from other days when she is wearing the same clothes. Every detail of her clothes on these days is identical. When she wears this grey jumper, it is always with black jeans and white flip-flops. They had to choose clips with identical clothes, of course, because why would her outfit change as she moved from the kitchen into the living room?’
Gil looked hard at Becky, as if to be sure she understood what he was saying.
‘The illusion that these videos have created is that Olivia Brookes came home from her holiday in Anglesey and was indeed in the house all last week, along with her children. In fact, she wasn’t there at all. There’s no genuine footage since the day she left – theoretically to go to Anglesey. We’re meant to believe she was alive and kicking right up until Friday afternoon, but it’s not true. I’m afraid Mr Brookes has been playing us.’
Tom watched Becky’s face as the penny dropped. His last argument was in the wind. Robert hadn’t had a few short hours to dispose of Olivia and the children. He’d had two whole weeks.
29
Sophie Duncan lay on the floor where she had fallen. She cursed loudly, screaming out a torrent of fury and vitriol.
‘Bastard. Fucking bastard,’ she muttered venomously, when all her screaming was done. How the fuck did he know where she lived anyway? Stupid bloody question. He knew absolutely everything about Liv. Every last sodding detail. An
d she was Liv’s best friend, so of course he knew where she lived.
And now here she was, tied to a chair and totally helpless. She wasn’t worried about herself; it was her mum she was anxious about. She needed to get to a place where she could talk to her – put her mind at rest. But she was shut in this room, about ten feet from a closed door. These 1930s houses were too well built, with solid brick internal walls. If only they had lived in a modern semi, she could just have hollered and the whole street would have heard. But she wasn’t getting anywhere.
Her mum would be freaking out, and Sophie hoped to God she didn’t try to get downstairs. Robert swore he hadn’t hurt her – and he’d better not have done. She would have him if he had harmed her mum. He didn’t know who he was messing with here. He said he’d brought the stair lift to the bottom of the stairs, disconnected the phone and taken the key to the window lock. The windows were double-glazed and there was no way her mum would be able to break one. Anyway, her bedroom was at the back of the house, and typically the neighbours had gone on holiday, so that was a non-starter.
Sophie couldn’t believe she’d let herself get in this mess. When she’d heard Robert’s voice from upstairs, she had panicked. How sodding pathetic was that? She was a soldier, and yet she did the absolute daftest thing she could possibly have done. She’d raced upstairs, taking them two at a time, to find him at the top with the serrated blade of a Swiss army knife to her mother’s throat.
Of all the dumb things to do. If she’d just stopped and thought there were a hundred other options she could have chosen, because a threat wasn’t any use if you didn’t know it was being applied, and he wouldn’t have hurt her mother. He just needed her as leverage. He was a fucking nutter.
He’d made her poor mum tie Sophie’s hands behind her back. A clever tactic, because even Robert must have realised that the minute he’d moved the knife away from her mum’s throat, Sophie would have taken him down – bad leg, or no bad leg. Then he’d marched Sophie downstairs, making it clear that one false move and he’d be back upstairs in a flash to finish the job with her mother. He’d shoved her in here, in the back room, closed the curtains and then done a much better job of tying her hands and feet to a dining chair.
The questioning had begun.
‘What were you doing in Anglesey?’
‘Why were you pretending to be Olivia?’
‘Who was the man who came to visit you?’
‘What do you know about me and Olivia?’
She’d started by saying nothing, but she could see the dark fury in his eyes. His thin lips were clamped tightly together, and he had two red spots high up on his cheekbones. Sophie knew enough about people to know this was anger, and it was all being directed at her. His eyes were black, like wet flint stones, the light shining out of them hard and white. Finally, she had spat the answers out with as much venom as she could muster. She wasn’t scared of this nasty little man, but she was scared of what he would do to her mum if she didn’t comply.
‘Why were you in Anglesey?’ Robert repeated, slapping Sophie hard with the back of his hand. She glared at him.
‘I’m not some wimpy little woman, creep. I’ve been beaten up by better men than you. I was shortlisted for the SAS – so I promise you, you’ve not got a fucking clue. What sort of a pathetic little shit are you, to threaten a pensioner with a knife?’ That had earned her another slap. But then the threats had come.
‘I won’t kill your mother,’ he’d said, a mean toothless smile causing his eyes to glint even more brightly. ‘I just need to be creative. Have you ever heard your mother scream, Sophie?’
Sophie spat out every expletive she could think of. He could do what he liked to her, but not to her mum.
‘I went to Anglesey so that Liv could go where she wanted. Somewhere away from you. Somewhere that was her secret, and a place where she didn’t have to think about you. A place where she felt safe. Safe from you.’ She spat the last word at him.
‘Liar,’ he shouted. The glint had gone now, to be replaced with a flat stare. She could see she’d hit a nerve.
‘You haven’t got any children, Sophie. So whose children did you have with you? Did you take my children?’
Sophie laughed at him, and he liked that even less. He lashed out at her leg with his foot. Pure luck guided him to her wound, and she couldn’t quite suppress a yelp. It was only a few weeks since her last operation, and it still wasn’t totally healed. Her spontaneous cry made him smile.
‘Of course I didn’t take your children. Do you think Liv would let them out of her sight for a moment, knowing what a fucking psycho you are?’ He knew her weak spot now, and it seemed he was determined to exploit it with further brutality as he lifted his foot and brought his heel down hard. Sophie felt the recent stitches burst apart, but she was better prepared this time. She gritted her teeth and waited for the pain to subside.
He wasn’t going to win. She had no intention of telling him that the two boys she’d had with her in Anglesey were her sister’s children, and the girl was her cousin’s. God knows what he might do to them. Her cousin and sister were both single mums and getting child care for the holidays was always a nightmare, so it was a huge relief when Auntie Sophie offered to take them on holiday. But there was no way Robert was finding this out.
‘Who came to visit you?’
‘None of your sodding business. I’m not your wife, so I can screw whoever I like. And, as it happens, so can she.’ She didn’t know why she felt compelled to add that, but she wanted to hurt this man, and as deeply as she could. The punishment was swift.
‘My wife has screwed nobody but me – and you know it,’ he growled, his voice dropping ominously low.
‘Do you think?’ she asked innocently. ‘What would you say if I told you she never got over Danush – she’ll always love him, and nothing you can do will ever change that?’
The bastard laughed. With genuine mirth. Poor Olivia. Robert was everything she’d ever said he was.
‘What do you know about Olivia and me, Sophie? What’s she told you?’
‘She’s told me everything, you sicko. I know it all. I know who you are, I know what you are. You’re a shit – a psychotic fucking shit.’ Sophie spat the last word as he plunged the serrated knife into the now open wound in her leg.
As she passed out, she heard him ask the one question she couldn’t answer – and she was glad. Glad that he’d never know whether she could have answered it or not.
30
As he got into his car and put the key in the ignition, Tom had to admit he was feeling weary. It had been a day of revelations, but still nobody had any idea how they all slotted together. Somebody had died in that house – but who?
Since Gil had exposed the sham of the video footage, a review of the CCTV had confirmed that Robert’s car had left the garage of the Newcastle hotel at 11.39 pm on Wednesday evening, and arrived back there at 8.32 am the next morning. Something else he had lied about. And his credit card statement confirmed that he had made some purchases from John Lewis in Newcastle on Thursday at lunchtime, although they wouldn’t be able to find out exactly what he had bought until the following day.
Finally, Jumbo had called through to say that, as expected, they had found a minute trace of blood that hadn’t been cleaned by the bleach. It was tiny, but enough to extract DNA from. He had taken Olivia’s hairbrush from the bedroom, and had asked for a super-speed rush job. He knew how important this was.
Tom was driving on autopilot, but fortunately the roads were quiet. His mind was spinning. They had so much to go on, but still hadn’t a clue what had happened, and now the whole family was missing, including Robert.
It was the video that was puzzling Tom, though. There was something contrived about Olivia’s clothing. Were they somehow both involved? But in what?
The FaceTime trail had temporarily gone cold, but they would get the court order tomorrow to demand the correct IP address for Olivia Brookes, or at least the
IP address of whoever was using Olivia’s email address.
Tom had promised to go round to see Leo to find out what she’d discovered about his break-in, if he could get away at a reasonable time. It was good of her to sort this for him. He knew from experience how devastating it could be to walk into a home that had been turned upside down, and he was just glad he hadn’t had to see his place that way. It was another thing he should be dealing with but was ignoring. He needed to make sure it was secure, though, because Lucy was coming to stay for a fortnight at the start of her summer holiday, and if her mother got wind of any of this she might just decide it wasn’t safe for their daughter to spend the night there. He could do without dealing with Kate if she decided to be difficult.
For once, he didn’t feel remotely like cooking, and anyway it was getting late. Maybe they could just go to a local restaurant. He would see what Leo thought – let her make the decision, because just now he felt it would be beyond him.
Three missing kids, and nothing that he seemed able to do about it. He had spoken to Becky about getting an artist to go to the school, or somebody to produce an e-fit. They might not have photos, but the combined efforts of the teaching staff should produce some reasonable results.
Tom pulled his car into one of the two reserved spaces for Leo’s apartment, grabbed his briefcase off the passenger seat, and made his way to the lift. He rang the bell and waited. Leo opened the door with a sympathetic smile. One thing he could say for her was that she was always very conscious of his mood. She reached towards him and pulled him close for a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
‘Come and sit down. I’ve got a glass of wine waiting for you,’ she whispered softly against his ear.
‘What about food?’ Tom asked. He knew Leo wouldn’t have cooked. He was never sure whether his prowess in the kitchen had made her wary of ever making a meal for the two of them. But he had to eat, and he was certain that if he sat down before a decision was made, he would never get up again.
Tom Douglas Box Set Page 96