computer screen.
Pat lifted the phone until it was in front, but slightly to the side of his face so that it wasn’t blocking sight of the monitor.
Tom rolled the mouse to the menu and clicked.
‘Shit!’ Pat stared at the computer screen, as a mirror image of his horrified face stared back. He looked at Tom. ‘What did you do?’
‘I switched your camera on remotely. Look at your phone.’
Pat glanced at his phone, and could see that the camera light was on.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
‘Your phone has been tampered with and an app has been installed. I can switch on your camera wherever you are, and whatever the camera can see will be displayed on the screen. I can even switch on the speaker remotely so that I can hear every word you’re saying.’
Tom looked at Pat with sympathy. Mimi had clearly not trusted him an inch, and from what Leo said she was probably right not to. But installing this sort of application on his phone was extreme. She would have known his every move, and would have been able to manipulate all his relationships by blocking calls, sending fake texts as if they were from him - the works.
‘Bloody hell,’ Pat said. ‘What a mess. It feels as if she’s invaded my body - knows my every thought and shares every moment I have with somebody else. No wonder she knew every time I went to Georgia’s. She always phoned me on some pretext within moments of me arriving.’
‘That would be from your GPS. It tracks where you are. She would have been able to log everything on here, but it would also have sent alerts to her own mobile every time you sent a text. How did you find this, Pat? Wasn’t there a password?’ Tom asked.
‘Yeah, but this is an old computer from school. They all have password logger software on them. She didn’t know it was there - why would she? So I called up the password for her user area. The daft thing was, I was only looking at the cricket scores, but when I saw how many times she’d been on this site, I decided to have a look. That’s where the logs of all my mobile activity were.’
Pat closed the computer window and turned round in his chair.
‘Sorry to drag you into this, Tom. I just wanted to know if I was going mad or not. It’s an awful thing to say, and no reflection on the child, but I wish to God that Mimi wasn’t pregnant. I can’t live with somebody who has so little faith in me.’
Tom couldn’t think of a single appropriate thing to say, so he changed the subject.
‘Leo said you mentioned Abbie Campbell when you phoned, Pat. This is actually about you and Mimi, and I can’t see where Abbie comes into it. Did Leo misunderstand?’ He was trying hard to curb his irritation. He didn’t need to sort out Pat’s domestic issues at this moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pat said, turning back to the computer. ‘I got a bit carried away with the mobile stuff, but it is relevant. When I was looking through Mimi’s files to see what else she might be hiding, I decided to look in the trash folder. I found some photos. They’re not of anybody I know, but they’re all of young girls. And one of them is called Chloe.
* * *
Leo wasn’t happy sitting out here on her own. Too much thinking time. Tom had been inside the house for what felt like hours, when in actual fact it was probably more like ten minutes. It was ridiculous, making her wait in the car. She wasn’t in any danger from Pat. The trouble was, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to, all she could do was think - and all this soul-searching wasn’t doing her any good at all.
She had been so wrong about Ellie, believing that she’d been meeting Gary that night. Of all the ridiculous ideas. And Ellie had been wrong about Max too. How had they all got into such a mess?
But none of it answered the burning question - who killed Sean? And why, for God’s sake?
Leo fought to dismiss the image of Sean’s mangled body from her memory, but she only succeeded in replacing one grim thought with another. Try as she might, she couldn’t eradicate from her mind the facts about her father that Tom had shared earlier, and now that she