The Dangerous Kind

by Deborah O'Connor

  She thought of a recent story they’d covered on her radio show: the murder of Alice Dunford and her two children. Alice had been in a violent marriage for years when she’d finally decided to leave. Afraid for her life, she had asked for a police officer to escort her to the refuge and been refused. Her husband had stabbed her, their five-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son before they had reached the garden gate.

  Although it was less high profile than most of the stories they featured on Potentially Dangerous People, it had got under her skin. At one point in the show she’d pushed O’Brien so hard on the question of police culpability that Mick had stood up and made a slicing motion across his neck, his way of telling her to reel it in. She usually prided herself on her ability to remain impartial but that night she’d been surprised by the anger she’d felt – the rage. Afterwards she’d apologised to a cowed O’Brien and had tried to figure out what it was about the case that had thrown her so off kilter. She guessed it was, in part, because the murder was so very ordinary – Alice Dunford was one of the two women killed every week by their partner – but there was more to it. It had got to her because it reminded her of something else, something much closer to home.

  A squeak. Someone had pressed down on the door handle that led to the roof. The door was swollen with moisture and the person had to give it a shove to get it open. Sarah emerged. Shivering in her favourite oversize purple fleece, she was talking to someone on the phone, her voice high and giggly.

  A boy. That was Jessamine’s first thought. Sarah was talking to a boy she liked.

  ‘Sarah.’ Jessamine stepped forward into the light. Sarah said something quietly into the phone and hung up. It was too dark to see her expression.

  ‘I wanted some fresh air.’

  Jessamine was sure this was a lie. Sarah had almost certainly come up here because she’d thought her mother was in the flat and hadn’t wanted to risk being overheard. ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  Sarah moved in close to where her mother stood and put an arm around her waist. They stared at the flashing pinnacle of No.1 Canada Square. On cold days a chimney of steam flowed out of the tower’s pyramid roof. ‘Remember when I used to think that was smoke?’

  Jessamine laughed. ‘You saw it out of the living-room window and started shouting, “Fire!” You even tried calling nine-nine-nine once. I got to the phone just in time.’

  Sarah sighed and snuggled closer to her mother. She often got her to recount stories like this, Jessamine mused, stories she’d heard a hundred times before.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You were two years old the day I brought you home. This was one of the first things I did. I carried you up here to show you the city.’

  ‘What did I do?’ Sarah knew the answer, but this was all part of it. The parry back and forth was like the gradual deposit of silt along a floodplain. Each layer was minuscule but eventually the grains of sediment had the power to change an entire landscape. The retelling and re-remembering of tiny moments forged a bond, a cartography, all their own.

  ‘You pointed at the tower and you giggled.’ Jessamine remembered marvelling at the beauty of her new daughter’s face bathed in the flashing white light. ‘Then you turned to me, delighted, and said, “Lighthouse!”’

  Sarah laughed and pulled her mother close. Jessamine buried her face in her daughter’s hair and kissed the top of her head. The smell of her scalp – loamy and sweet – triggered an unexpected, almost painful rush of feeling. The sensation was bizarre and Jessamine struggled to find a word for it.

  Jessamine had always wanted children and, until life threw her a curve-ball, she’d assumed they’d come to her in the usual way. Her thirties had been spent in a relationship with a paramedic called Finn. They’d met in the A and E department of King’s Hospital while Jessamine was there researching a story on the prevalence of knife crime in the capital. She’d noticed Finn on the first morning. Australian with gingery blond hair, he had a scar above his right eyebrow, the remnants of a teenage surfing accident. At the end of her third and final day at the hospital Jessamine had asked him out.

  Despite his initial enthusiasm, it soon transpired that Finn was terrified of commitment. It took him four years to agree to them moving in together, but they eventually rented a flat in Balham and things were good. Time passed, and occasionally Jessamine would broach the subject of children, only to have Finn laugh it off. Then, a month before her thirty-eighth birthday, he’d told her it was over. There was someone else. Melissa. A nurse. He moved out, and within six months, Finn the commitment-phobe had proposed. Not long after that he and Melissa had had a child.

  A year later Jessamine had still been reeling – from the loss of her relationship and the loss of the life she’d thought was hers – when she’d bumped into Finn on Clapham Common, a chubby baby strapped to his chest.

  After that she decided to take matters into her own hands.

  Friends in a similar situation had gone down the sperm-donor route but Jessamine knew from the off that she wanted to adopt. She’d thought the biology unimportant, that she’d love her child however they came to her and, besides, there were so many kids in care. Giving one a home where they would be loved and nurtured had felt good. More than that, it had felt right.

  She’d thought adopting as a single parent might be more difficult, but the process – intense and stressful as it was – had been exactly the same as if she had been in a couple. It took a year and culminated in a month in which she got to meet and know Sarah for a few hours each day at her foster-parents’ home. When the time came for Sarah to say her final goodbyes she had been distraught. It wasn’t that Sarah understood the significance of what was happening, the finality of it (she was too young for that) but rather that she hated being separated from her foster parents, even for a short time. After Jessamine had brought her back to the flat, she’d spent the rest of the afternoon mute, ignoring the hugs, food and toys her new mum had offered to try to coax her from her shell. Increasingly desperate, Jessamine had hitched Sarah onto her hip and carried her up to the roof to show her the lights. It was the first time the little girl had smiled all day.

  She thought again of Cassie Scolari. Maybe she should look into it. Just some cursory research. Jessamine knew of too many cases in which it had been assumed the woman had committed suicide or left of her own accord when in fact her husband had buried her in the front garden or hidden her body in the septic tank.

  Besides, if the rumours were true and the show was under threat, it might be good to have something different up her sleeve. As soon as she got back downstairs she’d call O’Brien, ask if he could put her in touch with someone from the case. Then she’d arrange a meet with Cassie’s friend, Marnie. Depending on what she uncovered, she could go for it. Pitch it to Mick as a PDP special. It could be the start of something fresh, more forward-looking.

  Arms linked, she and Sarah moved towards the door. They were about to head down the steps when Jessamine stopped, remembering Sarah’s laughter when she’d first appeared on the roof. ‘Are you seeing someone?’

  ‘Mum,’ groaned Sarah.

  Jessamine took that as a yes. ‘Are you being careful? Just tell me you are.’

  Sarah removed her arm from Jessamine’s waist. It was replaced by a cold stripe of air. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  Sarah took to the steps without her. Jessamine watched her go, Canada Square’s flashing white light faint against her purple fleece.

  Jitesh

  At home, his parents went into the kitchen. Anisha sloped into the lounge to watch TV. Jitesh retreated upstairs. His was the smallest room, the box room. It contained only one item of furniture: a bunk bed accessed via a ladder, with a desk and wardrobe fitted into the void underneath. Some years earlier the room’s walls had been painted blue but were now covered with posters of Jitesh’s hero, the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.

  He sat down at the desk and opene
d his laptop.

  All he’d thought about on the drive back was the girl from outside the Mandir, Meera. Her dad had said she was home for the holidays. That meant she might be at prayers next week. As might Kishor. He wanted to see her again almost as much as he didn’t want to see Kishor.

  He clicked on the Safari icon at the bottom of the screen. If he were to bump into her again, he wanted to be prepared. He started with the obvious things, the stuff Meera had available for public consumption. Neither her Instagram nor her Facebook account was set to private. He did a quick skim through her timelines. The most recent entries showed her at university in Durham, goofing around in a dinosaur onesie for rag week or posed outside a formal dinner, perfect in a cream silk dress. He noticed that in every shot, even the ones of her eating cereal, rumpled in pyjamas, she was wearing the black eyeliner he’d seen tonight, its thick stripe ending in a neat sixties flick at the corner of each lid.

  He scrolled back a little further. There she was, ecstatic in the sunshine after getting her A-level results, then covered with mud at Glastonbury, and later revising in the sixth-form common room. He noted with some satisfaction that there was no boyfriend in any of the pictures.

  He clicked on the red cross in the top left-hand corner of the screen and the page disappeared. After checking that the door was shut he crossed to the window and closed the curtains. Before he went any further he wanted to be sure of his privacy. He knew his precautions were pointless. If he were ever to be caught it would be through his IP address, not someone spying on him through his bedroom window. Still, the seclusion seemed to help his concentration and he liked how it made him feel: battened down, cocooned from the world.

  He was about to return to his desk when he stopped. In the corner by the window two cardboard boxes were stacked one on top of the other. They had been bound for his room at Jesus College, Cambridge. The same college as Kishor. Inside were books, tea towels, a tin opener, cutlery and a toaster. Brown packing tape seamed the middle of the top box. Left in the spot where it had been at the start of the summer, it was covered with dust. He used his finger to sketch his favourite Feynman diagram: a wiggly line with inverted arrows at either side. It looked like a drunken H and showed what happens when an electron and a positron annihilate each other. Jitesh traced a small arrow on the bottom left leg of the H to indicate time going backwards. The ability to turn back the clock was taken for granted in quantum physics. If only the same could be said of everyday life. He wiped the diagram from the box. Dust clumped against the heel of his hand. He dislodged it with a shake and watched the air carry it slowly to the carpet.

  Back to Meera.

  A bit more mooching online and he should have everything he needed. Then he’d start his hack into her email, into her life.

  It wasn’t that Jitesh was a tech genius. Far from it. He wanted to specialise in physics, not computer science, and, like most people, until he’d watched that documentary on YouTube, he’d assumed that to be a good hacker you had to be as they were in the movies: code-breaking supremos who could type binary really fast. It was only once he’d found himself in a desperate situation, in which he’d had to find his way into someone’s inbox, that he’d learned differently. That it was actually more effective to infiltrate a person than any mainframe, that if you could tap into someone’s humanity – their foibles, friends and favourites – you could unlock their online world and all its secrets, every last one.

  It was called social engineering. Far more prevalent than the major tech corporations liked to admit, it involved harvesting the personal details people had sloshing around on the internet, then using them to snoop on or defraud them in some way. ‘People put so much information about themselves out there, more than they know,’ said the expert in the documentary. ‘All you have to do is join the dots.’ Once you’d done that you had a good chance of breaking into someone’s accounts, either by outsmarting password-reset questions or by calling up their service provider helpline, convincing them you were that individual and getting them to change the password for you.

  His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He could usually assuage any guilt he felt about snooping in people’s private accounts by promising himself that he would do something good, some later act of kindness, to restore the karmic balance. Now, though, he found that the mere thought of looking at Meera’s cloud made his insides squirm.

  A knock at his bedroom door and, before he could answer, his father was there, peering into the darkened room.

  ‘You’re up late.’ He considered Jitesh, sitting at his desk. ‘Everything okay?’

  Jitesh flipped his laptop shut and turned to face him. ‘F-f-f-fine.’

  His father edged over the threshold, his gaze flicking to the back of the door. There was nothing on it, except Jitesh’s blue towelling dressing-gown, suspended from a single brass hook. ‘Aren’t you tired?’

  Jitesh let the question hang.

  ‘Okay then.’ He gave Jitesh one of his blindingly white smiles. ‘Goodnight, son.’

  Jitesh waited until he heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs, then reopened his laptop and brought up the Apple log-in page. Meera’s email address had been listed on her Facebook account for all to see. He thought of her ruby nose stud, the neat black flick at the corner of her eyelid. He typed the address into the first box, then clicked on ‘Forgotten password?’ A series of three reset questions appeared. All he needed to do was figure out the answers and he’d be in.

  He reopened Meera’s Facebook page and gazed again at the picture of her in the cream silk dress. She looked happy. People often did. He waited until his breathing had steadied, then rubbed his forefinger on the mouse pad. The search engine reappeared and he set to work. Guilt stuck to him, like glue.

  Thursday 15 December

  Present day

  Jessamine

  Nine a.m., Thursday, and Jessamine was in the car, headed down the A12 towards Loughton on her way to meet Cassie’s friend, Marnie. The verges on either side of the dual carriageway were heaped with snow, by-products of the freeze that had yet to release its grip on the country. The further she got out of the city, the higher the piles became, until eventually they merged into deep, ice-crusted drifts pushed there by the ploughs. Beyond, as far as the eye could see, were fields of white, their edges striped black by hedgerows and the odd bare-branched oak.

  The satnav instructed her to pull off the A12. She continued to follow the directions and before long she came to a stop outside the address Marnie had given her, a shabby 1930s semi. She was about to get out of the car when her mobile rang. O’Brien.

  ‘That was quick. You have something for me?’

  ‘And a good morning to you too,’ he said, chuckling.

  ‘Sorry. Morning, O’Brien.’ She gave it another beat, then jumped back in. ‘So?’

  ‘I talked to a mate. Used to work out of Paddington Green before he moved to the sticks, near where your misper is from.’

  Charles O’Brien had been forty years old, at the peak of his career, when he’d decided to leave the force. Jessamine had once asked why and he had given her some platitude about wanting a better work-life balance. She suspected there was more to it. The last case he’d worked had been a high-profile child abduction. They’d got the guy but it had been too late. O’Brien had found the victim, a three-year-old boy, encased in bin bags in the loft. That had been five years ago. He now did consultancy for various private security firms, and although he said the money was good, Jessamine got the feeling he missed the grit and scratch of real police-work.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Standard stuff. Cassie had a history of depression and anxiety, and in the weeks building up to her disappearance, various people had noticed her behaving oddly.’

  ‘They think she committed suicide?’

  ‘Consensus is she jumped in the Thames.’

  ‘Her friend said her husband was violent.’

  ‘There are some documented domestic-violence
call-outs. But he was at work at the time she was last seen. His alibi is solid.’

  ‘Do they think there’s any possibility she might have run away? An affair?’

  ‘They don’t believe she’d leave her son behind. By all accounts she was a devoted mother. Almost too devoted.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Teachers at the kid’s school say that during his first year in Reception she called the office every day at lunch to find out what kind of a morning he’d had. If he came home with so much as a grazed knee she was in the headmistress’s office, demanding an explanation about why her kid wasn’t being supervised properly at playtime.’

  ‘Maybe she planned to take him with her but something went wrong.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Her friend got a WhatsApp message from her nearly a fortnight after she disappeared but they think it was composed earlier, held in a queue, then sent automatically when the phone was turned on by whoever stole it. Other than that, she didn’t take any clothes, her debit and credit cards haven’t been used, there’s been no activity on her mobile and her voicemail hasn’t been listened to. They’ll put out an appeal every now and again but, to be honest, they’re just waiting for the body to surface.’

  ‘Thank you. This is really useful.’

  ‘Why the interest?’

  The net curtains twitched in the 1930s semi. A moment later the front door opened. Marnie peered out into the street. Her hair was tied into the same topknot it had been that first night outside Broadcasting House. In a black jumper dress that came to just above her knees, a black quilted jacket and opaque black tights, the only splash of colour was a red, fat-beaded necklace that looped down past her bust.

  ‘Her friend asked for my help. She thinks there might be more to it.’