by T. M. Logan
I turned an ear towards the landing, straining harder to hear Ryan’s side of the conversation.
‘Yes I know, I know. I didn’t mean that,’ he said. Another pause. ‘Yes of course. Of course I do, you know I do.’
Staring through the tiny gap between the open door and the frame, I tried to get a glimpse of Ryan. But I could only see the empty landing and the open door of the master bedroom.
‘Yes, the usual place. Usual day.’
A longer pause before Ryan spoke again. ‘You too. OK, bye.’
I heard the beep of a call being terminated and made a snap decision: it was better to make the best of a bad situation, before Ryan came in here and found me skulking behind the door like a burglar.
I came out of my hiding place and walked back out to the landing, trying to go for nonchalant, to steady my racing heart, as if letting myself into someone else’s house was no big deal.
Ryan was still in the master bedroom and for one mad second I thought of diving down the stairs, taking them three at a time and fleeing out of the front door, away down the street as fast as I could. But that would be what a burglar would do. I wasn’t that guy.
I just was a responsible, caring father looking out for my daughter. I hadn’t broken in, hadn’t violated any laws by being here. Heart still pounding, I stood my ground on the landing, fists clenched by my sides, as Ryan backed slowly out of the master bedroom.
I coughed quietly to get his attention. ‘Hey, Ryan.’
Ryan jumped like he’d been bitten by a snake, whirling around and almost tripping over his own feet, a small furled umbrella held out in front of him in a wavering hand. His usual poise, usual confidence, had been replaced by deer-in-the-headlights shock. If he’d been planning to challenge a burglar, he needed to do some work on his game face: his eyes were like saucers, every part of his body language screaming flight rather than fight. The little yellow umbrella made him look slightly ridiculous.
‘God, Ed.’ He put one hand on his chest. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’
I held my hands up in surrender, heat rising to my neck. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘What . . . what are you doing here?’ He lowered the umbrella. ‘Is everything all right? Is Abbie OK, has something happened?’
‘Everything’s fine, I was going to call to let you know but I didn’t want to disturb you at work. I was passing, so thought I’d just nip in and drop off some more of Abbie’s stuff.’
‘Oh,’ he said, exhaling heavily. ‘I see. You really didn’t need to do that.’
‘It’s no bother, none at all.’
Ryan propped the little yellow umbrella up by the bedroom door. ‘Sorry about the umbrella, I was just startled to see anyone here in the middle of the day. When my phone rang it surprised me, and then when you appeared on the landing . . .’
‘I owe you an apology,’ I managed a sheepish grin. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Ryan? You look a bit pale. Maybe you should sit down for a minute?’
‘I’ll be fine. Just don’t like shocks, surprises.’ He glanced towards the bedroom window. ‘I didn’t see your car outside?’
And I didn’t think you’d be here, I thought. Because fifteen minutes ago you were answering your work phone, at your desk in town.
And then all of a sudden you turn up back at your house.
How did you know to come home? How did you know I was here?
‘I’m just parked around the corner.’
There was a screech of skidding tyres outside. Slamming doors.
Ryan looked up, startled once again.
‘Oh, crap.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘I called the police when I saw the front door was ajar.’
Ed frowned. Did I leave the front door ajar?
‘The police?’
Before Ryan could reply, there was a heavy knock and a woman’s voice reached us.
‘Police officers!’ The voice was loud, confident. ‘Come to the front door of the property and identify yourselves. We’ve had a report of a burglary at this address.’
‘I can talk to them,’ I said, following Ryan downstairs, the heat rising to my cheeks. I needed to contain the situation, keep it from getting back to Abbie and Claire – if Ryan told them about this, there was no telling how they’d react. It could be the final straw. ‘Let me explain what’s happened.’
‘I’ll handle it,’ Ryan said over his shoulder.
‘I should really be the one to—’
But Ryan was already opening the door to a uniformed policewoman, chunky with body armour and equipment.
‘Morning sir, are you the homeowner?’ she glanced over his shoulder. ‘We’ve had a report of a burglary at this address.’
‘Yes, I made the call.’ Ryan was calm, confident and back in control once again. ‘I’m so sorry, officers. This is completely my fault.’
I glanced at the back of Ryan’s head, thrown off balance by his opening gambit.
‘Your fault?’ the officer repeated.
‘I forgot that I’d invited my father-in-law around to bring some things over while I was at work.’ He gestured with a thumb towards me, standing awkwardly behind him in the hallway. ‘I just nipped home for some files and realised that someone was upstairs, and I kind of panicked. Thought it was a burglar.’
Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the fluency of Ryan’s lies. I almost believed them myself.
The officer pointed a pen at me. ‘You’re the father-in-law, sir?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Sorry for wasting your time.’
A male officer appeared.
‘Rear entrance is secure,’ he said to the female constable. ‘What have we got?’
‘Nothing doing,’ she said, hooking her thumbs into the straps of her stab vest. ‘Just a false alarm. That’s what you’re saying, sir?’
Ryan glanced at me, the tiniest flicker of something in his eyes – what was it? Victory? Complicity? The knowledge of a debt to be repaid? – then back at the two police officers.
‘Absolutely, I’m so sorry to have bothered you.’ He gave them his best smile. ‘Sorry to have called you out unnecessarily.’
I stood on the small drive and watched as the two constables got back into their patrol car and drove off down the street. When I turned back to the house, Ryan was staring at me. His face was blank, expressionless – but those eyes, those eyes. Intent, unblinking, weighing the situation. Calculating. Knowing.
It lasted for perhaps a second and then his face creased into a sheepish grin, one hand on his chest.
‘God, I’m so embarrassed,’ he said. ‘How about we just keep this between ourselves, Ed?’
43
On the drive back to West Bridgford, I checked in with Joyce to see how she was doing. We chatted over a cup of tea in the lounge of her neat, airy flat – about Abbie and Ryan, mostly, as she deflected all my efforts to inquire about her ongoing health battle – but all I could think about was the conversation I had overheard in Ryan’s house, the mystery caller that he had been so keen to reassure. Not a work call, I was certain of that. It could be job-related though – perhaps he was talking to another agency about a move, taking clients with him? Maybe. But it hadn’t sounded like that kind of conversation. I’d heard Ryan’s work voice before, his professional voice, and it was a world away from this. A friend, then? But there was something about Ryan’s tone, something intimate and furtive, that made it sound like they were more than friends. Much more.
This could be it, I thought. This could be the key that finally unlocks Ryan’s secret life.
Back home, I went straight to my study and switched on the PC, the whine of its fan the only sound in the empty house. I pushed a pile of dirty plates away to make room for the mouse, rubbing at a tea stain with my elbow as I settled into the swivel chair.
Ryan had greeted the caller by their first name.
Danny? I can’t really talk right now.
Where was the usual place? And more importantly, who was Danny? Short of stealing Ryan’s phone and checking the last known caller, there was no way of knowing for certain who he’d been talking to. I couldn’t ask Abbie: I felt a powerful certainty that Abbie would know nothing about this relationship.
Maybe it wasn’t a work-related call, but it could still be someone from work, one of Ryan’s co-workers at Eden Gillespie. Either way, I decided to rule this out first.
I started on the company website, going to the ‘Who we are’ page and scrolling through rows of glossy staff pictures. No one called Danny, Daniel or Dan. I selected the Manchester office and checked the team there too: they had someone called Daniel Hernandez, the Chief Operating Officer, a shiny silver-haired man with a tan the colour of polished teak. But he was pushing sixty and looked like the host of a daytime TV show. Was that who Ryan had taken a call from? It didn’t seem likely. I googled Daniel Hernandez and found his Facebook page, full of shots of the guy with his wife and grown-up children, barbecues and holidays, the four of them dressed in the red and blue of Barcelona FC, grinning at the camera. Ryan featured once, in a smiling group shot taken at a work event, but the more I scrolled through the feed, the less confident I felt of any kind of secret link between the two men.
I shut the browser and sat back in my chair.
Where are you, Danny?
I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on, leaning against the counter as I waited for it to boil.
Think.
Ryan was thirty-three years old. He would have grown up with social media. He had hundreds of connections, friends and followers on multiple accounts, and I was willing to bet that somewhere in there I would find what I was looking for. Some kind of connection with the person on the other end of the phone.
Carrying a cup of tea back to the study, I went through his LinkedIn profile again, taking screenshots of five connections with the first name Danny or variations of it. Twenty minutes later, I had ruled them all out. Too far away, too old, too random. Maybe LinkedIn was just too dull. But was there anyone under thirty-five who wouldn’t have friended someone on Facebook if they had any kind of relationship with them? I moved on to Ryan’s Facebook page, clicked on ‘Friends’ and began to scroll through the list. Two Daniels, one Dan. One in Johannesburg, South Africa, one in Exeter and one in London. I stalked through their profiles to see if there was anything which seemed to link them to Ryan, any connection from school, university, the army or a previous job.
Nothing stood out. Three fairly average guys, two straight and in long-term relationships, one gay and married. Nothing which suggested a particular relationship with Ryan. None of their friends seemed to call them Danny, either.
I checked again, scrolling carefully through the list to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
There was no one else called Dan, Danny or Daniel.
But there was someone called Danielle.
44
Maybe it was Dani that had been on the phone, rather than Danny.
I clicked on the profile. Danielle White was dark-haired, mid to late twenties, very pretty. Her profile photo showed her outdoors somewhere, pale green hills and wide blue sky in the background, a cairn of stones and a sign behind her. She was dressed for walking, ruddy-cheeked and smiling into the camera as if sharing a private joke with the person taking the picture. Someone who didn’t know better – who didn’t know Abbie better – might say there was a passing resemblance between her and Danielle. Both young, slim, attractive, with shoulder-length brown hair.
Danielle’s profile was set to fully private so all I could see was her picture, her home city – Manchester – and that she originally came from Liverpool. We had no mutual friends, and everything else seemed to be locked down. I could send her a friend request to get access to everything she’d posted, all her pictures and interactions, see what I could find out that linked her to Ryan. But it would be weird and suspicious – I had never met her, or spoken to her, and unless she was one of those people who accepted every friend request automatically, she would probably just ignore it. The fact that her profile was set to private suggested that too. And if she mentioned it to Ryan, my cover would be blown.
There had to be another way.
I typed the words Danielle White Manchester into the search engine. The top result was a recruitment agency where Ryan had worked before he moved to Eden Gillespie. They had been colleagues, there, for three years. Maybe more than colleagues.
I went back to the profile picture. Behind Danielle there was a sign, white lettering raised on dark green metal, ‘Public Footpath’ just about legible but the rest slightly too far away to read. I saved the image to my desktop and opened it up in Photoshop, blowing up the image so I could zoom in on the letters.
I enhanced it and brought up the light levels, tweaking the contrast until the other words slowly came into focus. ‘Jacob’s Ladder, to Edale’. Smaller text below which looked like ‘Leave No Litter’. I called up a new browser window. According to Google, Jacob’s Ladder came from the Book of Genesis: it was a ladder that led to heaven.
It was also a feature in the Derbyshire Peak District.
I typed ‘Danielle White Edale Derbyshire’ into the search box. The top result was a page on Flickr, the photo sharing site, the same profile picture as Danielle had on Facebook, and a whole set of shots of green hills and blue skies, moorland stretching into the distance. They were good pictures, not just random snaps, and reminded me of the big print hanging over the fireplace at Ryan’s house. Instead of a title, the set of images had a date: mid-May. Nothing since then.
I scrolled down, further. Another set titled with a date from almost two months ago, then three. More photographs of rolling landscapes, Danielle making a very occasional appearance, standing on a peak. She seemed to be the only one in the pictures, although it was clear that these had been taken by someone else who never actually appeared in shot, except—
There.
I stopped scrolling down the page of images, my hand clutched tight around the mouse. There was another figure, in just a single picture from four months ago. Male, tall, in sunglasses and a waterproof jacket the colour of burnt orange. I double-clicked on the picture to blow it up, leaning closer to the screen to get a better look. The figure was half-turned away from the camera as if he had not been expecting to be photographed, not posed, a candid shot, the kind of thing a girlfriend would love. The handsome face, the jawline, that oil-black hair was unmistakeable.
Ryan.
I stared at the picture. There was absolutely no doubt: it was my son-in-law.
I grabbed the calendar off the noticeboard and flicked back to February, looking for the date of the photograph. The ninth was a Sunday, the second in the month. I checked again the dates of each set of pictures on Danielle’s account, flicking forward to March, then April. I heard Abbie’s words, the love and respect in her voice. The second Sunday of every month he goes to visit his mum’s grave, in Manchester. To keep it neat and tidy, put flowers down and spend a bit of time with her.
Manchester was just a cover story. He was going to the Peak District instead.
What was he doing there? Why was he lying to Abbie about it, lying to all of them? What did a man do up there, what secret was he keeping? The answer was so obvious, so bloody obvious now, that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realised it before.
Ryan was lying, because he wasn’t alone when he went up there.
He was meeting someone.
Cheating on Abbie, just like her ex-boyfriend Toby had done before him. Just like they all did. Abbie was so nice, so sweet-natured and forgiving, that she seemed to attract these . . . these assholes who just took advantage, who thought one woman wasn’t enough for alpha males like them.
Ryan had been hiding something from the start. I knew it.
I saw how it might have happened. They had been a couple before Ryan met Abbie, and they’d found a way to continue
the relationship behind her back. Danielle loved the pictures of their time together and couldn’t resist posting them on Flickr, thinking it would be a safe, private place, thinking they would be impossible to find – an almost invisible needle in one of a million haystacks – unless you knew her name and where she was, unless you knew how she’d tagged the images.
A single picture of Ryan, buried among all the others. He almost certainly didn’t know it was there. They’d probably agreed a rule that they shouldn’t post anything that showed them together in this place, on all the Sundays when he was supposed to be visiting his mother’s grave.
The location was bothering me too, nagging at me. I’d seen it before. My hand shaking with adrenaline now, I opened my downloads folder and clicked on the image I’d saved of Ryan’s route a few weeks ago, logged by the original tracking device I’d attached to his car. North-west out of Nottingham, up the M1 on the way to Manchester – but not all the way there. Instead, that drive had taken him to the tiny village of Edale in the Peak District. So they really had been there, together, the second Sunday of the month. And meeting up for months before that, according to the pictures on Danielle’s photo blog.
I sat back in my chair and stared again at the single image of Ryan on the screen. Caught unaware, as if he was not ready for the picture to be taken, and no doubt equally unaware that the image was out there on the internet. An image buried beneath billions of others where it should never have been found. But it had been found – and it meant that Ryan had been found out, too. Caught in a lie. His deception finally out in the open.
I drank the last of my tea. It was stone cold, but I didn’t care.
Got you.
This time, I’ve got you.
Because the weekend coming was the second Sunday of the month.
45
Someone had been in the house again. I was absolutely certain of it this time.
I had been out for my morning run. Put my headphones in and pounded all the way out to the water sports centre, managing two circuits of the long rowing lake before heading back along the Trent. A brutal nine-miler that had helped to focus my mind, to order my tumbling thoughts into a rough plan of dates and times, routes and logistics. By the time I got back to the house, dripping with sweat and breathing hard, I had a clear idea of what I needed to do next.
