I want her to be right. I think of all the times I’ve grabbed a carrier bag from the dozens stuffed into the cupboard under the sink, and found abandoned receipts from previous shopping trips.
I want her to be right, but I know from the prickle of fear across my neck that she isn’t. That the only reason that receipt is in our house is because someone brought it in.
‘Bit of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’ I try to smile but it falls apart, morphing into something quite different.
Fear.
There’s a voice in my head I won’t listen to; a creeping sense of dread telling me the answer is staring me in the face.
‘We need to think rationally about it,’ Katie is saying. ‘Who’s been in the house recently?’
‘You, me, Justin and Simon,’ I say, ‘obviously. And Melissa and Neil. The pile of paperwork I put on the table last night – the receipts and the invoices – that belongs to Graham Hallow.’
‘Could it be his?’
‘Maybe.’ I think of the pile of Gazettes on Graham’s desk, and remember his perfectly plausible explanation for them. ‘But he’s been really supportive lately – he’s given me time off work. I can’t see him doing something like this.’ A thought enters my head. The police might not have found any evidence against Isaac, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any to find. ‘We cleared the table before Sunday lunch last month. Isaac was here.’
Katie’s mouth opens. ‘What are you suggesting?’
I shrug, but it’s unconvincing, even to me. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m simply listing the people who have been in the house recently.’
‘You can’t think Isaac has anything to do with this? Mum, I hadn’t even met him when this all started – you said yourself the ads have been running since September.’
‘He took a picture of you, Katie. Without you knowing. Don’t you think that’s creepy?’
‘To send to another cast member! Not to use on a website.’ She’s yelling at me, defensive and angry.
‘How do you know?’ I shout back.
There’s a silence between us as we both take stock of ourselves. ‘It could be anyone’s,’ Katie says stubbornly.
‘Then we should search the house,’ I say. She nods.
‘Justin’s room first.’
‘Justin? You can’t think …’ I see her face. ‘Fine.’
Even as a toddler Justin loved computers above books. I used to worry I’d done something wrong – let him watch too much television – but when Katie came along and became such a bookworm, I realised they were just two different children. We didn’t even have a computer at home when they were young, but ICT was about the only subject Justin would turn up for at school. He begged Matt and me for his own computer and when we couldn’t afford it he saved his pocket money and bought the parts, each one arriving in a Jiffy bag to the house, to be stored under his bed with his Meccano sets and Lego figures. He built that first computer himself, with instructions he’d printed at the library, and as time went on he added more memory, a bigger hard disk, a better graphics card. At twelve, Justin knew more about computers and the Internet than I did at thirty.
I remember making him sit down after school one day, before he ran upstairs to join whatever gaming network he was into, impressing upon him the dangers of giving too much away online; that the teens he spent so long chatting to might not be teens at all, but fifty-year-old perverts, salivating over their keyboards.
‘I’m too clever for the paedos,’ he said, laughing. ‘They could never catch me.’
I was impressed, I suppose. Proud my son was so savvy, so much more clued up about technology than I was.
In all those years of worrying that Justin might fall prey to an online attacker, it never once crossed my mind he might be one himself. He can’t be, I think, in the very next beat. I’d know it.
Justin’s bedroom smells of stale smoke and socks. On the bed is a pile of clean laundry I put there yesterday, the neatly folded stack now fallen to one side, where Justin has slept in his bed without bothering to move them or put them away. I open the curtains to let in some light, and find half a dozen mugs, three used as ashtrays. A neatly rolled joint lies next to a lighter.
‘Check his drawers,’ I tell Katie, who is standing in the doorway. She doesn’t move. ‘Now! We don’t know how long we’ve got.’ I sit on the bed and open Justin’s laptop.
‘Mum, this feels wrong.’
‘And running a website selling women’s commutes to men who want to rape or kill them isn’t?’
‘He wouldn’t do that!’
‘I don’t think so either. But we need to be sure. Search his room.’
‘I don’t even know what I’m looking for,’ Katie says, but she pulls open his wardrobe doors and starts rifling through his shelves.
‘More receipts from Espress Oh!,’ I say, trying to think of something incriminating. ‘Photos of women, information about their commutes …’ Justin’s laptop is password protected. I stare at the screen, and his user name, Game8oy_94, looks back at me, beside the tiny avatar of Justin’s palm thrust towards the camera.