Her Last Tomorrow (15 page)

Having switched my laptop on and opened my web browser, I fight the urge to download TOR and log on to the dark web. A large part of me desperately wants to see if Geoff has been in touch — see what he has to say for himself — but I can’t risk it. That connection now has to be completely severed. Instead, I check my emails.

I don’t know how so many people have found my email address, but there’s a deluge of messages from complete strangers giving me their theories as to what happened to Ellie. Perhaps predictably, a number of them accuse me, Tasha or both of us of killing her and hiding her body. Some of the messages contain the most vile abuse I’ve ever read, but right now that’s washing over me. I know they’re wrong, and soon enough so will they.

Some of the friendlier theories are actually even wackier. A couple are convinced they have evidence of alien spacecraft being in the area on the day Ellie disappeared, some are certain they know where she is through dowsing and looking at ley lines, others that they’ve seen visions in their dreams which reveal Ellie’s location.

I scroll through, reading a few lines of each email, becoming increasingly worried about the mental state of some people in the world. One, though, catches my eye. I read it again more closely.

You should look at Lynda Macauley. I hope you find your daughter.

Below it is an address in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Another crank who wants to frame his neighbour. Great. I fire off what has become my stock response to people who’ve got a suspicion which doesn’t involve aliens or ghosts.

If you have some information which may help, please call Detective Inspector Jane McKenna.

As I hit the send button, the doorbell goes. I look out the front window and see McKenna stood at the door. Nice timing. I head into the hallway and open the door, standing aside to let her through.

‘How’s Tasha?’ she asks.

‘Yeah, she’s okay. Just tired and shaken, I think.’
I’m fine too, thanks for asking.

‘Probably best she rests. Takes it out of you, something like that,’ she says as she sits down in the living room. ‘You’ll need to keep a close eye on her. Quite often it’s the mental scarring that does the most damage. Can really knock someone’s confidence, something like that. Once she’s feeling better physically, it’s best to get her out the house again. Get back on the horse as quickly as possible.’

‘That’s the plan,’ I said. ‘Funny, isn’t it? How Tasha and I have spent most of our lives living complete normality, wanting to escape and do something different, and now we’re spending every waking minute trying to regain normality again.’ McKenna just smiles. ‘I can’t describe how bizarre it feels to be living this sort of nightmare. Unable to live a normal life in your own home.’

‘Being invaded every day by police officers,’ she adds, smiling.

‘Yeah, that too.’ I smile as well. It feels weird.

‘Which reminds me,’ she says. ‘It was Derek who you say saw you last night, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘Why? Don’t tell me he’s denied that too.’

McKenna smiles. ‘No, he didn’t deny it. He said he saw you. He actually went into great detail about how he saw you rush out of the house after Tasha and skidded to a halt when you saw him watching, then slunk back inside. Why did you do that, Nick?’

I swallow. ‘Do what?’ I ask, not even thinking about what I’m saying.

‘Why did you race after her?’

‘Uh, she forgot something,’ I say.

‘What did she forget?’

‘Hmm?’

‘What did she forget, Nick?’

My brain’s racing at a thousand miles an hour, but going nowhere useful. ‘Her phone,’ I say.

‘Her phone? Is that why Emma couldn’t reach her when she called to find out where she was?’

I feel suddenly relieved. ‘Yeah. Probably.’

‘So why didn’t you hear the phone ringing when Emma called? In fact, why did you try to call Tasha’s phone to find out where she was after Emma called you to say she hadn’t turned up? Surely if you knew she had left her phone at home, you wouldn’t have tried calling her.’

‘I forgot. Force of habit,’ I say, my insides feeling like they’re on fire.

McKenna nods. ‘Right. So the phone’s in the house somewhere is it?’

I shake my head. ‘I dunno. I presume so. Does it matter?’

‘Possibly not,’ she replies. ‘Mind if I have a look for it?’

‘Yeah I do actually,’ I say. McKenna stops dead in her tracks. ‘Tasha’s only just got out of hospital. I’d really rather you didn’t go around ransacking the house right now. It’s a phone. It can wait.’

McKenna looks at me, a stern look in her eyes. ‘That phone could prove to be important evidence in a case of violent assault on your wife, Nick.’

‘No it couldn’t. Because she didn’t take it with her to the park, did she? It was here the whole time, so it’s not evidence at all.’

‘Unless you’re somehow mistaken and she did take it with her.’

’In which case there’s no point searching the house, is there?’ I think that’s what they call having the upper hand. McKenna knows it, too, and changes tack.

’Don’t you want us to catch the person who did this to Tasha?’

‘Of course I do,’ I reply.

‘Why did you stop when you saw Derek and go back inside the house? Surely you wouldn’t want Tasha walking through the park without her phone, would you?’ Before I can answer, she’s fired another question at me. ‘Your back door leads through your garden to a footpath, doesn’t it? You can reach Jubilee Park from there. I suppose you could’ve taken that route to give Tasha her phone back, couldn’t you?’

She’s bombarding me with questions. I know exactly what she’s doing, but I can’t stop it and I can’t deal with it.

‘Well, I—’

‘Which begs the question as to why you didn’t just keep on up the road; why you stopped as soon as you saw Derek and took a route to Jubilee Park which’d make you less likely to be seen.’

‘Can I get a glass of water?’ I ask. ‘I’m feeling really weird.’

I keep my face relatively neutral, but inside I’m screaming.

McKenna’s gone. The CCTV at the end of the footpath, next to the corner shop, shows that I didn’t get that far. She knows I didn’t go to Jubilee Park last night. Somehow, that makes it even worse.

She knows something’s wrong, though. That’s why she was putting the pressure on, trying to trip me up and find out what was going on. All she knows at the moment is what
didn’t
happen.

I’m still shaking. I’ve downed three pints of water, trying to stop my head from spinning round in circles. Despite Derek’s alibi and the CCTV footage showing that I can’t have done it myself, I’m starting to panic that McKenna might trace Tasha’s attack back to me. What if they find the person who did it? What if he caves in and confesses? What if he comes to some sort of plea bargain with the police and McKenna comes knocking?

They can’t prove a thing. I know they can’t. Okay, so I spoke to Mark. I met up with an old school friend. What of it? And yeah, I was in the Talbot Arms and I spoke to Warren. That doesn’t mean a thing. Even if they link the attack to Warren, it doesn’t prove anything. At that point they’ll probably work out what went on, but how can they prove it?

All of these thoughts whizz around my head, barely registering before they disappear again and make way for another.

I go to pour myself another glass of water but opt for something stronger.

After a second glass of whisky, I decide to head upstairs. When I get there, Tasha’s sitting up in bed with the laptop on her knees, replying to an email.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

‘Working.’

‘Come on, Tash,’ I say, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. ‘I think you can take a few days off work seeing as you’ve just been mugged and your daughter has gone missing. They might just give you that much.’

‘I can’t afford the time off,’ she replies, not even bothering to take her eyes off the screen.

‘They can’t begrudge you the time off. You’ve got a legal right to it,’ I tell her.

‘It’s not like that. That’s not how it works. I’ve already missed important meetings.’

‘So what? They can have someone else do your work while you’re away,’ I say, trying to convince her.

Finally, she looks at me. There’s anger in her eyes.

‘Do you have any idea the sacrifices I’ve made for my career?’ she says. I feel like telling her yes, she’s sacrificed everything for it, including a decent family life and a moral compass. ‘I’ve worked so hard to get as far as I have, and now it’s all going to go to waste because I’m stuck here at home and other people are picking up my work and my clients. Is that really what you want?’

I snap. ‘How the hell can you only be thinking about work when your daughter is missing? What’s wrong with you?’ She sits and stares blankly at me so I let loose, giving her both barrels. ‘You’ve never cared about Ellie, have you? Or me. It’s always been your career. Your perfect image. Your own needs. You leave me at home to look after
our
daughter while you go off following your career.’

‘Nick, just because I’ve got a proper job and you haven’t, I don’t think—’

I don’t hear any more as I slam the bedroom door and head back downstairs for another night on the sofa.

This sofa’s starting to feel more familiar than my own bed. That can only be a bad sign, but it’s a hell of a lot better than sleeping upstairs with the dragon.

I’ve switched off push notifications for email on my phone. Every time the thing buzzed it nearly gave me a heart attack. Of course, it was always spam or a newsletter from a company I once bought a pen from eight years earlier.

I need to regain some control, so now I only check my emails manually. I’ve always got the constant worry that after the police had their tech guys look through my phone, they might have put something on it to trace my movements. I tell myself that’s daft; it wouldn’t be that straightforward with an iPhone and they’d never get the clearance to do that unless they really had some reason to suspect me. Plus, it’s probably illegal. I’m not naïve enough to think that these things don’t go on, but I’ve got to draw the line somewhere or the paranoia will finish me.

I open the Mail app on my phone and five messages ping through. That’s just from the last
 
couple of hours. Funnily enough, the concerned messages from family and friends seem to have stopped and there’s just four newsletters and another email from Jen Hood.

To keep myself calm and focused, I methodically delete each of the other four emails first. I’ve got to keep a level head. Then, fingers shaking, I open Jen Hood’s email. The subject line is
Ellie
and the email has just the words ‘
The password is Natasha’
followed by a Vimeo link.

I click the link and it takes me straight to a Vimeo page. The text on the screen says ‘
This is a password protected video. Do you have the password to watch this private video?’
It sounds weird, but I’m really fucked off by the picture of a hand being held palm-out like some sort of jumped-up nightclub bouncer. I try to remain calm and type Natasha’s name in the password field. I hit
Submit
.

The next page loads everything instantly except the video itself, which seems to be taking an age, hidden behind a plain white box. I’m on the verge of throwing the phone out of the window, then my screen changes and the video loads. It’s now a black box. I press the play button and turn my phone sideways to get the full-screen view.

After a couple of seconds, the black screen fades to a blurred shot of what could be any young girl. It’s the whimpering I recognise first, which is bizarre, because it’s not a whimpering I’ve heard before. It certainly isn’t the usual whimpering like the way she did that morning when she forgot the picture of Miss Williams. It’s pained, desperate, real.

‘Daddy, I want to come home,’ she says as the picture begins to clear and the tears start to cloud my eyes. ‘Please can you do what you have to do so I can come home.’ She begins to cry. They say love’s just a chemical reaction in the brain, but I can feel the pain in my chest as I hear her pained desperation. Just as quickly as it started, the video ends.

I’m lost, completely lost. One part of me wants to watch it over and over again, but another part knows I can’t bear to. I close the Vimeo page and my email inbox reappears, this time with another new email. It doesn’t even register at first — I’m still in pieces — but before long I realise it’s another email from Jen Hood. I open it and read the text.

I’m glad to see you’ve finally seen what it is you have to do, but it’s just not good enough. I want her dead, not just injured. You’ll need to try harder. She has to die or you will never see Ellie again. Don’t even bother trying to track us down. I can see everything you’re doing. One false move and you will never see her again. You know what to do.

My hands shaking, I close the email app and lock my phone.

I need another drink.

I’m in a quandary. My initial instinct is to take the video to the police. After all, they’ll be able to trace it, won’t they? All of this talk of killing Tasha to free Ellie seems completely irrelevant when I can see my baby girl crying on a video screen, begging to come home. This needs to end now.