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DC Jacobs makes a call. The grandmother’s case rings a bell. It’s still live, he thinks. It was in Lyme. A nasty affair, burglary gone wrong. Terrible. He tells his colleague to search the violent death of an elderly lady last month over in Lyme. Failing that, search for deaths recorded last month in West Dorset, women aged seventy and over, next of kin listed as Sam. Surname unknown. Find the surname.
‘He was completely destroyed.’ Cheryl is crying now; the tears come in waves. ‘He would do anything, anything at all. He thought Tommy was his. He… he loves him. He loves him like a father. Like blood, you know? Oh God, he’ll be desperate.’
What else? Anything, even if it doesn’t seem relevant, anything else at all?
No, sorry. Nothing.
They move on to Naomi’s car registration, but the Golf is immediately found to be parked on the road outside the house.
‘She might have gone with her sister,’ Cheryl says. ‘Joanne Harper. She has a black Ford Focus. Or dark blue. Dark grey maybe. Dark anyway.’
‘Registration?’ On the cop’s forehead, a vein twitches.
But as he predicted, Cheryl and Harry shake their heads.
‘No, sorry,’ Cheryl sobs. ‘I mean, you just don’t think people are criminals, do you? You don’t go round thinking that about people.’
While the copper phones it in and they wait for a registration trace, the family liaison officer brings tea that no one except her drinks. The trace comes in. Joanne Harper’s car and registration are then relayed for an ANPR. And that’s when DC Jacobs calls the dog unit and Cheryl becomes hysterical.
By now there are three police cars outside Harry and Cheryl’s house. At the windows of the other houses, curtains open; on doorsteps, neighbours stand in their dressing gowns, arms crossed over their chests. Officers go door to door. They search the area. In the gutter, they find an iPhone, which will turn out to be Sam’s and which, I presume, must have fallen out while in blind panic he was bundling the baby into Joyce’s low-slung MG.
‘We’ll need to unlock it,’ the cop says, standing in Cheryl and Harry’s living room. ‘Unless you know the passcode?’ He takes a photograph of the screen saver with his own phone: Sam and Tommy, grinning. Father and son. No longer. ‘At least we have a photograph now,’ he says.
‘Can I try it?’ Cheryl says. ‘The phone? It might be Tommy’s birthday.’
Her hunch is correct. It feels like the most monumental breakthrough.
‘That’s saved a lot of time,’ DC Jacobs says then calls Naomi Harper – the most frequently used number. There’s a long text thread to read, but for now he needs to find someone, anyone who knows this guy.
‘Miranda Clarke?’ he says. The second most frequently texted number. ‘That name ring any bells?’
‘No,’ Harry says. ‘As we keep telling you, we don’t know this guy. For God’s sake, we don’t know anything about him except he was our nanny’s boyfriend. Husband, sorry.’
‘Try and stay calm, sir. We’re doing everything we can.’
And that’s when Jacobs calls me.
CHAPTER 57
Sam is about to start the engine again when the glove compartment catches his attention. Hours ago, on the way home from Devon, he saw Naomi putting what looked like a document of some kind in there.
‘What’s that?’ he asked her.
She smiled. It was that same slightly unnerving smile she had used on honeymoon. Smug, knowing, a little mean.
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ A different smile then: flirtatious, inviting, full of promise.
He focused on the road, on the evening ahead. Naomi put on Radio 6 Music and they listened to New Music Fix until she complained she didn’t know any of the tunes and put on her own Spotify playlist, full of their old favourites: Outkast, Franz Ferdinand, Ezra Furman. They sang along loudly and, he thought then, joyfully. They sang like they were two people in love driving home to their baby boy. The document dropped out of his mind.
But now he opens the glove compartment and pulls out a thick A4 envelope. Inside is a typed letter, which begins:
April 2021
Dear Sam,
When I saw you today, I so wanted to tell you the truth, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.
CHAPTER 58
