Chapter 36
I replay my conversation with the jeweler.
Whoever had bought the watch probably wouldn’t sell it back to another shop—there was more margin to be made by selling it online.
I buzz the windows down and spend fifteen minutes trawling eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and a few other sales sites in the hope it might already be for sale, but there is nothing even similar to the Rolex being advertised by a local seller.
If they even wanted to sell.
As per Leah’s request, I wait on a side street off Aspley Lane, in sight of the school’s main entrance but not too close.
Also as agreed, I stay in the car and don’t do anything to draw attention to myself.
No waving, Dad, no shouting, and definitely no hugging.
The digital clock on the dashboard ticks past two thirty and I watch as gray-uniformed pupils start to stream out of the gates, Leah among them.
She gets into the passenger side, sliding down in her seat as if she doesn’t want to be seen.
I start the engine and pull up to the junction. “Hey, Leah. How was your day?”
“Terrible,” she says, yanking her seat belt down.
“The head of Year Eleven made a big thing of what happened yesterday during full-year assembly, warning everyone to ‘be vigilant’ and ‘walk with a friend if possible’ and ‘report anything suspicious.’ Oh my God, it was so embarrassing. I nearly died.”
“She mentioned your name?”
“No, of course not. But everyone knew it was me by the end of first break. So cringe. Like when they used to bang on about ‘stranger danger’ all the time back in primary school.”
It’s only five minutes later, after I’ve turned right off the ring road—away from the city, away from home—that she seems to sense even without paying attention that we’ve deviated from the normal route. She glances up from the screen, the smile fading from her face.
“Why are you going the wrong way, Dad?”
I mumble something about roadworks on the direct route home and not wanting to get stuck in a traffic jam. After a moment, she goes back to Snapchat, thumbs flying over the screen of her mobile as she reads, replies, responds to a string of messages.
I don’t tell her about the gray car I’ve spotted in the rear-view mirror.
It slid into the lane behind us a couple of minutes before and has been keeping pace in the stop-start traffic ever since.
Only shifting lanes when I do, keeping at least three other cars between us the whole time.
Not speeding up to pass or turning off, flashes of gray just about visible in my rear-view mirror.
The gray car follows me all the way around the double roundabout at Crown Island, still steady behind me as I embark on the little detour but never close enough for me to get a good look at the driver.
I’ll take the long way around Wollaton Park, all the way around and back to this junction—a full circle that won’t make any sense except if the gray car is actually following me.
In fact, I can do better than that. I drop down to third gear and slow my speed to twenty miles per hour, waving an arm out of the window for the white van behind to overtake.
Gripping the wheel a little tighter with my left hand as the van driver comes close, flashes his lights, honks his horn, then pulls out in a roar of exhaust and comes past me to flash through an orange traffic light on Wollaton Road.
If I can get the gray car close enough, I can make a note of the number plate and get a proper look at the driver.
For a strange moment I wonder whether it might be Maxine or Charlie behind the wheel. But that wouldn’t make any sense.
The light turns green and I slowly pull away, keeping my speed down and waving for a black SUV to pass me. I flick my hazard lights on for good measure, but he has to wait for a break in traffic before he can overtake. Only two cars now.
Leah glances up from her phone again. “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Detour.”
“No,” she says, “I mean, why have you got your hazards on?”
“The engine’s making a funny noise.”
She listens for a moment. “Is it?”
I don’t want to freak her out. “Thought there was a knocking noise in third gear.”
“I can’t hear anything.” She looks over her shoulder at the heavy grille of the pickup truck filling the back window. “That guy’s very close and he’s, like, shouting something.”
The pickup truck finally pulls out and overtakes in an angry burst of acceleration, but in the same moment the gray car behind him turns off to the right, cutting through a line of traffic as my mirror is obscured by the bulk of the pickup passing on my right-hand side.
By the time my mirrors are clear, the street behind me is empty. The gray car is disappearing down a side road onto a housing estate, the tail end just visible for a split second before it’s gone. I’m not even sure it was a Volvo estate after all.
Leah looks at me as if I’m losing the plot. “OK, well, that was weird.”
“You’re right,” I say. “The engine seems all right now.”
“Where even are we?”
“Wollaton.” I switch the hazards off and accelerate back up to the speed limit. “Home in ten minutes.”
My daughter shakes her head and we pass the rest of the journey in silence.
At home, she heads straight up to her bedroom and I go into the lounge, peering through the front window at traffic passing on the street. But it’s mid-afternoon and there are very few cars; no gray Volvos in any case.
My phone chirps with a notification on WhatsApp—two messages from Charlie Parish. The first one is a voice note.
“OK,” he says, his recorded voice quick and precise, older sounding than when I’d met him in person.
“So, I’ve been playing around with that photo, the one in the memory of the old flip phone?
I managed to extract it and download it to my Mac, and I’ve been doing some work on it to enhance the detail, sharpen it up, brighten it, remove the noise and so on.
I’ve got some software that uses an AI algorithm for resolution upscaling, which is kind of like filling in the blanks and making it better than the original.
Basically, it’s the best software there is.
” He pauses, a few seconds of dead air on the recording.
“Anyway, I don’t… quite know what to make of the picture, but have a look and see what you think. Give me or Mum a call back, yeah?”
The second message is an image without a caption.
I tap the display to blow it up to full-screen size.
It’s recognizable as the blurred picture Jess had discovered on the Motorola on Sunday evening.
But whereas before it had been tiny, like looking through frosted glass at something that might have been a hand or a thumb or the side of someone’s face, now it’s bigger and sharper and much clearer, clean lines and distinct shapes.
I pinch the image to blow it up, zooming in closer.
The skin that’s visible is ivory pale, the thin blue line of a vein threading through it. It’s not a hand, not quite. It’s the underside of a wrist—two wrists—one laid on top of the other.
Binding the wrists tightly together is a purple-checked scarf.