Watching Over Me

by M K Farrar

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  She pressed on with her theory. “So, if he wanted to cover up her murder, he’d be the one best able to make it appear as though she’d left on her own accord.”

  He frowned. “There was something else.”

  She leaned forward. “Yes?”

  “We did discover a patch of blood on the backstep outside the house. It wasn’t much, and Mr Swain claimed his wife had cut herself on a pair of gardening shears a couple of days earlier, but it was enough to make us suspicious.”

  “Gardening shears? Assuming Mrs Swain had already been planning to leave at that point, which surely she would have been—would she really have been worrying about doing the gardening?”

  “She may have been simply trying to carry on as usual so as to not make her husband suspicious.”

  “True,” she said, nodding. “And what about Edward? Did you interview him?”

  “Of course. His story matched his father’s exactly.”

  “And there were no signs of violence in the home?”

  He shook his head. “Not that we could tell. Edward did seem very subdued and maybe even detached from the situation. He didn’t cry or ask for his mother. But he was most likely still in shock, and sometimes kids have a strange way of showing when they’re upset.” He gestured towards her. “Well, you know all about that. Not everyone reacts the same way.”

  He was right on that front.

  “Since his mother went missing,” she said, “Edward’s behaviour has deteriorated. He’d been excluded from school, mainly for fighting, but I’ve also seen marks on his body which apparently have come from self-harm.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded “Sadly, we have been seeing an increase in self-harm, especially among teenagers.”

  “Edward isn’t a teenager yet,” she pointed out. “He’s still only twelve.”

  “It’s close enough.”

  “Do you have kids, Detective?” she asked, realising she sounded like all those people who asked her the same thing.

  He nodded and gave a rueful smile. “Yes, two. A boy and a girl. The boy is eight and the girl six, but they live with their mother. Divorced,” he said by way of explanation. “Two years now.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be. It was just one of those things. We got married too young. My ex-wife was only twenty-three, and I was twenty-six. The kids came along shortly after, but it wasn’t enough to keep us together. I still see them at the weekends, when I’m not working, but it’s hard with this job.”

  She did the maths. Her guesstimate about him being in his mid-thirties was correct.

  “Anyway,” he waved a hand, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.”

  “I’m a therapist,” she said, lowering her voice, part conspirator. “People can’t help but tell me all about themselves.”

  He chuckled, and she couldn’t help but smile at the sound. “Maybe that’s what it is then. You are very easy to talk to.”

  She experienced a frisson of electricity between them and quickly glanced away. Her relationship might be in tatters, but that wasn’t why she was here.

  “So, the missing person’s case,” she said, bringing them back to the reason she’d come. “You think I’m barking up the wrong tree?”

  “Not necessarily. Like I said, the way Mrs Swain was cut off from other people definitely got our suspicions raised as well, as did the blood we found. Let me look into things and reexamine the inquiries we made at the time, see if there was anything we might have missed, or if Susan Swain has resurfaced since we last ran any checks.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Normally, we would have expected for a missing person to have made contact with someone within the family, but obviously in this case there were no other family members. There’s also the possibility she relocated abroad, so I’ll send the details to Interpol and see what they can come up with.”

  “Thank you, Detective. I really appreciate you taking this seriously.”

  “Oh, call me David, please.”

  David. She hesitated. Should she tell him about all the strange things that had been going on with her recently? He seemed like someone she could trust, but at the same time, she didn’t want to muddy the waters. He was treating her as a professional, and she didn’t want to come across as unhinged or unstable. No, she’d keep it to herself, for the moment. It was nothing, really. Just some idiot trying to be funny.

  “What about the violence in the home?” David asked. “Do you think the boy is in danger?”

  She needed to be one hundred percent sure. Reporting it could mean Edward being removed from the home and placed into the system, and she knew that ending up in a foster home could be the worst possible thing for him. People didn’t want to take care of almost teenage boys with mental health issues. She could end up making Edward worse, not better. Just because she and Robert had butted heads, didn’t mean that Edward was being beaten by his father. She had enough self-doubt to make her question herself.

  Not enough self-doubt to stop you coming to the police, though.

  Maybe there had been a little self-preservation involved in coming to the police station. Had she been feeling vulnerable after the confrontation with Robert, and after the phone calls and the delivery of the doll to her house? Coming to speak to the police had helped her to feel better about things—like she had someone on her side.

  But was it enough to remove Edward from his home?

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t have enough proof.”

  “Well, if things change, you know where you can find me.” He held a slip of card across the desk towards her. “My number. In case you need to get in touch. About the case, of course.”

  She pretended not to feel the flutter inside her as she took the card. “Of course. And here’s mine.” She pulled one of her own business cards from her handbag and quickly scribbled her home number on the back before sliding it across the desk. “That’s my home number on the back of my card, and the other one is for my office. But if you do call the office, do you mind not telling whoever answers that you’re a detective. I’m still trying to keep things quiet for now, and I know my boss and colleague will start asking difficult questions if they know a detective is calling me.”

  “Of course.” He smiled. “I’ll just tell them it’s David.”

  Amy got to her feet and held out her hand.

  He shook it, holding on just a fraction too long. But unlike with Timothy, when he did things like that, she didn’t balk at his touch. If anything, warmth rushed up her arm and settled in her cheeks.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I find out anything,” he said.

  He released her, and she thanked him again. And as she turned and left, she discovered she was smiling.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Amy was able to slip back into the office before her afternoon appointment started.

  “Have there been any calls for me, Linda?” she asked as she walked through.

  The receptionist glanced up from her desk and shook her head. “No, sorry.”

  “Okay. Thanks anyway.”

  She wasn’t looking forward to going home alone that evening. She’d thought she might have heard from Gary during the day, perhaps even him telling her that they’d made a mistake and he wanted to reconsider their decision, but she’d heard nothing. He was probably relieved to be away from all her issues. She couldn’t say she blamed him.

  Tonight, she’d have to call her mother, and a weight sat on her chest at the prospect. How much of what had happened over the past week or so did she want to tell her? One part of her thought none of it, while the other desperately wanted someone to talk to. It wasn’t as though her mum had ever really paid much attention to Amy’s relationship or work in the past, so why should things be different now?

  She worked through that afternoon’s appointments, expecting Timothy to demand to speak to her. She felt sure Rober
t Swain would make a complaint about her going to his house that afternoon, and as the hours passed without him doing so, she couldn’t decide if she should be relieved or more anxious about it. Wouldn’t any normal person make a complaint if someone had barged into their home uninvited and made accusations against them? The only reason she could think for the lack of complaint was that Robert either had a guilty conscience and didn’t want anyone else to know what she’d accused him of, or he had something else planned.

  The memory of the figure on the street outside her flat the previous night popped back into her head, and her skin prickled with goose bumps. Could it have been him? She wasn’t sure if the build was wrong, but it had been dark and at a distance. There was no way she could know for sure.

  She managed to escape the office at five, without any awkward conversations with Timothy, and caught the Tube home. It felt strange to be going back to an empty flat, but there was a dizzying freedom to it as well. She didn’t know if she’d stay in the flat for the foreseeable future—it might be strange with memories everywhere—but at least she knew she wasn’t going home to an argument tonight. She wasn’t going to have to tiptoe around someone else’s feelings or explain herself at every turn. Did that make her selfish? Was it like that in every relationship to a certain extent, always having to think about the other person’s wants and needs and curbing your own natural responses to things in order to please them? Or did she feel that way simply because she and Gary had never been a good match? There always had to be some compromise in a relationship, but surely the big stuff, like marriage and children, had to be a shared goal.

  Amy clung to a pole inside the train carriage, squashed in on all sides by other people. Newspapers were spread out and filling every space, and the tang of cigarette smoke hung on the air. Maybe she should take up smoking now, she mused. Gary had always complained about the smell, and it wasn’t something she’d ever particularly wanted to start, especially after her first experience at school, but she could see the comfort in the routine of the habit.

  The train doors opened at her stop, and she spilled out with the other commuters, carried along in the wave of people. As she reached the top of the escalator, the sound of a trumpet met her ears. She didn’t know whether to be amused or horrified at the sight of a busker, dressed up as a clown, playing a trumpet for money. She threw a little change into his hat, even though she hated clowns. She didn’t know what it was, but something about them creeped her out.

  Outside on the street, back in the fresh air, though it was already starting to get dark, she took the familiar streets to her flat. She reached the building and climbed the stairs. She approached her front door, half expecting to find another package waiting for her, but the spot was empty. Perhaps whoever had sent the doll hadn’t meant it to be as threatening as she’d taken it. They most likely didn’t know about the phone calls or anything else and had meant it as a joke.

  So why didn’t they include their name on a gift card?

  The flat was painfully quiet, and she put on the television, if only for some background noise. At least she didn’t need to worry about cooking dinner. Some toast and a glass of wine would do.

  She whiled away the time until it approached six-thirty and she needed to make the call she dreaded each week. The phone was still out of its socket where Gary had yanked it out after the last middle-of-the-night creepy call. It had solved that problem, anyway, but she was going to have to plug it back in to call her mother.

  Taking a deep breath, she pushed the cord back into the socket. She stared at it like a snake that might strike at any moment, almost daring the telephone to ring, letting the seconds tick by into minutes.

  Nothing happened, and she released a long, shaky breath. She was being paranoid. Again. Seemed it was becoming a bit of a habit lately.

  Picking up the handset, she dialled her mother’s number. Louise Penrose answered on exactly the right number of rings, parroting back the number Amy had just dialled.

  “Hi, Mum. It’s me.”

  She wasn’t sure why she even needed to say who it was. She doubted her mother was inundated with calls and it was highly unlikely anyone else phoned at the exact time each week.

  “Hello, Amy. How are you?”

  To her surprise, tears were suddenly close to the surface, a painful lump constricting her throat.

  “Not so great, actually, Mum,” she managed to say.

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Gary and I broke up.”

  She hadn’t been sure she was even going to tell her mother until the words were already out of her mouth. They didn’t normally share personal stuff, more practical, but she’d wanted someone to talk to.

  Her mother sniffed. “Probably for the best. Men are only ever trouble.”

  Amy sighed. “You don’t know that he was trouble. You never even met him.”

  It was true. She hadn’t. When Amy and Gary had first met, and had been crazily in love in that way a new relationship often is, she’d desperately wanted her mother to meet him and approve. But after several failed attempts which left Amy mortified at her mother’s behaviour, she’d given up on the whole idea.

  “Maybe not, but I’ve known enough men to know that they only want one thing.”

  “That’s not true, Mum. Gary was the one who wanted to settle down. He wanted to get married and have kids, but I couldn’t do it.”

  Because I was terrified of turning into you, she thought but didn’t say.

  “It’s better to focus on your career, Amy. Your career will always be there for you.”

  You drove Dad away, Mum. He couldn’t stand being around you, but that wasn’t his fault. You pushed him to it. And now I’m turning out just like you, and I don’t know how to change that.

  Knowing she was on the path of saying something she would most likely regret later, she changed the topic. “Actually, I went to speak to a detective today.”

  “Why? What have you done?”

  Amy gave a nervous laugh. “I haven’t done anything. It was about one of my patients. The boy’s mother went missing a couple of years ago, and the detective I went to see was the same one who ran the original case.”

  “What does that have to do with you?”

  “Well, I’m trying to help him deal with things, and so I’ve been looking into where his mother might have gone.” Or if the boy’s father killed her or hurt her badly enough that she was forced to run. “The detective was very nice. His name is David Norton, and he’s divorced but has two children from his previous marriage. He seemed really willing to help and said to contact him if I need anything else.”

  She didn’t know why she was telling her mother all of this. Maybe because his kind smile had been featuring in her thoughts most of the day and it felt good to have something nice to say instead of always feeling as though her life was filled with misery—other people’s and her own.

  “I see.” Louise Penrose’s reply was curt and clearly disapproving. Anything involving men never went down well with her.

  “Anyway,” Amy said, switching subjects again. She felt like she was driving down a road filled with obstacles and had to keep veering to one side to avoid them. “How have you been this week? Keeping well?”

  “I suppose. As well as I can be.”

  Amy dutifully stayed on the line while her mother ran through the routine of what she’d done for the week—which was identical to every other week—and then when the clock ticked to seven, they were both able to make their excuses and say goodnight.

  “Talk to you next week, Mum.”

  “Goodnight, Amy.”

  “Goodnight.”

  And she hung up.

  She sighed, staring at the phone for a moment. She envied women who had a good relationship with their mothers. It must be wonderful to know that there was someone in the world who would take care of you, no matter what. No matter how old you got, or what you did in life, they would love you unconditionally. Someone to pu
ll you into their arms and tell you everything would be okay.

  The shrill ring of the phone cut through the air.

  Amy jerked back, her heart galloping. Was her mother calling back for some reason, something she’d forgotten to say, perhaps? Or maybe Gary was calling to check up on her, or make sure she was in so he could pick up some belongings.

  Her palms prickled with sweat, the hair on her nape standing to attention. She reached a hand towards the phone and noted how her fingers trembled. It was only a phone call, yet instinctively she was sure it was something more sinister.

  She picked up the handset and placed it to her ear. “Hello?”

  No answer came, and she strained her ears, trying to pick up on any sound.

  The rasp of heavy breathing came down the line.

  “Who is this?” she demanded. “I have a friend who’s a detective. I’ll make sure he finds you.”

  Then a hissed whisper froze the blood in her veins, and the cold settled right into her bones.

  “I’m watching you...”

  Amy let out a shriek and yanked the phone out of the wall. Plastic cracked, and the wire frayed with the strength she’d used to tear the socket from the wall. With fear and anger surging through her, she threw the remains of the phone against the kitchen wall, where it hit with a crash then fell to the floor. Tears blurred her vision, and she covered her face with both hands, trying not to give in to her emotions. Her entire body trembled, and she gasped in hiccupped sobs as she tried not to cry.

  Who was doing this to her? What had she done to upset someone so much that they wanted to terrorise her?

  All of this had started only after Robert Swain had walked into her office, his son at his side.

  The phone had been out of the socket for days now. She’d only plugged it in to call her mother. What were the chances of them calling at the same time she’d plugged it back in? Was it just coincidence that whoever had called her managed to connect? Had they been trying over and over, hoping to reconnect the call? Or did they know that she phoned her mother at exactly the same time each week and so would have needed to plug the phone back in then?