HE IS WATCHING YOU an Absolutely Gripping Crime Thriller With a Massive Twist

by Charlie Gallagher

  ‘It’s the Desire 10 — the pro version. We don’t get many of these. We might have a chance. They tend to use older Android technology. I’ll plug it in.’ He turned to Harry. ‘Just so you know, even if this is an instant fail, I’m still billing you for the full day’s callout.’

  ‘Just do what you can,’ Harry said.

  They were on the fourth floor. Rob and his fellow forensic media technicians, to give them their proper title, were tucked away at the end of a corridor where access could be controlled. The room was dark and the external windows had fixed shutters over them to prevent anyone from being able to see in — not that anybody was likely to see into the fourth floor, but the police had a responsibility to ensure they couldn’t. This was one of the rooms used for viewing and downloading evidential material for all sorts of cases. That could be anything from drug dealer phones to devices containing child pornography. Maddie couldn’t imagine the horrors that had been on display in this room. Rob seemed blasé about it all. He thumped a keyboard to wake a monitor. It had Do not switch off! handwritten on a peeling post-it note. The screen was cluttered with icons and Rob clicked on one. The screen changed and he reached for a lead. The other end ran behind the monitor.

  ‘You’re sure you want me to do this?’

  ‘Do what exactly?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I’m going to plug it in. I’ll be attempting to download whatever I can get from the phone but there are three possible reactions.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Yeah. It either bypasses the phone’s operating system and sucks up all the data as it was designed to, or the security is effective enough that it does nothing at all, or — and this is entirely possible — it meets with an installed bot app that detects something is trying to bypass the security and wipes the contents of the phone completely. Anything on there is lost forever.’

  ‘I see. What are the odds?’

  ‘No idea. I assume you know more about the owner of this phone than I do. If the right app is installed then we’re in trouble, but we won’t be able to tell that in advance. Our best bet is to use the systems at headquarters. They have something that can do a prelim scan. That gives you a pretty good indication of what applications are installed on the phone.’

  ‘And if it did show that this app was installed, would we be able to do anything to stop it happening and still get the data?’

  ‘Well, yeah, you get the phone’s unlock code from the owner. There’s no other way.’

  ‘That’s not an option. Plug in your gizmo.’ Maddie was aware of Harry looking at her as he continued, ‘let’s hope your girl isn’t security conscious, eh?’

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Maddie said.

  ‘Let’s get it done then, shall we?’ Rob took a seat at the desk. ‘My time off is precious.’ He connected the lead to the phone. It lit up and then fell back to black.

  ‘What happened?’ Harry said.

  ‘Nothing yet. Patience!’ Rob clicked the mouse and the screen changed again. A box came up asking if he was sure about something, but before Maddie could read the whole warning he had already clicked again and it disappeared. A box appeared with a pulsing horizontal line running through its middle. It started to fill from left to right . . . very slowly.

  ‘Looks like we might be lucky,’ Rob said. ‘There must be a lot of data on there, though. This is going to take a while. I take one sugar.’ He sat back and crossed his arms. Maddie could almost admire the front of the bloke. They had dragged him away from his precious time off, though, whatever the hell that meant. She watched the line build and relented.

  ‘I can do coffee, that’s all,’ she said.

  Harry turned to her. He still looked agitated but he snatched a nod. ‘I’ll call round for an update from the search teams.’ For the first time, Maddie considered that the stress of their situation might be getting to Harry.

  She made her way out. The coffee machine was on the next floor up. It was quiet. The only people that generally worked weekends were the response officers and they were too busy to stop for coffee. The machine burped and fizzed with the first of the drinks. She took a moment to check her phone. She had a text message. The sender was marked simply as ‘A.’ That was how she’d labelled Adam Yarwood. She slid her thumb across her screen to open it up.

  Hey. Coming back your way tomorrow I think. I’ll book into the same place. I liked the rooms there.

  Nothing more. It wasn’t a question, he wasn’t asking to meet and he wasn’t asking if it was alright. He was just being Adam Yarwood and that meant doing whatever the hell he wanted while assuming everyone else would fall in line. That might be the very same attitude that had got her into him in the first place, but right now it was threatening her career more than ever. She needed to handle him better than this. In her previous life she had lived and worked out of sight, off the grid. She had made it work, but she couldn’t do that anymore. She put her phone back in her pocket to start the next drink. It was a problem for later.

  The digital line on the screen was just about full by the time she returned with the drinks. Harry was still pacing. He wasn’t good at waiting for results. In her experience, detectives rarely were. The screen changed. A list of files quickly filled the screen from top to bottom.

  ‘What’s on there?’

  ‘Shit, Harry! You gotta give me a second. There’s a lot of data here.’ Rob was shaking his head.

  ‘Okay, focus on text messages. I need to know who she’s been talking to and what she’s been saying. And if we can get a phone number for the handset I can put in for a historic picture. We can see where she’s been.’

  ‘Messages? Well, there aren’t many, so that should be easy enough. Ninety percent of the shit on this phone is video and images. Are you interested in them?’

  ‘We’ll have a look at a sample. I’ve not got time to be going through it in great detail now.’

  Rob clicked and the monitor screen changed again. It seemed to mirror a smartphone home screen. It looked like a load of app tiles over a digital photo. Maddie gasped at it. She could make most of it out: a man in sunglasses, his arms crossed, his right foot up and resting on a white truck. ‘That could be our Andy!’ Maddie said.

  ‘Can you get the tiles out of the way?’ Harry growled.

  ‘No. It’s not like operating the actual phone. I might be able to find the photo, though.’

  Maddie bit down on her lip. Rob clicked furiously. A folder opened with a grid of thumbnails. It looked like the top image was the photograph they wanted. Rob had seen it, too. He double-clicked to open it up.

  ‘Look at the truck, Harry!’ Maddie said. The McCall’s livery could be seen clearly on the door. ‘They must be an item?’

  Harry stayed silent.

  Rob clicked again. The image changed: the same man minus the sunglasses. It was a selfie, the glimpse of scenery behind looked to be woodland somewhere. After that came a screenshot from a website. It was a motion sensitive webcam similar to the one Maddie had seen in the material sent from Sussex.

  ‘It’s his phone!’ Maddie breathed. ‘It’s Andy’s!’

  ‘It’s his phone,’ Harry repeated.

  Rob clicked again. He had to scroll through more pages of webcams; they all seemed similar. He stopped when he got to a solid, dark square with a triangular play symbol in its centre. A video. Rob clicked to start it playing.

  The blurring took a few seconds to resolve itself. Maddie leaned in to try and make something out. It wasn’t obvious what she was looking at. The monitor was dark. She could make out vertical lines that were a slightly lighter shade. A timer counted up in the bottom right of the screen and it showed 22:04:17. Suddenly the screen flared white, every part of it. Another second passed and the camera adjusted. The screen was still white but other details came into focus. It was like a version of night vision. Maddie’s eyes were drawn first to a number that stood out in the bright light as if it was glowing. The lines that she had seen as shades were now clearly
recognisable as the sides of a metal box or a container. A number came into focus, its thick, black font standing out against the white background — 37.

  ‘Thirty-seven!’ Harry exclaimed. ‘We’ve seen that! Leonard’s Farm — in that container!’ He was now as animated as Maddie had seen ever him. He walked to the door, then stopped and turned as if he had changed his mind.

  ‘This is what he was worried about. Ron Beasle was getting too close. I knew the fox wasn’t right. We were stood right there! This was going to be one of his dump sites. He must have changed his mind after he killed Ron.’

  Maddie shook her head. ‘We couldn’t have known. We weren’t there looking for dump sites, Harry.’ Her head was shaking; she knew she was consoling herself really.

  Harry still didn’t reply. He leant in closer to the screen. The video was still playing. The camera was fixed. At the bottom of the screen was something dark, it looked like a roll of carpet perhaps. There was movement. Maddie had to squint to make it out. She leant closer to the screen. Harry did too; they were almost touching. Definite movement. It was an arm. It seemed to reach out from the roll of carpet, the fingers on the hand were visible now and they scratched at the floor.

  ‘Harry! She’s alive!’

  Harry didn’t reply. Maddie held her breath. There was more movement on the screen. Now that Maddie had identified one body part the rest of the picture started to make sense. She could see the woman’s head moving. The camera was at an angle, like it was in the corner and pointed down and across. The arm was reaching away, towards the door. The angle of the camera meant they were looking at the back of her head. There was another shape lying alongside her too. There was no movement from that. The picture quality wasn’t good enough for Maddie to make out any details from it either; it was just a clump of darkness.

  She felt Harry move away. He paced back to the door and then came back again as if he didn’t know what to do with himself. ‘I need to call the team who are out at Leonard’s Farm,’ he said. ‘Damage limitation on the scene preservation. Rob, you need to keep this on your screen. I’ll get a DC up here to go through it all to see what else we can get. I need you to do a full evidential download too. I can’t have anything lost from that phone.’

  ‘Okay. You don’t want to see what else there is yourself? Quick? Looks like there’s all sorts of—’

  ‘Could we still activate one of those bot app things?’

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘No then. Get your download done. That takes a while, right?’

  ‘Two hours, based on the amount of material.’

  ‘That video — is it dated?’

  Rob clicked some more. ‘It will be. Normally the date is in the title but these files haven’t saved like that. They must be saved from a third-party app. I guess there’s one on here that runs the camera. I can find out exactly when that video was saved to this phone but it’ll take a while.’

  ‘Okay, it doesn’t matter right now. We need to be somewhere else. Can you just bring up the contacts list? I need to be sure of something.’

  Rob clicked his mouse. The video screen was replaced by a list of names and numbers.

  ‘There are hundreds of them.’

  ‘Are they alphabetical?’

  ‘No, but there’s a search function.’

  ‘Okay, search for James — or Jim.’

  Rob typed then shook his head. Nothing.

  ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘No, that would have come up. Who’s Jimmy?’

  ‘If we’re right about this, it’s his brother. One last thing . . . can you bring up the call list?’

  Rob typed something again. There was nothing inbound — maybe he’d deleted them — and just one of the outbound list showing on the screen as Bruv. There was a row of digits next to it and a date that was two days old. ‘I guess that’ll be your James then,’ Rob said.

  Harry took out his own phone for comparison. ‘It’s him. It’s James McCall’s number. We have to go!’

  Maddie looked up to where the video was back up on the screen. It was paused where Rob had stopped it. The arm was reaching out towards the door. Maddie could feel the desperation. Harry was already out of the room. Maddie snatched her attention from the screen to go after him.

  Chapter 41

  Something shook Lisa Simpkiss awake. Something or somebody. She was aware of a flicker in front of her, as if someone had walked across the bright light that was forcing her to squint. The light was pouring in through a large bay window. She tried to follow the direction of the movement but the pain came rushing back, slamming her eyes shut so there was just darkness. She groaned and sucked air in hard, coating her throat with a layer of thick dust. The coughing that followed was agony, but she did her best to get still again. The pain didn’t stop, but it dulled enough for her to bear it. She opened her eyes to the ground, away from the light. She could see exposed floorboards littered with dead insects that increased in number the closer they were to the window. She was in the room of a house. A front room: she could make out an old fireplace crudely papered over; the walls were scraped back to plasterboard and the dust was visible in layers.

  She tried to recall the sequence of events leading to her being here. Her mind had been foggy but it came back with sudden clarity. She remembered the man in her kitchen, the smears of blood she had left behind, and the desperation to get him away from her mother. She felt her pulse quicken. Her breathing sped up with it and the movement agitated her abdomen. She had to stay calm.

  She opened her eyes enough to squint at the window. It still flared painfully white. She was on her side. Under the window she could see a dark triangular shape. It was unmoving. For a terrifying moment she thought it was someone squatting down or hunched over but then she realised that it was a blue office chair with black legs on a chrome pedestal and castors. Her eyes were getting a little more accustomed to the light, too. Enough for her to see out of the window to a blue sky interrupted by the top of a tree. A small part of the window was open and she picked up birdsong and the shushing and creaking of tree branches in the wind.

  She detected movement. Someone was pacing from left to right. The figure settled on the chair. It was Andy.

  ‘You’re going to die, Lisa. Here.’ He stared at her for a few seconds. His stare broke off and he seemed to be looking around the room, looking for something perhaps. ‘I don’t know when. You’ve lost some blood but not enough. I will need to hasten things along. I don’t know how yet.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Lisa’s voice was quiet; it came out as a sigh almost. She was trying to limit her movement, trying to stay calm. Still she could feel the vibration of her own voice through her stomach. She moved her free hand to the wound and it felt warm to the touch. Her other hand was trapped beneath her body with no feeling.

  ‘To watch,’ he said. His voice was different from when they had spoken before and it wasn’t just the acoustics of the empty room. He scuffed his feet and the sound filled the space. ‘I know you understand,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re addicts, Lisa. Me and you. You know what that means, you understand. We’ve spent our whole lives trying to be understood but it’s only ever other addicts that truly do.’

  ‘I drink,’ she managed.

  ‘You do. You yearn for it. It’s all you think about. It’s the only time you really feel alive. Am I right? It is who you are, Lisa.’

  ‘It isn’t. I beat it.’

  The noise was sudden and loud. The chair tumbled onto its side and scraped across the bare floor. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, he had moved out of sight. The floor squeaked behind her. She could sense him. He was close. When he spoke this time she could feel his breath on her ear. ‘You beat it? What does that even mean? You get to go to a meeting once a week and then pretend you’re someone else the rest of the time? You can only be who you are. What’s the point of being alive if you don’t feel it?’

  Lisa felt a su
rge of rage and she managed to move enough to rock onto her back and free up her left arm. It tingled with a million tiny pinpricks. She was facing up now, towards Andy and beyond to a stained, white ceiling with yellowed paper hanging down around a single bulb. Andy moved quickly out of sight. She couldn’t twist enough to keep him in her field of vision.

  ‘So this is how you get off, is it?’ Lisa growled. ‘I never stood a chance! A knife from nowhere like a fucking coward.’ She spat her words towards the ceiling but she could sense him off to her left. Sure enough he appeared, looming over her. He had the same expression she had seen earlier, his excitement was peaking.

  ‘Addicts like you and me don’t care what people think, Lisa. I tried fighting it. I tried being what I thought everyone else wanted me to be, but I can’t do it anymore. Soon everyone will know anyway. I messed up. I got sloppy and I was kicking myself about it at first but I always knew this time would come. The time when I would have to take myself away from society completely. I don’t fit.’

  ‘You can still make it right. Call for help. Help me. We all want to give in sometimes, but you got to have the balls to fight it. It’s easy just to say it’s what you are, but I don’t believe that. You can be anything you want.’

  He moved away. She sucked in a big breath and gritted her teeth against the pain. She wriggled to try and get a view of where he had gone. She started a gentle rocking motion, building up to shifting onto her other side.

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘It’s never too late to start. You must remember that from the meetings, right?’

  ‘You don’t understand, Lisa. I can’t make it right. Just ask her.’

  Lisa made it all the way onto her other side in time to see Andy move again, but it was through a doorway and he was gone. Her eyes fell to a form next to her. She focussed on a woman’s pale face, her blue lips were parted slightly, showing her teeth, and her dead eyes stared out at her. For a moment Lisa froze. It didn’t look real. It was like a bad dream. She couldn’t scream, nor could she stop her eyes from scanning down the entire figure. She wasn’t clothed, she could see a rough and jagged wound slashed across the woman’s neck. Then her eyes ran over the pale breasts, stalling on an ugly laceration on the abdomen. Her hand was half over it, her fingers bunched together over a mass of something that looked like grey bubble wrap. Lisa couldn’t catch her breath. Her mind suddenly made sense of the picture in front of her. It put everything in place and it flashed up her own future. She flicked back up to where those dead eyes were still staring right at her. The dead eyes of a young woman with her throat slashed, holding in her own intestines.