Sleep Tight (27 page)

And now, here we are. We can relax. I may have left everything we owned behind us in Manchester, but one thing I am sure of is that there is nothing to connect us to Alderney.

41

‘
Alderney
,’ Tom said in amazement. ‘Why the hell do you think that’s where she is, Gil?’

‘And where on earth is Alderney anyway?’ Becky added.

‘It’s one of the smaller Channel Islands,’ Tom answered. ‘I think it’s the closest one to France, if my memory serves me correctly. What’s led you there?’ he repeated.

Gil tutted in a most irritating way.

‘Can we be clear that I am
not
saying she’s there. Until last Wednesday, somebody using Olivia Brookes’ email address responded to FaceTime messages from Robert Brookes. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this person was Olivia, or that she’s still there. However, you asked me to track down the IP address that she
appeared
to be using. You may remember I told you that most likely she’d purchased an IP address, and that it was a fake.’

Tom gritted his teeth. He knew he was being bad tempered, but he just wanted an answer, not a lecture.

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well, I managed to contact the company. Fortunately they’re not one of the more difficult organisations that make you go through hoops to get any sense out of them. Their service is intended for people who want to hide their location from the general public, not for criminals.’

Tom wanted to tell him to get on with it, but he resisted.

‘So, they’ve confirmed the real IP address, and the Internet service provider is a company in Guernsey. I contacted them to get the physical address of the user. However…’ and once more Gil paused for effect, ‘it turns out she was using the Wi-Fi signal from the airport on the island of Alderney.’

Tom was disappointed that they couldn’t pinpoint her address, but at least now they knew where Olivia was. Or where she
had
been, which was not necessarily one and the
same. Or, indeed, where
somebody
had been – as Gil had pointed out. What appeared to be great news and a real breakthrough could be yet another wild goose chase. If only he could shake off his grumpiness and feel more positive about their progress.

What progress?
Tom felt the weight of their failure to find these children pressing down on him. Every apparently excellent lead seemed to be a dead end. And what did they really know?

They knew for sure that the blood on the study wall wasn’t Olivia’s, but they didn’t know anything else, other than the fact that the blood was from a male. If somebody had been killed in that room, they couldn’t just assume that Robert Brookes was the guilty party. But if he were and he had killed once…

There was no body, but according to Jumbo there was no doubt in his mind that there was one somewhere. There had been so much blood, and when Tom saw the photographs of the luminol he had been horrified by how far the blood had spread.

He had stood in that very room with Robert Brookes, not knowing that behind him, splattered across the wall, was some poor bugger’s lifeblood. He felt he should have known, should have sensed something, but he knew he was being fanciful.

Given Jumbo’s assertion that a body was either still on the premises or had been transported to an unknown location, the forensic team had taken both of the family cars to be tested. If a body had been taken from the scene, there was every chance that it was moved in one of the boots or even on the back seat, although either would be quite unlikely in the Beetle.

Becky was looking puzzled. Something was obviously not adding up in her mind, and Tom realised that he hadn’t really been listening to Gil for several minutes. He had been thinking about the logistics of moving a dead body.

‘That can’t be right,’ Becky said. ‘She can’t have been at the airport when she spoke to Robert on FaceTime. He would have known she wasn’t at home. Surely he would have recognised an airport?’

‘I can assure you, DI Robinson, that it
is
right. And I’m not sure he would recognise this particular airport – it’s not exactly a cosmopolitan hive of activity,’ Gil said. ‘I’ve seen photos. But then it certainly doesn’t look like somebody’s bedroom either.’

Tom felt he had to interrupt.

‘We can’t trust a word that Robert Brookes said, and we know that Olivia wasn’t home last week. The only thing we
do
know is that according to his call logs, somebody responded to him on FaceTime up to Wednesday, and whoever it was – whether Olivia or not – was connected via this IP address, which bizarrely leads us to Alderney airport. But I do tend to agree with Becky that if it
was
Olivia, it would have been difficult for her to have these
conversations from the airport itself.’

‘Quite,’ Gil responded. ‘Which is
precisely
why I made some further enquiries. Apparently this particular Wi-Fi signal can be picked up in several places around the island – so people use it all the time. She could have been anywhere.’

‘Terrific,’ muttered Tom.

‘Sir,’ Nic was standing behind Becky waving a piece of paper in the air. ‘I heard you mention Alderney, and I’ve been checking it out on Wikipedia. Less than two thousand people live on the island, so she’s going to stick out like a sore thumb if she’s just arrived with three children in tow. Somebody’s going to know where she is.’

Tom felt some of his irrational testiness dissipate in the face of his team’s enthusiasm and optimism.

‘Okay. So let’s get on to the local force in Alderney and ask for their help. Give them the background so they know it needs handling carefully. More to the point, we need to be worrying about where the hell Robert Brookes has gone. After what he did to Sophie Duncan and her mother, we have to find Olivia so we can keep her safe until he’s under lock and key.’

Becky was making her way over to Ryan’s desk to brief him, and Tom turned back to Gil with an apologetic smile.

‘Thanks, Gil. And good work. I think this case is getting to all of us.’ Gil raised his eyebrows in a look that clearly said, ‘To some more than others,’ which gave Tom a moment of guilt. He hadn’t meant to be sharp, but how could they know so much and yet not know anything? And on top of that, there was all the stuff with his cottage, not to mention his frustration over Leo.

To cap it all, his mobile rang. Philippa Stanley.

‘Bollocks,’ he muttered to nobody in particular. He was tempted not to answer it, because right now there were more questions than answers, but at least the Alderney connection might just calm her down.

As he pressed the call button on his phone, he thought of something else they needed to do. While he couldn’t for the life of him think how Robert could possibly have connected Olivia to Alderney unless there was something they didn’t know – more than bloody likely in his opinion – instead of just checking international flights out of the UK, they might want to consider making sure he wasn’t on any flight to the Channel Islands. Just to be on the safe side.

Taking a deep breath, he spoke into his phone. ‘Yes, Philippa.’

42

I often wonder whether I must have done something very wrong in a former life for all these terrible things to have happened to me. Until the age of twenty-two, I seemed to sail through life. My parents adored me, I did well at school, had loads of friends, and all the boys I fancied seemed to fancy me back. Even at university, life was sweet. I had to study hard, but I thrived on it, and I thrived on the fun times too. I wanted to be a part of everything – to capture and devour as many experiences as I could. Nothing frightened me, and nothing fazed me.

It’s true that finding out I was pregnant with Jasmine wasn’t part of the original plan, but Danush and I loved each other so very much. We couldn’t bear to be apart in our last two years at university and when we decided to live together I thought the rest of my life was going to be perpetual bliss. How wrong could I have been?

I suppose things started to go wrong when Samir came over from Iran to talk to Danush about his family obligations. He had been sent by their parents to convince Dan that he should go back and marry his cousin, as had been planned for the whole of their lives. I was terrified. I couldn’t lose Dan – he was everything to me. And yet I could see that he was wavering. Not because he didn’t love me, but because he had such a sense of honour. I remember watching the pain on his face as he acknowledged that he was either going to lose me or lose his family. What a terrible choice.

Despite knowing how difficult this was for him, I did nothing to help. I ranted and raved about everything he would be giving up if he left me. He’d be giving up on love, giving up his life in the West as an engineer, so much of what he had always wanted, to go back to Iran – a place he also loved but that until now he had been prepared to sacrifice. For me.

I can’t believe how I behaved. Dan was getting pressure from Samir, and I was applying an even greater pressure because I wanted him so much.

Samir had capitalised on my weakness. He had scoffed at my selfishness and made me feel like an ignorant kid. He was only a few years older than us but already qualified as a
doctor. I
was
like a spoiled child, one who had never once failed to get something she’d wanted. And I was determined not to fail this time either. If that young version of me could see what I have become, what would she think?

I couldn’t lose Dan, but I didn’t know what to do to keep him. I tried to make him jealous – even with his own brother – to make him realise how much he loved me. Samir played along too. It was only later that he told me it wasn’t because he found me attractive. He was hoping it would prove to his brother how shallow I was. My behaviour was, if anything, driving Dan away. I could see it, but I just couldn’t stop.

I tried to excuse the way I acted by saying I was in love, which I thought was more important than anything in the world. But I recognise now that everything had always come so easily to me, and I had no experience of failure.

And then there was a miracle. I discovered I was pregnant.

It felt like a victory, but I really didn’t plan it. Even the young, naive girl that I was could see that trying to persuade Dan to stay with me was one thing, but intentionally getting pregnant in order to keep him was another thing entirely.

But Dan did stay with me, as I knew he would. Samir had already returned to Iran to report back to his parents by the time the pregnancy was confirmed, but Dan gave him the news as soon as we were sure, and Samir was resigned to something he had no control over. I knew what he would be thinking – that I’d planned all this just to keep Dan with me. He would be disgusted with me. I didn’t care, though. I’d won, or so I thought.

The day that Dan left I felt as if my life was over, and if it hadn’t been for Jasmine, I don’t know how I would have survived. Although Dan had stayed with me through the birth of my beautiful daughter and he still appeared to love me with the same passion and care, there were times when I knew he was thinking of his self-imposed exile from his family.

I can remember every minute of the day I lost him. It was November 6th, and I took my baby girl outside to take in the ‘morning after bonfire night’ special atmosphere that I remembered from my childhood. This one day of the year always seemed to dawn with a slight mist lingering from too many bonfires in back gardens, a thin pall of smoke hanging in the air from the smouldering heaps of old wood left to burn out overnight, their sooty scent mixing with a vague whiff of burned-out fireworks to give the day its unique perfume. And there were always surprises on the lawn – the empty shell of a rocket, or a blackened sparkler that somebody had discarded over the fence.

I was disappointed, though. Here on the outskirts of a city in the land of student flats, the morning dawned just like any other, the only new item on the lawn being an empty beer can that somebody must have tossed over the night before on their way home. And when I breathed in deeply, all I got were the usual morning smells of exhaust fumes and the occasional whiff of burned toast.

Although I didn’t know it then, this day was never going to be like any other. It was the day my world shattered into tiny fragments, because that night, Danush never came home. He had gone from my life.

Now I know the truth. I know why he left, but it doesn’t hurt any the less.

In the months after I lost him, it felt as if life could get no worse. My parents hadn’t been Dan’s greatest fans, and of course his disappearance only gave credence to their views. They were models of propriety, and when I screamed that they had never understood – Dan
loved
me – I saw the way my mum sucked in her lips, looking at my dad as if to say, ‘We knew this would happen.’

It wasn’t that they didn’t like Dan, they just didn’t approve of him as my ‘live-in partner’, as my mum called him. They didn’t believe mixed marriages could work. It wasn’t even the fact that he was Iranian. It was because he was a Muslim and, in their eyes at least, I was a Christian.

When he disappeared I thought his religion might have been the problem. Perhaps he had been mistaken for a terrorist and had been dragged off to a deserted warehouse to be beaten up. But the day after he went I had a text from him, saying no more than he was sorry. The police traced his phone to Heathrow, where he’d bought a ticket for Australia. A one-way ticket.

It seemed he didn’t want me, and he didn’t want his family either.

Despite their difficulty in acknowledging my love for Dan, my parents did everything they could to help. They knew how low I was, and they were concerned about their granddaughter. I had thought I was coping well with a new baby, and during those first two months we had seemed to be as happy as any young family could be. Yes, I was tired. Dan was too. But we didn’t mind. It was the start of my dream. Once Dan had gone, I struggled to focus on what Jaz needed and, although I was going through the motions of feeding her and changing her, sometimes I was so tired and weary I could barely drag myself to go to her in the night.