Chapter 27
They have searched everywhere. They have stood on chairs and looked in the light fittings; run their hands along the tops of cupboards and doorframes. They have felt down the seams of the curtains and in the linings of cushions. They have found nothing.
‘It’s a black disc,’ Scott had said, having looked up the recording device online, ‘about two centimetres diameter.’
‘It could be anywhere,’ Nadeeka says now, sitting down heavily on the stairs.
She has just searched her bedroom, feeling nauseous at the thought of a microphone recording everything she and Jamie had said – and done.
She thinks of all the conversations she’d thought were private, and imagines them replayed for an audience. What had New Dawn wanted from her?
‘Where did you and Jamie talk the most?’ Scott says.
He’s flushed with the exertion of clambering on to furniture, his eyes shining with determination.
He looks, Nadeeka thinks bitterly, almost as though he’s enjoying this.
She doesn’t reply, simply points to the lounge.
She’s paralysed by the thought that people might be listening to her right now.
Nadeeka thinks of all the evenings she lay on the sofa, her feet in Jamie’s lap, telling him about her day.
Her eyes widen as she thinks of something.
‘What?’ Scott says.
She shakes her head mutely. Doesn’t want to say it out loud.
She’s thinking about the job fair at work; about Stefan and the vitriol from people who consider his job beneath them yet still don’t want him to have it.
She’s thinking about the black BMW that followed her to work.
Is that why New Dawn chose her? Because she works for a company that employs large numbers of foreign-born workers?
‘Do you still take work calls in the car?’ Scott says, as though he can read her thoughts.
‘Maybe he bugged the car.’ He snatches up her keys from the bowl on the hall table and opens the front door, letting in a blast of cold air.
He is enjoying this, Nadeeka thinks. Her ex-husband is one of those men who revel in the role of protector; she always had the impression it irked him that she didn’t need him more.
She tries to remember when she’d had the idea for the job fair – when she would have talked to Jamie about it.
She gets out her phone and scrolls back through her calendar, and it takes her breath away to think that she was blithely making hair appointments and holding meetings with no idea her life was about to implode.
Nadeeka stops scrolling as the memory of Lauren’s interrogations intersects with the dates in front of her.
Jamie withdrew three hundred pounds in cash.
Had he been radicalized to the extent that he would have given New Dawn money?
She stares at her calendar and racks her brain to remember what was happening around the same time.
The girls had an after-school rehearsal for the nativity, and Nadeeka had worked from home on the Monday because the boiler man had come – that part of her lie to Lauren had been true.
Nadeeka opens Facebook. She isn’t one for status updates, but she often posts photos – a pretty sunset; the girls enjoying a hot chocolate after school – in the knowledge that Facebook will surprise her with these moments in years to come.
When she scrolls back, she doesn’t find any photographs, just a post shared from the local paper’s feed.
Police are appealing for witnesses following a fire at Shop Express on Station Approach.
Nausea builds in her stomach as she pictures Jamie setting fire to -Surinder’s shop. Surinder’s home.
Scott comes back inside, swinging shut the front door with a slam. ‘I didn’t find a bug.’
Nadeeka is trying to make sense of the timeline.
Lauren had interrogated her about Jamie’s movements the week of the fire – had Nadeeka seen him buying lighter fuel?
A face mask? – but the cashpoint withdrawal was after the fire, and Nadeeka suddenly remembers something Surinder said, when he’d seen her the day after the murder.
People have been very kind. We even had money pushed through the door. It’s not a bad neighbourhood, really.
‘Is this his?’ Scott is holding up Jamie’s coat between his thumb and forefinger, as though it’s radioactive.
‘Yes,’ Nadeeka says shortly. She’s too embarrassed to admit she’s been wearing it, and anyway, a green dot on Shop Express’s Messenger tells her Surinder is online. She sends him a message. He’ll wonder why she’s asking, but if she’s right . . .
‘Did you know this was in the pocket?’ Scott says, and something about his tone makes Nadeeka look up from the dancing dots that tell her Surinder is typing. Scott’s holding Jamie’s woolly hat, except that he’s unfolded it, and it isn’t a hat at all – it’s a balaclava.
‘I . . .’ She stares at it. Imagines Jamie pulling it down over his face; imagines him among a group of other masked men, jeering and hurling missiles, the way she’s seen on the news.
But Jamie wasn’t like that, she thinks, and when she glances at her phone and reads the response from Shop Express she feels a surge of conviction.
The money I mentioned was in an envelope pushed through our door the day after the fire, reads Surinder’s message. There was ￡300.
‘If Jamie was part of New Dawn – ’ Nadeeka pushes back her chair ‘ – he didn’t want to be.’
‘You can tell yourself that all you want,’ Scott says. ‘The evidence says otherwise.’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. Goes into the kitchen and looks again at the printout of places encompassed in Jamie’s step count.
Scott had emailed it to her along with more scathing comments about Jamie’s shit watch.
Nadeeka had hit up Google right away, searching the street names to build a picture of where Jamie had been.
Maybe she could track down other members of New Dawn – the people who had groomed him.
If she could present Lauren with hard evidence . . .
She had stopped when the search engine had thrown up the Lord Admiral pub.
Did Jamie ever mention any of these places to you? Lauren had said. The Lord Admiral, the King’s Arms, the British Legion?
They were presumably all places the police knew to be connected to New Dawn. One by one, Nadeeka found them all among the data Scott had managed to retrieve from Jamie’s ‘shit watch’. She so desperately wanted to clear his name, but everything she found made things ten times worse.
Nadeeka stares at the data now, willing it to show her something new. Is there a pattern? Some place he was going to regularly?
‘Where are the kitchen scissors?’ Scott says suddenly.
‘In the drawer next to the hob,’ Nadeeka says distractedly.
Beech Street, she thinks, looking at the list. Why does Beech Street ring a bell?
Jamie had gone there a month before he died.
‘Where they’ve always been,’ she adds. When Nadeeka puts it into the map, she realizes Beech Street is where the police -station is.
The job centre is next door, she remembers, and the magistrates’ court across the road; there are no shops, no residential buildings.
‘Could Jamie have gone to the police station?’ she says, half to herself.
Scott snorts. ‘Maybe he was answering bail.’
‘He’d never been in trouble with the police.’ Unlike you, Nadeeka wants to add, but doesn’t. Scott’s helping her out, even though she suspects he’s only doing it to prove she was wrong to trust Jamie. ‘That’s why they didn’t have his DNA on file. They had to take it from his toothbrush.’
‘Asking for the time, then?’ Scott shrugs. ‘I dunno.’ He’s fiddling with the balaclava, pulling it between his fingers.
‘Can you take this seriously? And leave that alone.’ Nadeeka bats at the balaclava. ‘It might have important evidence on it.’
She stares at the map. What would Jamie be doing at a police station, that he couldn’t do online? Lost property, neighbourhood disputes, even crime reports – they’re encouraged to do almost everything via a contact form nowadays.
‘What if he wanted advice?’ she says, but Scott isn’t listening. He’s hacking at the balaclava with the scissors. ‘What are you doing?’ Nadeeka says, outraged.
Scott doesn’t answer. Instead, like a magician with a rabbit, he pulls a small black disk from the knitted seam. He places it on the table between them.
The bug.
‘Then he wasn’t recording me,’ Nadeeka says slowly. Scott opens his mouth, and she holds up a hand, blocking his retort. ‘I know you think I’m in denial, but I think I’d have noticed if Jamie wore a balaclava in the bloody house.’
‘Where did he wear it, then?’ Scott flips the bug over tentatively, as though it might move of its own accord.
‘Protests?’ One by one, the pieces are clicking into place.
The cash Jamie had taken out wasn’t to fund terrorist activity but to mitigate the terrible crime he’d committed against Surinder – a crime Nadeeka increasingly believes Jamie was compelled to carry out.
‘He didn’t buy a recording device to spy on me,’ she says.
‘He got it to spy on New Dawn.’ Jamie must have worn the balaclava when he carried out the arson, and when he met with other members of the group.
‘Going undercover in a white supremacy meeting?’ Scott whistles. ‘That’s a sure-fire way to get yourself—’ He breaks off abruptly, eyes fixed on the table.
‘Killed.’ Nadeeka says quietly. ‘Maybe that’s why he was at Beech Street police station. Because he knew they were after him.’
How to conceal your identity.
Jamie wasn’t trying to hide from the police, he was trying to hide from New Dawn.
‘Jamie was behaving strangely because he was scared,’ Nadeeka says, everything coming together with blinding clarity. ‘He distanced himself from me to protect me – even tried to walk away, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.’
Scott tears his eyes away from the table. He nods slowly, reluctantly. ‘I think you might be on to something.’
‘I know I am.’ Nadeeka feels strangely disassociated, as though she’s watching herself come to a conclusion she’s known all along. She dials Lauren’s number. There’s a lot Nadeeka still doesn’t know, but she’s certain the police have it wrong about New Dawn.
Jamie hadn’t been one of them.
He’d been trying to stop them.