Even after checking her phone, he’d wondered why he was doing it, skulking around stealing samples to send off to some DNA lab. To prove what? he’d wondered. It seemed impossible that Samuel wasn’t Josh’s son. Cassie had been right: he was the living, breathing image of him. Still he went ahead and did it, if only to confirm his own neurosis. Samples hadn’t been hard to obtain. Kim’s brush in the bathroom had many strands of hair to choose from. He’d even taken a glass she’d drunk from.
He’d thought that obtaining a sample from Josh would be problematic. Not so. He’d felt his heart crack wide open when he’d taken the lock of hair Cassie had kept in one of the family albums.
So here they were, the results. Scarcely able to comprehend it, he read the letter again. There is no genetic link to Kimberley Summers, the report clearly stated. Kimberley Summers is therefore excluded as the biological mother. How had this happened? How had he let it? Why in God’s name hadn’t he mentioned his concerns to Cassie? She’d also sensed something wasn’t right. That had been abundantly clear when she’d had what he’d feared was some kind of mental breakdown that day in the garden. His sympathies had been with Kim, whom he’d thought had been attacked, and who seemed to be under attack all over again. He’d refused to listen to his own wife, insinuated she was paranoid when in fact she was half out of her mind with grief and suspicion. And now… He had to find her. Reach her before she… Christ, what would she do?
Pressing his phone hard to his ear, he willed the taxi firm he was calling to pick up, cursing when it didn’t. Wiping his hand over his face, he googled another, all the while scanning every conceivable place for Cassie’s car keys. They were nowhere to be seen. What the hell should he do? She would be almost there by now. Panic climbing inside him, he contemplated ringing Kim. He would have to say there was an emergency, ask her to come over here, rather than alert her to the fact that they were aware of what she’d done… to what end? Why would she have feigned a pregnancy, claimed another child as her own? To get to them, obviously. She done that masterfully. But why? She’d said she’d loved Josh. They’d believed her. She knew things about him she couldn’t possibly know unless she’d been close to him. But was it possible she’d hated him for some reason? Fallen out with him? That she’d been trying to exact revenge for some kind of wrong she imagined he had done her?
He sucked in a breath, the same impotent anger crashing through him that always did when he tried to work out who would have wanted to harm Josh. He couldn’t make himself believe he’d been so drunk he’d fallen onto the tracks and just lain there. It didn’t make sense. Josh had drunk in his youth, as most kids did, but never to excess. He could have knocked himself unconscious – Adam had held onto that. Prayed that Josh had been out of it in those last seconds of his life. He couldn’t bear to imagine what would have been going through his mind if he hadn’t been.
Bile rose in his throat as he recalled what the officer had said about possible suicide. He couldn’t make himself believe that either, that Josh had been so depressed he was contemplating ending his own life. He’d tried to move on, to forget, but he simply couldn’t. The inescapable fact was that what was left of Josh’s wallet had still been in his bloodied pocket. His broken phone by the side of the tracks. If someone had attacked him, then robbery hadn’t been the motive. So failing a random attack by some kind of psychopath, it had to have been someone who knew him. Someone who’d wanted to hurt him.
Kim, who had to be insane to have coldly done what she’d done? But she was petite. Would she have had the strength to push a grown man who didn’t want to be pushed onto the tracks, to be pulverised by the approaching train? He pressed his fingers hard to his temples, then breathed a sigh of relief when the next taxi firm picked up.
While he waited for the cab, he bolted up the stairs