* * *
‘Sorry we’ve ended up in this heap of junk again,’ Tom said as they clambered into the Jeep. ‘I could go back for the car, but it would waste a bit of time. Are you okay with this?’
‘It’s not a date, Tom. I don’t think we’re out to impress each other.’
Despite the circumstances, Tom almost smiled. Leo reminded him of an arrow, straight and true. Not just because of her tall slender body, but because she didn’t mess around. She got straight to the point by the shortest possible means, and would cut through any junk that got in the way. Incapable of dissembling, it would seem. He liked it.
‘I meant what I said, you know,’ Tom said. ‘We will fix this. Ellie will be okay.’
‘I hope you’re right. It doesn’t help poor Sean, though. I just can’t make sense of any of it.’
Leo rested her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, but Tom could see the furrows of tension that hardened her face. This, of course, wasn’t the only thing she’d had to face in the last few hours.
‘I’m so sorry that I had to break the news of your father today. With everything else, the timing was pretty crap, wasn’t it?’
‘Do you know, I’d almost forgotten about that,’ Leo answered. ‘All I can think about is Ellie.’
‘Have you decided what you’re going to tell her? It’s going to be unbelievably hard for her to hear just at the moment.’
‘I know. It’s difficult. Her mother kept it from her and lied about it, so although she didn’t have the highest opinion of her mother, that will hurt too.’
Tom glanced at Leo.
‘You know, you might find this difficult to believe, but as I said before, it could be that she had yours and Ellie’s best interests at heart. She might not have wanted to upset you.’
Leo said nothing, but leaned forward and peered out of the windscreen, looking towards the sky.
‘What’s up? What are you looking for?’ Tom asked, trying to keep his eyes on the road, but flicking his gaze to Leo.
‘There it is!’ she said with mock glee, pointing upwards. ‘Now I see it!’
Tom couldn’t see anything.
‘What? What are you talking about Leo?’
‘A flying pig,’ she said with a sour expression, leaning back with a thump against the seat.
‘Very funny,’ Tom said. ‘Okay, I’ll stop trying to give credit where maybe it’s not due, but perhaps knowing your dad’s dead is one thing. But finding out how and where he died is going to be hard on her at the moment, even if we leave out the bit about why he was there.’
Leo’s head was hard back against the headrest, and she was staring straight ahead.
‘I know. I am going to have to tell her. But not now. I’ll tell her that you’ve found out that he’s dead and when, but I’ll probably say that’s all you could find out - and convince her that it’s enough. When she’s got her emotional strength back I’ll tell her the rest. We mustn’t have any more secrets. But she’s too fragile at the moment, and she’s going to have so much else to deal with. She’s not as tough as me.’
Tom resisted the urge to comment. Leo had one of the toughest and most resistant exteriors he had ever come across. Which perhaps made the softness that was lurking beneath infinitely more interesting.
‘You need to turn left here,’ she said. ‘We’re nearly there, but this is the tricky bit.
As Leo gave him brief but concise instructions, Tom turned his thoughts to Pat. What could he want that was so urgent? He didn’t like the feel of this.
‘When we get there, I want you to stay in the car,’ he said to Leo.
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t know what’s going on, and until I do it’s better if you stay out of harm’s way.’
Leo turned to look at him without saying a word, and he cast a quick glance in her direction.
‘I know you think I’m mad, but just do it please. There was something about Pat that seemed a bit shifty at Ellie and Max’s dinner party. I don’t know what it was, but he didn’t come across like a totally honest sort of man to me.’
Leo gave a derisive snort.
‘I’m not surprised. Ellie said that at every break in the eating he was sneaking out to phone his wife, or text her. He might have physically left her, but he’s still there mentally. No wonder he looked like he was up to something. He was. I almost feel sorry for Mimi. I know he’s Max’s friend, but he’s not coming out of all this in a very good light, is he?’
‘I’ll reserve judgement. I don’t know any of them. But nevertheless, if he has something to tell me or talk to me about it might be easier if you’re not there.’
Tom knew without looking that Leo would be casting her eyes up in irritation, but she said nothing else and continued to give him instructions until they pulled up in one of the parking spots close to Mimi’s house.
‘Mimi must be out,’ Leo said. ‘Her car’s not here.’
Pulling on the handbrake, Tom turned to Leo.
‘Maybe that’s a good thing. Listen, I’ll be as quick as I can. Don’t run away, will you?’ he smiled and leaned across to give Leo a brief peck on the cheek. He didn’t know why he did it but it felt like the most natural thing in the world, and she didn’t pull away.
50
Pat was waiting by the open door, obviously anticipating Tom’s arrival, but he was casting anxious glances around the neighbourhood.
‘Everything okay, Pat?’ Tom asked.
‘Sorry - I was checking to see if Mimi was back yet. I need to talk to you before she gets here. You’d better come in.’
Tom walked into the small sitting room as Pat shut the door and walked over to the computer, where a screensaver was drawing vaguely nauseating patterns in blue and green.
‘I’m sorry to drag you out tonight. I hope you weren’t busy.’
Tom smiled to himself, but shook his head.
‘I do have somewhere that I need to be shortly, but Leo said you sounded worried on the phone.’
‘I wanted to show you this, to see what you think,’ Pat said, pointing to the laptop on the computer desk. He walked across and sat down. Tom stood behind and watched over his shoulder.
Pat rolled the mouse and the screen burst into life revealing what appeared to be a list of phone numbers, some of which had the words ‘blacklist’ next to them. The numbers didn’t mean anything to Tom, although one looked vaguely familiar.
‘These numbers are all on my phone,’ Pat said. ‘Those that are marked ‘black list’ are Georgia, Max and Ellie.’
It must have been Ellie’s number that he recognised from when she’d called earlier.
There was a menu at the top of the screen that offered other options, such as SMS, email, GPS, and Pat selected SMS.
‘This is a list of all the texts that I’ve received and sent for the last week or so. There’s even a section for texts that I didn’t send, but have been sent as if from my phone. What does it mean, Tom?’
Tom knew immediately what it meant, although this was by far the most sophisticated of the software applications that he had seen.
‘Where’s your phone, Pat? I want to show you something.’
Pat fished his mobile from the pocket of his trousers and put it on the desk.
‘This is why I didn’t call Max’s house from my mobile. I’m not sure I understand what’s happening, but I’m sure that I don’t like it.’
Tom leaned forward towards the desk.
‘You did right. But can I have control of the mouse for a moment? Hold your phone up as if you are looking at it, but watch the computer screen.
Pat lifted the phone until it was in front, but slightly to the side of his face so that it wasn’t blocking sight of the monitor.
Tom rolled the mouse to the menu and clicked.
‘Shit!’ Pat stared at the computer screen, as a mirror image of his horrified face stared back. He looked at Tom. ‘What did you do?’
‘I switch
ed your camera on remotely. Look at your phone.’
Pat glanced at his phone, and could see that the camera light was on.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
‘Your phone has been tampered with and an app has been installed. I can switch on your camera wherever you are, and whatever the camera can see will be displayed on the screen. I can even switch on the speaker remotely so that I can hear every word you’re saying.’
Tom looked at Pat with sympathy. Mimi had clearly not trusted him an inch, and from what Leo said she was probably right not to. But installing this sort of application on his phone was extreme. She would have known his every move, and would have been able to manipulate all his relationships by blocking calls, sending fake texts as if they were from him - the works.
‘Bloody hell,’ Pat said. ‘What a mess. It feels as if she’s invaded my body - knows my every thought and shares every moment I have with somebody else. No wonder she knew every time I went to Georgia’s. She always phoned me on some pretext within moments of me arriving.’
‘That would be from your GPS. It tracks where you are. She would have been able to log everything on here, but it would also have sent alerts to her own mobile every time you sent a text. How did you find this, Pat? Wasn’t there a password?’ Tom asked.
‘Yeah, but this is an old computer from school. They all have password logger software on them. She didn’t know it was there - why would she? So I called up the password for her user area. The daft thing was, I was only looking at the cricket scores, but when I saw how many times she’d been on this site, I decided to have a look. That’s where the logs of all my mobile activity were.’
Pat closed the computer window and turned round in his chair.
‘Sorry to drag you into this, Tom. I just wanted to know if I was going mad or not. It’s an awful thing to say, and no reflection on the child, but I wish to God that Mimi wasn’t pregnant. I can’t live with somebody who has so little faith in me.’
Tom couldn’t think of a single appropriate thing to say, so he changed the subject.
‘Leo said you mentioned Abbie Campbell when you phoned, Pat. This is actually about you and Mimi, and I can’t see where Abbie comes into it. Did Leo misunderstand?’ He was trying hard to curb his irritation. He didn’t need to sort out Pat’s domestic issues at this moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pat said, turning back to the computer. ‘I got a bit carried away with the mobile stuff, but it is relevant. When I was looking through Mimi’s files to see what else she might be hiding, I decided to look in the trash folder. I found some photos. They’re not of anybody I know, but they’re all of young girls. And one of them is called Chloe.
* * *
Leo wasn’t happy sitting out here on her own. Too much thinking time. Tom had been inside the house for what felt like hours, when in actual fact it was probably more like ten minutes. It was ridiculous, making her wait in the car. She wasn’t in any danger from Pat. The trouble was, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to, all she could do was think - and all this soul-searching wasn’t doing her any good at all.
She had been so wrong about Ellie, believing that she’d been meeting Gary that night. Of all the ridiculous ideas. And Ellie had been wrong about Max too. How had they all got into such a mess?
But none of it answered the burning question - who killed Sean? And why, for God’s sake?
Leo fought to dismiss the image of Sean’s mangled body from her memory, but she only succeeded in replacing one grim thought with another. Try as she might, she couldn’t eradicate from her mind the facts about her father that Tom had shared earlier, and now that she was alone they hovered at the edge of her consciousness like black vultures, ready to swoop.
She may not have thought much of him as a man, or at least any love she may have felt for him had been violently suppressed after she had been offloaded onto Ellie’s mother. As she had grown older and begun to understand what he’d done to her own mum, the last remaining fragments of affection had turned to contempt. But who wanted to live with the knowledge that they had been fathered by a monster? How could she come to terms with the fact that the man her mother had loved had such a dark side? The thought made her feel physically sick, and she was terrified of what it would do to Ellie.
It was strange, but since Tom had told her about him she could now vividly recall details of her father that had eluded her only a couple of short days ago. He would have been just over fifty when he disappeared for the last time, but he dressed like a much younger man. Or at least, he tried to. She remembered smart suits on work days, and brightly coloured ties. But when he went out in the evening - which she seemed to think he did practically every night - his jeans were that bit too tight in an era where others were wearing looser clothes, and his leather bomber jacket always made her think that he was trying that bit too hard. But maybe all teenage girls feel like that about their fathers. She did remember some girls at school saying her dad was cool, but she wasn’t impressed. She had felt vaguely embarrassed by him.
Now, she was ashamed, although shame had already played a huge part in her life so it was nothing new. Ever since arriving in this village, she had been viewed as something of a dirty secret, but she had learned to hold her head high and ignore what other people thought. If all of this ever came out, she would just have to do the same again.
The silence in the car was broken by the ringing of a phone. She knew it wasn’t hers and realised that Tom must have left his in the side pocket of the Jeep. She leaned across, but couldn’t reach it.
‘Bugger.’ She shuffled onto her knees, and managed to scuttle across the wide central console and squeeze down behind the steering wheel. After all that, when she picked the phone up it stopped ringing. Looking at the display to see if it was Max, she noticed that it said Steve. Wasn’t he the detective that Tom had been talking to? If it was important, no doubt he would phone back.
Deciding that she would stay on this side of the Jeep until Tom had finished with Pat, she switched the ignition on to get power, and started to fiddle with the radio. She needed something to drown out her thoughts. Her uninformed twiddling resulted in a burst of loud music, and she couldn’t for the life of her find where to switch the volume down. She felt a brief draught on her neck from somewhere just as she found the right button and managed to take the level down to something tolerable.
And then she felt it. She knew, without looking, that somebody was in the car behind her. She could feel their breath changing the atmosphere, and every inch of her flesh tingled with fear. For a second, she didn’t move. She felt a shifting of the air behind her as she groped blindly for the door handle.
* * *
Pat opened the folder, and Tom could see a number of image files.
‘There’s a whole folder of pictures of girls at around the same age here - but it was the name Chloe that made me think. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I thought I should ask you before wasting anybody else’s time.’
‘Can I grab your chair for a moment, Pat?’
Sitting down quickly and leaning towards the computer, Tom checked out all the files that Pat had found and confirmed that he was right. They were all pictures of girls around fourteen or fifteen years old. All the photos were low resolution, so it was unlikely that they were original. Tom guessed that they had been grabbed from social network sites.
He checked the browser history, but couldn’t find what he was looking for. That wasn’t much of a surprise. If his guess was correct, there was a degree of expertise here. So why hadn’t she emptied the trash and cleaned her computer?
Tom had an idea.
‘What are you looking for?’ Pat asked.
‘I’m no expert,’ he said, ‘but I know a bit about computer security. My brother made an absolute fortune out of it before he died, and I did listen occasionally to some of the less technical stuff he told me about. Do you mind if I have a look round? There’s a couple of things that I want to check.�
��
Tom clicked a few items on the screen and opened a few menus. It only took him three or four minutes.
‘Bingo,’ he said.
* * *
As Leo reached for the door handle, there was a rush of movement from behind her left shoulder.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said a voice that she instantly recognised. A voice that usually sounded so timid but which Leo had acknowledged yesterday was a clever act. Still, she would never have expected this.
A sharp, cold point was stuck into the side of her neck, and she could smell the hot, sweaty body that was crouched in the gap between the front seats. ‘Make any move and this knife goes through your throat.’
Leo tried to keep calm.
‘What do you want, Mimi? If it’s money, take my bag. Take what you want, and go.’
‘I need a car. The police will be here soon, so I need to get away, and you’re going to take me.’
The knife pressed sharply against Leo’s neck, and she could feel drops of warm blood running down to her collarbone.
‘Why don’t I just get out? Take the car. You can have it.’
She heard a snigger in her left ear, as if that was a ridiculous suggestion.
‘Because I’m not thick. You’d run straight to your policeman, and this heap of a car would be picked up in no time. If Tom comes out and you’re gone, he’ll assume that you were in a strop and drove off without him, because you are a stroppy bitch, aren’t you? Besides - you’re my insurance. You can be my hostage. But I will get away, Leo - it’s up to you whether you help me or you die right now.’
The mirthless laughter from behind made Leo’s blood turn to ice.
* * *
Tom turned round on the computer chair and looked at Pat’s dazed expression.
‘It’s all there. There’s no doubt about it, I’m sorry to say. Mimi has been setting up false identities on Facebook. She’s the Chloe that the police have been looking for. She knows her way around this stuff somehow, because she’d hidden her tracks pretty well for an amateur. She’s disguised her IP address, and erased most of the files completely. I couldn’t understand why some files were still there when she had been so careful about everything else. But she’d set her files to be wiped on restart, so it was either a mistake or she forgot to shut down.’
The Back Road Page 37
