‘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’tneedit. 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 asnapand 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 whathemade 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 wasLeon. 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 – anything 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,feelher. 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, sonear. 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?
