Sleep Tight (16 page)

‘Sit down, Mum. I need to move around, or I’ll end up being desk-bound for the rest of my career.’ Ignoring the predictable, ‘And a good job too,’ that her mother muttered, Sophie had slowly and steadily made her way to the front door of her mother’s 1930s semi.

Opening the door, she had let out a shriek. ‘Liv? Liv – is it really you? Oh my God. Oh my
God. Let me look at you. I’ve missed you so much.’

There were tears in Liv’s eyes as she had looked Sophie up and down and taken in the extent of her friend’s injuries, so Sophie had done her best to lighten the moment by attempting a little twirl, raising her good arm in the air and shouting, ‘Ta da!’ as she spun round on the better of her two legs, nearly falling over.

‘Oh, Soph – what happened? It said on the news that you were rescuing people from an attack on one of the dam projects when the bomb went off. Are you going to be okay?’

‘Course I am. Just a bit of damage to various bits, but as long as they can get all the parts lined up and operational again, I’ll be right as rain. Come on, Liv. Smile. I could be dead – as some of my mates already are.’ For a moment, Sophie had thought she might lose it, but she’d had years of practice at keeping a smile on her face.

‘Let’s get you sat down, and then we can open a bottle. Any excuse, eh?’ She’d dragged Liv into the sitting room, her arm around her friend’s waist. ‘Look who we’ve got here, Mum.’

‘Ooh, Liv, you’re a sight for sore eyes,’ Sophie’s mum, Margaret, had said. ‘We’ve missed you, you know. Both of us.’

Sophie had seen a flash of guilt cross her friend’s face and came to her rescue.

‘Yes, well – we’re both to blame. If I hadn’t buggered off to the other end of the earth to fight somebody else’s battles, things might have been different. Liv’s been doing the grownup stuff – getting married and having babies. I’ve been playing war games.’

It hadn’t been anything like that at all, really. When she’d left Manchester – initially for officer training at Sandhurst, and then ultimately on her first deployment – she had done everything she could to keep in touch with Liv, but within weeks of Sophie leaving the country, her friend had stopped writing. She had always assumed it was because she hadn’t been there for Liv when Dan went AWOL. She had literally been about to board a flight for Iraq at the time, though, and you can’t tell the British Army that your best friend’s upset so you’re sorry, but you can’t get on the plane.

There had been a couple of letters early on, up until the time when Liv’s parents died – and then it all went quiet. Sophie had understood that the grief must have been so intense that maybe even writing a letter was too painful, so when she heard from her mother that Liv was marrying a man called Robert she had sent a card with a long note wishing the couple all the happiness in the world. That also had seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Sophie wasn’t one to bear a grudge, though; life, as she well knew, was way too short for that, and at least Liv was here now, although the last seven years seemed to have aged her more than Sophie would have expected. The skin looked tight around her friend’s eyes and mouth as if she didn’t smile enough, and the bright light that used to shine from Liv seemed
to have been reduced to a pale glow.

‘Let me get the wine, and then we can settle down and have a good long catch up,’ Sophie had said, limping towards the door.

‘No wine for me, thanks, Sophie. I’m driving and I need to get back for the kids.’

‘Ooh – plural now. How many have you got?’

‘Three. And I have to leave to pick them up from school in about half an hour.’

‘Well, you can have a glass surely?’ she had asked, clinging on to the edge of the door for support.

‘Not really. If I turn up for the children smelling of alcohol, they’ll have social services on me before I can say, “It was just the one glass.”’

‘It can’t be that bad,’ Sophie had said. But she’d looked at Liv’s face, and somehow knew that it was. ‘Okay – cup of tea, then?’

Sophie’s mum was struggling to her feet.

‘Sit down, Sophie. I can manage to make a cup of tea, and you two have a lot of catching up to do as Liv doesn’t appear to have long.’ Sophie hoped her friend hadn’t picked up the slightly sharp note in her mum’s voice. She was obviously thinking:
Why wait so long and then only come for five minutes?
But it was a start.

‘So, Liv, tell me about your life, your husband, your kids – I want to know every sodding detail.’

She’d heard her mother mutter, ‘Your language, Sophie,’ as she went out of the room. The two friends had shared a smile, and it felt good.

‘No, Sophie – tell me about what happened to you. I couldn’t believe it when I saw your picture come up on the news. We don’t watch it very often, but I put it on for five minutes, and there you were. It must have been awful.’

‘You don’t watch the news? How do you know what’s going on in the world? Do you read the papers?’

‘Oh, it’s just Robert. He wants me to be happy, and he thinks bad news upsets me. He sort of filters it – tells me the good stuff, keeps the bad stuff from me. It’s his idea of taking care of me, but I have a quick catch-up every now and then when he’s not around. Never mind that. Just tell me.’

So Sophie had told her about Iraq, Afghanistan and her career in the Intelligence Corps. She had kept the emotion out of her voice, but hadn’t tried to hide the fact that she loved her job. She had known she was gabbling, but she’d wanted to get her story out of the way before her mother came back in the room. She’d told Liv about the day of the bomb, and
the carnage. She was being lauded as a hero, but so many had died and she had only managed to save a few.

When she heard her mother opening the door, she’d quickly changed the subject.

‘Do you remember the day we met? You were doing a happy dance in your room, skipping round upended suitcases, kicking clothes, picking them up, throwing them in the air. You were a maniac.’

Liv had turned to Sophie’s mum, trying to look indignant. ‘Your daughter just barged into my room without knocking, and stood there watching me.’

‘You should have seen her, mum. A real slob, she was – and blamed it all on her dad for being obsessively tidy. I had to fold everything up and help her put it all away. Even when we lived together I had to tidy up after her every few weeks.’

‘Yes, and you always left me a charming note saying “Lazy Cow” or “Messy Mare” or something equally derogatory, if I remember rightly. But we did have a great time, didn’t we?’ Liv had laughed, almost looking like the girl Sophie had first met.

‘
You
did.’ Sophie had said, pointing an accusing finger. ‘I felt like your minder. You were so daring - up for absolutely anything. You volunteered for every hare-brained stunt going, and dragged me into it too, if I didn’t keep an eye on you. I think every man in Manchester was in love with you. I sometimes felt like your bodyguard, fighting them all off.

Liv had grinned. ‘Rubbish. And anyway, once I’d met Dan, I never even looked at anybody else.’

Liv’s face had fallen at the mention of Dan.

‘Poor you. I know it must have hurt like buggery at the time – sorry, Mum. But look at you now. Happily married and three kids. Did you ever find out what happened to Dan?’

‘No. I never heard another word.’

Sophie had nodded and looked down at her clasped hands. She hadn’t known whether it was an appropriate time to tell Liv what she had found out, but she’d never been one for keeping quiet.

‘I met Danush’s brother – Samir,’ she’d said in a soft voice.

‘
What?
’ Sophie had suddenly known she shouldn’t have started this. She had thought her friend would be over Dan by now but, judging by the eagerness with which she leaned towards Sophie, her eyes wide with expectation, that was far from the case. ‘What did he say? Where did you see him?’

‘In Dubai. I caught a nasty bug when I was in one shit hole or another – can’t really remember which. Anyway, I was airlifted to Dubai and taken into hospital. When they said I’d be treated by Doctor Jahander, I did wonder. I remembered you telling me that Samir
was a doctor, although I’m sure it’s a fairly common name. But as soon as I saw him I recognised him. I’d met him before – don’t you remember – when he came over to read his brother the riot act for shaming the family by living in sin with an un-chaste white woman, when he should have been marrying his cousin, or something?’

She could tell by Liv’s face that she remembered it well. But it was only weeks later that Liv had found out she was pregnant, and so if Danush had had any thoughts of leaving Manchester after his PhD, they were quashed.

‘Samir has a job at the hospital in Dubai, which is where he makes his money, and then he spends a few weeks every year working on a voluntary basis in some of the poorer areas of Iran. I liked him.’

In Sophie’s opinion, Olivia had the right to know what Samir had said about Danush. So she’d told her. Maybe this would finally put an end to any dreams she was clinging on to.

By the time Sophie had finished, Liv was clearly fighting back the tears and it was only a few minutes later that she’d said she had to go. Sophie hadn’t known whether she would ever see her one-time best friend ever again. She hadn’t mentioned the fact that Liv had never responded to her letters – that conversation had come much later and with far more tears.

But it was all a long time ago. The months had passed quickly, and so much had happened between then and now.

Sophie shook herself out of her reminiscences. It was time she started to think about the future. She would soon be back on active duty. She had undergone endless operations on her leg, but the final round seemed to have been successful, and she was just waiting for the wound to heal. More importantly, she’d completed a course in Pashto, the language favoured by the Taliban, while she had been recuperating. And she’d been here for her mum, whom she was getting desperately worried about. Her arthritis was getting steadily worse, but at least they’d had the stair lift installed, so she could get up and down to her bedroom.

When she’d first come back from Afghanistan, Sophie had had some savings, and she’d wanted to put money aside to make sure her mum could afford the help she needed. But her mother was having none of it. She was adamant. She wouldn’t let Sophie spend a penny of it. It was perhaps just as well now, because in the last twelve months nearly all of those pennies had gone, and she’d have a hell of a job explaining that to her mother.

Sophie pulled her car into the short drive behind her mum’s silver Fiesta, a car that hadn’t been driven in the last two years but which her mum insisted on keeping for ‘when I’m ready to drive again’. Everybody knew that would be never but nobody had the heart to tell her.

Sophie’s mind was spinning with all these different worries as she retrieved the first of the shopping bags. Balancing it on her knee as she put her key in the front-door lock, she called out to her mother.

‘Only me, Mum.’ There was no response. Perhaps she was sleeping.

Sophie went back out to the car and collected the rest of the bags and took them through to the kitchen to start unpacking them. Maybe she should check on her mum first.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs. The stair lift was at the top, so there was no point looking in the sitting room.

‘Mum,’ she called again softly, not wanting to wake her if she was sleeping. ‘Would you like a cup of tea and a biscuit?’

There was a pause.

‘That would be lovely, Sophie. Thank you.’

Every hair on her body stood on end, because the voice that answered from the upstairs landing was definitely not her mother’s.

25

As soon as Becky reported that Robert Brookes was missing from the house but his car was still there, Tom told her to call the crime scene team. Given the state of the bedroom as described by Becky, it was far from clear whether there had been some major disturbance at the house, or even a break-in. It was the perfect opportunity for getting their guys in, even if it turned out that Robert had simply gone out for a run and left by the back door. Not that Tom believed it for one single moment. He’d gone. Scarpered.

‘Bollocks,’ Tom muttered under his breath. He really should have seen this coming. But they’d had no basis up to now to carry out anything more than a standard search of the house. It had been too early to start pulling the place apart, and whatever his growing suspicions about Robert Brookes, he had planned on bringing him in for formal questioning before he made any decisions about calling in a full forensic team.

What about the woman impersonating Olivia at the guest house? Could Robert have paid somebody to go in his wife’s place in an attempt to conceal the
real
date that she went missing? But this was the third time this ‘Olivia Brookes’ had stayed there, or so they had been told by Mrs Evans. They needed to find out who the woman was, and quickly. Something about her was niggling at him, but he couldn’t for the life of him think what. And then there was the overnight visitor. Was he just another pawn in Robert’s game?

Tom knew his driving was erratic as he made his way towards the Brookes’ house. His head was all over the place this morning with the whole Leo situation, the burglary in Cheshire and now bloody Robert Brookes, but when he realised he had almost mowed down a cyclist, who admittedly was on the wrong side of the road, he pulled his thoughts back round to the job in hand – driving with due care and attention. That lasted all of about five seconds until his phone rang. He touched the button on his console to answer.

‘Tom Douglas.’

‘Tom, it’s Leo. I’m at the cottage. Are you free to talk for a moment?’

‘You must have made an early start, Leo. Thanks for going. I appreciate it.’

‘Well, I set off before eight. I didn’t sleep too well.’ Tom decided not to mention that made two of them. ‘Tom, do you think…’ Leo paused and Tom waited. He heard her take a deep breath. ‘Never mind. It’s probably a conversation for another day. Anyway, back to the house. Max and Ellie managed to tidy up most of the mess and get the house secure again, but it does look as if the intruders were interested in your papers. One of the cupboards in the study has been completely torn apart – they’ve even taken up the floorboards in there. I’ve no idea why. Nowhere else seems to have been damaged.’