by T. M. Logan
It seems weird that there are no pleas from family for her safe return. Surely it must have been her family who raised the alarm that she and Mia were missing? Who else could it have been?
The landline rings with its unfamiliar tone and I reach for the handset, thinking it’s my mum calling again. But it’s my ex-husband instead: Richard’s voice filling my ear, deep and full, as familiar as my own.
I try to be calm whenever we speak, refusing to let him see the scars he’s left me with.
‘Richard,’ I say, wondering whether he’s seen my picture in the news.
‘I’ve been trying to reach your mobile but I couldn’t get hold of you,’ he says, sounding concerned. ‘I was going to leave a message. I thought you’d be at work.’
‘Day off in lieu today, I’ve been . . .’ It doesn’t seem right to tell him, to share this new piece of my life with him. ‘Been busy sorting some things out. Mobile’s been switched off for a bit.’
‘Is everything OK? You sound tired.’
‘Fine. Just work stuff.’
A silence, then he clears his throat.
‘Listen, Ellen, I wanted to let you know about something, before you . . . hear about it from anyone else.’ He sounds reticent, almost apologetic. ‘The thing is, I – we, I mean Francesca and me – have got some news and I thought it best that you hear it straight from the horse’s mouth rather than—’
‘I know, Richard.’ I’d rather not hear him say it out loud.
‘About her being—’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, right.’ He doesn’t ask me how I know. ‘Sorry.’
I close my eyes, force the words out.
‘I’m happy for you. Honestly. Both of you.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Thank you, Ellen. That means a lot. It just came a bit out of the blue when it happened, you know? I thought it would be better if you heard it from me first.’
‘Sure.’ I suddenly feel hot, my throat thick and painful. ‘Listen, I’ve got to go, OK?’
I cut him off before he can launch into any more details, and we say our goodbyes. I sit for a moment in my silent lounge, the phone clutched in my white-knuckled hand, blinking tears away. The pain is back, that old familiar sense of failure tightening its rusty barbs around my stomach. In a box somewhere upstairs is a set of framed photos of our navy wedding, with him in full dress uniform, a guard of honour outside the church in my mum’s village. We had left the service a couple of years later to start our new life together, to start our family. A man I once thought I would spend my life with; a man who seemed to have his whole life planned out. By the time I realised I was no longer part of his plan, it was already too late to save our marriage.
I don’t know how long I sit there with the phone in my hand. Eventually I go back upstairs to the bedroom and find the old sweatshirt they gave me at the police station, balled up at the end of my bed. I reach into the pocket and pull out a small tightly-folded square of white cloth, the muslin that Mia was clutching when we arrived at the police station. Gilbourne had asked for all of the baby’s things – he was quite particular about it. But I’d felt strangely reluctant to hand it over. They didn’t need it. I decided to keep it instead, just this one little thing of hers.
I sit on the bed, blinds drawn against the gathering dark, rolling the cloth between my fingers, the cotton soft and crumpled, remembering the way Mia had clutched it in her own tiny hands, how it had comforted her. I lift the cloth to my face and inhale deeply, that unmistakeable clean baby smell filling my nostrils.
I think back to the day before, late leaving the hospital, not caring whether I made my train or had to wait for the next one. Not caring about anything really anymore, the deadening finality of the doctor’s words blotting out everything else. Walking slowly through the town on autopilot, barely aware of the time, barely aware of the people or the traffic or the daily life going on around me. Just wanting to be on my own, to not talk to anyone or think about anything. I would have missed my train – the 2.11 to Marylebone – except it had been three minutes late, so instead I made it with seconds to spare. I was the last passenger to climb aboard, the carriage door sliding shut right behind me. If the 2.11 had been on time, I would have missed it. I would never have met Kathryn. I would have been spared the trauma of the abduction, the pain of my injuries and the terror of the escape, I would have avoided a bruising interrogation by the police and the criminal charges now hanging over me.
But I would never have met Mia either, never held her, never been there to take care of her.
I was glad the train had been late.
21
Leon
He had downloaded the new pictures and blown them up to A4 size. Now they were tacked to the board above his desk alongside the images of the other women. Alongside the two brunettes: the pretty one and the short one. And the blonde, the one with the piercings. Three girls, three victims. He checked his fingers. There was a faint residue of printer ink so he rolled the white latex gloves off his hands with a snap and dropped them into the stainless steel germ-capture pedal bin beside the desk. Plucked a new pair from the large box and eased his long fingers into them, flexing them until the latex was snug against his skin. Then he settled back at his desk and studied the new images. There were three: one in profile as she looked out of the train window, one smiling down at the baby, and one when she was looking straight at the camera, her lips parting, a frown already forming on her face.
She was strange, this one. Tall, athletic, a confidence to the way she walked. Different to the others.
This was his sanctuary, his fortress, his safe space. Fully sound-proofed so no noise could penetrate the walls in either direction, windows painstakingly taped so no light could reach inside. An array of mobile phones lined up and charging on the right side of his big corner desk. This place was what he made it, without any interruptions or intrusions from the outside world. In here, he could find his own truth, make his own reality.
His birth name, his baptism name, was Leonard. But no one called him that anymore. His mother had been the last one, and she was long gone. To the few who knew him now, most of whom he kept at arm’s length, he was Leon. Like the lion. King of the jungle, Panthera Leo, top of the food chain. A keystone predator, zoologists called them, because of their disproportionately large effect on their natural environment. He liked that.
His eyes returned to the two large screens in front of him, arrayed with a selection of google search results, social media accounts and an image-handling programme. A third screen had multiple tabs open using the TOR browser that gave anonymous access to the dark web.
But he wasn’t using the dark web for this; the open web should give him what he needed. The harvesting software on his laptop sought out internet-connected devices looking for unsecured Wi-Fi; most people were never even aware their phones were doing it. On the train he had used it to harvest the details of the Devlin woman’s phone, including her user ID, first name and the networks it had connected to in the last few days, and from there he’d tracked down her social media accounts and gone through the images one by one.
She was on Facebook, posting infrequently until three months ago when her activity dropped to virtually nothing. Before that there had been pictures of her and some predictably handsome drone named Richard Sloane – husband, presumably – together at a restaurant, on a beach, at a back-garden barbecue. But since early June, nothing. Her Twitter account had seen a similar decline in activity, also going back to the same time. Posts on fundraising stuff to do with the Royal Navy and Royal Marines charity. The last post was the second of June. He returned to Facebook and made a note of all the check-ins over the last six months. Then scrolled back through the images posted, clicking on each one and blowing them up to fill the whole of the thirty-seven-inch monitor, studying each carefully for location tags, street signs, menus, landmarks, backgrounds, car number plates, logos, company names – an
ything that would help him triangulate her location. Noting all the people who were tagged in her pictures for later perusal. There were more pictures of the cat and the husband than her. In one from May captioned ‘The two men in my life xx ’, the husband was lying on his back on the sofa with the big brown-and-black cat sprawled across his chest. Leon suppressed a shudder of disgust as his eyes skated across the image, searching for clues. It was in high-definition, probably a phone camera with ten megapixels plus, a quality that would have been uncommon even a few years ago.
There.
He saved the picture and opened it in the image handling programme, then zoomed in and enhanced it. Highlighted an area below the cat’s chin and blew it up another two hundred per cent. Then again.
The cat’s tag. It was angled towards the camera, a flat silver disc hanging from its collar. He zoomed in another 25 per cent, sharpened the image, smiled to himself. At normal resolution, you wouldn’t have even noticed the careful engraving. But with a little enhancing, it was right there.
Dizzy
46 Claverton Gdns
07791 626957
He switched to another screen and called up Google Maps.
THURSDAY
22
Mia is crying.
A plaintive, mewling cry that cuts right to the bone, right to my core. I can hear her, feel her. The cry is swelling to fill the room, the sound squeezing tightly around my heart. Mia needs me. She’s afraid, in danger, frightened in the dark. I snap awake. Reach for her, hands searching in the darkness to lift her up and hold her to my chest and—
Mia isn’t here.
I lie back down against the pillow, heart thudding against my ribs. The crying was so real, so near. Almost as if she was in the room with me. I lie in the darkness, waiting for my heart rate to steady, staring at the outline of moonlight leaking in around the edges of the blinds. It’s almost 4 a.m., more than thirty hours now since I last saw Mia. I know she was taken to the hospital for a precautionary check over, but I wonder where she is now. With a foster family? In some council-run facility? Or have they found Kathryn, reunited the two of them?
I shift my legs under the duvet and feel the comforting shape of Dizzy, my tabby cat, curled up at the foot of the bed. Richard had never liked him sleeping upstairs – he claimed his padding about in the night kept him awake – but now Richard’s gone and I like Dizzy’s company. I’m still not used to sleeping alone, to waking up alone. I sit up, the night-time air cool on my arms, and give him a scratch behind the ears. He doesn’t stir but a soft bass purr starts up deep in his chest.
That’s when I hear it.
Not a cry this time. A sound. A creak of wooden floorboards shifting under weight. I lift my hand from the velvety fur on Dizzy’s head and his purring slowly fades back into the dark. I hold my breath, my pulse ticking faster. Ten seconds of silence spools out, twenty, before it comes again. An almost imperceptible creak, slow, deliberate, the kind of sound Richard used to make when he came back from ‘working late’ with the new colleague who was now carrying his baby. The kind of sound you make when you’re trying very hard not to make any sound at all.
Downstairs.
Dominic’s words come back to me.
‘I will come looking for you and I will find you. You’ll wake up one night and I’ll be standing there at the end of your bed.’
I reach for my bedside lamp, half-expecting the light to reveal his face glowering at me from the corner of the room, or blocking the doorway, holding the broad-bladed knife.
But I’m alone in the bedroom, just me and the cat. The air seems suddenly colder and I shiver in my pyjamas, a thick wedge of fear lodging painfully in my throat. Very carefully, I lift my phone from the bedside table and type 999, so I just have to hit the green ‘dial’ button to make the call. The smart thing to do would be to push something heavy in front of the bedroom door, barricade myself in, stay quiet and call the police now.
My thumb hovers over the dial button.
But there’s anger behind the fear, too. How dare he come to my house? How dare he track me down, break in, violate my home? Who the hell does he think he is?
If it even is him. Maybe it’s just the creak of my little house cooling in the night. Maybe it’s some poor creature that Dizzy brought in while I was sleeping, half-dead, trying to make its escape. Or maybe it’s nothing all. Just my imagination working overtime, conjuring babies’ cries and the sounds of an intruder in the night.
All these thoughts spin through my mind in a matter of seconds as I sit up, listening for the next sound. Nothing. As quietly as I can, I swing my legs out of bed and stand up, pulling on my thick towelling dressing gown. I go around to the other side of the bed, where Richard used to keep an old sawn-off piece of curtain pole for eventualities like this. I just hope he didn’t take it with him when he left.
He didn’t. It’s still there, leaning up against the wall, an eighteen-inch long baton of wood that feels smooth and solid in my right hand. Gripping it tightly, the phone still in my other hand, I move to the door. My heart is beating so fast I feel like it’s going to fly out of my chest, my legs tingling with adrenaline. I wait another minute, debating whether to turn the door handle. This is my bloody house. I am not going to cower in the bedroom.
I am nobody’s victim.
Slowly, carefully, I open the door to the landing as silently as I can. All I can hear is the breath in my throat and the thundering of my heart. I use my phone hand to hit the main light switch, squinting against the sudden brightness as the landing and stairs are bathed in halogen light.
‘I’ve called the police!’ I shout down the stairs. ‘They’re on their way.’
At the top of the stairs I listen again. A creak? A click? Something else?
I take the stairs slowly, straining my ears to hear the slightest sound, hitting the other lights when I get to the bottom. I tiptoe down the hall, breath trapped in my throat, checking the front door is locked and bolted with the security chain on. I check all the rooms, turning all the lights on as I go, every bulb blazing bright in the night to banish the shadows and illuminate the hiding places. The sliding glass door in the lounge is closed and locked. The little dining room with its chairs pushed tightly into the table. The kitchen is last, my narrow galley kitchen with its worktops left and right, a sink looking out over the small garden blanketed in darkness. The iPad there is untouched, plugged in to charge on the kitchen side. I reach the back door that leads out into the narrow alleyway with the garden one side, the street on the other. I test the handle, expecting it to remain firm and unmoving under my palm like the rest.
But the handle gives and the door swings open, a blast of cold night air greeting me.
I stand for a second, frozen with shock, eyes blinking into the darkness – is someone there? A face, a pair of eyes? Movement at the far end of the garden? – before I slam the door closed again and turn the key in the lock. Twisting it all the way around until I hear the metallic click of the deadbolt slotting into place. Testing the handle again twice, to make sure it’s solid and secure.
Clammy sweat dampens the back of my neck. There is a smell too, faint and fading. A ghost of something sour in the cold kitchen air, sweat and dirt and exhaled breath; then there’s fear rising in my throat and I turn back to the hallway raising the baton to strike—
There is no one there.
Heart thudding painfully in my chest, I check the phone in my left hand again, light up the screen up with a shaking hand to make sure the 999 call is only one press away. Listen to the sounds of my house again, straining my ears to pick up any tiny movement. A soft noise on the stairs, descending slowly. Footsteps. I grip the baton in a moist palm. Steps nearing the bottom now. Soft. Padding.
Dizzy appears at the foot of the stairs and walks slowly into the kitchen, winds his way between my legs and sits down by his food bowl. Yawning and blinking slowly up at me. Early breakfast?
‘Too early,’ I say to him, my voice
loud and shaky in the silent house. But the cat’s calmness relaxes me slightly. If there was someone else still here, he would have sensed it, surely, would be on alert. I check back through all the rooms again anyway, looking behind curtains and anywhere else someone might be concealed. The cat follows me every step of the way until I return to the kitchen and put a few treats in his bowl.
I watch him eat. I’ve been on my own here every night for three months but I’ve never felt as alone as I do right this minute. Did I leave the kitchen door unlocked? I was still tired from the previous night at the police station, still strung out and distracted. Maybe I just forgot to do it. Locking up the house at night always used to be Richard’s job, one of his night-time tasks, and I’m still acclimatising to his absence. I think for a moment. Maybe it was Richard. Maybe he let himself in – he still has a key. But why would he be creeping around in the middle of the night? That wouldn’t make sense at all, and he would have mentioned it on the phone earlier – but I text him anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that third glass of wine before I went to bed. Maybe I really did just forget to check the back door.
Or maybe someone is still looking for Mia, and he found a way in.
Because he thought she might be here. With me.
Another thought comes swiftly after the first.
As long as he is still out there, Mia is still in danger.
23
I leave all the lights on for the rest of the night. Sleep is an impossibility now, so instead I check all the doors and windows again, search all the rooms twice – even the little box room and the garage – checking under all the beds, then finally shower and dress and put a pot of coffee on. No TV or radio, no Alexa, nothing to mask the sound if someone tries to get into my house again. I make a mental note to buy a couple of deadbolts for the kitchen door and fit them before tonight. Then I scan a dozen news websites for updates on Mia and Kathryn, but there doesn’t seem to be anything new beyond what they were running yesterday. Kathryn is still missing. The unnamed baby is barely mentioned, almost a footnote to the story now she has been found. The CCTV image of me no longer features on most of them.
