plastic storage boxes.
When they got upstairs Inspector Kirby was pulling out books from Sean’s bookcase in the office, flicking through them one at a time, putting them back haphazardly. Sean would have gone crazy if he’d seen him.
‘This is the only place Sean kept anything from work. If he did bring anything home it would be in this room. And that laptop is mine.’ She pointed at her shiny black Toshiba. It was in a pile with Sean’s laptop and some papers near the door.
‘I’m afraid we’ll have to take that one too.’ The inspector’s tone could have sliced steel. He looked at the policewoman. They were communicating in some unspoken language.
She should have been raging, fuming at them, but she wasn’t. Every file on her laptop was stored on the internet, in a cloud. None of what they were doing mattered. The only thing that mattered was getting Sean back.
She stood there, watching him as he took out and looked through the last of the books on the bottom row of Sean’s bookcase. After he was finished he stood and surveyed the room.
The plainclothes officer she’d seen carrying the other blue box came into the room. He had an empty box in his hand now.
‘Just one more, Tom,’ he said. He bent down and put the laptops into the box. He dropped them in, as if they were far more rugged than you’d imagine they would be.
‘Be careful,’ said Isabel.
‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mrs Ryan. We’re finished, for now.’
‘You’re going?’ The weight on her chest diminished.
‘Yes, Mrs Ryan. We’ll let you know if we find out where your husband is, and please, don’t forget, call us if he contacts you or you hear any news about his whereabouts. We wouldn’t want to disturb you again. We do take into account the impact our investigations have on families. We try to be as reasonable as we can.’
To Isabel that sounded like a threat.
He took out his card, handed it to her.
When they were all gone she sat on the stairs, trembling. She felt exposed, vulnerable. They’d poked into every corner of the house, of their lives.
Her watch said 4:20 p.m. She held her head. She felt as if she’d aged ten years in the last few hours.
The dirty white van with the ACE PLUMBING sticker on its side shook a little as the police car went by. The two men inside didn’t react. They were in the back of the van and could see the front door of the house the police had come from and the entrance to the lane that ran around the houses without moving an inch. But they couldn’t be seen. The black one-way filter on the back windows of the van made sure of that.
Each of the men had two plastic bottles. One to drink from. A second to piss into. It could be a long night. A lot of people stay at home, weeping, when their lives fall apart. Others head for relatives or friends. Some ramble the streets or visit people they blame for what’s happened to them.
Their instructions from Henry Mowlam had been clear. Report on the movements of the target, photograph everyone she meets. Watch out, in particular, for anyone else taking an interest in Isabel Ryan or her house. It was unusual for Henry to request live surveillance, but when he did there was always a good reason.
As the larger of the two men moved in his seat, he reached down and adjusted the holster strapped above his ankle. It was unlikely he’d have to use the weapon, but he always carried it. You never knew what way a job like this could go. There had already been one recent murder in London related to the woman they were watching and further incidents in the past.
He pulled his trouser leg down, hiding the gun.
‘Did you hear what happened to that dancer who was murdered’ he said, softly. Then he leaned towards his companion.
‘Whoever did that was pure fucking evil. This ain’t no ordinary murderer we’re tracking. Just make sure you stay awake on your watch, mate. I don’t want no pieces of my skin getting cut off.’
Had the police got what they wanted, Isabel wondered? Did Sean have anything she didn’t know about on his laptop?
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. The button on the side, which set it to ring silently, had been moved. It did that of its own accord occasionally, just to annoy her.
Had he called?
She checked.
No. No one had.
In front of her, on the hall floor, jutting out from under the crimson curtain that hung down on one side of their front door, was a small pile of letters. She picked them up, more out of habit than anything else. Her hand was trembling. She pressed it to her lips, forced the trembling away.
She went to the kitchen and opened the letters. There was an early Christmas card from Rose, a letter from the gas company, a request for immediate funds from Save the Children, and a bill from their mobile phone company. She was about to put them all in the dresser, in the usual place, when something struck her.
A few months before, when they’d been planning to switch phone companies, she’d gone through one of these phone bills. She’d wondered whether they needed all that detail, all those pages. Shouldn’t they have stopped getting this paper by now? Hadn’t she asked for an online-only bill years ago?
But maybe this was exactly what she needed, details of who Sean had been calling recently. If, and this was definitely one of her total nightmare scenarios, he was seeing someone else, if that was the explanation for all this, there had to be a chance that someone else’s number was in this bill.
Her hand hesitated as she looked at the pages. She didn’t like prying.
Would it be better that he had been with someone else, than that he was involved in some fraud at his office or something worse? She closed her eyes for a moment, rubbed at her forehead. It wasn’t a choice she wanted to make.
She examined the bill. She felt compelled to look, to check the numbers. She examined each page. Some of the numbers she recognised. Their home number, her mobile number, his office number. Then there was a sprinkling of other numbers, some the same, many different.
This was totally impossible. How could she ever figure this out? There was no way she was going to be able to find out anything except by ringing these numbers, and if she did ring them, what was she going to say? Are you and my husband having an affair? Is he hiding out with you?
Yes, that was going to work.
And then she noticed something.
Right at the end, there was a series of calls to the same number. Sean had made ten calls in one day to the number, five the next. Then the calls had stopped. That was two weeks ago.
Who had he been calling ten times?
Why had he stopped?
Her breathing quickened. She could imagine some woman answering the phone, laughing, then cutting the line, if she called the number, asked if Sean was there. Would she hear his voice in the background? Would the woman say something about Sean? Was Sean’s real life somewhere else? She stood, gripped the back of a wooden chair, held it tight with both hands. It was clear what she had to do.
Bzzzzzz.
The front doorbell. Was it Sean? Hope switched on like a floodlight in her brain. Then she heard a strange voice, and the floodlight switched off again.
‘Taxi.’
It was the taxi she’d ordered to take