is, they know who I am, and who Ted is. They know what Ted and I are to each other. And they knew how to find me through the charity’s website. Whether they are for me or against me remains to be seen, though if it is Sadie or Ted’s ex-wife it is all too clear which group she is a member of.
Whoever sent it, whatever their reason, I am actually glad they did it. They gave me a gift even if they didn’t mean to. I would rather know than not know. Always. My stance on everything. Because the information – the fact that Ted is in this café with Ruby – is louder than everything else. It is so loud it is drowning out the context. Even if my brain is asking the right questions about the circumstances which got that photograph to me, my emotions are engaged only by what it shows.
It is after seven by the time I have finished my daily run, followed by my usual sit-ups and presses and pull-ups and stretches. I have barely stepped out of the shower before I hear Luke’s keys in the locks, then the front door of my little Victorian house crashing open and his shout, ‘Stay out of the way, Auntie Ella. Back in a minute.’
I shrug off the oversized towelling bathrobe that Ted left with me shortly before you disappeared. It is navy blue. It is so big I used to wrap me and Luke in it together when he was a baby and I wandered through the house late at night, trying to lull him out of crying and into sleep. There are holes and loose threads from uncountable washes, but this old thing of Ted’s is an object of comfort to me still.
I shimmy into a jumper and jeans, tie my wet hair into a ponytail, and fly down the stairs to the sight of Luke and our father, lurching sideways into the hall. They are each clutching one side of the doll’s house, which is shaped like a medium-sized chest of drawers. Ted is rear and centre, taking most of the weight. Above Ted’s head, in the clear black night that followed the afternoon storm, there is an explosion of silver stars. They fall from the sky as if to announce him.
Luke cranes his neck to watch. ‘Awesome,’ he says.
‘Luke asked me to help.’ Ted says this like an apology. He looks at Luke, not me, when he speaks, and a wave of sickness moves through my body.
Somebody on my street has lit a bonfire. The air is thick with smoke. Ash floats into the house. My eyes are burning. I blink and rub them. I think of the disappointed embarrassment that coloured my parting from Ted on Monday night, after trick-or-treating and dinner, which I see now he only went through for Luke.
‘Ted came out to Granny and Grandpa’s tonight,’ Luke says. ‘He helped us get the doll’s house down from the attic and into Grandpa’s van. He followed us here.’
‘That was kind.’ I am moving backwards, up the stairs again, out of their way.
‘Luke and I could have managed,’ our father says. I wink at Luke without our father seeing.
Once the doll’s house is in Luke’s room, there is a great deal of whooping and high-fiving between our father and your son and my furtive ex-boyfriend.
‘So what have you and your aunt got planned for tomorrow?’ It is infinitely easier for Ted to talk to Luke than to me.
‘How about the zoo?’ I say.
‘Yessssss,’ Luke says. He puts out a hand for some more high-fiving with Ted.
‘Luke and I will run to the van to get the box.’ Our father is trying to channel our mother’s matchmaking impulses but not managing her social smoothness. Ted and I stand awkwardly in Luke’s room after they are gone, looking at our own feet.
My heart is squeezing as if I were a teenaged girl about to ask a boy to a dance. But what I have to say is not at all romantic, and it hardly matters anyway because it doesn’t seem possible to piss Ted off any more than I already have. Besides, it’s not like I will lose him – I have been there and done that several times over – and it looks as if I am about to repeat the experience. Once that happens my chance of learning what I need to will vanish forever.
‘Tell me about her laptop,’ I say. ‘Tell me what they found on it.’
He actually sighs. ‘You will never stop.’
‘No. But I am willing to say please if it helps.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to do something so unnatural.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘You won’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
‘They found nothing. The laptop’s empty.’
‘Then why are they holding on to it? Why does it still matter to them?’
‘I said you wouldn’t believe me. It’s lose-lose with you, no matter what I do.’
‘I am not the one making it lose-lose for us.’ My fingers are fidgety and nervous, brushing hair from my eyes that isn’t there because it is already pulled into a ponytail.
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘You know exactly what.’
‘Is there something you want to get off your chest, Ella?’
‘No.’ For now, I want the power of having knowledge without his knowing that I do. ‘So why did you make such a big deal of refusing to tell me about the laptop if there’s nothing to tell? Was it some kind of power game for you?’
‘Low blow. That was beneath you. When I say there was nothing, I mean that whatever is there is hidden. Tech have kept the laptop in the hope that some future tool might uncover something.’
‘You’re saying she used the laptop, but everything she ever did on it is invisible?’
‘So far as I can understand, yes. One of the things they think she did was to use an onion router to mask all of her online activity.’
My amazement actually drives the photograph and the café and Ruby from my head. ‘But that’s impossible. She wouldn’t know what an onion router is.’ My head snaps up. ‘What is an onion router?’
‘You’re talking deep web. That internet world where nothing leaves a trace anywhere. None of the search engines you’d recognise.’
‘But she was seriously useless at technology.’
‘Evidently not.’
‘But she can’t have done that. If MI5 gave her a spying device she wouldn’t know how to turn it on.’
‘Well she did. And it wasn’t the kind of technology ordinary people have access to.’
‘Then someone else set it up and taught her. We need to know who. And why.’
I spend my days warning women of the importance of guarding their privacy to keep safe. But your skill at doing this – your talent for secrets – might have been the very thing that put you in jeopardy.
