People get caught when they get careless.
You won’t find my name in the digital trail leading to findtheone.com – I’ve only ever used other people’s names, borrowed from wallets and coat pockets.
James Stanford, who had no idea he had a mailbox on Old Gloucester Road, or a credit card with which he was paying for adverts placed in the London Gazette. Mai Suo Li, the Chinese student who was happy to hand over his British bank account in exchange for enough cash for his flight home.
Other people’s names. Never mine.
The receipt, though. That was careless.
A door code, scribbled thoughtlessly on the nearest scrap of paper, never a consideration given to the fact that it could mean the end of everything. When I think of it now – when I think of the carelessness – it fills me with rage. So stupid. Without that receipt everything was perfect. Untraceable.
It isn’t over, though. When you’re cornered, there’s only one thing to do.
Go down fighting.
30
By lunchtime the dining table is clear again and the house has regained some semblance of order. I sit at the table and work my way through Graham’s accounts, finding the methodical process of logging taxi fares and lunches strangely relaxing. My phone beeps with a message from PC Swift, returning the text I sent her earlier.
Sorry haven’t been in touch. Quick update – I’ll try and call later. We believe offender has administered the website from a café called Espress Oh near Leicester Square – enquiries ongoing. Luke Harris still on bail – I’ll let you know what the CPS say. Sounds like working from home is a good move. Take care of yourself.
I read the message twice. Then I pick up the file of miscellaneous paperwork from the table and retrieve the receipt for Espress Oh! I look at the number scribbled on the back, then search for the date. The ink at the bottom is smudged and I can’t make it out. How long has it been here? It’s not cold in the house, but I’m shaking and the receipt flutters in my hand. I walk into the kitchen.
‘Katie?’
‘Mmm?’
She’s buttering bread on the counter without using a plate. She brushes the crumbs into her hand and shakes them into the sink. ‘Sorry.’ She sees my face. ‘It’s only a few crumbs, Mum.’
I hand her the receipt. ‘Have you ever been to this place?’ I feel light-headed, as though I’ve come up for air too fast. I can feel my pulse ticking, and I count each beat in an effort to slow it down.
Katie screws up her nose. ‘Don’t think so. Where is it?’
‘Near Leicester Square.’ When you face danger your body is supposed to go into one of two modes: fight or flight. But mine isn’t doing either. It’s frozen, wanting to run but unable to move.
‘Oh, I know it! At least, I think so. I’ve not been there, but I’ve walked past it. Why do you want to know?’
I don’t want to panic Katie. I tell her about PC Swift’s email, but calmly, as though it’s nothing of great importance. The buzzing in my ears grows louder. It’s not a coincidence. I know it.
‘It’s just a receipt. It doesn’t have to belong to the person behind the website. Does it?’ Her eyes flicker across my face, trying to read me; trying to gauge how worried I am.
Yes.
‘No, of course not.’
‘It could have come from anyone; a coat pocket, an old plastic bag, anything.’ We’re both pretending it’s something innocuous. A lone sock. A stray cat. Anything but a receipt that somehow links a maniac to our house. ‘I leave receipts in bags all the time.’
I want her to be right. I think of all the times I’ve grabbed a carrier bag from the dozens stuffed into the cupboard under the sink, and found abandoned receipts from previous shopping trips.
I want her to be right, but I know from the prickle of fear across my neck that she isn’t. That the only reason that receipt is in our house is because someone brought it in.
‘Bit of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’ I try to smile but it falls apart, morphing into something quite different.
Fear.
There’s a voice in my head I won’t listen to; a creeping sense of dread telling me the answer is staring me in the face.
‘We need to think rationally about it,’ Katie is saying. ‘Who’s been in the house recently?’
‘You, me, Justin and Simon,’ I say, ‘obviously. And Melissa and Neil. The pile of paperwork I put on the table last night – the receipts and the invoices – that belongs to Graham Hallow.’
‘Could it be his?’
‘Maybe.’ I think of the pile of Gazettes on Graham’s desk, and remember his perfectly plausible explanation for them. ‘But he’s been really supportive lately – he’s given me time off work. I can’t see him doing something like this.’ A thought enters my head. The police might not have found any evidence against Isaac, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any to find. ‘We cleared the table before Sunday lunch last month. Isaac was here.’
Katie’s mouth opens. ‘What are you suggesting?’
I shrug, but it’s unconvincing, even to me. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply listing the people who have been in the house recently.’
‘You can’t think Isaac has anything to do with this? Mum, I hadn’t even met him when this all started – you said yourself the ads have been running since September.’
‘He took a picture of you, Katie. Without you knowing. Don’t you think that’s creepy?’
‘To send to another cast member! Not to use on a website.’ She’s yelling at me, defensive and angry.
‘How do you know?’ I shout back.
There’s a silence between us as we both take stock of ourselves. ‘It could be anyone’s,’ Katie says stubbornly.
‘Then we should search the house,’ I say. She nods.
‘Justin’s room first.’
‘Justin? You can’t think …’ I see her face. ‘Fine.’
Even as a toddler Justin loved computers above books. I used to worry I’d done something wrong – let him watch too much television – but when Katie came along and became such a bookworm, I realised they were just two different children. We didn’t even have a computer at home when they were young, but ICT was about the only subject Justin would turn up for at school. He begged Matt and me for his own computer and when we couldn’t afford it he saved his pocket money and bought the parts, each one arriving in a Jiffy bag to the house, to be stored under his bed with his Meccano sets and Lego figures. He built that first computer himself, with instructions he’d printed at the library, and as time went on he added more memory, a bigger hard disk, a better graphics card. At twelve, Justin knew more about computers and the Internet than I did at thirty.
I remember making him sit down after school one day, before he ran upstairs to join whatever gaming network he was into, impressing upon him the dangers of giving too much away online; that the teens he spent so long chatting to might not be teens at all, but fifty-year-old perverts, salivating over their keyboards.
‘I’m too clever for the paedos,’ he said, laughing. ‘They could never catch me.’
I was impressed, I suppose. Proud my son was so savvy, so much more clued up about technology than I was.
In all those years of worrying that Justin might fall prey to an online attacker, it never once crossed my mind he might be one himself. He can’t be, I think, in the very next beat. I’d know it.
Justin’s bedroom smells of stale smoke and socks. On the bed is a pile of clean laundry I put there yesterday, the neatly folded stack now fallen to one side, where Justin has slept in his bed without bothering to move them or put them away. I open the curtains to let in some light, and find half a dozen mugs, three used as ashtrays. A neatly rolled joint lies next to a lighter.
‘Check his drawers,’ I tell Katie, who is standing in the doorway. She doesn’t move. ‘Now! We don’t know how long we’ve got.’ I sit on the bed and open Justin’s laptop.
‘Mum, this feels w
rong.’
‘And running a website selling women’s commutes to men who want to rape or kill them isn’t?’
‘He wouldn’t do that!’
‘I don’t think so either. But we need to be sure. Search his room.’
‘I don’t even know what I’m looking for,’ Katie says, but she pulls open his wardrobe doors and starts rifling through his shelves.
‘More receipts from Espress Oh!,’ I say, trying to think of something incriminating. ‘Photos of women, information about their commutes …’ Justin’s laptop is password protected. I stare at the screen, and his user name, Game8oy_94, looks back at me, beside the tiny avatar of Justin’s palm thrust towards the camera.
‘Money?’ Katie says.
‘Definitely. Anything out of the ordinary. What could Justin’s password be?’ I try his date of birth and ACCESS DENIED: TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING appears on the screen.
‘Money,’ Katie says again, and I realise it isn’t a question. I look up. She’s holding an envelope, exactly like the one Justin handed me with my rent money. It’s stuffed so full of twenty-and ten-pound notes the flap won’t stay shut. ‘His wages from the cafe, do you think?’
Katie doesn’t know about Melissa’s cash-in-hand tax dodge, and although I doubt she’d care I don’t plan on telling her. The more people who know, the more likelihood there is that HMRC will find out, and that’s trouble neither Melissa nor I need.
‘I guess so,’ I say vaguely. ‘Put it back.’
I take another stab at Justin’s password, this time entering a mash-up of our address and the name of his first pet; a gerbil called Gerald who escaped and lived under the floorboards in our bathroom for several months.
ACCESS DENIED: ONE ATTEMPT REMAINING.
I daren’t risk another try. ‘Is there anything else in the wardrobe?’
‘Not that I can find.’ Katie moves on to the tallboy, pulling out each drawer and running a hand expertly beneath each one, checking to see if anything has been taped there. She feels among his clothes and I close the laptop and leave it on the bed in what I hope is the same position I found it. ‘How about the laptop?’
‘I can’t get in.’
‘Mum …’ Katie doesn’t look at me as she speaks. ‘You know the receipt could be Simon’s.’
My answer is immediate. ‘It isn’t Simon’s.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I do.’ I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. ‘Simon loves me. He would never hurt me.’
Katie slams a drawer shut, making me jump. ‘You’ll point the finger at Isaac, but you won’t even entertain the idea of Simon being involved?’
‘You’ve known Isaac five minutes.’
‘It’s only fair, Mum. If we’re going through Justin’s stuff, and accusing Isaac, then we have to consider Simon, too. We need to search his room.’
‘I’m not searching Simon’s room, Katie! How could I ever expect him to trust me again?’
‘Look, I’m not saying he’s involved, or even that the Espress Oh! receipt is his. But it could be.’ I shake my head and she throws up her hands. ‘Mum, it could be! At least consider it.’
‘We’ll wait until he gets home, and then we can all go up together.’
Katie is unflinching. ‘No, Mum. Now.’
The staircase leading to the attic is narrow, and the door on the first-floor landing gives the impression there is nothing but a cupboard behind; perhaps a bathroom or a small bedroom. Before Simon moved in I used to use it as a sort of escape: it wasn’t properly furnished, but I piled cushions up here and would shut the door and lie down for half an hour, stealing time for myself from the maelstrom of single parenting. I used to love how hidden it felt. Now it feels dangerous, each step up taking me away from the openness of the rest of the house, away from safety.
‘What if Simon comes home?’ I say. Simon and I have nothing to hide from each other, but we’re both adults; we’ve always agreed it’s important to have our own space. Our own lives. I can’t imagine what he’d say if he could see Katie and me now, snooping around his office.
‘We’re not doing anything wrong. He doesn’t know we’ve found the receipt. We have to stay cool.’
Cool is the last thing I feel.
‘We’re getting the Christmas decorations down,’ I say suddenly.
‘What?’
‘If he comes home and asks what we’re doing. We’re up here to get the decorations out of the eaves.’
‘Right, okay.’ Katie isn’t interested, but I feel better, knowing I have an excuse ready.
The door at the bottom of the stairs swings shut with a bang that makes me jump. It’s the only door that does; the only one with a fire regulation compliant closer. Simon wanted to take it off: he said he liked having the door open, so he could hear the hustle and bustle of life below him. I insisted it stayed, worrying about fire, worrying about anything that might threaten my family.
All that time, is it possible the real threat has been right there in front of us?
Living in our house?
I feel nauseous and I force the bile down, trying to capture an ounce of the strength my nineteen-year-old daughter is now showing. Katie stands in the middle of the room and takes a slow, careful look around. There’s nothing on the walls, which slope from ceiling to floor at an angle that leaves only a narrow strip of full head height, along the centre of the room. The single Velux window lets in a paltry amount of winter sun, and I turn on the main light.
‘There.’ Katie points to the filing cabinet, on which Simon’s Samsung tablet is resting. She hands it to me. She’s decisive, almost snappy. I wish I knew what she was thinking.
‘Katie,’ I say, ‘do you really think Simon’s capable of …’ I don’t finish.
‘I don’t know, Mum. Look at the search history.’
I open the case and enter Simon’s password, then open the browser. ‘How do I see what he was looking at?’
Katie looks over my shoulder. ‘Tap there.’ She points. ‘It should bring up a list of sites visited, as well as what he’s been searching for.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. There’s nothing obvious. News sites, and a couple of holiday brokers. A Valentine’s weekend break. I wonder how Simon can even think about booking a holiday when he’s so much in debt. Window shopping, I suppose, thinking of the evenings I spend looking on Rightmove at million-pound properties I could never hope to afford.
Katie is looking again in the filing cabinet drawer. She pulls out a piece of paper. ‘Mum,’ she says slowly, ‘he hasn’t been telling the truth.’
The nausea returns to the pit of my stomach.
‘“Dear Mr Thornton,”’ she reads, “further to your recent meeting with Human Resources please accept this letter as formal notification of your redundancy.”’ She looks at me. ‘It’s dated first of August.’
The relief is instant.
‘I know about the redundancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I only found out myself a couple of weeks ago.’
‘You knew? Is that why he started working from home?’ I nod. ‘And before that? Since August, I mean. He’s been wearing a suit, going out every day …’
I feel too loyal to Simon to admit that he spent those weeks pretending to be at work, lying to us all, but I don’t need to; I can tell from Katie’s face she’s already worked it out.
‘You don’t know for sure, though, do you?’ she says. ‘You don’t know what he was doing – not what he was really doing. You only know what he told you. For all you know, he spent that time following women on the Underground. Taking their photographs. Posting their details on the Internet.’
‘I trust Simon.’ My words sound hollow, even to me.
She starts searching through the filing cabinet, throwing files on the floor. The top drawer is filled with Simon’s paperwork; work contracts, life assurance … I don’t know what’s there. In the middle drawer I keep all the documentation relating to the house; buildings
and contents insurance, my mortgage statements, the building regs certificate for the loft conversion we’re in right now. In another folder are the children’s birth certificates and my divorce certificate, along with all our passports. In a third, old bank statements, kept for no other reason than I don’t know what else to do with them.
‘Check the desk,’ she says, just as I ordered her to search Justin’s room. Frustrated by the time it’s taking to look at each document, she pulls out the filing cabinet drawer and tips the contents on to the floor, swirling them around with one hand until everything is uncovered. ‘There’ll be something, I know it.’
My daughter is strong. Feisty.
‘She gets that from you,’ Matt always used to say, when Katie stubbornly refused the laden spoon I was waving in front of her, or insisted on walking to the shops when her little legs were barely stable. The memory hurts, and I mentally shake myself. I’m the grown-up. I’m the strong one. This is my fault. I’m the one who was taken in by Simon; flattered by the attention, by his generosity.
I need answers, and I need them now.
I open the first desk drawer and pull out the contents, dumping files on the floor and shaking them in case anything of interest lies beneath the pages of otherwise dull documentation. I meet Katie’s eye and she gives me a grim nod of approval.
‘This drawer’s locked.’ I rattle the handle. ‘I don’t know where the key is.’
‘Can you force it?’
‘I’m trying.’ I hold the top of the desk with one hand and yank hard on the handle of the drawer with the other. It doesn’t budge. I look around the chaotic desk to see where Simon might keep the key, tipping up a pen pot but finding only a collection of paperclips and pencil shavings. Remembering how Katie searched Justin’s tallboy I run my hand under the desk in case the key is taped there, and look at the underside of all the open drawers for the same reason.
Nothing.
‘We’ll have to pick the lock.’ I say this with more confidence than I feel, having never picked a lock in my life. I take a pair of sharp scissors from the floor, where they have been tipped out from a drawer, and jam them into the lock. With no real method, I wiggle the blades violently from side to side and then up and down, at the same time pulling on the handle. There is a small crunching noise, and to my amazement the drawer opens. I drop the scissors on to the floor.
I See You Page 28