‘Could you … could you quickly come upstairs for a minute?’
My concerns about the unprepared food fall away quickly. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Lead the way.’
As soon as we are upstairs, he leads me into his room and gestures at me to close the door. ‘Tell me now, what’s wrong.’ I walk to the other side of the room and sit down on his desk chair, facing him.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he mutters. He keeps glancing at the door as if it’s going to burst open at any moment.
The sentence frustrates me. How can he expect me to accept that as an answer?
‘Honey, Dad can’t hear us. I’m fairly sure he’s downstairs in the library, avoiding me in case I give him a job to do. We’re alone. And I’m not leaving until you tell me.’ I’m talking firmly now. Firm, but kind.
He finally looks me in the eye, takes a deep breath, apparently trying to choose his words carefully, and says: ‘I found something. Something a bit strange.’
‘Found what?’ My mind starts diving wildly to various different things he could have found. What does his father keep secret? Does he have a gun? That possibility is so unlikely it almost makes me laugh. Maybe evidence of an affair. That one sends a cold chill crawling across my skin.
‘It’s … it’s a bit hard to explain. They’re files. Files I found on Dropbox. In his folder.’
This takes me by surprise. ‘What? What do you mean? Why were you looking through his Dropbox folder?’
He sighs and rubs his eyes. This is clearly torture for him. I just want to hug him, but I’m scared of interrupting his explanation, so I sit still.
‘It’s … I think it’s something bad. Like, really bad.’
That cold chill is back. I really don’t like where this is going. A dark, menacing mass is forming in my head, as if it’s been let out of a deep, sickening recess of my mind.
‘What kind of thing are we talking about here?’
He stares at me and, for the first time this evening, I see resolve in his eyes. He’s going to tell me everything.
‘I think I’d better just show you.’
I nod, preparing for the worst.
‘Okay. Let me see.’
Julianne
Knightsbridge, London, 2019
I can feel myself getting colder, an ice cube making its way down my neck, across my back, burning its icy stain into my blood.
‘I really don’t want to rush you, but I don’t think we have much time.’ I try to sound kind, rather than impatient, but waiting for Stephen to snap into action is making me tenser by the second.
His eyes are starting to overspill and I reach out to put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Please, Stephen, I need you to show me. Right now. It may not be what you think it is. You may have got the wrong idea.’
He just shakes his head.
‘Is that a ‘no’ as in you won’t explain, or ‘no’ as in you won’t show me, or ‘no’ as in you haven’t got the wrong idea?’ My smooth tone is breaking at the seams, my impatience to discover if the worst is true tearing me apart inside.
‘No, as in I don’t know. I’m not sure. I just know it’s been eating me up for two days now and I need to talk to you about it.’ After a pause, he goes to a bag by his bed and takes the device out of its leather case. I sit down on his desk chair while he perches on the bed and starts tapping away on the tablet, his face bathed in the blue-white glow of the screen.
‘And you don’t think this could be anything to do with his work?’ I say, partly to fill the silence.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I wanted to show you.’
I nod and wait. Overall, James keeps his work to himself, a lot of it bound up in such rigorous confidentiality it’s hard for him sometimes to even vaguely explain what project he’s working on. My mother once joked that he was like a spy – a bit of a James Bond – but I assured her the job of a head analyst and coordinator at a data services company is one full of spreadsheets, desk work and boardroom meetings rather than anything very exciting.
Stephen is offering me the iPad. I take hold of it and glance at the screen, a mass of files in front of me. From the ends of the file names, I can see they’re PDF documents. There’s something in this that comforts me. At the back of my mind, I think there was a part of me that expected to see .mov or .mp4. But these aren’t videos. That’s a good thing, surely? I scan down the list and then turn towards Stephen.
‘And these were in his Dropbox file?’ I ask.
‘In our Dropbox. The family one. The one we use to transfer photos and things and where I used to put my homework back when you wanted to check it over before submission. It’s Dad’s section of it. I clicked on it by mistake.’
This makes me feel ever so slightly better. If James had anything to hide, surely he’d be a little more savvy about protecting it than to upload it all to the family Dropbox account, the place I store family holiday snaps and copies of dull household documents like the TV insurance details?
‘Tap on one of the files listed here.’ His voice sounds strained, as if he’s trying to calm himself.
I look over at him. ‘If you’re really that worried, I can look at these later? We don’t have to do this now.’ As I say this, though, I know there’s no chance of me happily going back downstairs to carry on with the cooking. I need to know what this is about.
‘No, I’m fine,’ he says, and moves to the edge of the bed, crouching forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He looks like he’s about to take a particularly gruelling exam.
I focus back on the iPad and, as instructed, tap on the first in the list of files. They’re all unnamed, save for a list of seemingly random numbers and the file type. A document appears on the screen and I turn the device to view it in portrait mode.
A company logo is the only thing on the page. Clover Shore Construction is all it says, with a small clover leaf at the end of it. Underneath, in all-caps Times New Roman font, it says: BUSINESS PROPOSAL.
I flick the page with my hand and it changes, this time bringing up what looks like some kind of CV or personal profile, with a photo at the top of the page, followed by a name, date of birth and separate categories filled with bullet points. I look at the photo. It’s of a young woman. She isn’t looking into the camera; her eyes seem vacant, staring off into the distance. There’s something about her expression that I find quietly alarming. It’s as though she’s drunk or stoned and doesn’t quite know she’s having her photo taken. Although it’s a colour photo, her skin is pallid and grey, her dark hair untidy and her face drawn in and gaunt-looking.
‘Who is this?’ I say out loud, though more to myself than to Stephen.
‘Read the information. It’s pretty specific.’
I take a look and see what he means.
Name: Ashley Brooks
Date of Birth: 12 March 1989
Occupation: Officially unemployed, ex-stripper, occasional sex worker
Area: Ilford, East London