‘There.’ Katie points to the filing cabinet, on which Simon’s Samsung tablet is resting. She hands it to me. She’s decisive, almost snappy. I wish I knew what she was thinking.
‘Katie,’ I say, ‘do you really think Simon’s capable of …’ I don’t finish.
‘I don’t know, Mum. Look at the search history.’
I open the case and enter Simon’s password, then open the browser. ‘How do I see what he was looking at?’
Katie looks over my shoulder. ‘Tap there.’ She points. ‘It should bring up a list of sites visited, as well as what he’s been searching for.’
I breathe a sigh of relief. There’s nothing obvious. News sites, and a couple of holiday brokers. A Valentine’s weekend break. I wonder how Simon can even think about booking a holiday when he’s so much in debt. Window shopping, I suppose, thinking of the evenings I spend looking on Rightmove at million-pound properties I could never hope to afford.
Katie is looking again in the filing cabinet drawer. She pulls out a piece of paper. ‘Mum,’ she says slowly, ‘he hasn’t been telling the truth.’
The nausea returns to the pit of my stomach.
‘“Dear Mr Thornton,”’ she reads, “further to your recent meeting with Human Resources please accept this letter as formal notification of your redundancy.”’ She looks at me. ‘It’s dated first of August.’
The relief is instant.
‘I know about the redundancy. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I only found out myself a couple of weeks ago.’
‘You knew? Is that why he started working from home?’ I nod. ‘And before that? Since August, I mean. He’s been wearing a suit, going out every day …’
I feel too loyal to Simon to admit that he spent those weeks pretending to be at work, lying to us all, but I don’t need to; I can tell from Katie’s face she’s already worked it out.
‘You don’t know for sure, though, do you?’ she says. ‘You don’t know what he was doing – not what he was really doing. You only know what he told you. For all you know, he spent that time following women on the Underground. Taking their photographs. Posting their details on the Internet.’
‘I trust Simon.’ My words sound hollow, even to me.
She starts searching through the filing cabinet, throwing files on the floor. The top drawer is filled with Simon’s paperwork; work contracts, life assurance … I don’t know what’s there. In the middle drawer I keep all the documentation relating to the house; buildings and contents insurance, my mortgage statements, the building regs certificate for the loft conversion we’re in right now. In another folder are the children’s birth certificates and my divorce certificate, along with all our passports. In a third, old bank statements, kept for no other reason than I don’t know what else to do with them.
‘Check the desk,’ she says, just as I ordered her to search Justin’s room. Frustrated by the time it’s taking to look at each document, she pulls out the filing cabinet drawer and tips the contents on to the floor, swirling them around with one hand until everything is uncovered. ‘There’ll be something, I know it.’
My daughter is strong. Feisty.
‘She gets that from you,’ Matt always used to say, when Katie stubbornly refused the laden spoon I was waving in front of her, or insisted on walking to the shops when her little legs were barely stable. The memory hurts, and I mentally shake myself. I’m the grown-up. I’m the strong one. This is my fault. I’m the one who was taken in by Simon; flattered by the attention, by his generosity.
I need answers, and I need them now.
I open the first desk drawer and pull out the contents, dumping files on the floor and shaking them in case anything of interest lies beneath the pages of otherwise dull documentation. I meet Katie’s eye and she gives me a grim nod of approval.
‘This drawer’s locked.’ I rattle the handle. ‘I don’t know where the key is.’
‘Can you force it?’
‘I’m trying.’ I hold the top of the desk with one hand and yank hard on the handle of the drawer with the other. It doesn’t budge. I look around the chaotic desk to see where Simon might keep the key, tipping up a pen pot but finding only a collection of paperclips and pencil shavings. Remembering how Katie searched Justin’s tallboy I run my hand under the desk in case the key is taped there, and look at the underside of all the open drawers for the same reason.
Nothing.
‘We’ll have to pick the lock.’ I say this with more confidence than I feel, having never picked a lock in my life. I take a pair of sharp scissors from the floor, where they have been tipped out from a drawer, and jam them into the lock. With no real method, I wiggle the blades violently from side to side and then up and down, at the same time pulling on the handle. There is a small crunching noise, and to my amazement the drawer opens. I drop the scissors on to the floor.
I wanted the drawer to be empty. I wanted it to contain nothing more than a dusty paperclip and a broken pencil. I wanted it to prove to Katie – to me – that Simon has nothing to do with the website.