The Back Road

50

Pat was waiting by the open door, obviously anticipating Tom’s arrival, but he was casting anxious glances around the neighbourhood.

‘Everything okay, Pat?’ Tom asked.

‘Sorry - I was checking to see if Mimi was back yet. I need to talk to you before she gets here. You’d better come in.’

Tom walked into the small sitting room as Pat shut the door and walked over to the computer, where a screensaver was drawing vaguely nauseating patterns in blue and green.

‘I’m sorry to drag you out tonight. I hope you weren’t busy.’

Tom smiled to himself, but shook his head.

‘I do have somewhere that I need to be shortly, but Leo said you sounded worried on the phone.’

‘I wanted to show you this, to see what you think,’ Pat said, pointing to the laptop on the computer desk. He walked across and sat down. Tom stood behind and watched over his shoulder.

Pat rolled the mouse and the screen burst into life revealing what appeared to be a list of phone numbers, some of which had the words ‘blacklist’ next to them. The numbers didn’t mean anything to Tom, although one looked vaguely familiar.

‘These numbers are all on my phone,’ Pat said. ‘Those that are marked ‘black list’ are Georgia, Max and Ellie.’

It must have been Ellie’s number that he recognised from when she’d called earlier.

There was a menu at the top of the screen that offered other options, such as SMS, email, GPS, and Pat selected SMS.

‘This is a list of all the texts that I’ve received and sent for the last week or so. There’s even a section for texts that I didn’t send, but have been sent as if from my phone. What does it mean, Tom?’

Tom knew immediately what it meant, although this was by far the most sophisticated of the software applications that he had seen.

‘Where’s your phone, Pat? I want to show you something.’

Pat fished his mobile from the pocket of his trousers and put it on the desk.

‘This is why I didn’t call Max’s house from my mobile. I’m not sure I understand what’s happening, but I’m sure that I don’t like it.’

Tom leaned forward towards the desk.

‘You did right. But can I have control of the mouse for a moment? Hold your phone up as if you are looking at it, but watch the computer screen.

Pat lifted the phone until it was in front, but slightly to the side of his face so that it wasn’t blocking sight of the monitor.

Tom rolled the mouse to the menu and clicked.

‘Shit!’ Pat stared at the computer screen, as a mirror image of his horrified face stared back. He looked at Tom. ‘What did you do?’

‘I switched your camera on remotely. Look at your phone.’

Pat glanced at his phone, and could see that the camera light was on.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

‘Your phone has been tampered with and an app has been installed. I can switch on your camera wherever you are, and whatever the camera can see will be displayed on the screen. I can even switch on the speaker remotely so that I can hear every word you’re saying.’

Tom looked at Pat with sympathy. Mimi had clearly not trusted him an inch, and from what Leo said she was probably right not to. But installing this sort of application on his phone was extreme. She would have known his every move, and would have been able to manipulate all his relationships by blocking calls, sending fake texts as if they were from him - the works.

‘Bloody hell,’ Pat said. ‘What a mess. It feels as if she’s invaded my body - knows my every thought and shares every moment I have with somebody else. No wonder she knew every time I went to Georgia’s. She always phoned me on some pretext within moments of me arriving.’

‘That would be from your GPS. It tracks where you are. She would have been able to log everything on here, but it would also have sent alerts to her own mobile every time you sent a text. How did you find this, Pat? Wasn’t there a password?’ Tom asked.

‘Yeah, but this is an old computer from school. They all have password logger software on them. She didn’t know it was there - why would she? So I called up the password for her user area. The daft thing was, I was only looking at the cricket scores, but when I saw how many times she’d been on this site, I decided to have a look. That’s where the logs of all my mobile activity were.’

Pat closed the computer window and turned round in his chair.

‘Sorry to drag you into this, Tom. I just wanted to know if I was going mad or not. It’s an awful thing to say, and no reflection on the child, but I wish to God that Mimi wasn’t pregnant. I can’t live with somebody who has so little faith in me.’

Tom couldn’t think of a single appropriate thing to say, so he changed the subject.

‘Leo said you mentioned Abbie Campbell when you phoned, Pat. This is actually about you and Mimi, and I can’t see where Abbie comes into it. Did Leo misunderstand?’ He was trying hard to curb his irritation. He didn’t need to sort out Pat’s domestic issues at this moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pat said, turning back to the computer. ‘I got a bit carried away with the mobile stuff, but it is relevant. When I was looking through Mimi’s files to see what else she might be hiding, I decided to look in the trash folder. I found some photos. They’re not of anybody I know, but they’re all of young girls. And one of them is called Chloe.

* * *

Leo wasn’t happy sitting out here on her own. Too much thinking time. Tom had been inside the house for what felt like hours, when in actual fact it was probably more like ten minutes. It was ridiculous, making her wait in the car. She wasn’t in any danger from Pat. The trouble was, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to, all she could do was think - and all this soul-searching wasn’t doing her any good at all.

She had been so wrong about Ellie, believing that she’d been meeting Gary that night. Of all the ridiculous ideas. And Ellie had been wrong about Max too. How had they all got into such a mess?

But none of it answered the burning question - who killed Sean? And why, for God’s sake?

Leo fought to dismiss the image of Sean’s mangled body from her memory, but she only succeeded in replacing one grim thought with another. Try as she might, she couldn’t eradicate from her mind the facts about her father that Tom had shared earlier, and now that she was alone they hovered at the edge of her consciousness like black vultures, ready to swoop.

She may not have thought much of him as a man, or at least any love she may have felt for him had been violently suppressed after she had been offloaded onto Ellie’s mother. As she had grown older and begun to understand what he’d done to her own mum, the last remaining fragments of affection had turned to contempt. But who wanted to live with the knowledge that they had been fathered by a monster? How could she come to terms with the fact that the man her mother had loved had such a dark side? The thought made her feel physically sick, and she was terrified of what it would do to Ellie.

It was strange, but since Tom had told her about him she could now vividly recall details of her father that had eluded her only a couple of short days ago. He would have been just over fifty when he disappeared for the last time, but he dressed like a much younger man. Or at least, he tried to. She remembered smart suits on work days, and brightly coloured ties. But when he went out in the evening - which she seemed to think he did practically every night - his jeans were that bit too tight in an era where others were wearing looser clothes, and his leather bomber jacket always made her think that he was trying that bit too hard. But maybe all teenage girls feel like that about their fathers. She did remember some girls at school saying her dad was cool, but she wasn’t impressed. She had felt vaguely embarrassed by him.

Now, she was ashamed, although shame had already played a huge part in her life so it was nothing new. Ever since arriving in this village, she had been viewed as something of a dirty secret, but she had learned to hold her head high and ignore what other people thought. If all of this ever came out, she would just have to do the same again.

The silence in the car was broken by the ringing of a phone. She knew it wasn’t hers and realised that Tom must have left his in the side pocket of the Jeep. She leaned across, but couldn’t reach it.

‘Bugger.’ She shuffled onto her knees, and managed to scuttle across the wide central console and squeeze down behind the steering wheel. After all that, when she picked the phone up it stopped ringing. Looking at the display to see if it was Max, she noticed that it said Steve. Wasn’t he the detective that Tom had been talking to? If it was important, no doubt he would phone back.

Deciding that she would stay on this side of the Jeep until Tom had finished with Pat, she switched the ignition on to get power, and started to fiddle with the radio. She needed something to drown out her thoughts. Her uninformed twiddling resulted in a burst of loud music, and she couldn’t for the life of her find where to switch the volume down. She felt a brief draught on her neck from somewhere just as she found the right button and managed to take the level down to something tolerable.

And then she felt it. She knew, without looking, that somebody was in the car behind her. She could feel their breath changing the atmosphere, and every inch of her flesh tingled with fear. For a second, she didn’t move. She felt a shifting of the air behind her as she groped blindly for the door handle.

* * *

Pat opened the folder, and Tom could see a number of image files.

‘There’s a whole folder of pictures of girls at around the same age here - but it was the name Chloe that made me think. Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I thought I should ask you before wasting anybody else’s time.’

‘Can I grab your chair for a moment, Pat?’

Sitting down quickly and leaning towards the computer, Tom checked out all the files that Pat had found and confirmed that he was right. They were all pictures of girls around fourteen or fifteen years old. All the photos were low resolution, so it was unlikely that they were original. Tom guessed that they had been grabbed from social network sites.

He checked the browser history, but couldn’t find what he was looking for. That wasn’t much of a surprise. If his guess was correct, there was a degree of expertise here. So why hadn’t she emptied the trash and cleaned her computer?

Tom had an idea.

‘What are you looking for?’ Pat asked.

‘I’m no expert,’ he said, ‘but I know a bit about computer security. My brother made an absolute fortune out of it before he died, and I did listen occasionally to some of the less technical stuff he told me about. Do you mind if I have a look round? There’s a couple of things that I want to check.’

Tom clicked a few items on the screen and opened a few menus. It only took him three or four minutes.

‘Bingo,’ he said.

* * *

As Leo reached for the door handle, there was a rush of movement from behind her left shoulder.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said a voice that she instantly recognised. A voice that usually sounded so timid but which Leo had acknowledged yesterday was a clever act. Still, she would never have expected this.

A sharp, cold point was stuck into the side of her neck, and she could smell the hot, sweaty body that was crouched in the gap between the front seats. ‘Make any move and this knife goes through your throat.’

Leo tried to keep calm.

‘What do you want, Mimi? If it’s money, take my bag. Take what you want, and go.’

‘I need a car. The police will be here soon, so I need to get away, and you’re going to take me.’

The knife pressed sharply against Leo’s neck, and she could feel drops of warm blood running down to her collarbone.

‘Why don’t I just get out? Take the car. You can have it.’

She heard a snigger in her left ear, as if that was a ridiculous suggestion.

‘Because I’m not thick. You’d run straight to your policeman, and this heap of a car would be picked up in no time. If Tom comes out and you’re gone, he’ll assume that you were in a strop and drove off without him, because you are a stroppy bitch, aren’t you? Besides - you’re my insurance. You can be my hostage. But I will get away, Leo - it’s up to you whether you help me or you die right now.’

The mirthless laughter from behind made Leo’s blood turn to ice.

* * *

Tom turned round on the computer chair and looked at Pat’s dazed expression.

‘It’s all there. There’s no doubt about it, I’m sorry to say. Mimi has been setting up false identities on Facebook. She’s the Chloe that the police have been looking for. She knows her way around this stuff somehow, because she’d hidden her tracks pretty well for an amateur. She’s disguised her IP address, and erased most of the files completely. I couldn’t understand why some files were still there when she had been so careful about everything else. But she’d set her files to be wiped on restart, so it was either a mistake or she forgot to shut down.’

‘That would be my fault, I guess.’ Patrick admitted. ‘She started the shutdown process as she was going out, but I interrupted it so I could log onto BBC Sport.’

Tom stood up.

‘I need to make a call, I’m afraid.’

Pat ignored Tom. He looked totally baffled. ‘Why would she do this? Why would she pretend to be somebody called Chloe so that she could be friends with Abbie Campbell? It doesn’t make any sense. And why all those other fake names too?’

‘She had to seem real to Abbie. What do you know about her past?’

Pat couldn’t quite meet Tom’s eyes.

‘Not much. I wasn’t that interested. I had a senseless fling with her that lasted about five minutes. I was feeling sorry for myself. Pathetic. But what could a woman like Mimi want with a young girl like Abbie? Do you think she was in cahoots with a man?’

‘I don’t know, Pat. It’s very unusual for a woman to abduct a child, so she could have had an accomplice. And I imagine we’re not going to know until we find her. I need to get the police here.’

Tom fished around in his pocket for his mobile while Pat continued to talk.

‘I wish I’d never met her. If Georgia hadn’t found out, everything would’ve been fine. But she got some anonymous text. Mimi swore it wasn’t her, but now we know differently I suppose. I never asked Mimi much about herself. If she hadn’t been pregnant, I was going to move out this week.’

Tom was getting slightly sick of Pat feeling sorry for himself. This wasn’t about him and Georgia.

Where the hell was his mobile?

‘Sorry, Pat, but I need to phone the police and I need to do it now. You’ve got to stop thinking about what might have been, and think about where Mimi might have gone. And where she came from,’ Tom said.

Tom tried his other pocket, attempting to stem his irritation at Pat’s feeble behaviour. In the end, he gave up the search.

‘We have a problem. I must have left my phone in the car. We can’t use yours because we mustn’t alert Mimi. Do you have any idea at all where she is, because if she comes home we’re going to have to keep her here until the police arrive.’

‘She went out at about six, and I haven’t seen her since. We weren’t speaking. She was mad about something, and I just assumed it was something that I’d done. I didn’t bother to ask.’

‘Right, well you wait there and I’ll go and get my phone.’

* * *

‘Drive, Leo, or I’ll kill you now.’

‘No you won’t. If you didn’t need me, you’d have killed me already.’

Leo could feel Mimi’s sweaty body as she manoeuvred herself farther into the gap between the front seats. She felt hot breath, fetid with nerves, settling damply on the side of her face, and the knife was pressed harder against her throat. Leo knew she was going to die, but not yet if she could help it.

Mimi’s voice had turned brittle with emotion.

‘All you smug bastards did everything possible to break me and Patrick up, didn’t you? He wasn’t part of the plan, but he was a bonus - until I found out what he’s really like. But if Gary hadn’t wrecked everything, I could have made it work - all of it. Me and Patrick. Me and Abbie. I could have seen my Abbie in secret. She’d have liked that.’

Abbie? What could this possibly have to do with Abbie?

‘You didn’t know, did you? None of you guessed that she was mine. My little girl. I was going to make it up to her, all of it. She was my baby. I just wanted to see her - to show that that her mother isn’t a monster. It wasn’t my fault Jessica died – none of it was my fault. I wanted her to understand.’

Mimi was Abbie’s mother? Leo had no idea who Jessica was, but she knew that time was running out.

‘Abbie liked me when I was Chloe. But the real me wasn’t good enough, was it? Not good enough for Abbie, not good enough for Jessica, not good enough for Patrick. She said she hated me, do you know that? She screamed when I tried to touch her. I wish she hadn’t done that.’

Leo could sense a blistering anger, tinged with the heartbreak of a woman who had no illusions left.

‘Get moving, Leo, or I’ll enjoy every moment of watching you die. You won’t be the first person I’ve killed tonight.’ The knife was prodded harder, and Leo felt a new stab of pain as the point penetrated farther into her flesh.

‘I’m not driving anywhere with a knife pressed against my neck. If I go over a bump in the road, you’ll slice through my carotid artery. Move the knife, and I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’

There was a pause.

‘Hands on the wheel. The top. Hold it tight, and lean your head against your hands. Now, Leo.’

She felt a new stab of pain as the knife twisted in the open wound. She did as she was told. But she wanted to keep Mimi talking.

‘Why Sean? Why did he have to die?’ Leo asked, her voice muffled as it rested on her arms.

The knife never leaving her neck, she felt a shuffling, and realised that Mimi was climbing through the gap in the seats and into the front. If she could just time it right…

‘Don’t move a muscle - I know what you’re thinking,’ Mimi growled as the knife jabbed harder. Leo winced in pain, but Mimi was too busy talking. ‘Sean was a case of mistaken identity. I was sure Ellie was screwing that cold blooded, murdering bastard Gary, and only she could deliver him to me on a plate. It was Gary I wanted. He knew I was there. He knew I was the one that had taken Abbie.’

Mimi had only needed seconds to climb into the front seat, and the pressure on the knife never eased up all the time she was talking. Had Mimi slipped, Leo knew it would all have been over.

‘Sit back. Seatbelt on,’ came the voice.

‘Why?’ Leo asked.

‘I keep telling you I’m not stupid. You can’t leap out of the car at traffic lights if you’ve got your seat belt on. And I’ll be watching. You’re my insurance if we get stopped.’

The position of the knife was adjusted so that it hovered over Leo’s hand as she fastened the seatbelt.

‘Where do you want me to drive to?’ Leo asked.

‘Put the car in gear, and leave your left hand on the gear stick. Just get off this crummy estate, and then I’ll tell you.’

Leo put the car into reverse, and felt a piercing pain as the knife cut into the thin skin on the back of her hand. Steering one handed and without looking to her left for fear of seeing the madness in those watching eyes, just inches from her own face, she backed out of the space using mirrors and a lot of hope. She knew beyond doubt that as soon as she had driven to whatever destination was chosen, she would be dead.

She had to think.

Then she remembered something that Tom had said to her when they left his house earlier this evening. She had one chance. It was going to hurt, but there was only one thing she could do.

She put the car into gear, and slammed her foot hard on the accelerator.

* * *

Tom had only taken two steps towards the door when they heard the sound of a car revving loudly and accelerating down the road. The noise lasted no more than five seconds before there was an explosion of sound as metal hit brick with considerable force.

He finally knew what it meant when somebody says their heart leapt into their throat, and he was out of the door and running in an instant. All he could see were the taillights of his Jeep, and smoke pouring from the bonnet, which was buckled to half its size against the brick wall that marked the entrance to this part of the estate.

“Leo!’ he shouted, fear giving him speed he didn’t know he still had.

‘Pat, call an ambulance. Don’t just stand there. Call a f*cking ambulance,’ he yelled over his shoulder as he ran. And yet he knew that Pat would be standing watching, open-mouthed.

Fortunately the noise had brought other people from their homes, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a more alert neighbour grab his phone as Tom covered the four hundred yards to the car. He raced towards the passenger door. That’s where he’d left Leo. He gulped back of cry of dismay when he was still fifty yards away. He could see that she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, and with no airbag her head was protruding through a hole in the windscreen, her neck at an odd angle that in Tom’s experience meant only one thing.

‘Oh no,’ he whispered. ‘Oh God, no.’

He made it to the car and scrambled onto the twisted metal of the bonnet. He could see little but the upper half of a body, and blood. He was blocking out the light from the street lamp behind him, and he tried to pull himself round, sliding all the time on the hot surface. He needed to move so that the light shone on Leo’s face, so he could get to her and check if she was alive. Then he saw it. The hair covering the face was blond and limp, not Leo’s thick dark tresses. He knew instantly who this was, and a brief hope flared in his chest.

He slithered across the bonnet and dropped down at the driver’s side, frantically pulling on the handle. The door wouldn’t budge, but he could just make out Leo’s crumpled form behind the steering wheel. She wasn’t moving, and her head had lolled forward onto the now deflated airbag.

Tom tried the rear door. It only opened inches, but he yanked it as hard as he could, and slid in through the gap. He heard his shirt rip, and felt a sharp sting of pain as a piece of exposed metal tore into the flesh covering his ribs, but he barely noticed. Climbing onto his knees on the back seat, he leaned forward very gently so as not to disturb Leo’s body or the seat in case her spine was injured.

He held onto the grab bar with his right hand to steady himself, and with his left hand felt for Leo’s neck, and her pulse.