Trust Me

by T. M. Logan

  I have a sudden, powerful sense that he already knows the answer to this question. That he is testing me, probing, trying to catch me in a lie. I feel my anger rising, cutting through the pain and fatigue. I’ve coped with everything the last twenty-four hours has thrown at me but I’m not about to lay out my medical history in front of these three strangers.

  ‘A personal matter.’

  ‘Which was?’

  I stare at him. He still has that half-apologetic, hang-dog expression on his face, as if it pains him to even have to ask.

  ‘Personal,’ I say again.

  I feel the duty solicitor, Betteridge, shift in his seat beside me.

  ‘Perhaps you could give an outline of your movements, Ellen,’ he says. ‘In broad terms.’

  ‘I don’t see how it’s relevant.’

  Gilbourne holds up his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘I’m sure it isn’t, Ellen, but it would be great to have the full picture.’ He gives me a tight smile. ‘For the sake of completeness.’

  I cross my arms and sit back in the chair, the plastic edge hard against the backs of my thighs. ‘I had a doctor’s appointment.’

  ‘Where?’

  I let a beat of silence pass. Don’t let them get to you.

  ‘The Macmillan Institute.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Holt says.

  I glance at the younger detective, willing him to back down, to apologise, to move on. But he simply returns my stare.

  ‘It’s a specialist centre attached to the hospital.’ I swallow hard. ‘A fertility clinic.’

  Holt scribbles another note on his pad, his handwriting a tiny black mass of letters packed closely together.

  Gilbourne says: ‘And what time was your appointment?’

  ‘One o’clock.’ I can feel my face reddening. I want to be out of this room, out of this grim police station. Back in my house with the door locked behind me. I want to shut out these men, these questions, shut them all out. ‘It was a follow-up appointment to some previous treatments I’ve had there.’

  ‘So it wasn’t for treatment, as such, but more for . . .’

  ‘Test results.’

  Gilbourne nods but says nothing. I recognise the tactic, to leave a silence and wait for me to fill it, but I just want to get this interview over and done with.

  ‘It wasn’t good news,’ I add quietly.

  Gilbourne’s face softens. ‘I’m sorry, Ellen. That must have been a very hard thing to hear.’

  I nod, once, and he lets another moment of silence pass. This time I don’t fill it.

  ‘And after your appointment,’ he says. ‘Did you go straight to the train station?’

  ‘Yes. The 2.11 to Marylebone, via High Wycombe.’

  Gilbourne sits back in his chair, glancing at his partner.

  ‘It’s understandable, in the circumstances,’ Holt says, taking over from where Gilbourne has left off. He clicks his ballpoint pen open and shut with his thumb. Click-click. Click-click. ‘I mean, I understand how these things can happen. I get it.’

  ‘You understand what?’

  ‘A spur-of-the-moment decision.’

  ‘You mean Kathryn?’

  ‘I mean you.’ Click-click. Click-click. ‘The baby.’

  17

  I look from one detective to the other, a prickle of unease at the back of my neck.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of what you’re saying.’

  ‘The urge to have that baby,’ Holt says, ‘to hold her, maybe even keep her. To be a better mother to her than anyone else could be.’

  I shift in my seat, the unease turning to frustration and anger.

  ‘That is an incredibly offensive suggestion, detective,’ I say. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I know what it’s like to want something you can’t have.’

  I look at him, this well-groomed, chisel-jawed, confident young man, and wonder if he has ever been denied anything in his entire life.

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ I say.

  ‘I can imagine how strong that urge might be, how powerful, how all-consuming, if you’ve been hoping for a baby for years.’ Click-click. Click-click. ‘How you must feel when you’re told you can’t have a child of your own. Then an opportunity presents itself and it seems like fate is finally on your side.’

  ‘Hold on, a few minutes ago you were asking if I’d planned this with Kathryn in advance. Now you’re suggesting I took Mia as some kind of opportunistic kidnapping?’

  ‘We’re just trying to dig out the truth, Ellen.’

  ‘I’ve told you the truth; I was asked to look after her.’ I glance at Betteridge, sitting mutely beside me, but he refuses to meet my gaze. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘What happened to Kathryn Clifton?’ Holt asks, changing tack.

  ‘I thought that was what you were trying to find out.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ I frown. ‘She got off the train at Seer Green, like I told you.’

  ‘Because she hasn’t come forward, which is obviously a serious concern for us. No word from her at all in the last twelve hours, no phone calls, no sightings, no contact with family or friends as far as we can establish. And in the meantime you turn up at the front desk with a child you say she gave to you.’

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting that I somehow took Mia from her, against her will? That’s crazy.’

  ‘What I’m suggesting is that you saw your chance on the train and decided to take this baby, to make her yours. Call it a . . .’ He shrugs, ‘a moment of madness. You saw an opportunity and you took it. This sort of thing does happen from time to time. And it felt so good to have that cute little baby in your arms, a baby you could call your own, so you just took her and walked out of the station.’

  ‘No.’ I can feel myself flushing, hating that my body is betraying me.

  ‘That’s why you didn’t alert a train guard, or go to a member of staff, why you didn’t approach uniformed officers on the concourse, you didn’t make a call right there at Marylebone. You just walked out with her. But at some point later you panicked, when you realised what you’d done and what might happen to you. Maybe when you saw yourself on the evening news.’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ I say, arms crossed tightly against my chest. ‘That’s not how it was at all.’

  Gilbourne holds up his hands again, like a referee pausing a boxing match.

  ‘I’m sure you can understand, Ellen, that we have to explore all the possibilities until we can rule each of them out.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything to Kathryn, so you can rule that one out right now,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Look, I’m exhausted, I’ve hardly slept, I’ve told you everything I know and I just want to go home. I don’t know what your agenda is, what’s going on here. Mia’s OK, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’

  Gilbourne gives a sympathetic smile. ‘Just a few more questions then we’ll be done.’

  ‘This Dominic individual,’ Holt resumes. ‘What’s his surname?’

  I rub at my eyes, gritty and sore under the harsh strip lighting of the interview room. It feels like I’ve been in here for a dozen hours already.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I told you that already.’

  ‘Any other identifying information at all? Did he ever actually say he was the baby’s father? Did he ever say it himself, refer to her as his daughter?’

  I think back to the snatches of conversation we had shared.

  ‘I don’t remember for sure.’

  ‘It’s very important, Ellen.’

  I’ve been replaying Dominic’s actions in my mind. Being in the car with him, in the room with him, I felt so sure about his motives. There was clearly violence in him, but had any of it been directed towards Mia? The unloaded gun, the empty threats, opportunities to hurt us both – to kill us, even – not taken? And both he and Kathryn had made the same paranoid assertion, in their own ways: that the police were not to b
e trusted. Any police? Someone in particular?

  ‘So you’re basically the original good Samaritan,’ Holt says, clicking his pen again. ‘Travelling around and doing good deeds?’

  ‘I was just in the right place at the right time, that’s all.’

  ‘Tell me more about the gun,’ Gilbourne asks, his voice soft. ‘You’re familiar with firearms, correct?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say familiar, no.’

  ‘What would you say?’

  ‘I know the basics. Not much more than that.’

  ‘But you’ve handled them before, been trained with them.’ He picks up a sheet of paper from his folder. ‘Ellen Anne Devlin,’ he pauses, glancing at me over the top of his glasses, ‘County Tyrone is that? Devlin?’

  ‘My grandfather.’

  ‘Ah, interesting. Omagh?’

  ‘Dungannon.’

  ‘My grandma was an O’Neill, from that part of the world.’ He makes a little grunt of satisfaction and resumes reading from the sheet. ‘Graduated 2001, twelve years in the navy, currently employed at Global Aerospace as a Project Manager. Married to Richard Sloane, 2013.’

  ‘Yes.’ The cut in my forehead starts to throb again.

  ‘Did you want to call him, by the way? Your husband? The desk sergeant said you’ve not called anyone yet.’

  ‘We’re separated,’ I say.

  ‘Ah,’ he says after a pause. ‘I see.’

  Holt sits forward in his chair. ‘What made you join the navy, Ellen?’

  ‘My dad served on destroyers. HMS Sheffield.’

  ‘Right, a family tradition. Encourage you to follow in his footsteps, did he?’

  I stare at him, this arrogant young detective, imagining what it would feel like to throw the rest of my tea in his face.

  ‘He was killed in the Falklands when I was two years old.’

  Holt blinks once, twice. But he recovers quickly. ‘Sorry to hear that. So, what did you do in the navy?’

  ‘I was on HMS Richmond and then on the Dauntless. Some other roles onshore. I was a principal warfare officer.’

  ‘So you do know your way around guns.’

  ‘I had some small arms instruction as part of my initial training, same as everyone else. But that wasn’t my primary role, I barely even carried a weapon outside the practice range.’

  ‘But you’re pretty familiar with . . .’

  Betteridge, the duty solicitor, holds up a small hand. ‘Can I ask what the relevance of this is?’

  ‘Your client was arrested with an unlicensed, unregistered firearm in her possession.’

  ‘And she’s explained to you that she only had it to facilitate her escape, from a place where she was being held against her will.’

  ‘So she claims.’

  ‘If I’d left it behind,’ I cut in, ‘he could have used it on me. Or on Mia.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use it on him?’

  ‘I tried, but it was unloaded.’

  ‘You tried to shoot him? To kill him?’

  ‘I was going to put one in his leg, just to slow him down.’ The sound is seared into my memory, the empty, impotent click of the trigger on an empty chamber. ‘I couldn’t outrun him while I was carrying Mia, but I didn’t realise the gun was empty. I ended up hitting him with it instead.’

  ‘Hard?’

  ‘As hard as I could.’

  Gilbourne turns to his partner. ‘Have we done a hospital check yet?’

  Holt shakes his head, scribbling a note on his pad, and Gilbourne turns back to me.

  ‘Can I get you another tea?’ He smiles. ‘It might even be hot this time.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘OK then. Let’s get back to last night, shall we?’

  His voice is calm, measured. Friendly. And his smile is almost paternal. But he leaves another long pause for me to speak. I hold his gaze until he finally breaks the silence.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell us, Ellen?’ His voice is soft, no edge to it. ‘Get it off your chest.’

  ‘I have told you. I just did.’

  ‘But you’ve left us with a three-and-a-half-hour window that we can’t account for. At 3.06 p.m. we’ve got you on camera leaving Marylebone with someone else’s child, then entering a café on St George Street eleven minutes later, where you stayed for sixteen minutes. After that, nothing. A big blank, until officers are called to Bassingham Road on the King’s Meadow industrial estate just before 7 p.m., where they find you running around with the child and a gun, covered in blood. Kathryn Clifton is nowhere to be found, your so-called kidnapper is nowhere to be found, and I’m just struggling to fill in those three and a half-hours, to corroborate anything you’ve said so far.’ He smiles at me, spreading his hands. ‘Help me out?’

  ‘I’ve told you. Everything.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Gilbourne frowns, studying me again over the top of his glasses. ‘Let’s go over it again, shall we?’

  18

  Dominic

  The stitches were a dull, constant throb in his cheek, the whole side of his face tender to the touch. He washed at the cracked sink, the cold water shocking him awake and lighting up fresh lines of pain that radiated from the wound. He patted his face dry with the thin towel. The stitches were still holding, each surrounded by puffy red skin against a darkening purple bruise. He covered it with a fresh plaster but his face still looked a mess. Sleep had come in fragments, a string of blood-soaked dreams from which he’d finally jerked awake after a couple of hours, but there was nothing to be done about that. Time was running out and he had to move soon.

  He took her phone from the pocket of his bomber jacket and sat down on the small bed. He wasn’t good with technical stuff but he knew enough to get what he needed before she could get home, log into another device and lock the phone or wipe it remotely. There was nothing particularly sophisticated or technical about it. He opened the phone with her unlock pattern, scrolled through a couple of screens until he found the Google Maps app, selected it and watched as it zoomed in on his current location. He tapped the search bar and immediately the screen was populated with all her address searches for this week, last week and prior. Oxford, Northolt, Chiswick.

  At the top of the list, with little blue icons next to them, were two words: ‘Home’ and ‘Work’.

  He clicked on ‘Home’ and the map scrolled, pulling out then zooming in again until it came to rest, a spidery route laid out in blue dots from his location to hers. He switched to satellite map and studied the top-down street view. A neat neighbourhood of newbuild houses and small gardens, parallel streets above and below it, not far from the A40.

  Claverton Gardens, South Greenford.

  He clicked on the car icon.

  22 minutes (3.7 miles) fastest route.

  It was a postcode, no house number. He came out of Google Maps and scrolled more apps until he found one for Outlook email. He scrolled her inbox briefly, then the list of folders until he found what he was looking for. A recent Amazon delivery confirmation, complete with her full address.

  I see you. I know where you live.

  He took a screengrab of the address and texted it to the number of the new SIM for his next burner phone. The work address was near Bond Street. He googled it and clicked on the first result. It looked as if she’d been telling the truth about her job, at least. He screengrabbed that as well. It would be useful to keep in reserve in case there were more complications. Still using her phone, he did a search for news stories, scanned the first few results. Just the usual lies and bullshit, half-truths and police propaganda regurgitated by the media. He retrieved a USB drive from his backpack and connected it to her phone, downloading her address book, message history, picture gallery and the contents of her email inbox. With the download complete, he switched off her phone, extracted the SIM card and snapped it in two, before smashing the screen of the phone with the butt of his knife, bringing it down again and again until the mobile was a shattered wreck. He swept the cracked plastic and m
etal fragments into the small, sticky bin by the bed and took his remaining burner phones out of the backpack – only three left now – unwrapping the nearest one and inserting the new SIM card. He plugged it in to charge.

  He emptied the rest of her purse. Credit card, debit card, stamps, gym membership, organ donor card, Costa loyalty card, a few receipts. No driver’s licence. No family photos in the little plastic window; no snapshots tucked into any of the pockets. He pressed the soft leather between his fingers, feeling for anything metal sewed into the lining. Picked up his knife and ripped into it, tearing open the lining and separating all the pieces until he was satisfied there were no GPS devices inside. He pocketed the cash and threw the rest into the bin. Better to burn it, to dispose of it properly, but there was no time for that.

  The knife had a custom-made sheath that strapped to the inside of his left forearm, so it was concealed but could be drawn quickly. He stood up and strapped it to his arm and put his bomber jacket on over the top.

  Finally, he took out a folded picture from his own wallet. He kept nothing digitally, no images, moving from one burner phone to the next without leaving a footprint behind. It was as close to off-grid as he could get, but he hadn’t been able to give up this picture, the printed image already starting to wear and crease where he had folded and unfolded it so many times. He allowed himself a moment to stare at the picture, his eyes travelling over her face, her lips, her cheeks, her eyes. He had to get to her before it was too late. Before anyone realised who she was. What she was.

  He had found her once. He could find her again.

  And this time, he would do what needed to be done.

  19

  DI Gilbourne

  Gilbourne took a long drag on his cigarette, looking out over the street lights on Northolt Road.

  He liked it up here after hours. The city was asleep, laid out beneath him. The streets quiet, the night air cold and sharp in his lungs, the good people of the city asleep in their beds. He did some of his best thinking up here when it was like this. He was on the fourth-floor fire escape, the door wedged open with a fire extinguisher dragged in from the hallway. It was the only place in the whole building where you could smoke without setting off the fire alarm or having one of the young snowflakes coughing and covering their mouth. The chief had forbidden officers from smoking out the front of any station, anywhere that was visible to the public – it didn’t send the right message, apparently, to have cops smoking when there was police work to do – so the few remaining smokers congregated at the rear of the building in a scrubby patch of gravel next to the vehicle compound. He didn’t mind making small talk with the other twenty-a-day pariahs, but sometimes he liked to have a few minutes alone with his vices of choice.