Please, Jess.
Please.
Just when I think it’s about to go to voicemail again, there is aclickon the line as the call is answered. A rustling sound. Other noises in the background that I can’t quite make out.
“Jess?” I say. “What’s happened? Are you OK?”
No answer.
I look up at my brother-in-law, his face as pale as snow.
“Jess,” I say again. “Are you all right? Talk to me.Please.”
The rush of relief that comes next is as powerful as any drug.
“I’m OK,” she says at last, her voice faint and far away. “I lost him. But I’m OK.”
It’s almost two hours later, after dealing with police at the scene and exchanging insurance details with the other driver, before Ican get my wife home. Paramedics treat her at the roadside but the airbags had done an amazing job in absorbing the impact and it was also lucky, they tell her, that the van she’d collided with at the junction was only just pulling out. She’s shaken up, with some bruising to her legs, but insists she doesn’t need to go to the hospital. Her brother’s Skoda is in a rather worse condition and will have to be towed. Fortunately, the van driver was also uninjured and Jess admits straightaway to the police who arrive that it was her fault for going through a red light.
Neither of us mention the Volvo she had been pursuing at the time of the crash.
Back home, she opens up the Find My function on her phone and looks for a location signal for the AirTag. Dom shows us how it works, bringing up a map of the city, zooming in closer and closer onto a blue pulsing dot that I presume denotes the last location of the tiny gadget. I hadn’t been sure it would actually work, but there it was—showing on the map as Nixon Street in Bulwell, on the northwestern outskirts of the city. A small swell of pride blooms in my chest, pride in my wife settling alongside the guilt over her injuries.
You did it, Jess. You got them.
I take a screenshot of the map and send it to my phone. Seeing it arrive alongside my other photos gives me an idea and I select her camera roll, scrolling through the most recent images. There are half a dozen shots of random people in Wollaton Park, individuals, couples, people walking their dogs. But most of the images are grainy and indistinct, taken from too far away to discern anything meaningful. None of the people look in any way furtive, or suspicious, or as if they’re doing anything other than enjoying the park on a warm evening.
The last set of pictures are not from the park. There are adozen or so, shot through the windscreen of a car, zoomed-in shots of a dark street. It looks as if they’ve been taken in burst mode, a whole set of pictures shot in very quick succession, all of the same thing. The first ones are slightly blurred, out of focus, but the last ones are pin sharp as the camera found its range.
They show the back of a gray Volvo estate, caught as it crosses a junction.
And a number plate.
I would go and have a look at the location where the AirTag had ended up. That was all. Get an address, a street number—maybe a quick photo of the Volvo if it wasn’t in a garage—and pass it straight to the police. I wouldn’t knock on the door, or wait around, or do anything that might give the game away. It was very clear what these people were prepared to do, to get what they wanted, and I needed to protect my family.
Jess goes up to bed and Dom insists on staying at our house until I return.
The ring road is quiet as I head toward Bulwell, using the screenshot of the AirTag’s location as a guide. There had been no more texts from the unknown number since the drop-off at Wollaton Park, no reference to the backpack or questions about the items inside it.
A police patrol car flashes past me on the other side of the road, blue lights blazing.
Turning onto Nixon Street, I compare the screenshot to the live map showing on my car’s satnav screen, heading up and around the long slow curve of small semi-detached houses set back fromthe road. It was near the end of this stretch, on the left-hand side and toward the next junction, where the AirTag was transmitting its last location. The houses on the left are replaced by a string of three-story flats, then a small scrubby car park, then an open space before what looked like a pub and a row of shops.
I slow down and check the screenshot again. Maybe another two hundred meters or so: I will drive past first, see if the Volvo is there, then park farther up the street and return on foot for a closer look. Quieter that way.
Slowly, I approach the AirTag’s location, checking the image against the satnav screen again.
This was it—this was the right place. But there are no houses here, only a row of half-derelict shops, boarded-up windows thickly plastered with posters. Drifts of rubbish piled against abandoned doorways, empty cans and broken bottles, old newspapers and flyers, blown together by the wind.
The entire parade of shops seems to be empty. No flats above, no lights on, no signs of life.
I pull over and get out of the car, walk up and down, and double-check the screenshot again. This wasdefinitelythe right place. Across the street is an old petrol station, boarded-up windows heavily tagged with graffiti, pumps standing broken and abandoned in the middle of the potholed forecourt. No CCTV around here, and no people in the immediate vicinity, either. The place smells of rotten wood and oil-soaked concrete.
The black backpack has been discarded like so much rubbish behind one of the pumps.
I shine my phone torch inside—empty.
Apart from a small silver disc nestled at the bottom, with the familiar bitten-apple logo in its center.
