I See You (35 page)

Diggers
stared at Nick. Kelly thought she saw amusement in his eyes, but his mouth was set hard and she decided she was imagining it. ‘Would you care to explain why?’

‘Operation FURNISS has proved to be more wide-ranging than first anticipated, sir. The Maidstone rape indicated that offences aren’t confined to within the M25, and although the adverts only started in September the full extent of the crimes aren’t yet clear. We’ve so far struggled for leads on the principal offender and I thought it would be a good idea to take a broader look at rapes with a history of stalking. I thought it possible the pattern might have been repeated in other cities.’

‘Over a decade ago?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Diggers took off his glasses. He eyed Nick thoughtfully, then looked at Kelly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?’

‘I – I’m not sure, sir.’

‘I take it you haven’t found a link between Operation FURNISS and Durham?’ The question was directed at Kelly, but it was Nick who answered.

‘I’ve ruled it out,’ he said, without any of Kelly’s hesitation.

‘I thought as much.’ Diggers looked from Kelly to Nick and back again. Kelly held her breath. ‘Might I suggest we consider the background research into similar crimes complete?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get back to work, the pair of you.’

They were in the doorway when Diggers called to Kelly. ‘One more thing …’

‘Sir?’

‘Offenders, coppers, witnesses, victims … there’s one common thread running through them all, Kelly, and it’s that no two people are the same. Every victim deals differently with what’s happened to them; some are hell-bent on revenge, others want justice, some are looking for closure, and some’ – he looked her straight in the eye – ‘some just want to move on.’

Kelly
thought of Lexi, and of Cathy Tanning’s desire to start over, in a house to which no one but her had the keys. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t get hung up on the victims who want a different outcome to the one we want. It doesn’t make them wrong. Focus that drive of yours – your not inconsiderable talent – on the case as a whole. Somewhere out there is a serial offender responsible for the rapes, murders and stalking of dozens of women. Find him.’

People
get caught when they get careless.

You won’t find my name in the digital trail leading to findtheone.com – I’ve only ever used other people’s names, borrowed from wallets and coat pockets.

James Stanford, who had no idea he had a mailbox on Old Gloucester Road, or a credit card with which he was paying for adverts placed in the
London Gazette.
Mai Suo Li, the Chinese student who was happy to hand over his British bank account in exchange for enough cash for his flight home.

Other people’s names. Never mine.

The receipt, though. That was careless.

A door code, scribbled thoughtlessly on the nearest scrap of paper, never a consideration given to the fact that it could mean the end of everything. When I think of it now – when I think of the carelessness – it fills me with rage. So stupid. Without that receipt everything was perfect. Untraceable.

It isn’t over, though. When you’re cornered, there’s only one thing to do.

Go down fighting.

By
lunchtime the dining table is clear again and the house has regained some semblance of order. I sit at the table and work my way through Graham’s accounts, finding the methodical process of logging taxi fares and lunches strangely relaxing. My phone beeps with a message from PC Swift, returning the text I sent her earlier.

I read the message twice. Then I pick up the file of miscellaneous paperwork from the table and retrieve the receipt for Espress Oh! I look at the number scribbled on the back, then search for the date. The ink at the bottom is smudged and I can’t make it out. How long has it been here? It’s not cold in the house, but I’m shaking and the receipt flutters in my hand. I walk into the kitchen.

‘Katie?’

‘Mmm?’

She’s buttering bread on the counter without using a plate. She brushes the crumbs into her hand and shakes them into the sink. ‘Sorry.’ She sees my face. ‘It’s only a few crumbs, Mum.’

I
hand her the receipt. ‘Have you ever been to this place?’ I feel light-headed, as though I’ve come up for air too fast. I can feel my pulse ticking, and I count each beat in an effort to slow it down.

Katie screws up her nose. ‘Don’t think so. Where is it?’

‘Near Leicester Square.’ When you face danger your body is supposed to go into one of two modes: fight or flight. But mine isn’t doing either. It’s frozen, wanting to run but unable to move.

‘Oh, I know it! At least, I think so. I’ve not been there, but I’ve walked past it. Why do you want to know?’

I don’t want to panic Katie. I tell her about PC Swift’s email, but calmly, as though it’s nothing of great importance. The buzzing in my ears grows louder. It’s not a coincidence. I know it.

‘It’s just a receipt. It doesn’t have to belong to the person behind the website. Does it?’ Her eyes flicker across my face, trying to read me; trying to gauge how worried I am.

Yes
.

‘No, of course not.’

‘It could have come from anyone; a coat pocket, an old plastic bag, anything.’ We’re both pretending it’s something innocuous. A lone sock. A stray cat. Anything but a receipt that somehow links a maniac to our house. ‘I leave receipts in bags all the time.’

I want her to be right. I think of all the times I’ve grabbed a carrier bag from the dozens stuffed into the cupboard under the sink, and found abandoned receipts from previous shopping trips.

I want her to be right, but I know from the prickle of fear across my neck that she isn’t. That the only reason that receipt is in our house is because someone brought it in.

‘Bit of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’ I try to smile but it falls apart, morphing into something quite different.

Fear.

There’s
a voice in my head I won’t listen to; a creeping sense of dread telling me the answer is staring me in the face.

‘We need to think rationally about it,’ Katie is saying. ‘Who’s been in the house recently?’

‘You, me, Justin and Simon,’ I say, ‘obviously. And Melissa and Neil. The pile of paperwork I put on the table last night – the receipts and the invoices – that belongs to Graham Hallow.’

‘Could it be his?’

‘Maybe.’ I think of the pile of
Gazettes
on Graham’s desk, and remember his perfectly plausible explanation for them. ‘But he’s been really supportive lately – he’s given me time off work. I can’t see him doing something like this.’ A thought enters my head. The police might not have found any evidence against Isaac, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any to find. ‘We cleared the table before Sunday lunch last month. Isaac was here.’

Katie’s mouth opens. ‘What are you suggesting?’

I shrug, but it’s unconvincing, even to me. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply listing the people who have been in the house recently.’

‘You can’t think Isaac has anything to do with this? Mum, I hadn’t even met him when this all started – you said yourself the ads have been running since September.’

‘He took a picture of you, Katie. Without you knowing. Don’t you think that’s creepy?’

‘To send to another cast member! Not to use on a website.’ She’s yelling at me, defensive and angry.

‘How do you know?’ I shout back.

There’s a silence between us as we both take stock of ourselves. ‘It could be anyone’s,’ Katie says stubbornly.

‘Then we should search the house,’ I say. She nods.

‘Justin’s room first.’

‘Justin? You can’t think …’ I see her face. ‘Fine.’

Even
as a toddler Justin loved computers above books. I used to worry I’d done something wrong – let him watch too much television – but when Katie came along and became such a bookworm, I realised they were just two different children. We didn’t even have a computer at home when they were young, but ICT was about the only subject Justin would turn up for at school. He begged Matt and me for his own computer and when we couldn’t afford it he saved his pocket money and bought the parts, each one arriving in a Jiffy bag to the house, to be stored under his bed with his Meccano sets and Lego figures. He built that first computer himself, with instructions he’d printed at the library, and as time went on he added more memory, a bigger hard disk, a better graphics card. At twelve, Justin knew more about computers and the Internet than I did at thirty.

I remember making him sit down after school one day, before he ran upstairs to join whatever gaming network he was into, impressing upon him the dangers of giving too much away online; that the teens he spent so long chatting to might not be teens at all, but fifty-year-old perverts, salivating over their keyboards.

‘I’m too clever for the paedos,’ he said, laughing. ‘They could never catch me.’

I was impressed, I suppose. Proud my son was so savvy, so much more clued up about technology than I was.

In all those years of worrying that Justin might fall prey to an online attacker, it never once crossed my mind he might be one himself. He can’t be, I think, in the very next beat. I’d know it.

Justin’s bedroom smells of stale smoke and socks. On the bed is a pile of clean laundry I put there yesterday, the neatly folded stack now fallen to one side, where Justin has slept in his bed without bothering to move them or put them away. I open the curtains to let in some light, and find half a dozen
mugs, three used as ashtrays. A neatly rolled joint lies next to a lighter.

‘Check his drawers,’ I tell Katie, who is standing in the doorway. She doesn’t move. ‘Now! We don’t know how long we’ve got.’ I sit on the bed and open Justin’s laptop.

‘Mum, this feels wrong.’

‘And running a website selling women’s commutes to men who want to rape or kill them isn’t?’

‘He wouldn’t do that!’

‘I don’t think so either. But we need to be sure. Search his room.’

‘I don’t even know what I’m looking for,’ Katie says, but she pulls open his wardrobe doors and starts rifling through his shelves.

‘More receipts from Espress Oh!,’ I say, trying to think of something incriminating. ‘Photos of women, information about their commutes …’ Justin’s laptop is password protected. I stare at the screen, and his user name, Game8oy_94, looks back at me, beside the tiny avatar of Justin’s palm thrust towards the camera.

‘Money?’ Katie says.

‘Definitely. Anything out of the ordinary. What could Justin’s password be?’ I try his date of birth and
ACCESS DENIED: TWO ATTEMPTS REMAINING
appears on the screen.

‘Money,’ Katie says again, and I realise it isn’t a question. I look up. She’s holding an envelope, exactly like the one Justin handed me with my rent money. It’s stuffed so full of twenty-and ten-pound notes the flap won’t stay shut. ‘His wages from the cafe, do you think?’

Katie doesn’t know about Melissa’s cash-in-hand tax dodge, and although I doubt she’d care I don’t plan on telling her. The more people who know, the more likelihood there is that HMRC will find out, and that’s trouble neither Melissa nor I need.

‘I
guess so,’ I say vaguely. ‘Put it back.’

I take another stab at Justin’s password, this time entering a mash-up of our address and the name of his first pet; a gerbil called Gerald who escaped and lived under the floorboards in our bathroom for several months.

ACCESS DENIED: ONE ATTEMPT REMAINING.

I daren’t risk another try. ‘Is there anything else in the wardrobe?’

‘Not that I can find.’ Katie moves on to the tallboy, pulling out each drawer and running a hand expertly beneath each one, checking to see if anything has been taped there. She feels among his clothes and I close the laptop and leave it on the bed in what I hope is the same position I found it. ‘How about the laptop?’

‘I can’t get in.’

‘Mum …’ Katie doesn’t look at me as she speaks. ‘You know the receipt could be Simon’s.’

My answer is immediate. ‘It isn’t Simon’s.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do.’ I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. ‘Simon loves me. He would never hurt me.’

Katie slams a drawer shut, making me jump. ‘You’ll point the finger at Isaac, but you won’t even entertain the idea of Simon being involved?’

‘You’ve known Isaac five minutes.’

‘It’s only fair, Mum. If we’re going through Justin’s stuff, and accusing Isaac, then we have to consider Simon, too. We need to search his room.’

‘I’m not searching Simon’s room, Katie! How could I ever expect him to trust me again?’

‘Look, I’m not saying he’s involved, or even that the Espress Oh! receipt is his. But it could be.’ I shake my head and she throws up her hands. ‘Mum, it could be! At least consider it.’

‘We’ll
wait until he gets home, and then we can all go up together.’

Katie is unflinching. ‘No, Mum. Now.’

The staircase leading to the attic is narrow, and the door on the first-floor landing gives the impression there is nothing but a cupboard behind; perhaps a bathroom or a small bedroom. Before Simon moved in I used to use it as a sort of escape: it wasn’t properly furnished, but I piled cushions up here and would shut the door and lie down for half an hour, stealing time for myself from the maelstrom of single parenting. I used to love how hidden it felt. Now it feels dangerous, each step up taking me away from the openness of the rest of the house, away from safety.

‘What if Simon comes home?’ I say. Simon and I have nothing to hide from each other, but we’re both adults; we’ve always agreed it’s important to have our own space. Our own lives. I can’t imagine what he’d say if he could see Katie and me now, snooping around his office.