The figure froze. Took another step, then another, coming towards the porch.
And then.
Coming over the fence behind him were two more figures, advancing stealthily. Both wearing dark bobble hats, jackets zipped, collars turned up, their faces almost totally obscured by goggles.
The figure in front stopped in his tracks. Then moved on towards the porch. He stopped again, pulled something out of his pocket, something long and slender, some kind of a tool.
He disappeared from view into the porch. Then, moments later, he came back into view and now he was holding a gun – the gun! – in his hand.
And in the same moment, one of the two figures behind him ran forward, also holding a handgun, raised it at the base of his head and there was a burst of light from the muzzle.
The head of the figure in the cap snapped sharply upwards, then he collapsed back onto the gravel, arms outstretched, gun falling from his fingers and coming to rest a few feet away.
As they had found him, Naomi realized.
And then.
No.
This could not be happening. This really had to be a dream. Luke and Phoebe in their raincoats, in their wellington boots, trotted into view and threw their arms around each of the two figures in goggles in turn.
There were several moments of warm embracing. Then the four of them hurried across the gravel drive. The adult figures, still wearing their goggles, helped Luke and Phoebe over the fence into the field beyond.
Then a flash, indicating a time jump. John came into view, in his dressing gown, holding his shotgun, walking towards the motionless figure of the man in the bobble hat.
‘No!’ Naomi said. ‘NO! PLAY IT BACK, JOHN, PLAY IT BACK! OH GOD, PLAY IT BACK!’
John rewound it a short distance. But the repeat was the same. Luke and Phoebe clambering eagerly over the fence. Then himself coming out of the house with his shotgun.
He pressed the stop button.
For some moments none of them spoke. Then John turned to the Detective Inspector and said, without malice, without anything, just drained, bewildered, not even desperate, just utterly helpless, ‘Do you still want to work on the likelihood that they are not far away?’
101
Naomi sat on her own in front of two police officers. Although no one had said as much, it was clear that whilst she and John were being treated with kindness and courtesy, they were not themselves beyond suspicion. Which was why they were being required to make separate statements.
A tiny red light blinked on a video camera that was bolted high up on one wall and pointing at her. The room was small, anodyne and windowless. Bare cream walls that looked recently painted. A carpet that smelled new and comfortable bright red chairs with just a coffee table in front of them.
Two detectives faced her. One, in his early forties, was a bruiser of a man, in a fawn suit, with a precise, rather wooden air. The other, a woman about ten years younger, with short ginger hair, had a podgy face with small, suspicious eyes. She was dressed in a blue blazer sporting a club emblem on the breast pocket, over a thin roll-neck, and slacks.
Naomi could scarcely believe the speed at which the media had arrived at their home. The police had cordoned off the driveway down at the entrance, but within not much more than an hour of their first arriving there had been photographers snapping the scene with long lenses from the surrounding fields, and down in the lane there must have been a dozen different news vehicles, including a cameraman, high up above everyone else on a Sky TV hydraulic crane.
The male detective switched on the tape recorder in front of him. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Tom Humbolt and Detective Constable Jo Newman interviewing Mrs Naomi Klaesson, Friday, January sixteenth at-’ He paused to check his watch. ‘Ten twelve a.m.’
His tone was bend-over-backwards polite. ‘I’d like you to start, Mrs Klaesson, if you wouldn’t mind, with your taking us through the events that led to you calling the police this morning.’
With her shattered nerves made even edgier by the formal tone of the interview, she gave them, in a faltering voice, as detailed an account as she could.
‘Why exactly did you get up so early today, Naomi?’ the woman detective asked. ‘You said you don’t normally get up until seven on weekdays.’
Naomi gulped down a mouthful of hot, sweet tea and asked, ‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ll know what I mean about a mother’s instincts?’
She nodded. Naomi glanced at Humbolt, who signalled with his eyes that he understood, also.
‘I just sensed something was wrong, I can’t put it any clearer than that – and I needed a pee.’ There was a brief silence. Naomi toyed with her cup. ‘Someone will call, won’t they? If they find them while I’m in here?’
‘The moment there is any news, we’ll be told,’ Detective Newman replied.
‘Thank you.’
Then tears welled up inside Naomi, and she began crying, deep, choking, sobs. Murmuring an apology, trying to compose herself, she pulled a handkerchief out of her handbag and pressed it to her eyes.
‘Interview suspended at ten twenty-one a.m.,’ she heard the DS say.
*
Half an hour later, feeling a little bit calmer, Naomi sat back down in the interview room, and the tapes were restarted. In her mind, a constant loop of the videotape of Luke and Phoebe was running, over and over. She saw them trotting across the driveway towards those strangers in their baseball caps and goggles, hugging them, embracing them, kissing them. Greeting them in a loving way they had never – ever – done with herself or John.
Greeting them like they were their parents.
And suddenly the deep, numbing cold that was in every cell of her body froze her rigid.
What if?
What if?
What if those people were their parents?
No. Unthinkable. Besides, Luke and Phoebe had so many of her and John’s features, everyone said that, and it was plain, absolutely plain to see sometimes when she looked at Luke how much of his father was in him.
And now she had another, even worse, thought. This was the first thing that had gone through her mind when she’d seen the body on the gravel and her children’s missing coats and boots. She stared down at the table, listening to the hiss of the air conditioning. This was the thought she had pushed away, tried desperately to push back into a chamber of her mind as she had stumbled down the drive, as she had staggered through the sodden fields.
The thought that she did not, absolutely did not ‘Mrs Klaesson?’
The voice of Detective Sergeant Humbolt cut through her thoughts. Calm, but insistent.
She lifted her eyes up to his face.
‘Would you like a little more time before we start?’
‘Would you like to see a doctor to give you something to help calm you?’ Jo Newman asked.
Naomi closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘Please, tell me something. These paedophiles – they target chatrooms, don’t they? You get these sick perverts chatting to young children, they become friends, then they lure them to meetings. This happens, doesn’t it?’
The two detectives glanced at each other, then Humbolt said, ‘For older children it is a real danger, but I don’t think at three years old that’s likely. They’d be too young.’
‘I don’t imagine at three, your children are old enough to be going on internet chatrooms, are they?’ Jo Newman said.
‘Their mental age is much older,’ Naomi said. ‘They are far more advanced than you could imagine.’
