by Toby Faber
Dad was adamant. ‘We spoke about this on our way back. We’ve agreed it’s probably better if we don’t tell you anything about what we did with the bodies. So please don’t ask.’
Laurie was taken aback, not so much by what Dad was saying – she could see the sense of it, was relieved at being spared the details – but by the idea that from now on he and Jess would have a secret in which she could not share. Dad would never tell her; there was no point in trying to persuade him.
But why hadn’t they called the police? The last thing Laurie wanted was an argument, but this was something she had to understand. She approached the subject as indirectly as she could: ‘Jess? Those two men in the flat? Dad said—’ She stopped, not sure what she wanted to ask. What had really happened while Jess was tied to that bed? They’d had all the time in the world.
‘Well,’ Jess replied, shortly but not unkindly, ‘we’d be very unlucky if we’d attracted the attention of two different sets of shaven-headed thugs, wouldn’t we?’
Shaven-headed? Yes of course, just like the two who had chased her and Paul through Euston Station a lifetime ago. Except they hadn’t been chasing Paul, had they? Laurie stopped to ponder this before starting again. ‘Jess, you know you saved our lives last night? They’d logged onto a website in my name, were going to make it look like a double suicide.’
It was Dad who replied. ‘I thought it must be something like that. Why else would they be so careful not to bruise us?’
Yes, Laurie considered, the men’s actions all made sense, in some horrible psychopathic way. It was Dad and Jess whose behaviour she still couldn’t understand. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘as far as I’m concerned, they deserved to die. The only thing is, I’m pretty sure the police would have seen it the same way.’
Dad wouldn’t meet Laurie’s eye. She could tell he agreed with her, but didn’t want to say. It was Jess who eventually replied: ‘This morning, in the cold light of day, I can see why you might be right, but last night I was absolutely certain you weren’t. I was more than insistent, and David …well, he did as I asked.’
Dad was looking at Jess now, but he still didn’t speak. Instead Jess continued, ‘There’s something else you need to see.’ With that, she pulled over a chair, stood on it and reached on top of the dresser. When her hand came down, it was holding a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. She dumped it on the table; a thin bundle of £50 notes fell out from the bag as she did so. Laurie picked it up and noted the NatWest logo on the tape that bound it: £2,500.
‘There are thirty-nine more like that inside the bag.’ Jess answered Laurie’s unspoken question.
Laurie was starting to feel lost. ‘I don’t understand. Where did you find this? What’s it for?’
‘I found it in their car. They’d parked it along the lane. And I think it’s fairly obvious what it’s for. It’s some sort of payment – for killing you; that would be my guess. Think about what we’ve all gone through. As far as I’m concerned, we deserve that money. By rights, it’s ours.’
Laurie looked at the bag. The police wouldn’t have thought it was theirs; she was pretty sure of that, but she could see Jess’s point. By itself, of course, it wasn’t a good enough reason for hiding the bodies. Combined with the fear of prosecution, however, and in the immediate aftermath of a night of horror, well she could just about understand it. One thing was certain; there was nothing to be gained by challenging that decision any more. Then a thought struck her. ‘Where’s their car?’
It was Dad who replied. Was it Laurie’s imagination, or was he a bit too eager to change the subject? ‘We dropped it off back at the hire office in London, put the keys through the letterbox. That’s what took us so long.’
Then he reached down inside the bag and produced two mobile phones: ‘We also found these by the way – by your computer – thought they might help us work out why they were here.’
Laurie immediately recognised one of the handsets. It was the new phone she’d had delivered only a few days before; the other was a cheap throwaway – the kind you buy over the counter when you need an emergency replacement. ‘Have you looked at them?’ She asked.
‘One of them’s yours, isn’t it? The other has only been used to call one number. There are some texts as well – from the same number. One of them has my address here in it.’ Dad stopped there, letting the implications of what he had said sink in.
‘When was it sent?’
‘Yesterday evening.’
‘Is that the last one?’
‘No – there’s one more; just says “lonelygirl73 monday-blues”. We’re still trying to puzzle that one out.’
Laurie had to shake herself to drive away the tightness in her chest: ‘I think I can help with that.’
Dad insisted they were systematic about it, writing down the date and time of every call and text the mobile had sent or received. Laurie recognised and appreciated the forensic nature of the undertaking, although she wasn’t sure she or Jess would have had the heart to do it without him.
As a basic model, the handset only showed the last twenty calls in its register, but even those few entries covered several weeks. Working backwards, they included a call made early that morning; it was a shock to all three of them to realise that it could only have been made while Laurie and Dad were already tied up. One minute later, that ‘lonelygirl73, mondayblues’ text had arrived.
Gradually, the phone began to yield its secrets. The texts were most chilling. There were only three others, besides the ones Dad had already told her about. Each was preceded by a call and each contained a combination of username and password. The first was a few weeks old. One was from earlier in the week. The last of them had been sent only a few hours before the one with Dad’s address. It was hard to avoid the implication that they had done this three times before. Done what? Dad and Jess wondered. So Laurie explained: ‘It’s what I was telling you they’d done with me. These will be usernames on some website for people considering suicide. Someone’s opened the account and put up posts that sound like they’re written by the person they want to kill. Then after the murder, they make sure the victim’s PC is open on the site. I guess that’s the modern version of a suicide note.’
Dad and Jess took in the implications. ‘You mean,’ Jess said ‘they’ve already faked the suicides of three people? Who?’
‘I think we know the name of one them, don’t we?’ Dad interposed.
‘If you mean William Pennington, then I’m still not sure. None of the dates of these messages correspond with when he went under that train.’
‘The first one’s only a few days before,’ Dad objected.
‘But it doesn’t fit the pattern. You only need the password when you’re sitting at your victim’s computer, just before you fake their suicide. With William Pennington that was the last thing they needed. Not only did he fall, hundreds of people – me included – saw it happen. No, if you want to know who, I think you’ve got to start off with why. In particular, why us.’
Dad and Jess remained silent, watching Laurie while she struggled to put what she had to say into words. Now that she was about to speak, she felt surprisingly calm.
‘I think we’ll find these people were all killed because of their pensions.’
‘What, like those little old ladies who get mugged for the contents of their purses?’ Jess was openly disbelieving.
‘No – they’ll be people who represent a big liability in the Sanderson pension scheme – ones with long service and high salaries.’ Laurie appealed directly to Dad now. ‘Don’t you remember? Margaret said that the finance man – what was his name? – had left some sort of suicide note. I’ll bet he’s one of these.’
‘And us?’ Dad was looking at Laurie very directly now.
‘I was just starting to work this out. While you two were out yesterday afternoon, I called somebody up and told him.’
‘Somebody?’ Jess had her head cocked to one side, frowning as her eyes flicked from L
aurie to Dad and back again.
‘Paul.’ Laurie exhaled the name, forcing it to come out.
Jess had her arms around her in an instant. Laurie found herself racked with sobs, desperate to speak but hardly able to do so, snatching the chance to form words as her chest heaved with the effort of breathing. ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry … It’s all my fault … what those men did to you … what they did to Dad … I’ve been so stupid … I thought he was someone special.’
Laurie felt better after she was sick: shaky but clear-headed – purged, in fact, ready to begin the task of working out who ‘Paul’ really was. She already had a pretty good idea. Dominic Sanderson was the owner of Sanderson Recruitment, the person who had the most to lose from the need to plug its pension deficit. Paul might, Laurie supposed, have been some sort of middleman, or a third member of the team employed by Sanderson – its brains, say – but why not go for the simplest suggestion first? She didn’t even need Dad to go on about Occam’s razor and how you should always select the solution that required the fewest assumptions.
Frustratingly, however, the internet was no more use in finding a picture of Dominic Sanderson than it had been when she was looking for Paul Collingwood. There was one image on Facebook that might have been him: the size of a postage stamp, it showed a man hugging a boy and a girl to his chest. Were these Aidan and Mia? Laurie found herself wondering, before remembering sharply that even if ‘Paul’ did have children, the names he had told her were no more likely to be real than his own. In any case, this man’s face was in shadow and partially obscured by his daughter’s hair. Had Laurie slept with him? She kept the disconcerting uncertainty entirely to herself. She couldn’t even be sure – from the few details on the public profile – that this Dominic Sanderson was the one she was looking for.
‘I suppose we could ask Margaret Pennington if she’s got any pictures of him,’ Dad mused.
‘We could do better than that,’ Laurie exclaimed in triumph. ‘I took a picture of Paul, or whoever he is. We could show it to Margaret, ask if she recognises him.’ She fumbled excitedly for her phone, looking for the photo she’d taken by the canal.
‘Wouldn’t that be the phone that was stolen?’ Dad asked.
‘Yes, but I reloaded it onto here the other day.’ Laurie felt faintly embarrassed at the admission – this picture mattered so much to her that she hadn’t just filed it and forgotten it like so many others.
‘No, it’s not that,’ Dad started. ‘It’s just that it’s given me an idea.’
Laurie cried out in disgust. ‘They’ve wiped all the photos from the phone – everything I synced onto it the other day. It’s gone. I’ll look on the cloud.’
Ten minutes later, Laurie realised this was not going to be quite so straightforward. Only she would have noticed, but someone had been through her cloud account with meticulous care, deleting the email in which she’d sent herself that photo of Paul and removing the picture itself from the folder in which she’d stored it. That was why they’d wanted the password, she realised with a shudder of remembered pain.
Dad, meanwhile, was nodding. He didn’t seem to share Laurie’s frustration. ‘What is it?’ Laurie asked, unable to keep a note of irritation out of her voice.
‘It’s an explanation, isn’t it? Why your phone was stolen, and the flat broken into. Your man – Paul, Dominic, whatever his name is – couldn’t bear the idea of you keeping a picture of him, of you one day being able to track him down.’
‘Not much of an explanation,’ Jess complained, with an edge that reminded Laurie how she had been the one in the flat. ‘What could Laurie do with a picture?’
‘Look,’ said Dad. ‘This is a man who’s gone to great trouble to plan the murders of however many people, making them look like suicide. He must be some kind of psychopath. He’s using anonymous mobiles, false names; he’d be obsessive about making sure nothing led back to him.’
Try as she might, Laurie couldn’t help thinking of him as Paul. She remembered his reaction over the phone when she told him that everything on her mobile had already been saved onto the cloud. ‘I think Dad’s probably right.’
‘OK,’ said Jess slowly, ‘but in that case, why did he ever make contact with Laurie in the first place? I mean, you’re a lovely girl and all, but that wasn’t very careful, was it?’
Laurie had a flash of inspiration. ‘He’d seen me talking to William Pennington, and the way I reacted after he died. He had to check I hadn’t seen anything.’ It all became clear. He must have followed her up, seen the problems she was having with her bike, looked for the opportunity to talk to her later in the evening. Christ, he must even have been waiting for her the following morning. It wouldn’t have been hard to do if he knew that was her route into work.
‘So,’ Dad said. ‘Now will you admit William Pennington was murdered?’
Laurie saved herself from answering this by musing along a different tack. ‘I can’t help thinking that we only went to see Margaret Pennington, and found out all this, because my phone had been stolen. If …’ Laurie hesitated for a moment. ‘If Paul had let sleeping dogs lie, not worried about that picture, never contacted me again, then none of this would have happened. Those men would never have come round last night. I suppose I’d be at work right now.’ Laurie left unspoken the thought that encompassed the consequences of that visit, but it hung between them all, nonetheless. Could Jess really be as unfazed as she apparently was by the thought that a few hours ago she’d bludgeoned two men to death? Laurie remained profoundly grateful that she had, but it certainly made her think differently about her flatmate.
Dad broke the silence. ‘And those two thugs would still be on their little murder spree. And your man Mr Sanderson would have got away scot-free.’
‘And,’ Jess added, ‘we wouldn’t have one hundred thousand pounds in used notes sitting in a carrier bag in the kitchen.’
Monday, 10 August – 1 p.m.
The mobile phone yielded one more secret: there was apparently no routine for the men to re-establish contact with their controller after they had killed someone. Presumably, Dad suggested, the messages left on the website – and the associated open account – were evidence enough that they had done their work. Laurie remembered the concerned comments that had followed lonelygirl73’s last post. Might one of them have been Paul, checking that his thugs had done their work?
So there was an outside chance that the controller – it felt better giving him an anonymous, functional name – did not yet know that his supposed victims were still alive. That surely meant they should return to London as soon as possible. If they could track down the man who had wanted them dead, and surprise him with their very aliveness, that could only put them at an advantage.
Laurie wanted to leave immediately, but Dad was more sensible. ‘Having the benefit of surprise is one thing, crashing the car on the motorway because I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel is another. We’ll have a quick lunch and then a nap. A couple of hours either way will make no difference to anyone.’
Laurie might have argued the point, but she was too tired to put any energy into it. Lying down on her bed after lunch, she was asleep within seconds. When she came back downstairs an hour or so later, she found Dad and Jess sitting out in the garden, relieved from the necessity of watering by the morning’s rain. There was a sense of relaxation about Jess’s shoulders; her face looked different. There had been tension around her eyes, Laurie realised, something she had failed to notice until it was gone. She went to give her a hug, and got a satisfying squeeze in return.
Laurie’s snooze had achieved something for her too. She’d remembered the email she’d sent Henry, the one that was meant to prove that she’d only sent herself a photo from work. It was still there, sitting in her sent items folder on Gmail. Laurie had to will herself to open it and print off the attachment. The picture of Paul by the canal came out inch by inch. Was this man a killer? Had he ordered her murder? The memory of what she had on
ce felt for him – what she had done with him – had now changed so utterly into revulsion that she felt the bile in her throat even as she looked at him. She wanted to track him down; she wanted revenge.
Right now, there was no way Laurie was going to show the picture to Dad and Jess. She could just imagine the train of thought she would be setting off by doing so, but she had to admit to the photo’s existence. Dad was suitably appreciative. ‘Well done, darling. So that means we can make Margaret our first stop on our way back to London.’
Laurie tried to suggest to Jess that she didn’t have to come too, that she and Dad had been the targets and that surely what made sense now was for her to keep as far away from things as possible, but Jess was having none of it. ‘And miss the fun of a showdown? Not on your nelly. I think I’m in deep enough already, don’t you? Of course, there’s an argument that you shouldn’t come. You’re the only one of us he’ll recognise. Why don’t you stay here and guard the money?’
All three of them got into Dad’s car for the journey back to London; the bundles of notes stayed behind, still in their carrier bag at the bottom of the tin dustbin that contained Roxanne’s winter feed. She gave them a whinny from the paddock as they left, leaning over the gate as if to say, ‘Off again?’ It was noticeably cooler now, a foretaste of approaching autumn. In a few weeks Dad probably wouldn’t even be able to leave her out overnight. For now, however, the Shillings had once again agreed to keep an eye on her.
By some silent agreement, Jess stretched out on the back seat while Laurie rode in the front with Dad. Was it a signal that she was back in favour, could once again be treated like a grown-up? Laurie knew it was absurd, but felt comforted nonetheless: they were a team; they had been through this together. Then her thoughts drifted to the last man with whom she’d partnered. Her head jerked: a nervous twitch, but also a physical effort to shake the memory away. Embarrassed, she looked across at Dad to see if he had noticed. His hands gripped the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the road; driving was a job that Dad always took seriously.