With the help of another officer, he forces me into the vehicle, and I collapse onto the seat, out of breath from the struggle. The pain when he releases my arm is terrible and I nurse it and I also feel as if something frozen is melting down my spine because things weren’t supposed to go this way. My plan was better than this.
They haven’t slammed the door on me when my phone buzzes.
The DNA results. Must be.
I get my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, greedy to know, desperate to be able to show the result to Imogen before they drive me away so that when I’ve explained why they’re wrong about me and that Edie and Paul have absconded and I’m just a guy tryingto do the right thing for a girl who’s actually my daughter and they let me go, Imogen will be waiting for me and she and I can start all over again.
There’s an email from the company who runs the tests. My hand shakes as I open it and I click on the link to the PDF that contains proof of everything I’ve ever wanted and it starts to download.
The police officer takes the phone out of my hand.
“Thank you, sir,” he says. “I’ll have that.”
He slams the car door and all the sound from the outside world becomes a little bit muted and I can see through the window that he’s looking at my phone, reading the email, and I can’t believe this is happening.
I bang on the window, but he ignores me, and I stop when I see the policewoman approach because I want to hear what they’re saying.
“Is the phone unlocked?” Rosie asks Billy.
“Yes.”
“Brilliant. Don’t let it lock itself again. Keep swiping. It’ll save us a nightmare trying to get it unlocked.”
“I won’t. Don’t worry.”
“Jo’s taken the girl inside, poor thing. I’ve called social services and requested a family liaison officer, and we need to make sure someone stays with her until they arrive, but drinks later, yeah? Just goes to show, you don’t know what the day’s going to bring when you get up in the morning. What an absolute result.”
Billy looks at the phone as the PDF finishes downloading.
“What was our friend so keen to look at do we think?” he says. “Oh! Paternity test results.”
He scans down.
“Blah, blah,” he says. “Technical stuff. . . . Okay, here we are: “The probability of paternity is zero percent.”
He turns to the car and holds the phone up against the window so the perp can read the screen.
“Don’t worry!” he shouts. “The kid’s not yours.”
Sunday—One Year Later
Jayne hesitates before opening the email
Jayne hesitates before opening the email. It’s from William Elliott. She hasn’t thought of that name for so long that she feels as if the message has dropped into her inbox from another world.
She checks her emails as infrequently as possible. She’s withdrawn from friends and they’ve stopped contacting her regularly. Journalists find her address periodically and hound her with earnest requests for interviews. They want her to tell her story and Mark’s and sometimes they shamelessly offer bribes, the generosity of which often surprises but never tempts her.
Mark has been called a “serial killer” by the press and this has created a market. People are slavering for details, for “personal” stories about him. And who better to provide one than his wife?
The subject line on William Elliott’s email is “Hello” which encourages her. It makes a nice change.
As well as contact from journalists, Jayne also gets emails and messages from people who want to tell her what a disgusting person she is and how she must be partly responsible for what Mark did.
It makes her think of how much vitriol must have fueled their presumably extensive efforts to find her and she wonders if they have a bottomless reserve of it, to be tapped into indiscriminately whenever they feel disgust or outrage, or if their vitriol is directed specifically at her, and at Mark because of what he did.
She wonders if they write to him at his institution or if they just target her, the wife, who should have known what he was capable of.
Some of them imply that she could have stopped him. Others accuse her of failing to do so.
