Detective Bríd joined them and Shelly stood to greet her.
‘I am sorry it’s been so long since we caught up properly about everything that’s been going on. Donal?’ Bríd beckoned the young guard forward. ‘Will you bring Ms Devine’s phone up to Mitchell on the third floor for examination and can you organise some tea and bickies on your way back? I wouldn’t punish you with what passes for coffee round here,’ she confided as Donal took Shelly’s phone and left, pulling the door shut behind him.
‘Now, firstly,’ Bríd continued, ‘I am so, so sorry about the attitude you encountered when you spoke to law enforcement after the incident of the’ – she consulted her notes – ‘the twenty-fifth of the seventh in your home. At the time the call came in, I was in an interrogation – as you know we had a major case that took up a lot of resources – and when I saw the dispatch notes later I was so upset that two unbriefed beat cops were sent. I’m so sorry that they didn’t bring appropriate professionalism to their dealings with you all. It must have been incredibly upsetting.’
‘Thank you, Bríd. Look, it’s OK. I knew these guys just didn’t understand what they were looking at. I’m just really keen to get more of a sense that we are closer to finding out who @__________ is.’
‘Absolutely.’ The detective pushed her short blonde hair back behind her ears and pulled out a blank page. ‘Can you quickly give me a rundown of security measures you put in place since the twenty-fifth?’
‘Changed the locks on all ground-floor doors and windows. Changed alarm codes. My mum and dad are staying with me. I’ve alerted my husband – he lives in the garden currently – he says he’ll try not to be away as much until we get sorted. I’ve also got that new doorbell app, the one with the camera. Not that @__________ has ever just rocked up and rung the doorbell.’
‘That we know of,’ Bríd muttered darkly as she continued to note down Shelly’s information.
Shelly glanced at her mother, who, if possible, looked even more terrified than Shelly felt. Maybe it had been a mistake to ask her to come. Though Jim, her dad, would have been even worse – he was prone to histrionics, hence tasking him with bringing Georgie to the cinema while they were at the station.
‘So, does that mean you think Shelly definitely knows @__________ in real life?’
‘Shelly, did you bring the lists I asked you to make?’ Bríd skilfully skirted Sandra’s question.
Shelly unfolded and smoothed out two sheets of A4 paper: on one, everyone she could think of who’d ever been given the alarm code, and on the other, the people who could’ve got a hold of and made copies of keys to the house.
‘The keys to the house one is, in our opinion, the more crucial,’ Bríd explained. ‘Mitchell strongly suspects that info about your whereabouts, alarm codes, your conversations with the likes of Amy and your husband could be gleaned through spyware installed on your phone, if we find any. However, the fact that @__________ gained entry and locked the door after themselves on the night of the seventeenth suggests someone trusted, potentially someone close to you, Shelly.’
‘I see.’ Shelly clasped and re-clasped her hands on the table in front of her until Sandra gently placed her hand on top to calm Shelly’s agitated movements.
Bríd took the lists and slid them into a brown file to her left. ‘I’ll be working on ruling out the people on these lists. And there is still a possibility it’s not someone you know.’
Shelly was rueful. This was not the comfort Bríd intended it as.
A knock at the door startled everyone.
‘Come in,’ called Bríd. ‘Ah, Detective Mitchell. Great. Please meet Shelly Devine and her mother, Sandra.’
Mitchell came over and shook hands before joining them at the table beside Bríd. Donal, who had slipped in behind Mitchell, placed a fully loaded tea tray down on the table and scuttled back out the door.
‘So, I have good news and bad news.’ Mitchell slid the phone back across the table to Shelly. ‘We have detected and removed a malicious spyware app called YourEveryMove. That’s the good news.’
‘Really?’ Shelly had to laugh. This constituted good news now?
‘The bad news is that it’s actually a very sophisticated piece of spyware,’ Mitchell continued in his oddly robotic manner. ‘Most of the spyware we’d see being used among civilians is crude and usually easily attributed to the person who installed it. YourEveryMove has layers of encryption, however. We do know that it would be impossible to install remotely and that it was installed sometime between January and March of this year. We may be able to narrow that installation window as we examine our findings in more detail, but we need you to create an exhaustive list of people who may have had access to this device. Bear in mind, they could have reconfigured your device’s settings and installed YourEveryMove in mere minutes. So, try to remember every instance that your phone was out of your sight for even five minutes. Hell, a slick operator could have done the installation while pretending to take a photo of you with the phone.’
Mitchell went on to explain some of the grubby ins and outs of spyware before filling his suit pockets with most of the biscuits from the plate on the table and ducking back out of the interview room.
‘He’s an odd one,’ Sandra remarked as the door clicked shut.
‘He’s odd but very thorough.’ Bríd was quick to come to Mitchell’s defence. ‘Everyone on the tech unit says he’s their best guy. Look, I know none of it feels that positive but in a way it is. The spyware is providing @__________ with so much of the access and information they’ve been taunting you with. The time they knew you were in the hospital, the old photographs, even the voicenote you sent to Amy about the birthday. Yes, they gained entry to the house and planted the decorations and the nanny cam concealed in the teddy bear that captured you getting, eh, frustrated with your daughter but at least now we know it was likely an isolated incident.’
Shelly was exhausted from the meeting with the guards but knew skipping any more press events could jeopardise her standing with the various PRs and brand managers who were an essential part of the ecosystem of her precarious career. She walked the red carpet leading into The Landing for the beauty launch she’d promised Amy she wouldn’t bail on. She posed for the social pics, swishing the long Rixo dress on loan from the Princess Closet and placing her hand on her bump lest anyone confuse it for – horror of horrors – weight gain. She’d swung home for make-up and wardrobe and to get Georgie bathed and dressed for bed. Then she headed out, leaving her parents messing with the TV settings. It was amazing to have them there, built-in babysitters for Georgie and nice company in the evenings, but still, she resented how @__________ had made her afraid in her own home. The guards, Bríd assured her, were devoting all their resources to identifying who installed the spyware, though she’d looked a little daunted when Shelly handed her the tally of every person who’d had access to her phone during a two-month period. There were close to thirty names. Still, at least the phone was clean now. And Mitchell’s team had installed an anti-spyware app.