Feeling guilty for reading the text, she was turning off the phone when there was another ping. But not from the phone in her hand. It seemed to have come from the cupboard under the windowsill.
She opened it.
It was full of printer paper and random cables. There was also a small cardboard box that seemed illuminated from within. Lulu peered inside. Under a tangle of more cables, she could see a screen lit up.
It was another smartphone.
Heart bumping, she pushed aside the cables and pulled it out. There was another text message from Ben Sinclair showing on the screen.
Nick, trying you on your new number too. Could you sell half my DGK holdings when LSE opens? First thing. Please let me know when done. Thanks!
Lulu felt her insides plummet. She stared at the phone in her hand, and then, as if of their own accord, her thumbs were navigating to the call history.
There were only three calls in it.
All from the afternoon of Yvonne’s disappearance.
She let the phone drop to the windowsill. Why would Nick have used a second, secret phone to make calls on that particular afternoon?
There was only one possible explanation.
Lulu sank to her knees, as if in prayer.
No no no, God, no!
He must have left his own phone here, switched on so the police would be able to ascertain that it never left Sunnyside during the crucial period. He had taken the other phone with him, a phone presumably not registered to him, and used it to make trades and calls to his clients, including this Ben Sinclair, so they could give him an alibi and confirm he was working when Yvonne disappeared.
Andy and Yvonne and Michael had been right.
Lulu had been so, so wrong.
Nick had killed Yvonne.
Because Yvonne knew he had killed his family.
Nick.
Nick?
Nick was some sort of psychopath?
But this was madness! Psychopaths were callous. They didn’t feel empathy. They didn’t love people, because they couldn’t. And Lulu knew, without a shadow of doubt, that Nick loved her – too much, if anything. And he’d loved his dad. The idea of Nick being capable of hurting anyone, let alone his family, his beloved father . . .
But she had the proof right here. The proof that he’d set himself up with an alibi for Yvonne’s murder, just as Andy had told her he’d set himself up with one for the murder of the delinquent boy.
How could she have been so stupid, thinking Andy and Yvonne had somehow been feeding off each other’s paranoia? Why hadn’t she listened to them?
Nick – her Nick, her darling Nick –
He had killed all those people.
Yvonne had been trying to tell her that his problems weren’t those of a poor, traumatised soul. Controlling behaviour and rages could be symptoms of PTSD, but they could also be psychopathic traits. Psychopaths were often charming and plausible. They were manipulative. Nick had been playing a part, all this time.
And sucked Lulu right in.
Controlled her.
She grabbed both phones and got shakily to her feet. She had to go to the police with these. They could look at the call histories and see that he was using the second phone on the afternoon of Yvonne’s disappearance. No doubt his plan was to dispose of it and, if the police ever got round to checking the actual phone records and queried the lack of calls on his own phone – which had never left Sunnyside – at the crucial time, he’d have said he used a different phone, an old one, one he had since chucked out.
Oh, he’d have some plausible answer.
She stared at herself in the darkened window, stared into her own eyes, as if this was someone apart from herself, some woman who had been so, so stupid and gullible and – Behind the reflected Lulu, there was movement.
She wheeled round.
Nick, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, raised his eyebrows at her.
She looked down at the phones in her hand. ‘I – I heard a ping,’ she blurted.
‘Couldn’t you sleep?’
She shook her head.
‘Oh, darling. How about a cup of hot chocolate?’
She couldn’t move, she couldn’t say anything as he crossed the room and put an arm around her shoulders, his hand gripping her upper arm just a little too tightly. He gave her a gentle shake. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes,’ she croaked.
He took the phones from her hand and laid them down, side by side, on the windowsill.
‘Come on then, let’s get you sorted.’
It was like she’d stepped into one of her nightmares. This couldn’t actually be happening, could it? Numbly, she walked at his side, feeling the heat of his body against hers, willing him not to challenge her, not to ask her anything about the phones. She just had to go along with him, with anything he suggested, pretend she didn’t suspect anything.
And hope she got a chance to run.
22
Maggie - November 1997
They sat round Michael and Yvonne’s big kitchen table, the four of them, to have what Yvonne called a ‘crisis meeting’ while Nick was at school. Maggie had put Isla down in one of the spare bedrooms, and the baby monitor sat on the worktop behind her. It was a grey, misty, gloomy morning, and Yvonne had put on all the wee lights under the high-level cupboards as well as the overhead ones.
‘We locked ourselves in the bedroom last night,’ went Duncan, looking down into his mug of coffee. ‘Locked ourselves away from Nick.’
‘Well, you’re the only one here who finds anything strange in that,’ said Yvonne briskly. ‘Thank God Maggie had the sense to buy a bolt for the door.’
‘But . . .’ Duncan was hanging on by a thread. ‘What were we thinking he’d do? Come in while we slept and . . . what?’
‘Hurt Isla, maybe,’ said Yvonne. ‘Who knows what he’s capable of? For God’s sake, Duncan, he tried to kill your baby! You have to keep remembering that. Remembering what you saw. Nick pushing the pram into the path of that timber lorry. He wants her dead.’
As if on cue, a mewing sound came from the monitor, then stopped.