CD: You know I had, yes.
DCI McVey: So it’s fair to say you knew the layout well.
CD: It’s a small flat. There wasn’t much to know.
DCI McVey: But you did know about the exit route at the ground-floor level, which led to a communal garden, didn’t you? You did know that the CCTV cameras had been smashed a few weeks back?
CD: Yes.
DCI McVey: You knew that there would be very few people around at that time of night and that if you wanted to leave through the garden, you could.
CD: What are you getting at?
DCI McVey: Mr Dillon, did you know that Ms Harvey was babysitting Eve Grant that night?
CD: Of course not. I hadn’t spoken to her. You just read me the last message I ever sent to her. [pause] Shit. [wipes eyes] Look, you’ve got to remember that I’ve lost someone too, Detective. I’ve lost Caroline.
DCI McVey: Spare us, Mr Dillon. Had Caroline ever mentioned Eve Grant to you before?
CD: [pause]
POC: You don’t have to answer that.
CD: Yes, she – she did once or twice. A while ago. She liked Eve. She liked babies, children, you know. Lots of women do.
DCI McVey: Lots of people do. Not just women. [pause] Do you like children, Mr Dillon?
CD: Jesus Christ, what are you implying?
POC: I object to the implications of your question, Detective.
DCI McVey: Why did you take Eve Grant from Caroline’s apartment, Mr Dillon? Why did you clean the flat with bleach after killing Caroline Harvey?
CD: I didn’t. I DIDN’T!
DCI McVey: Where is Eve Grant now?
CD: I. Don’t. Know.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ipswich
19th August
Siobhan
Callum’s lawyer, Patrick O’Connell, has come back to the house with him. The pair of them disappear off into my husband’s studio, taking with them a bottle of whiskey (oh, stop being such a cliché, Callum), and Maria and I sit at the kitchen table, trying listlessly to eat a lasagne that she’s made. Yvonne, our family liaison officer, has gone for the day, and I’m rather hoping that she doesn’t come back. I’m sick of her snooping around; I feel like she’s been watching us, listening in on our conversations. That’s the absolute last thing I need.
Emma appears at the doorway.
‘Why did they call Dad back today?’ she asks, her voice small. She’s wearing jeans with a rip in the knee, a white T-shirt that could do with a wash.
I swallow the bite of lasagne that I’ve been pushing around inside my mouth for the last thirty seconds.
‘Sweetheart, I don’t know.’
But she’s not looking at me, she’s looking at Maria, and as I look up, a spark of something seems to pass between them, like a jolt of electricity that zips straight by me.
‘Have they found something?’ she asks, and Maria gestures to her to come sit with us, patting the chair next to her at the kitchen table.
I take a sip of my glass of red wine; it tastes vinegary and strange, has been sitting out on the side for far too long in the heat.
‘Emma,’ I say, ‘nobody’s told us anything. Dad’s with his solicitor in the studio, and Patrick is one of the best lawyers around. He’ll know what went on today, and he’ll know what to do.’ I reach out a hand across the table to stroke hers, but her skin is cold, unresponsive to my touch.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ I ask her, because all of a sudden, I’m noticing how pale she is, the tiny beads of sweat that are sitting along her hairline, just visible against her skin and the blonde of her hair.
‘You must be tired,’ Maria says suddenly, and getting to her feet, she stands and puts a hand on my daughter’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t you go back upstairs, have a little lie down? I’ll bring you up some painkillers.’
Wordlessly, Emma does as my sister says, standing up and moving away from the table, almost as though she is in a trance.
‘Emma?’ I say, astonished, but Maria turns back to wince at me and puts her hand on her abdomen.
‘Period pains!’ she whispers, mouthing the words, ‘she told me earlier. It’ll pass!’
The pair of them disappear from the kitchen, leaving me sat in front of the plate of congealing lasagne, wondering what on earth that was about.
I’m shut out, I realise, I’m shut out of even the things going on in my own home.
Slowly, I get to my feet and begin cleaning the table, scraping the messy lasagne off our plates and into the waiting bin. I slug the rest of my red wine, wanting something to take the edge off. I can’t stop the jealousy swirling around inside me – first my husband, then my sister – it seems Emma is prepared to be close to anybody apart from me. What do I have to do to be her mother again? What do I have to do for her to let me in?
Chapter Forty
France
19th August
Adele
The female police officer is tired. It’s been a long day, and the heat is getting to her – she’s too hot in her uniform and she resents the fact that whoever owns this house is clearly making more money than she will ever hope to – for as long as she is in the police force anyway.
The villa is huge, lavish almost, yet it has an eerie stillness about it. The place has already been scoured for DNA, the belongings of Callum, Siobhan, Emma and Maria have been carefully searched and are now in messy, careless piles near the door, ready for someone like her to clear up. She can’t wait until the day she doesn’t have to do menial jobs any more, can move onto the exciting stuff. No more transcripts and emails, no more making cups of coffee. But most of the people who rise up in this particular force seem to be men. She sighs, grits her teeth. Just get on with it, Adele.
Bending down, she reaches for the nearest suitcase, powder blue and padded, the name Siobhan Dillon written neatly on the attached luggage tag. The woman’s clothes are nice, high quality – she touches a silk dress almost reverently. The design is British.
She hasn’t been told all the ins and outs of the case, but knows her colleagues are liaising with the English police to get to the bottom of a murder case. She wasn’t able to pick up much from the interview transcripts she’s painstakingly typed up – pages of no comment that give nothing away. She gives a little shiver when she thinks of the English police, all those miles away, desperately searching for answers. These clothes belong to the wife – Adele feels sorry for her. Deciding to be kind, she begins to fold them, taking care of the frills and creases. She stacks them neatly into the suitcase and zips it up, ready to be sent back to England.
Beside the pile of female clothing is another pile, mainly consisting of shorts and T-shirts, obviously belonging to the husband. Adele knows he is the one in trouble, the unfaithful one, the one arrested on suspicion of murder. She decides not to bother folding those – sounds like he doesn’t deserve it. She looks around for his suitcase, but sees only two other bags – one clearly belonging to the teenage daughter, and another, a holdall, with the name Maria Wilcox on the side. Nowhere is there a suitcase that looks as if it could belong to the man.
Frowning, Adele gets up and begins to search the rooms, going into each bedroom, checking the cupboards in case the suitcase has been left behind by the officers here before her. She checks underneath the beds, on top of the wardrobes, all the places one might normally put a suitcase. But there is nothing. She even checks the bathrooms, but sees only her own reflection – confused and tired-looking, staring back at her in the huge walled mirrors.
Returning to the hallway, she looks again at the piles of clothing. Did Callum and his wife pack together, share a suitcase? It doesn’t look as though it would all fit – Siobhan Dillon has a lot of clothes. Adele pulls her telephone out of her pocket, presses it to her ear and waits.
Chapter Forty-One
Ipswich
10th August: The night of the murder
Caroline
I am still holding Eve, standing in the bat
hroom, the water glistening below me. My hands are shaking, my whole body is shaking. Around me, everything looks the same – the gleaming white bathroom, the cold water in the bath, the brightly coloured shampoo bottles and toilet roll and toothbrush, mocking me with their normality. The bag of nappies, unused and redundant. Her skin feels funny, as if it is stretched too tightly across her tiny little bones, and the silence, the awful silence, is all around me. Around us.
A speck of water drips from the tap into the bathwater, the splash making me jump. Carefully, gently, slowly, I place Eve down onto the fluffy white towel I’d laid out for her on the floor. It is way too big for her, it would have swaddled her several times over. I stare down at my hands as though they are not my own. Her eyes are shut, the dark lashes sweeping the thin skin of her small cheeks. The hands that are not my own lift her again, and I feel the wetness of her against my chest, my chest that is warm and beating and alive. This is a joke, I think, or a hallucination. At any moment I will wake up, snap out of it, Eve will open her mouth and cry and cry and the flat will fill with noise again, glorious, delicious baby noise that I will never wish away again. Her eyes will meet mine, those gorgeous eyes, and I’ll cuddle her to me, dry her off, put her back in her little pink playsuit and tuck her up for another try at going to sleep. Jenny will come home and she will be so pleased that I’ve bathed her, so very very pleased, and she’ll smile at me and say that Eve can stay over, if she wants, she can sleep here all night because she’s so happy here, look at her, she’s so content.
But of course, none of that is happening.
Desperately, I put my mouth close to hers, wanting to feel her soft breath against my face. Please, I think to myself, please, I’ll do anything. Nothing happens. I place my mouth against hers and breathe in, as steadily as I can, keeping her little chin lifted, trying frantically to remember the first aid we were taught back in school. I pull back, stare at her chest to see if it’s moving, then do the same thing again, breathing into her mouth for the count of a second then pulling back.
The moment feels as if it has lasted forever but suddenly, there is a movement, and her bare chest rises with a tiny, soft sound. Immediately, I am crying, and for a horrible second I think I have imagined it, but no, she’s breathing, and I pick her up, oh-so-gently, and her eyelids flutter open to reveal the beautiful brown eyes beneath.
‘Eve,’ I say, ‘Eve.’ My heart is beating so fast and I feel as though I am going to be sick but none of that matters because she’s alive, she is, she’s alive and she’s safe and I’ve got her, I’ve got her now. She coughs, a strange little sound, and water spills from her mouth. I pat her back, over and over, murmuring to her, tears slipping down my face. I thought she’d drowned, I thought she was dead. Oh Eve. Oh Eve. I don’t deserve to be looking after her.
My legs are beginning to go numb; I realise that I’ve been sitting on them, staring at Eve, terrified to take my eyes off her in case she stops breathing again. But her little face looks OK now, her skin has returned to a normal colour, and her eyes move around the room, with no sign of anything untoward. I don’t know how long we have sat here for – time has become elasticated, stretchy, something I cannot and do not want to grasp hold of. I hear my phone begin to ring, the tinny, electronic sound seeping into my consciousness, but I ignore it. It doesn’t matter – all that matters is Eve.
It might be a minute later, it might be an hour, but gradually I become aware of another noise, a different sound to my ragged breathing and Eve’s gentle stirs. It is a knocking, persistent, and for one mad moment I am convinced it is the police, they are here, they know what almost happened, they know I’m not a fit babysitter, they know a child almost drowned on my watch. But then I realise – and this realisation is even worse – that it will be Jenny, Jenny is back, she will come in here, and I will have to tell her what might have happened, listen to her berate me, clutch her daughter to her chest and tell me I’m never allowed near her again. And then I remember the message, the reason this happened, the reason I was so stupid and selfish and lost concentration. I’m here. It hardly seems to matter any more. All that matters is the baby in my arms, the fact that she is alive.
I pick Eve up, holding her body close to mine, and I go back into the bedroom, place her carefully in the cot. I move as if in a dream, my limbs heavy, disconnected with relief, and I am almost fascinated when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hangs on the back of my bedroom door. I look the same – my eyes are red, and my skin is blotchy with tears – but other than that the same brown eyes stare back at me, the same hair tied back to keep the heat off, the same silver necklace bumps around my collar bone. How can I look the same, after what has just happened? How close I came?
The knocking continues, and I shout out ‘Just a minute!’, trying to buy a little more time. It will be Jenny, I know it will. My breathing is still strange and I force myself to take deep breaths, in and out for the count of five. Eve is fine, isn’t she? She didn’t drown. She is fine. She will be fine. My voice echoes around my head, bouncing off the walls of the room as though I am in an echo chamber.
‘Caroline!’ the voice calls from outside, but it’s not Jenny’s voice. I take a deep breath, my mind racing. There is a little peep-hole in my door, and I put my eye to it, press my cheek against the wood. But the person on the other side of it isn’t the one I’m expecting. The image is blurry, but I think I recognise it – the slim figure, the hazel eyes. It looks like her. It looks like Callum’s wife.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ipswich
19th August
DS Wildy
‘The suitcase.’
DCI McVey strides into the middle of the open-plan office, her hands spread out as though it is obvious.
For a moment, Alex is nonplussed. ‘What suitcase?’
‘Callum Dillon’s suitcase. The French police have just been in touch – a young constable, that Adele, has just been over to the villa to pack up the family’s clothing but it turns out there’s nothing to put Callum’s in.’ She spins round, facing them. Dave Bolton frowns.
‘Did he share with his wife, with his daughter?’
‘They think not, it wouldn’t all fit. Besides—’ DCI McVey leans over Alex’s shoulder, taps a few keys at his computer. ‘Don’t you think Callum Dillon is the kind of guy who’d have his own luggage?’ The screen fills with photographs of him, mainly taken locally, at various charity events and benefits. There is one of him walking not far from a minor celebrity; they look as though they are leaving an airport. Callum’s hand trails behind him, pulling along the silver handle of an expensive-looking black case.
The DCI nods. ‘He had it in the airport CCTV, too. It was on the tapes, clear as day.’
‘So where is it?’ Bolton asks, and DCI McVey laughs, though the sound is harsh and cold.
‘That, Dave, is the million-dollar question. Where is Callum Dillon’s suitcase?’
‘Want us to ask him about it, boss?’ Alex says, but the DCI shakes her head quickly.
‘No, no I don’t. I don’t want him knowing anything at this stage – it gives him time to prepare a cover story back at home with his lawyer. Gives him time to have a nice little think. No, if that suitcase is in France, our colleagues over there will find it. And if it’s been used to keep Eve in, they’ll find that too.’
And find it they do. It’s just under two hours later when the phone call comes. DCI McVey’s voice changes as she answers it. The suitcase is black, the name tag ripped off it, found on the verge half a mile away from Maria Wilcox’s villa, almost as though someone might have thrown it out of a moving vehicle. It’s empty, the lining slightly ripped. Alex looks at the photos.
‘Maria Wilcox told us that Callum and his daughter took a road trip one day alone,’ he says slowly, ‘he could’ve thrown it from the car then, couldn’t he?’
‘Going for testing now,’ the DCI says, ‘and I’ve reminded the lab what the word urgent actually means, seeing a
s they haven’t even got the dummy swab back to me yet.’ She rolls her eyes, but Alex can see that the mood in the office is brightening, now that the investigation is beginning to get somewhere.
‘France have brought in Superintendent Pascal,’ the DCI says, ‘and the entire area is being swept again. This time – and God knows how they’d have got it there – this time, they’re looking for a body. I think we’ve been focusing on the wrong place.’
All of them stare at the small black suitcase on the screen, and Alex knows they’re all thinking the same thing. Just big enough to hold a baby.
Chapter Forty-Three
France
19th August
Adele
Adele watches as the dust churns up around the villa, settling onto everything it touches. It is a shame, really, she thinks, the place is so beautiful. She thinks of the wife’s fancy dresses, the glistening blue of the swimming pool. A place of luxury, ripped apart in the search for the child.
It is only her fourth month in the Rouen police force, the process is new to her. Her superior told her she could stay, help with the search that will continue this evening. They are pleased with her for spotting the lack of suitcase, for her sharpness, her speed. The English police are excited, they think this will be what they need.
Despite the lingering heat of the day, she feels a shiver go through her at the thought of the wife, finding out what her husband has done. Adele doesn’t have a partner, non, and this case hasn’t made her any more inclined to find one, much to the chagrin of her parents back in Paris.
Around her, the machine digs up more and more earth, the green, flowered gardens surrounding the villa transforming into mounds of sandy dirt. Pink roses fall to the floor, beheaded by the excavations. Further down the hill, more police are searching manually; the surrounding houses are all holiday lets but their bins have been emptied, the nooks and crannies of the hill have been splayed open in case they are hiding the baby. The sun is beginning to set now, they will not be able to dig for much longer.
The Babysitter: From the author of digital bestsellers and psychological crime thrillers like The Girl Next Door comes the most gripping and addictive book of 2020! Page 22
