Chloe loved reading, so she had no problem wading through the magazine article that ran to four whole pages.
It mostly repeated what had already appeared in newspapers and on the television during the past month. But there were more details and more photographs. She found it odd the way the writer kept switching between the names Alice and Chloe, and she wondered if readers would find it confusing.
The photos were all in colour and each of them provoked a different reaction. There was only one that she hadn’t seen before and it was of Sophie on her wedding day. The man she married was standing next to her with a wide grin on his face.
Bruno Perez looked very different back then. He was slim, handsome and smartly dressed in a grey suit with a yellow flower in one lapel. Nothing like the brutal monster who Chloe saw for the first time eleven years later when he turned up at her father’s bar in Spain.
He was the man they were running from when they fled to England, the man who went on to murder her dad and then force Sophie to take her own life. The man her mother and everyone else described as a violent psychopath.
Chloe’s eyes settled on another photo and this one caused the breath to freeze in her throat. It was of a tall, ugly building and below it were the words:
It was from the roof of this warehouse in Deptford, South London, that Sophie Cameron and her estranged husband, Bruno Perez, fell to their deaths as Detective Anna Tate and her daughter Chloe looked on.
Four weeks had passed since that night, but to Chloe it still seemed like only yesterday. Every time she closed her eyes, she recalled every horrific second of what happened on that roof as well as the events that led up to it.
It began that morning when she and Sophie were getting ready to go on holiday to Spain, the first time they’d been back there since leaving three years ago.
Chloe didn’t know at the time that Sophie planned for them to stay and never to return, fearing that Bruno had found out where they lived in Shoreditch and was planning to do them harm.
After Chloe had packed her suitcase, she pleaded with Sophie to let her go and see one of her friends who lived close by, just a brief visit before they were due to leave for the airport. Against her better judgement, Sophie allowed her to go. But it proved to be a costly mistake because Perez was waiting outside in a van.
He snatched Chloe off the street and then phoned Sophie to tell her what he’d done. Chloe was in the room when he made the call and she could still hear his violent words, as though it had happened only hours ago:
‘You should know that before I arrived at your place today my intention was to abduct you and then make you wish you had never been born. But catching hold of Alice allows me to take your punishment to a whole new level and to make sure your suffering is not short-lived … Alice will be my guest for a couple of days and I’m going to have some fun with her. I even plan to share her with a couple of the guys who work for me … I’ll send you photos and maybe even a video.’
Perez then threatened to kill Chloe if Sophie went to the police. Sophie knew she couldn’t take the risk so she did the next best thing – which was to enlist the help of the woman she had only just discovered was Chloe’s real mother – Detective Anna Tate.
Before describing what happened next, the article took readers back ten years to when it all began, and Chloe read it with tears streaming down her cheeks …
Anna had only recently divorced her husband Matthew following an affair he had. They shared custody of two-year-old Chloe, although the girl resided with her mother.
Matthew started begging Anna to take him back and when she refused he abducted their daughter after sending Anna a note that read:
You won’t let us be a family again because I made a stupid mistake. So I’m starting my life afresh with my lovely daughter … Don’t bother trying to find us because you never will.
Matthew acquired fake passports in the names of James and Alice Miller and moved to Spain where within weeks he met an English ex-pat named Sophie Cameron, who was working in a restaurant. He told her he was a widower and that his wife, Alice’s mother, had died of cancer.
But Sophie also lied to him by saying that she was single when in fact she was married to a man who was in prison for a vicious assault on another man. His name was Bruno Perez.
Sophie and the man she knew as James fell in love and spent the next seven years together, during which they did not find out the truth about each other.
Sophie acted as Alice’s adoptive mother even though she and James never married. The three of them were a happy family in all but name.
Then three years ago Bruno Perez was released from prison and the life they’d created for themselves came to an abrupt end.
Perez, who was part of a crime family operating in Spain and the UK, set out to punish Sophie because she had refused to provide him with an alibi that would have kept him out of prison. Instead, she saw his conviction as a way to escape an abusive relationship at the hands of a violent control freak.
With the help of his family and various contacts inside the Spanish police, Perez tracked Sophie down to Puerto de Mazarron on Spain’s Costa Calida, where she, James and Alice were living. He turned up there and made threats against Sophie, forcing her to confess to James that she hadn’t been honest about her past.
James forgave her and they decided it would be too dangerous to stay in Spain, so they fled to England and rented a house in Southampton.
However, Perez traced them again after only a few weeks. James was returning home from the town centre when he spotted Perez following him. He decided to confront the man, but first he phoned Sophie and told her to flee the house with Alice and wait for him to call her.
But he never did call because he was stabbed to death in a park. Sophie chose not to tell the police that Perez was the killer because she knew they would never be able to prove it. She also didn’t want to take the chance of losing Alice after the authorities discovered that Sophie wasn’t her real mother.
So she moved with Alice to London, rented a flat in Shoreditch, and worked as a cleaner for three years.
Meanwhile, Anna knew nothing about any of this until just over a month ago when she found out purely by chance that her ex-husband was dead and that their daughter was last seen three years earlier leaving a house in Southampton with a mystery woman …
Chloe paused to wipe the tears from her face with a tissue. Her heart started beating rapidly as though it was about to explode in her chest. She blew her nose into a fresh tissue and turned to the fourth and final page of the article.
The top half contained two photographs – one was of her as a two-year-old and the other was the age progression image that was supposed to show what she looked like now. Even Chloe had to admit that the forensic artist had done a good job. The resemblance was striking.
Underneath the photos the story continued:
It was a twist of fate that ended Detective Anna Tate’s ten-year-long search for her daughter.
She was heading up the investigation into the abduction of nine children from a nursery school in South London and the murder of one of their teachers.
Anna appeared on television news bulletins and among those who saw her was a man named Paul Russell, who was dying of cancer in a hospice.
He got in touch with her just days before he passed away and told her that he used to be a master forger and he had produced the fake passports for Anna’s ex-husband that enabled him to take their daughter to Spain. He also revealed that the pair had moved back to the UK three years ago. He knew because he had been approached to provide them with more fake documents.
Anna hired a private detective who picked up the thread and the mystery started to unravel. Police in Southampton confirmed that a man named James Miller had been murdered in a city centre park three years ago and that he’d been living with a child and a woman who disappeared after he was killed.
Anna then told this story to the Evening Standard newspaper, which ran it over two nights.
Sophie Cameron happened to read it, and that was when she discovered that the man she had known as James Miller had been living a lie and that his ex-wife was still alive.
A heartbroken Sophie realised that the net was closing in and made arrangements to flee the country with Chloe. But Bruno Perez suddenly appeared on the scene again and kidnapped the girl. He took her to one of the warehouses owned by his family, and Anna’s police colleagues traced him there.
Before they could arrest him he took Chloe to the roof and held her hostage while demanding that Sophie come to him.
In an interview with this magazine, Anna described what happened – how Perez held on to Chloe and threatened to jump off with her unless Sophie took her place.
Chloe’s adoptive mother agreed to do so without a moment’s hesitation. She then told Chloe that Perez was the man who had murdered her father and that Detective Anna Tate was her birth mother.
Sophie Cameron then took matters into her own hands. Rather than wait for Perez to pull her over the edge, she pushed him backwards and they both plunged to their deaths.
Chloe broke down then and sobs racked her body as that awful scene was replayed in her head. Tears flowed and she felt the muscles knotting painfully in her stomach.
It was a full minute before she got a grip and managed to stop crying. She inhaled a deep breath and decided to go and clean herself up before Tom arrived.
But as she rose from the sofa a noise outside seized her attention.
She stepped over to the front window and pulled back the curtain. To her horror she saw a group of young men with their faces covered marching along the middle of the road. Some were punching the air with their fists while others were holding up placards. On one of them, Chloe saw the words: Kill all cops.