‘And?’ Silas asks. Last time he looked, he was working for Wiltshire CID not bloody Relate.
‘Can you check? You know, the number plates. See if it was his new car?’
‘If it’s been stolen, Rob needs to report it,’ Silas says.
‘I don’t think it’s been stolen.’
Where’s Kate going with this? She seems so ill at ease, uncomfortable. ‘Can’t you just check with Rob?’ he asks.
‘Not really,’ Kate says, looking down awkwardly.
‘If you give us the number plate, we’ll run a search,’ Strover interjects, glancing at Silas, who turns away. She’s out of order, but the damage is done.
‘Won’t be a moment,’ Kate says, walking over to the corner of the kitchen, where she finds a scrap of paper. ‘Someone in the village made a note of it.’
‘Thanks,’ Strover says, taking it.
Silas will talk to her later.
39
Kate
‘You just need to speak to Rob,’ Bex says, glancing at the missing person poster that DI Hart left on the kitchen table. ‘Ask him up front if he was here this morning in a new car. End of. For your own sanity.’
She’s right. Kate was about to call him when Hart and Strover dropped in to say goodbye. She feels sorry for Hart. His son has caused him so much pain in recent years. She’ll keep an eye out for him, for what it’s worth. Scan the summer crowds on the beaches. Old habits die hard.
‘Will you also talk to Rob?’ Kate asks.
‘Gladly,’ Bex says. ‘Give him a piece of my mind.’
Kate’s angry with him too. Earlier, they’d worked themselves up into a gin-soaked lather as they discussed the possibility that Rob might have come back down to Cornwall without telling her. Was it to see the woman who met him at Truro station? It might explain why Rob didn’t wave back at Mark. Kate’s also frightened. And still a little drunk, which isn’t helping her paranoia. If it wasn’t Rob in the car, who was it?
‘I’ll start by asking him what he’s been doing today – in a casual way, of course,’ she says, for her own benefit as much as Bex’s. ‘But we also need to see where he’s speaking from.’
If he’s in a car, she’ll challenge him, explain that Mark from the gallery saw him driving past this morning. It would mean he wasn’t in his London flat when they spoke earlier. For most of that conversation, he was just a blur on her phone.
‘You going to facetime him?’ Bex asks.
‘On my laptop – connected to the big screen next door.’
Bex gives her a quizzical look. ‘Really?’
‘That way we can see the background properly, work out where he’s calling from.’
Ten minutes later, they’re all set up in the sitting room, Kate’s laptop connected to the vast TV set. Rob is going to appear much bigger than he is in real life. Huge. As big as he was last night on the French news. If they’re looking at someone else, it will show. At least, that’s the theory.
They both sit on the sofa and Kate opens up FaceTime, her desktop mirrored on the large screen.
‘This is so weird, Kate,’ Bex says.
‘You focus on him, I’ll look at the background.’
Kate’s still not sure whether she’s strong enough to do this. Her fear is that the moment Rob appears on the big screen, she’ll feel like she did before and have to end the conversation. She can’t deal with the disorientation, the overwhelming sense that the man she loves has been replaced by a stranger. It’s like a rug being pulled from under her feet so hard that she’s spun upside down. Also, she’s been trained to look at a face as soon as she sees it, beginning with the nose and then taking in the whole, studying it for likenesses. Holistic facial recognition. Will she be able to look away quick enough?
She dials his number on FaceTime. Rob answers almost immediately, an image flickering into life on the vast screen. She can’t cope. Keeping her eyes averted, she gets up and walks to the door, where she hovers.
Bex looks over to her anxiously and then turns back to the screen.
‘Hi, Bex. What’s up with Kate?’ Rob says. ‘Everything OK down there?’
It sounds like Rob and he appears to be talking from a room rather than his car. The voice is loud and clear, coming from all around them, thanks to an array of sunken Bose speakers. At least he’s not in Cornwall. Not visiting some floosie in Truro.
‘Hi, Rob,’ Bex says, casting another imploring glance at Kate.
From where Kate’s standing, she can listen to his voice without having to look at him.
‘She was here, but…’ Bex falters. Kate rolls her hands encouragingly, urging Bex to carry on, to bluff. She’s great at charades. ‘There’s someone at the door,’ Bex continues. ‘Rang the bell just as we were calling you.’
Kate raises both hands in the thumbs-up sign to encourage her.
‘People are so friendly down there,’ Rob says. ‘Dropping by all the time. No one ever knocks on my door here in Shoreditch.’
Kate tiptoes into the room, stepping in far enough to be able to see the screen. Rob seems to be doing something else, eyes down. She forces herself to look away from his face, aware of his movements but not his expression. All she needs to do is focus on the background. It looks exactly as it did earlier, when he said he was calling from his flat.
She steels herself and walks over to the back of the sofa where Bex is sitting.
‘Hi, babe,’ she says, leaning over Bex’s shoulder. The laptop is on the table in front of them. She keeps her eyes firmly averted from both images of Rob’s face. She’s often talked to him in the past on FaceTime while she’s been doing something else – cooking, yoga, painting. It’s quite common for her not to be looking into the camera.
‘Who was at the door?’ he asks.
‘Oh, Mark from the gallery,’ she says breezily. ‘Asking if Stretch fancied a walk.’
She is aware of Rob smiling.
‘Did you lock the front door afterwards?’ he asks.
‘Of course,’ she says.
Bex nudges her, subtly pointing at something she’s just scribbled down on a piece of paper:
This is nuts! It’s definitely him. And he’s gorgeous.
Maybe it is nuts, but something’s still niggling her.
‘So are you guys just facetiming for a friendly chat or what?’ he asks.
‘Don’t you like our company?’ Bex says, leaning into the camera in her flirt mode. She’s still a bit drunk too.
‘You know I love it, Bex,’ Rob says. ‘It’s just that I’ve got someone on the other line and the small matter of a company to float…’
‘It’s fine,’ Kate interjects. He’s busy with work. He always is. ‘Just wanted to ask about the pool. The automatic vacuum’s stopped cleaning the bottom.’ It’s her turn to improvise now.
‘Leave it with me,’ he says.
The robotic vacuum that criss-crosses the bottom of the swimming pool all day ground to a halt earlier. It could have been worse. A few weeks back, the cover started to roll over the pool while she was swimming in it, coming up behind her. She got out just in time – it was terrifying. Rob played it down afterwards, said that the cover’s sensors would have detected a body in the water and stopped, but she hasn’t been in the pool since.