“Thank Christ. God, I love having kids, but if there’s one thing I won’t miss, it’s the school run. How are you?”
“Okay,” I said, though it wasn’t really true, and Hel knew it. “Listen, do you have a spare phone knocking around anywhere? The police have mine, and I really need to…” I stopped. What I really needed to do was start telling people what had happened to Gabe. At the very least I needed to put an out-of-office on the Crossways Security email address. We had clients lined up, a job booked in for next week. Arden Alliance would be expecting their report. And that was without even thinking about Gabe’s friends and family, who would be starting to wonder why he wasn’t reading the family WhatsApp group messages or returning emails.
“Sure,” Hel said quickly, seeing my chin start to quiver. “You can have my old phone, the one the girls play with. It’s perfectly functional. I think Rols might even have a spare SIM somewhere. He got a free one when he got his phone.”
“That would be amazing,” I said gratefully. “Even if there’s no SIM, if I can use your Wi-Fi…”
“Hang on,” Hel said. “I’ll be back.”
She left, and I heard the sound of her feet heading upstairs to the living room, and the noise of doors opening and closing as she rummaged through the girls’ toy box and then Roland’s office, which was off the back of the living room. Then her feet on the stairs again.
“Sorry about the stickers.” The Motorola she held out wasn’t that old—it was the same model as my last one, in fact—but the case was plastered with My Little Pony unicorn stickers. “And I might… hang on, there’s something a bit gross on the screen.” She was scrubbing at it with a baby wipe. “I think it’s jam. Here you go. The pin is 1234, but it’s logged into my Gmail so feel free to do a hard reset. I assume you don’t want to see my messages.”
“Are you sure? Won’t the girls be annoyed if I wipe all their games?”
“Probably, but it’ll be good for the little square eyes. They’ve still got the iPad so I’m sure they’ll cope. And I found this in Roland’s desk.” She was holding a small cardboard folder, and now she opened it up and pulled out a SIM card, snapping it out of its plastic surround. “God, why do they make these things so tiny? I preferred it when they were a size you could actually see with the naked eye.”
I didn’t answer, I was too busy googling how to reset Motorola Play. I was halfway through the steps when Hel’s own phone rang, and she stepped over to the window to answer it.
“Hello? Yes, that’s me. Oh… oh, sure. Hang on. She’s right here.” She put her hand over the receiver and said in a low voice, “It’s for you. The police.”
My stomach swooped. I took the phone from Hel’s hand.
“Hi, Jack speaking.”
“Jack, hi.” It was DS Malik. “Sorry to disturb you so early, but are you free today? Could you come into the station?”
“Of course.” I found my heart was beating fast. Had they found something important? “Have you got any leads?”
“We’ve got a number of lines of inquiry and we’re hoping you might be able to help us with some of them, but I’d prefer to talk it through at the station.”
“Of course, what time would suit?”
“Say…” There was a pause, and I heard Malik leafing through a notebook, or perhaps a diary. “Say eleven a.m.?”
“Sure. Thank you. See you then.”
I hung up and handed the phone back to Helena.
“Have they found anything?”
“I don’t know.” I looked down at the unicorn phone in my other hand. It had finished the reset process and was asking me to log in as a new user and enter Hel’s Wi-Fi password. “I think possibly… yes? They’ve asked if I can come in at eleven. But they clearly didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”
“God, I hope they’ve got a lead.”
“Me too.” I felt my throat close up as I said the words. The idea that whoever had done this to Gabe was still out there… I still couldn’t fully process that realization.
“Have you eaten anything?” Hel asked now.
I shook my head. “I’m not really hungry.”
Hel gave me a look that was pure mother hen, and I sighed.
“I know, I know, I have to eat, blah, blah. The truth is I feel a bit sick. I’ve got to—” I looked down at the phone in my hand. It had connected to my Google account, and the notifications were pinging onto the home screen. Unread email. Unread email. Unread email. “I’ve got to start telling people. I can’t leave clients hanging, and Gabe’s parents…”
I broke off. I couldn’t even say the words.
“I can do it,” Hel said urgently. “Honestly, Jack, no one would expect you to be ringing round, not twenty-four hours after Gabe—” She stopped, not wanting to say the unspeakable, and waved her hand as if to indicate, after all this.
But I shook my head. She was probably right—and there were definitely people I could let her deal with. But not Gabe’s parents, and not his best friend, Cole. They deserved to hear from me, and they deserved to hear before the police got in contact, which they might be doing right now, for all I knew. I couldn’t let the first they learned of Gabe’s death be a call from Scotland Yard.
“No, I have to do at least a handful of people myself. I need to, Hel. I promise I’ll lean on you for the work stuff, but John and Verity, and probably Cole, I have to call them myself.”
“Okay,” Hel said resignedly. “If you really feel you have to. But first you’re going to call your lawyer, yes?”
“Not now,” I said, and then seeing her expression, I held up a hand. “Hel, I will call her, I promise, but please stop bugging me. I just—I have to get this out of the way first. I can’t let Gabe’s parents hear about this through the grapevine.”
Even Hel could see the justice in that one, and she nodded, albeit a little reluctantly.
“Can I borrow a laptop?” I asked, as much to change the subject as anything. “For the work stuff, I mean.”
Hel nodded again and picked up a battered MacBook from the sideboard.
“Knock yourself out. Password is powerpets, same as the Wi-Fi. All lowercase. Safari is logged into my Gmail, but you can open up an incognito tab or use Chrome. And the phone should be working now, I’ve activated the SIM. The number’s on there if you need to give it to anyone.” She pointed at the cardboard sleeve that had contained the SIM.
“Thanks,” I said, and then, impulsively, I moved across the kitchen and hugged her. She smelled like home, our home, our childhood home, the smell I remembered from walking through my parents’ front door after staying with friends and inhaling like it was oxygen. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” Her arms tightened around me, and I could feel everything she wanted to say. How unfair this was. How eagerly she would have taken this grief away from me if she could. But neither of us were the kind for big emotional speeches, and at last she let go, coughed, and moved towards the stairs.
“Okay, well, I’ll be upstairs if you need me. Shout, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll drive you down to the station. If we leave at ten thirty, that should be fine.”
“Ten thirty. Sure.” I looked at the phone in my hand. It was just after nine. I had ninety minutes to destroy Gabe’s parents’ world.
* * *
IT WAS ABOUT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later that I shut down the laptop with a sigh, knowing that I had done the easy tasks, and that now only the impossible ones were left. I had emailed the clients we had in the diary, not giving much information apart from explaining that I’d had a serious family bereavement and that Crossways would be closed for at least a fortnight and would not be able to fulfill their job. I gave them the choice of waiting to be rescheduled or contacting one of the other security companies that I rated, and then I changed the out-of-office response to say something along the same lines. I didn’t say that Gabe was dead—I couldn’t bring myself to type the words—but I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t need to. It would probably be in the papers very soon.
Now I had to contact Gabe’s parents, John and Verity, and his best friend, Cole. The only question was what order to do it in.
I decided to call John and Verity first—if only because I thought the police would probably track them down fastest. Their home phone number was stored in my contacts as “Gabe’s parents,” whereas Cole was down simply as “Cole Garrick,” with nothing to spell out his relationship to Gabe.
But when I rang, the call went to answerphone. “You’ve reached the Medways,” Verity’s pleasant voice came over the recording. “Sorry we can’t come to the phone. We’re either out or on the other line. Please leave a message and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.”