28

“Good morning, you little monkey,” I said gleefully, lifting Tim out of his bed. He wrapped his arms tightly around me.

“Did you sleep well?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You slept through the night,” I gushed and poked my finger in his chest. “Timmy deserves another sticker on his sheet, don’t you sweetie?”

With Tim on my arm, I opened the curtains and looked out onto our street where life was slowly resuming for another day. The sun was peeking over the four-storey, hundred-year-old houses across from us, shining into my face and providing a lavish warmth. Directly opposite was a building screened by scaffolding, the decorative ornaments and patterned brickwork of the gables restored to their full glory by craftsmen. Down the street at my favourite cafe, the first cups of coffee were being served to early-bird commuters.

Tim had enough of my reverie – he wriggled out of my arms, jumped nimbly to the ground and starting scampering off in the direction of his wardrobe. Together we selected an outfit for the day – a blue and white polo over a pair of jeans. Oliver would have been pleased to see his son dressed so smartly, I thought to myself. After sliding into my favourite jeans and a clean shirt with the scent of lavender, I headed downstairs with a spring in my step. I let Tim watch some television while I prepared breakfast. I slotted two slices of bread into the toaster and turned it on, set the table and made myself a cup of coffee. I’d resolved that, no matter how incredibly sad it was that Oliver was gone, I had to go on with my life.

I suddenly realised that I hadn’t yet responded to Lindsey’s message from the other day, so I grabbed my phone.

‘Thx for your message, sweetie. Really sorry for my outburst. I was just a bit overwhelmed with everything the other day,’ I typed generously. ‘Feeling much better now. Sounds perfect to go for drinks. Xxx,’ I ended my message.

About an hour later I parked my bike in front of the practice and after a brief chat with Simone and Hans, entered my consultation room. My phone buzzed with a text message from Lindsey.

‘So happy to hear from you, Jen. I’ll see you soon! X.’

I smiled and slid my phone into my handbag.

The morning went by in the blink of an eye and when I entered our lunchroom at midday, I noticed a brown paper bag on the table – Simone had apparently already picked up our order. I peeked inside the bag and took out my tuna sandwich with a bottle of sparkling water, while Hans and Simone joined me.

Hans sat down opposite me. “Hey Jennifer, did you enjoy your day off yesterday?” he asked, while Simone absent-mindedly scrolled through her phone.

My mind went back to my visit to Roderick and I smiled. “I met up with someone who recently became a widower,” I answered and took a bite of my crusty, French baguette, causing crumbs to fall on the floor.

Hans looked awfully serious. “Did you join a support group?”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t exactly call it that. It was more or less a coincidence that I bumped into him,” I said, immediately realising it was yet another lie, though this time an innocent one.

“That’s great,” Hans continued kindly. “I hope it helped?”

“Very much,” I said sincerely. “It has brought me more than I could have imagined.”

Hans had a puzzled expression on his face, but before he could ask any questions, my phone rang.

I picked it up and stared at the display in incredulity.

“I have to take this one,” I mumbled, leaping up, and dashed out towards my consultation room.

Never in a million years had I expected to hear from this man again. Memories of our last encounter flooded back into my mind, crushing my sunny mood.

I closed the door behind me, locked it and answered the call. “Jennifer Smits.”

“It’s Dan. Daniel Bernstein.”

“Dan,” I echoed coolly. Surely he wasn’t going to act like it was all water under the bridge now? He’d kicked me to the curb like I was some kind of dirty hook-up. I may have behaved rather oddly, but that didn’t give him a free pass to treat me like that.

There was a hint of diffidence in his voice. “Do you remember who I am?”

“Of course I do,” I retorted. “I don’t make a habit of hooking up with strangers and staying over at their place. Do you?”

He ignored my question. “You were right,” he said.

I felt the blood drain out of my face. “What are you talking about?”

“After our chat that morning, I started having doubts about what you’d shared with me. I told myself it was inconceivable, but I somehow couldn’t shake it off. Later that night, I sneaked into your husband’s former office, found those DVDs and watched them all at home one by one. On each labelled disk, I recognised all the paralegals who were hired at Mason & McGant in that particular year – exactly as you’d described.”

I was in shock. Just when I thought I had put this ordeal behind me, Daniel popped up in my life and turned it upside down again. I stumbled to my chair and collapsed into it.

Dan’s voice sounded far away. “Since the footages corroborated your story, I decided to run a search for the Van Santen file in our system at Mason & McGant,” he continued. “It was blocked and only accessible via an additional security password, which is highly unusual.”

I recovered from the blow, leaped up and began pacing up and down the room, hanging off his every word.

“The next day I tried to access the file on my computer again only to find it had suddenly been deleted. There was nothing left of it in the system. Vanished. Totally disappeared into thin air,” Dan said, sounding worked up.

“I just can’t believe it,” I stammered.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s crystal clear that something’s up.”

I clenched my fists. “So I wasn’t going loopy then,” I couldn’t refrain from saying, although perhaps this was directed to me rather than to Dan. “I knew all along something was wrong.”

Dan sounded remorseful as he spoke. “You were right. I should have listened to you.”

I felt like bursting into tears with relief at the knowledge there was finally someone out there who believed me.

“I need your help, Jennifer. If we work together, we may be able to find some answers.”

I chewed on my finger. “I don’t know, Dan. I had just convinced myself I needed to let it go. Everyone around me claimed I was imagining things, my girlfriends, the police, you. Yesterday I went to visit Sandra’s husband …”

Dan interrupted me. “They’re all wrong,” he blurted. And then with a tad more uncertainty, “At least, I think so. I’ve racked my brain over it, but there’s no plausible explanation for those DVDs and the file that was first blocked and then covertly erased. As a firm, we are required by law to store all documentation related to our cases for at least seven years.”

I thought of how Hans moved all the data in our practice to the archive disk once in a while, whenever the system started to fill up. “Couldn’t the file have been archived?” I suggested.

“We keep everything both digitally and as a hard copy, but there’s nothing to be found about Van Santen in the archive,” he responded.

I leaned my back against the poster of the human skeleton, bearing the Latin names for each bone, which I’d received as a gift from my parents when I finished my medical studies. “That’s odd. Sandra and I discovered the papers in that archive room no too long ago.”

“Exactly.”

I stared out of the window through the blinds and thought back to the nightly visits that Sandra and I had made to Mason & McGant – it felt like an eternity ago. I had finally found peace and now everything was being raked up again. Every part of me was screaming, I don’t want this. I’d had enough of the tension and the restlessness – I wanted to get on and just live my life.

Dan interrupted my thoughts. “You told me that morning that you’d copied the file. Can you tell me again what exactly it contained?”

I told Dan how, after our date, I’d reviewed the papers Sandra had shared with me and that they revealed more details about the evidence of the four cases.

“So there were four case file numbers listed?” Dan asked.

I took my handbag and started rummaging through it until I realised I’d of course left the papers with Detective Armstrong. I did have a copy safely stored at home – it had felt too definite to dispose of them. “I believe the numbers all started with a year, followed by a five-digit code,” I added hesitantly.

“That does sound like our file number structure. It’s not much Oliver left us to work with, but it should give us a good starting point,” Dan said, sounding excited. “I think it would make sense for us to meet up and comb through those documents together. These types of files are right up my alley so I can probably extract more information from them.”

I dropped onto my chair again and rested my head on my hands – I was afraid of getting dragged in, feeling again like I was out of my depth, but there wasn’t really another option. I sat up and gave in. “All right, then.”

He made a proposal. “How about we meet at Mason & McGant and look for those four case numbers in the system? I’m hoping we may uncover details in them that will throw light on the notes in the Van Santen file.”

“Ohhhh,” I moaned. “I’m not exactly keen on sneaking back in there for a third time.”

“This time we’ll do things by the book. I’ll register you in our system to have an official visitor’s pass created for you. We’ll just act like it’s a business meeting.”

I gave it a thought and concluded it ought to be safe.

“When would be a convenient moment for you to come over?” Dan asked.

I took a seat behind my PC and searched my schedule for a gap. “How about four o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”

“Okay, see you tomorrow,” I said and hung up.

I checked the time and concluded that my lunch break was nearly over. I unlocked the door, dashed out and almost ran straight into Hans. “Hello stranger, do you still work here? Must have been an important call to miss lunch – again,” he said jokingly, but his voice told me he was a bit upset. “I came to see if you were still alive,” he added, which made me realise I wasn’t the only one who’d been rattled by the incident with the tile.

“Sorry, Hans. It was my Mum – some problem at her volunteer job. Ever since my parents retired, it seems like they have a different sense of time,” I said and rolled my eyes excessively, but I could feel my hands trembling.

He accepted my apology and together we walked to our lunchroom where Simone, wearing ear buds, was listening to music on her phone. “It looks like I wasn’t the only one who was being antisocial,” I whispered to Hans and gave him a wink.

He smiled. “Don’t forget to eat,” he said, indicating my sandwich.

I nodded and quickly took a bite when something came to my mind. I tapped Simone gently on the shoulder – she removed an ear bud and looked questioningly at me.

“Can you keep my schedule empty after half past three tomorrow afternoon?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

Hans looked at me with a scrutinising look on his face. “Other plans?”

“Appointment at the dentist,” I lied. “Completely forgot about it.”

He narrowed his eyes and turned up the heat. “Check-up or cavity?”

“The first,” I croaked, feeling sweat collect in my armpits. I’d had my fill of lying and scheming and longed for all this secrecy to be over.

I nodded at the clock that hung above the lunch table. “Time to get back to work.”