‘The only ones we have are from when he was with Olivia – so they must be at least nine years old. They’re the ones she provided at the time.’ He could see Becky’s eyes lingering on the smiling face of Danush Jahander, his full lips turned up in a beaming smile displaying perfect white teeth, and his curly dark hair brushed back from a smooth, broad forehead. A bit different from Becky’s fifty-odd-year-old ex-lover, he couldn’t help thinking – and a damn sight better looking.
Becky’s phone was ringing, so he left her to it while he stared at Danush Jahander’s photo. He looked like a decent guy, with what appeared to be a genuine smile that definitely reached his deep brown eyes, but Tom wasn’t naive enough to believe that looks counted for much. He could have been a right bastard for all they knew.
He was momentarily distracted by Becky’s conversation.
‘Are you sure about this, Gil?’ she asked. There was a pause. ‘Okay, well could you please surface from below decks and explain it to DCI Douglas, who’s sitting opposite me right now. I think we need to understand a bit more about this. Right – we’ll see you in a few minutes then.’ Becky hung up.
Tom gave her a quizzical look, and waited.
‘Gil’s going to explain how FaceTime works, and what’s been going on with the two laptops. A bit technical for me, I’m afraid. I might understand it, but not well enough to repeat it and have it make sense. Are you okay to hang on, or do you want me to give you a call when he gets here?’
Tom agreed to wait and took out his mobile to make a few quick calls – one of which was to Leo. He had been planning on suggesting they got together tonight, but he had no idea what time he would be finished here. Maybe he should offer to cook them a late supper, if she could buy the ingredients. They had to eat, after all. But there was no reply, and he didn’t have time to leave a message. He looked up as he heard footsteps approaching the desk.
‘Gil, pull up a chair,’ Becky said.
Tom smiled and nodded at Gil Tennant. As unlike a stereotypical technology geek as you could imagine, he was almost dapper in appearance. Short and slender as a teenage girl, today he was wearing mustard-coloured jeans and a black polo shirt, with immaculate black suede trainers to match. Tom had noticed on a few occasions that Gil was a man who liked to co-ordinate his shoes: a strange, but harmless fetish. His wiry hair was gelled into submission, and he looked permanently surprised – a look that Tom sometimes suspected was down to a bit of surreptitious eyebrow plucking.
‘Okaaaay,’ Gil said, drawing out the word dramatically. ‘A few interesting facts here. What do you know about FaceTime?’
Tom looked at Becky and shrugged. ‘I know what it is. I’ve used it on my Mac at home. But let’s assume nothing. That’s probably best.’
‘FaceTime is used to communicate between any two relatively recent Apple devices: iPhones, iPads, Macs, whatever. It’s a video link – just like Skype, really. Okay up to now?’
Tom hid a smile at being spoken to as if he were six years old, and nodded.
‘Right. Well the thing is, if FaceTime calls are made between computers rather than mobile phones, as they were in this case…
allegedly
,’ Gil stressed the word, paused and gave them both a little smirk, ‘the contact is between email addresses, so we can use the computer’s IP address to identify the user’s location.’
Tom tuned out while Gil explained in unnecessary detail the difference between the various technologies and the intricacies of tracing people. He had been through this before, so he let his mind wander to Olivia Brookes and the first time he had met her, one wild and windy November night almost nine years ago. He shouldn’t have been there at all, really, but Ryan Tippetts was giving Tom a lift home when the call came through. Ryan had been asked to visit Olivia and Tom had gone with him.
His lasting memory was of Olivia rocking back and forth, clasping a crying baby to her chest and repeating over and over again, ‘Dan wouldn’t leave us. I know he wouldn’t leave us. Please find him.’ It had been heartbreaking to watch her. Tom’s daughter Lucy was only a little older than Olivia’s baby, and he knew how Kate would have reacted in the same circumstances. Of course, that was when he and Kate were happy.
Tom realised that Gil had paused again, looking from one to the other and back again to see if they were keeping up with him.
‘Now, let’s start with Mr Brookes, shall we?’ he beamed at them both. ‘Am I right in saying that he claims to have contacted her daily?’
‘Yes,’ Becky added. ‘Up to Friday morning.’
Gil made a clicking sound with his tongue and wagged his index finger in the air.
‘Not true, Mr Brookes. We’ve checked his laptop, and he did contact his wife using FaceTime – every night and most mornings. But only until Wednesday. After his Wednesday evening call, there are no more calls from his laptop.’
Gil had finally captured Tom’s interest. So Robert had lied about when he’d last spoken to his wife. Why did that not surprise him?
‘But we’ve checked the log on Mrs Brookes’ laptop too, and the interesting thing is that the log is showing no calls between her and her husband
at all
in the last two weeks. Which means, if I need to spell it out, that when he called her she definitely wasn't speaking to him from this laptop. She must have been using a different computer, or maybe an iPad.’
That didn’t make sense to Tom. If Olivia had been in the bedroom, lying on the bed as Robert said, she would have needed something mobile. But, according to Robert, apart from Olivia’s own laptop – which Gil claimed she definitely didn’t use – there was no other suitable device in the house.
Gil hadn’t finished. His head swivelled from side to side, looking first at one and then the other with a cat-that-got-the-cream expression. ‘However… there
are
several calls from Mrs Brookes’ computer to a Hotmail account over the last few months, and the IP address appears to be,’ he paused for effect, ‘in
Iran
.’
Becky had been scribbling notes as Gil spoke, but at this news she stopped and looked up. Tom intercepted her look, and no words were necessary.
‘The next thing we would normally do is contact the Internet Service Provider and do all the paperwork to get them to release details of the precise location where the call was received. But I don’t fancy your chances with an Iranian ISP, frankly.’
‘You are absolutely certain this IP address is in Iran, are you Gil?’ he asked. ‘When was the last time contact was made?’
Gil’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows nearly shot through the ceiling.
‘I’m
absolutely
certain, DCI Douglas. I don’t make mistakes like that. The last contact with the Hotmail account was just over two weeks ago.’ Gil consulted his notes. ‘Two weeks ago yesterday, to be precise.’
Tom picked up a pencil from the desk and rotated it in his fingers. Was it possible that
Olivia Brookes had just decided she was off with her Iranian lover, and that was all there was to it? But it didn’t feel like that.
Why had Robert lied about when he’d spoken to her? Gil said the last contact was Wednesday – although not on Olivia’s laptop. Robert said she was definitely there, in their house, until Friday – but that didn’t ring true either. So why was he lying?
‘Sorry, Gil. I just need a moment to think,’ Tom said. ‘There’s nothing confusing about your explanation, just about this bloody Brookes family and their mix of truth and lies. Is there more?’
‘A bit. As I mentioned, we know Robert Brookes was making calls to his wife’s email address until Wednesday. We’ve tracked where the device that
received
the calls was situated. It appears the calls were received in France.’
Becky looked bemused. ‘She hasn’t got a passport, so how the hell did she get there?’
‘She probably didn’t.’
Becky sagged in the chair and pulled a face.
‘Huh?’ she said.
‘We’re pretty sure it’s a fake IP address. She must have bought it on the Internet – it’s easy enough to do. But if you want to find out the
real
IP address, you’re going to have to do some more paperwork, I’m afraid.’
‘Why not route it round the world to disguise it, and confuse us completely?’ Tom asked. His own brother had made a fortune out of this particular technology, and it wasn’t the first crime he’d been involved in where locations had been disguised in this way.
‘Not much good with FaceTime. The signal wouldn’t be strong enough and the video would degrade. We can get the details of her real location from the provider, but her husband wouldn’t be able to – which I imagine was her intention. It’s going to take time, probably two or three days and, as I said, lots of lovely paperwork.’
Gil was quiet for a moment, looking eagerly from one to the other.
‘I know this may be stating the obvious, but can I just draw your attention to the fact that just because Robert Brookes contacted his wife’s
email address
on FaceTime, there is absolutely no evidence at all that it was Olivia on the other end of the call. We only have Robert’s word for that. Anybody who knows her email address and password could have answered Robert’s calls. He could have done it himself, come to that, just to make us believe that she’s alive and kicking. So even if we track the location down, there is absolutely no guarantee we will find Olivia at the end of the trail.’
Great. Just great, Tom thought. So all we know is that Robert lied about speaking to Olivia on Friday. We don’t really know if he
ever
spoke to her in the last two weeks – it could
all have been set up. And that was the only evidence we had that she is actually alive. Maybe Becky had been right all along.
But if Robert had killed her, where the hell were the children?
17
He lay on the bed, his head propped up on four pillows. Having been up all night, Robert needed to sleep but his mind was spinning. He wished he hadn’t involved the police now, but it had seemed the right thing to do. If he hadn’t reported Olivia missing he would have looked as guilty as sin. But oddly it seemed that filing the report hadn’t diminished the suspicions that were already surrounding him. And that was something he needed to deal with.
It was reaching the point where he was going to have to give the police more – more information than he wanted to – but there might be no other choice. They were going to find out anyway, sooner or later, and so maybe if he were the one to show them the evidence rather than leaving them to find it themselves, it would score him a few points.
Olivia, why did this have to happen?
He had always known he was second best and that nobody would ever replace Danush in her eyes, but he had tried so very hard to make her love him. She said she did, but he could sense the void hiding behind the words. She didn’t understand how that had made him feel – how his heart raced with the desire to pump some emotion into her and bring back the laughing, carefree girl he’d first seen all those years ago and instantly fallen in love with. To Robert it seemed as if a spotlight shone on Olivia wherever she was, and everybody around her faded into the shadows. She was all he could see. But back then she hadn’t even known he existed.
He had known what he’d needed to do. He’d made himself indispensable, an essential part of her life. Without him, she couldn’t function. He had proved it to her over and over again. But still she remained contained within herself, and he was never sure whether the armour she protected herself with was to stop him getting in, or to avoid exposing the gaping wounds beneath.
His gaze flicked around their bedroom, resting for a brief moment on the dressing table, picturing Olivia sitting there, brushing her hair. When they’d bought this house, he had
made sure that the upstairs could be adapted to provide a whole suite for them – a bedroom big enough to hold a comfortable sofa, a dressing room and a luxury en suite bathroom. He wanted Olivia to feel spoiled. It was decorated predominantly in shades of cream and grey with a few accents of plum. It looked like something photographed for a very expensive magazine – but somehow it had failed to create the feeling of an intimate hideaway that he had striven for. His eyes stung as he remembered his initial hopes for their life together.
Brushing aside all wistful thoughts of what might have been, he focused on his anger and on everything he had discovered in Anglesey. He leaned across the bed to where he had thrown his jacket, pulled the creased photo out of the breast pocket, and held it in both hands. Mrs Evans had seen him looking at it, pinned to her noticeboard with a collection of snapshots.
‘When was this taken, Mrs Evans?’ he had asked, forcing his voice to remain steady.
‘Just last week. Your wife was on her way out of the door as one of our regulars was taking snaps of the house. She always sends me copies. It’s a shame Olivia wasn’t full face to the camera, because she’s such a pretty girl, isn’t she? Would you like the photo, Mr Brookes?’
Robert had wanted to rip it from the wall and tear it to shreds, but that wasn’t going to help, and he might just need it.
‘Thank you, Mrs Evans. I appreciate it. Do you have any others of my wife?’
But she hadn’t. This was the only one.
He stared at it, but whichever path his mind travelled down, it came to dead end after dead end.
From where he was sitting against the headboard, he could see the road opposite. He had been watching the police knocking on doors, speaking to all the neighbours and sharing the fact that Olivia was missing. He knew what they would all be thinking.
Finally they had reached the house of Edith Preston directly opposite, and he was certain she’d have plenty to say. Whether it had any substance or not was another thing. He expected her to invite the policeman in, sit him down, and give him chapter and verse on her thoughts about the Brookes family, so it was a surprise when she stepped outside the front door and started to point.
Robert sat up further in the bed. What was she saying? She grabbed the policeman’s sleeve and dragged him across to just in front of her sitting room window – probably to indicate where she had been standing, peering through the curtains as always. And then she pointed. First to the road, then to the drive. Then she did a funny twisty action with her finger: point and curl, point and curl. What was that about?