‘Okay, Sophie,’ Tom said. ‘Just answer a couple of questions now and we’ll be on our way. We’ll catch up with you again tomorrow. Is that all right?’
Sophie nodded, and settled back slightly against the pillows.
‘The most crucial thing is that you tell us where Olivia Brookes and the children are.’
‘Oh, shit. I knew you were going to ask me that – and I don’t know. I honestly don’t have any idea where they are. I’m worried sick about them all.’
Tom looked into her anxious eyes, and he knew she was telling the truth.
‘After Robert attacked you, he disappeared. We know he’s been lying about when he last spoke to Olivia. Do you think he might have hurt her or the children?’
Sophie looked down at her leg and grasped the top of her thigh in both hands.
‘You’ve seen what he’s capable of. I don’t even know why you’re asking me that question.’
She turned her head slightly towards Tom.
‘There is one person who might have more of an idea than me where she is. If you can track Dan down, you could ask him if he knows anything,’ she suggested. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of him, but he’s not answering his mobile.’
‘Dan?’ Tom asked, in no doubt whatsoever who she was talking about.
‘Danush Jahander – the guy who ran away from Liv all those years ago. Well, he’s back, and he wants her back. But she was bloody terrified of what Robert would do if he found out.’
Tom looked at Becky. Despite Sophie’s obvious discomfort they weren’t going to be able to leave this until tomorrow. He thought back to Robert’s smug, almost amused expression when Jahander was mentioned. He knew, Tom thought. And if he did, what would that have meant for Olivia?
His thoughts were rudely interrupted by the buzz of his telephone. He glanced at the screen as he accepted the call.
‘Excuse me, Sophie – this could be important.’ He stepped outside the cubicle. ‘Yes, Jumbo. Tell me you’ve got more news?’
Jumbo’s deep voice rumbled down the phone. ‘I have – and not news you’ll be expecting, my friend. The blood at the scene? Well, as it’s for you I managed to pull in a few favours. I know a rush job is usually forty-eight hours, but I also know you’re worried about Olivia Brookes and the children. So we’ve done the analysis on the blood and it turned up an unexpected result.’
Tom waited.
‘Given the height of the blood spatter, we are fairly sure this is blood from an adult, although of course we’ll check that. I know we were all expecting this to be Olivia Brookes’ blood, but we were wrong. It’s not female blood at all. The blood is from a man, as yet unidentified.’
Tom felt a cold run of fingers down his spine. It was a feeling he’d had many times, but he never quite got used to it.
PART THREE
OLIVIA
32
Monday
Some people believe that freedom is every person’s right, but I have had to fight for mine. And it’s been a long and difficult battle.
It began when Robert took my children. That day, he sent me to a darker place than I had ever imagined. I thought I had experienced the worst that life could throw at a person, visited every dark dungeon of despair, but nothing compared to the fear that I had lost my children. And that is exactly what Robert wanted; it was a warning, a taste of what might be if I didn’t stay within his control. From that day forwards, I knew I would never again feel we could sleep safely in our beds, and the threat of all Robert was capable of hung over me like a black cloud.
My only option was to leave him, but how could I do that? I had no money of my own any more, and no means of getting any. I couldn’t leave a trail; if he finds us, the consequences are too dire to contemplate.
The years since Dan haven’t all been bad, but in the brief time I had with him I felt as if my spirit was alive – as if bubbles were effervescing inside me. I sparkled. With Robert there were never bubbles, but I was content to settle for stillness. After Dan and then what happened with my parents, serenity and calm seemed to be just what I needed, but as the years passed I started to realise that it wasn’t enough. And that was before I understood it all – before I knew the reason I had lost Dan.
I’d begun to feel as if there was a creeping deadness inside me, encroaching on the calm and replacing it with a black void, a vacuum where emotion should be. And the deadness was growing and penetrating every corner of my soul, reaching out its dark tentacles to smother all natural reactions.
When Robert took my children, two things happened. I realised I had to banish the deadness and bring myself back to life. Not for my sake, but for my children. And somehow I had to use my stagnant brain to work out a solution to the terrible life in which I had found myself. I didn’t know how, though. Every idea I came up with was flawed.
I couldn’t just leave. I knew what Robert would do if I did, and anyway he had been so clever. He had managed to bring my sanity into question. The whole of our tiny, shrinking world believed that I couldn’t cope with life without Robert’s help. To an outsider, he appeared to take care of me and provide everything I ever could have wanted.
What I wanted was freedom.
The schedule on the kitchen wall was supposed to be there to help me. So why did I have to write down every action that required contact with other people? Robert said that if he came home unexpectedly and I wasn’t there, he needed to know where I was.
Why?
I felt as if I was in a cage, being controlled, being observed. And I knew he was watching me. He couldn’t bear me to be out of his sight, and the thought of me having a friend – even just another mother of a child at school – brought out the worst in Robert. His campaign to undermine me would be stepped up a notch.
It wasn’t me I was worried about, though. It was my children. Robert’s obsession was focused on one thing. Me. To him, the children were just another weapon in his armoury.
From the day Robert took my children, I spent six months trying to find a way to escape – but I had no money and no ability to get us all to a safe place. That was when I found Sophie again, and from that moment I began to hope.
It’s been hard to maintain the outward image of the old me for Robert’s sake while simultaneously starting to feel alive again. But I did it, and I just pray he never finds us. Nobody knows where we are. Not even Sophie. Especially not Sophie, because she is the only link. She knows so much, but I had to make sure our location is a secret even from her, because I know Robert.
I’m getting worried about Sophie. She was supposed to call me last night, and I’ve heard nothing. That’s not like her. She has been amazing since the word go and I couldn’t have made it through the last eighteen months without her. And she gave me a precious gift. That day I went to see her for the first time since I married Robert, she gave Danush back to me.
‘Dan loved you, Liv,’ she’d said. ‘Whatever happened, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that, and Samir feels so guilty about what he did. But he thought he was doing the best thing for his brother, and it’s all so long ago. Anyway, now you have your husband and three children to think about. Tell me all about them.’
But I hadn’t been able to. Not that day. Not after hearing about Dan. More than anything it had made me realise how much I’d missed Sophie, how much I loved the company of other women – and yet somehow I had lost touch with reality and shut myself away. I promised Sophie I would come back to see her again. She suggested visiting our house and meeting the children, but I couldn’t let that happen. Robert wouldn’t like it. He’d never met Sophie, but he would hate her for no reason other than the fact that I love her.
I waited a couple of weeks, and found a time when I felt reasonably certain that Robert wouldn’t check up on me. He had been moaning about a presentation he had to give, and I knew when it was happening. It gave me about an hour and twenty minutes of free time – a rare commodity in my life – and for those few meagre mi
nutes, I felt able to breathe.
I chose some photos to show Sophie, and drove quickly to her house. When I calculated the time there and back, it was going to allow us forty minutes together, which for me was bliss. I couldn’t let her know I was coming – her number would have shown on the phone records. Robert received copies of my mobile account too, so I just prayed she would be in. She was.
Sophie hadn’t seen Jaz since she was two months old, and when she saw the pictures I knew she would be amazed at how beautiful my daughter had become as a seven-year-old. Jaz is nearly nine now, and she’s getting prettier by the day. Sophie had never seen the boys, of course. Both with bright blond hair to offset their sister’s dark, silky tresses – as a family we really stood out. Which is why Billy’s hair is now dyed a darker brown, and Freddie’s has been cut so short he almost looks bald.
Sophie wanted to know all about us. Where Robert and I had met, where we lived. I remember playing the happy wife, talking about everything we have and how close knit we are. I don’t think she was fooled, though. She knew something was wrong, because I was wrong. I wasn’t me any more, and she could see that. I wasn’t Liv.
When her penetrating glance became too much, I fished in my bag for the photos.
‘God, she’s adorable,’ Sophie had shrieked as she looked at a picture of Jasmine. ‘She looks exotic, but then it’s not surprising based on her parentage. I don’t often say this about men, but Danush was bloody beautiful, wasn’t he?’ I said nothing, and just sorted through the photos yet again. First Billy, then Freddie. She eulogised about them for the requisite two minutes, but it was obvious she was more interested to see who I had ended up with after Dan.
‘Let’s see him then. Come on, don’t hold back on your knight in shining armour.’ By then she knew the story of how we had met.
I extracted a rare photo of Robert and me, taken by Jasmine when I let her use my camera on our last holiday. Sophie looked at the picture, smiling broadly. Then, although her face didn’t change, I realised her smile had become forced.
‘Tell me again how you met Robert,’ she asked without raising her eyes to mine.
So I told her the story one more time, even though I’d already explained how Robert had been the man who had bought my flat, and how he had rescued me when my whole life had fallen down around my ears. How he’d been so kind. All of that was true. The fact that I wasn’t happy now was no reflection on how things had been then.
‘Where did he go to university?’ she asked. Strange question, but I told her it was Manchester, just like us.
‘Did you never meet him then?’ she asked. I was beginning to be concerned about this. What was wrong with Sophie? She handed the photo back to me and leaned over to grab both of my hands, looking me in the eyes for the first time since she had seen the picture.
‘Do you remember I told you how all the guys at university were in love with you?’ She didn’t wait for my response. ‘There was one guy who I was really worried about. He turned up everywhere, just watching. Remember – I told you about him, but you used to laugh it off? I called him Creepy Guy.’
I had no idea where this conversation was going, so I just looked at Sophie and I’m sure she could see my confusion.
‘You may never have clapped eyes on Robert before he bought your flat. But I can promise you that he’d seen you before – about a thousand times. He knew exactly who you were.’
‘I swear to you, we’d never met. I would have remembered.’
‘Liv, this guy used to follow you everywhere. You never believed me at the time, but wherever you were, there he was. I don’t know how to tell you this. Robert… he’s Creepy Guy.’
33
Robert Brookes lay on the faded peach candlewick bedspread and looked around him at the grubby room. He had never expected it to come to this, hiding out from the police in a dingy hotel in the back streets of Manchester. But he’d had no choice. He couldn’t use his credit cards again, and he had to find somewhere that would let him pay cash.
He’d been round all the banks and withdrawn the maximum on each card. His gold card had let him take out £750 and, although he had been expecting more from his platinum account – the one Olivia knew nothing about – he was limited to the same amount. He’d got as much as he could on both debit cards too, so he had about £2500 to keep him going. He had also let himself into his office and signed out a pool car in somebody else’s name. He just hoped nobody would notice for at least a couple of days.
With any luck his trick with the taxi would use up some police resources too. Did they really think he would be stupid enough to phone for a taxi from the house? Once he had placed the bogus call to one taxi firm, he had walked in entirely the opposite direction to the nearest supermarket and picked up the public telephone there to call a different taxi company.
Another thing he’d had to do was lose his mobile phone. His mind had been in such a muddle that he couldn’t remember whether he could be tracked just by the SIM card, or by the phone itself. He’d read somewhere that in the US it was possible for the authorities to switch on the microphone on a mobile to listen in even when the phone was switched off. He couldn’t risk being wrong about this. He’d extracted the SIM as he had walked to the supermarket and dropped it down a grid in the side of the road. Much as it had pained him, he had gone round the back of some local shops and stamped on his brand new iPhone until it was completely shattered. He had put the bits into a huge trash bin behind the butcher’s where no doubt it would be mixed with all kinds of carcasses and offal. Nobody was going to be looking in there.
The taxi had dropped him off outside the office and, as soon as he had purloined a car and grabbed an iPad that nobody knew was lurking in his desk drawer, he had started his search for Sophie Duncan. She and Olivia had been inseparable in their early days at university, until Jahander had come along to join the party. There had been other boyfriends before Danush, but nobody serious, and Robert had known he would just have to bide his time. He’d watched and waited. From the first moment he saw Olivia, laughing at some joke or other in the bar, he had decided that she had to be his. It was as if everybody else in the room had faded to a pale grey, with only Olivia glowing with colour and vitality in the centre. That was how he always saw her – at the centre of his vision – until that bitch Sophie made it impossible for him to be near.
He’d been racking his brains to remember everything he had ever known about Sophie. He had made it his business to find out about Olivia’s friends, and Sophie had been top of the list. She’d been dealt with appropriately nine years ago – it hadn’t taken much to drive her out of Olivia’s life. She’d had to go: Olivia had to rely on him and not on random friends who wouldn’t take care of her like he would. How had they managed to get back in touch? He must have got sloppy, but he couldn’t think how.
One thing he did remember from all those years ago was where Sophie’s mother lived, and he hadn’t been able to believe his luck when the lovely Mrs Duncan – under some pressure, it had to be said – had revealed that her daughter was living there for the time being, and would be home soon.
That bitch Sophie had told him nothing, though. Nothing. And then he had pushed it just that little bit too far. He had dearly wanted to slap her around to wake her up, but before she’d passed out she had been screaming and he had no idea if the neighbours would have called the police. He’d had to get out of there.
From the moment he saw Sophie’s photo on Mrs Evans’ pinboard, he knew Olivia had out-manoeuvred him, and that wherever she had gone, she wouldn’t be coming back. He wasn’t ready to share that with the police, though. She had to be found. She had to be returned to where she belonged. With him.
He had made it absolutely clear to her exactly what would happen if she ever dared to leave him, and he had been sure she had understood his every word, every nuance. He had worked so damned hard to win her, but she was going to suffer for what she had done to him, and all he could think of
was the pain he would inflict on her for the torment she had caused him.
34
The news from Jumbo the previous night had disrupted all of Tom’s plans to interview Sophie. As he had ended the call and stepped back into the hospital cubicle, he could see a new greyness to Sophie’s skin, and her eyes were bright with fever. For a moment, he wondered if she had heard Jumbo’s booming voice even though he had moved away, but she would have needed extraordinary powers of hearing. He knew they would get nothing else from her until she’d had a chance to rest.
And of course, he’d had to tell Becky the news.
‘It could mean nothing,’ she’d said. ‘He could have killed some other poor bugger too.’
But it had dinted her confidence, and he felt as if they were almost back at square one.
They were hoping that Sophie would be able to tell them more; give them some clue about what had happened to Olivia and the children, but when she’d opened the door to them this morning, Sophie looked as if she had barely slept, so Becky had volunteered to go and make some tea and toast while Tom started the questioning. He had watched Sophie as she walked towards one of the two sofas in the living room and lowered herself gingerly on to the cushions. It was clear that her leg was giving her hell.
‘Why did Robert Brookes break into your house and hurt you, Sophie? What did he want?’
‘Probably the same as you lot want. He wanted to know where Liv is, and why I was in Anglesey, not her. He wanted to know whose children I had with me – but they’re irrelevant. There was no way I was telling him, because fuck knows what he would have done next. Probably gone after them – as if they’d know anything. They weren’t Liv’s children, and that’s all he needed to know. She’s scared to let those kids out of her sight, so she wouldn’t even have trusted me with them in case he had something plotted.’
Tom Douglas Box Set Page 98