Monday, February 2
“Can I help you?” Dan asked to the man’s back.
He turned slowly, calm, unbothered at being questioned.
“Oh, hi. No, I’m okay, thanks. Well, actually, yes, you probably could help me. I’m looking for Mountbatten Close? There’s a house for sale. I’m thinking about viewing it, and I thought it was here, but, as you can see, it’s not.”
Dan looked at him.
He had current, or former, military written all over him. The way he stood, the way his hair was cut and his neck was shaved. The way he looked, confident and sure, and the way he spoke; friendly, but clipped and businesslike. There was no doubt in Dan’s mind that civilians often possessed these traits, too, but there was something in the way that they combined in someone with military experience and training that just stood out if you knew what to look for.
“You’re one street too early,” said Dan, returning his smile. “Mountbatten’s identical to this, but one street over.”
She pointed over the top of her own house.
He looked behind himself, at Dan’s house, as though he might be able to see through the terrace to where she was directing him.
“Oh, great, thanks,” he said, moving up the small hill toward the road.
“The signs for all these small closes get lost in the bushes,” said Dan, pointing to the thick greenery where the street name for her close should be. “But it literally backs onto these houses, so it’ll be easy to find.”
“Well, excellent,” he said, stepping toward Dan and extending his hand. “Maybe we’ll be garden neighbors?”
“Maybe we will,” said Dan, shaking his hand.
She watched him leave and couldn’t help but vividly imagine what Felicity’s expression would be now.
Her friend would almost certainly have raised eyebrows, wide eyes, a gleam in her eye, and a broad smile on her face. She’d very likely be mouthing “Handsome” as the man walked away.
Dan headed straight to her front door. She shut it quickly behind her and went to the kitchen window to check that he was gone. She pulled her phone from her pocket and searched houses for sale in her area. Sure enough, she found an end of terrace in Mountbatten Close for sale, just as the man had said.
She watched the small parking lot outside for a while, knowing she was just spooked but feeling that to dismiss her instincts so easily would be a mistake.
The last time she’d been here, looking out the window for something that wasn’t there, she’d ended up on the phone to Josie, asking her for a favor, asking her to check where Aaron Coles was.
He was at sea, redeployed onto HMS Torbay and gone for several more months; still she’d watched and waited for an hour or so, the lights off, peering out from the darkness of her kitchen to the darkness of the world, until fatigue had forced her to bed.
There was nothing there, no one watching, and the man was simply on the wrong street.
She felt herself relax and flicked the kettle on before she wandered upstairs to her room.
The lady on reception at the hotel where Jason, Natasha Moore’s former fiancé, worked had been helpful, but she hadn’t known where Jason was.
Dan had left her card and asked for him to call her, talked the woman into giving her his home address, and left another card there when the small flat had been empty. She’d hoped for a callback soon but suspected it’d be morning now before she heard.
Her phone rang and she snatched at it, wondering if she might be able to speak to Natasha’s former fiancé tonight after all, but it was her dad again.
“Be honest with me,” she said, without any other greeting. “And I mean super honest. Do you set an alarm to remind you to call me?”
There was silence for a moment.
“Well, yes, but not to remind me to call—to remind me not to call too often.”
Dan chuckled.
“Then you set it wrong, because I’m in-date for Dad calls from yesterday.”
“I just wanted to remind you to call your sister back,” he said, ignoring her teasing. “Don’t tell her I rang, and she’s out for dinner tonight now, but call her tomorrow, okay?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, not at all. I think she just gets bored being the one who always has to deal with me.”
“Hey,” protested Dan. “When the time comes, I’ll pay my share of your old folks home.”
“Bet you don’t do your share of the visiting,” he said.
“I will,” said Dan. “I’ll come and sit and listen to your stories, but I’ll secretly nap, and you’ll be too old to notice.”
He laughed at that, and the sound made Dan smile; he had an infectious laugh, loud and honest. He’d have slapped her shoulder if he could’ve reached it.
“You used to try that when you were little,” he said. “You’d hear me coming upstairs and switch off your flashlight and hide your book, then pretend to be asleep when I came in to check on you.”
“You didn’t know,” said Dan. “You’re just guessing.”
He laughed again.
“Believe it or not, Danny-bear, I’ve known you and your sister all your lives. I remember when all you wanted to be when you grew up was a boy. And I can tell without fail when you’re lying to me, when you’re pretending to be asleep, when you and Charlie are rolling your eyes behind my back…”
Now Dan laughed.
“We don’t do that, Dad. We wouldn’t, not to you!”
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“I have to go, Dad,” said Dan, glad of the distraction he’d brought.
“You always do,” he said gently.
“I’ll call Charlie tomorrow, and I’ll call you next time, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
They said their good-byes and Dan sat down on her bed and then stood up again, hearing the kettle boil and switch itself off downstairs. She remained in her room.
Her sister would soon be facing several months alone while her husband, Liam, deployed with the marines. Dan thought about how cheerful Charlie was at the moment, even as the time for his leaving approached. Dan wondered if she’d be able to be that positive if her partner was leaving for so long; though she also wondered if she’d ever be able to have someone in her life who meant as much to her as Charlie and Liam did to each other. She moved to the window and looked across her garden at the back of Mountbatten Close, then went back to her bed and kicked off her shoes. She let herself slump onto the floor and instinctively pulled the lockbox from beneath her bed. She hesitated, not sure why she wanted to look at it tonight, then set the combination and opened the lid.
She looked at the picture on top for the first time in a long time. She’d become used to palming it out and flipping it facedown as soon as she opened the lid, hiding it from view so she wouldn’t have to deal with the guilt that it spawned, then putting it back on top so that she’d never forget what had happened, as if that was possible. Now she let her eyes scan over the image and down the words before she set it aside, faceup; she was proud that she was able to look at it today.
Tucked to the side was the letter her father had given her a few months before, still unopened, though she had no idea why.
There’d been something in the way it’d been delivered, passed to her by Roger, by hand, that meant that Dan knew it was important and would know when to open it. Now so much time had passed that she didn’t open it for fear it was something so important that it shouldn’t have been ignored, or maybe too mundane, something that should have been dealt with long ago but had now changed and become more complicated.
She’d spoken to her dad many times since she’d received the letter and he’d never once mentioned it.
The envelope felt cool in her hand; it was plain, boring, and functional, everything her father wasn’t.
She set it aside and looked at her files.
The Tenacity files were on top—she’d been looking at those last—and she flicked through them again now, looking at notes and pictures, names and theories. Ideas as to where Ryan Taylor might have gone since he went missing after the Tenacity investigation ended.
He’d hold the key to understanding what had happened on board Tenacity. He’d have some information about the quantities of narcotics that were being brought in and where they went. When and how the sailors passed it along and how they were paid for their efforts. If he could be found.
She dug in her lockbox again, to the files and laptop a few layers down.
There were years of files generated from investigating Hamilton, and Dan wondered how she’d end up as the years passed by. Would she one day come home to the house and have a huge filing cabinet of all the different cases and investigations that she couldn’t let go of? Maybe she’d work away into her old age, poking into crimes that only she cared about, unable to move on and not totally sure why.
The files on Tenacity covered those that were about Hamilton, and Dan was glad. Some of the images toward the bottom of the box were hard to look at, but they also tempted back more vivid ones, ones that were locked away inside Dan’s mind.
“Not tonight,” Dan said out loud. She put the files back, locked the box, and pushed it under the bed.
She’d read a book tonight. That might clear her mind, stop her from dreaming about crimes and wrongdoing, stop her from dreaming about Christopher Hamilton and all the terrible things he’d done.