‘All I need to know,’ he’d said the last time she’d visited him in prison – yes, she’d visited him while he was on remand, she’d had to or he’d have sent someone to the house to check on them – ‘Is that you’ll stand by me if this doesn’t end well. Tell me you’ll still be there when I come out.’
She hadn’t answered, had been unable to find any words.
‘Swear to me that you will,’ he growled urgently. ‘If I know I can trust you no one will come after you.’
No one will come after you.
Her silence made him draw back suddenly, grey eyes darkening with fury. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he hissed. ‘Tell me what I’m thinking is wrong.’
‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ she replied helplessly.
‘You fucking helped them, didn’t you?’ he spat. ‘That’s what I’m seeing … Bitch! You’ve been working with the police …’
She shook her head desperately.
‘If I find out you have you’ll pay, I hope you know that.’
She’d wondered who would make her pay, the foreign investors – launderers – he was protecting, no doubt because he knew his life wouldn’t be a long one if he didn’t stay silent? Or, more likely, one of his even more dubious connections.
He’d never mentioned the case he’d stuffed into the safe the day the police had come for him, so she hadn’t either, and no one had pulled aside the filing cabinet during a search of the house. For a long time she’d expected someone – his lawyer, maybe his sister (a raging sociopath if ever there was one) – to come for it, but no one had. It had remained where it was until the night before Claudia had left, when she’d used the code she’d watched him tap in the day of his arrest and discovered she’d memorized it correctly. She’d thought then that it might prove a kind of insurance policy, a way of protecting herself and Jasmine if anyone found them; she wasn’t sure what she thought now. In fact, for the most part, she tried to forget they had it.
‘When you made your call to the inspector,’ Marcy said carefully, ‘did you ask if it was possible to keep our whereabouts a secret?’
Claudia swallowed dryly as she shook her head. Neither of them knew for certain what would happen if Marcus found out where they were, but there was no doubt in either of their minds that he wouldn’t be in prison for nearly long enough and when he got out he’d feel the need to punish Claudia for trying to escape him.
It was just after eleven the next morning when Claudia showed DI Phillips and another detective into the flat. Both men wore sombre expressions, though they were polite and even friendly in the way they greeted and thanked her for seeing them. Phillips was just above average height with thick grey hair and shrewd brown eyes, while his colleague, clearly a decade or more younger, was a fiery redhead with a face full of freckles.
It felt odd, she reflected as she followed them along the hall, to have men in this space that she’d made so essentially feminine, but for the moment at least they didn’t feel threatening.
Her mother was in the kitchen making coffee to accompany the pastries she’d picked up from the bakery earlier. Jasmine had an exam today, so she’d gone to school. She knew that the police were coming to talk to her mother and grandmother; they’d decided at the start of this that they must never hold anything back from each other. She’d been nervous when she left, even afraid that she’d come home to find they’d been arrested and taken away, but Claudia had assured her that wouldn’t happen.
She hoped she was right.
‘This is my mother, Marcy Kavanagh,’ Claudia announced as they entered the living area.
Phillips stepped forward to shake Marcy’s hand and introduce himself.
Claudia could sense her mother’s anxiety, but Marcy’s expression remained confident as she said, ‘It’s good of you to come all this way to see us.’
Without commenting on that, Phillips identified the younger man as Detective Constable Leo Johnson from the local CID and after Johnson had also shaken hands, they both accepted the offer of coffee.
Claudia directed them to the table and as she set down the croissants and pain au raisins her mother carried through a tray of mugs, and a cafetière.
Phillips was the first to speak in a tone that was gruff, but not aggressive, and Claudia thought she detected tiredness in his eyes. ‘Following on from the conversation I had with your mother yesterday,’ he said to her, ‘I must ask why, if you felt you needed protection, you didn’t contact the police?’
Having expected the question, Claudia watched Marcy pouring the coffee as she said, ‘I needed to get away from my husband completely, to make sure my daughter was safe and do everything I could to stop him from finding us again. All you would have offered me was protection during the trial – or maybe a few weeks after – but that wouldn’t have been enough.’
Marcy added, ‘As I explained on the phone, he’s violent and unpredictable. And it’s not only what he did to my daughter, he also made threats against my granddaughter. We have reason to believe that while he’s in prison others have been instructed to “keep an eye on us”. He’s very controlling, you see, frighteningly so.’
Phillips’s expression revealed little as he took his coffee and declined a pastry, while Johnson tucked hungrily into a croissant.
For the next few minutes, to the accompanying sounds of seagulls, traffic and tourists drifting in from outside, Phillips outlined the offences they had committed and how wasting police time could be punishable by a custodial sentence.
Claudia felt her insides clench. ‘You don’t understand,’ she told him, her voice thick with emotion. ‘We weren’t thinking about the trial. We just had to get away.’ She took a gulp of coffee to calm herself, before adding, earnestly, ‘I really didn’t mean for our disappearance to cause so much … concern. I am very sorry for the trouble we’ve caused.’
How naïve did that sound? Unbearably, she realized, but at least he wasn’t looking scornful, or angry.
Marcy said, ‘Why did you start looking for us? We hadn’t done anything wrong; it’s not a crime to change your name, or to move house, or to erase your profiles from social media.’
Phillips said, ‘You could have done all that and still let us know you were doing it. No one would have stopped you. But to answer your question, you were reported missing, so we were obliged to follow it up.’
Claudia’s eyes met her mother’s. She said quietly, ‘I’m guessing my sister-in-law, Eugena, contacted you?’
Phillips neither confirmed nor denied it, only regarded her in a way that caused colour to rise in her cheeks. ‘Why did you leave your phones and laptops in the house?’ he asked curiously. ‘Wouldn’t it have made more sense to dispose of them?’
Claudia accepted that it would have, but it was too late now. ‘I suppose it was my way of telling my husband, and his sister,’ she said, ‘that we’d gone for good and there was no point looking for us because we’d left our old lives behind.’ She didn’t mention anything about the internet advice on disappearing, it was a site that might work well for some and so needed to remain in place.