Page 69 of Don't Let Him In

“But still, you feel uncomfortable?”

“I do. I felt uncomfortable immediately. It was like he was… too good to be true? Like no man could actually be like that?”

Emma nods. “And in particular a man who has no permanent home, no source of income, and is dating a recently widowed woman whose estate is worth over two million pounds.”

“Yes!” says Ash. “Exactly! It was like, who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want? And then lots of things didn’t add up and now, well, he’s in. Feet under the table and he has an answer, an explanation, for absolutely everything. I’ve tried talking to my mum about it, but she doesn’t really trust me?” Ash pauses before taking a sharp breath in. “I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder eighteen months ago and I was accused of stalking someone, which I didn’t. Not really. But I did do some pretty crazy things and the police got involved and now, well, whatever I say to her, she’s going to see it through that lens. Of me being unstable. Unreliable. So I’m waiting until I’ve got him, fully, a hundred percent. And then I’m going to hit her with it.”

Emma nods again, then she opens a folder and pulls out a couple of sheets of paper. “This is my list,” she says. “This is what I have so far.”

It’s a timeline. It starts in the mid-2010s with the words:Mum and Jonathan meet.

“How did they meet?” Ash asks.

“Dating app. She resisted his charms for a while—she was slightly unconvinced at first—but he worked really hard on her. He just seemed to know exactly what it was she wanted and then he’d give it to her. And then the next we knew, they were getting married! Some dodgy civil thing at the town hall with three guests. I never liked him, not for one small minute. But he made my mum happy. Until he didn’t.”

“What sorts of things did he do?”

“Disappearing acts, mainly. And always scrounging for money. He told her he needed a knee-replacement operation, but the NHS waiting list was too long, so she paid for him to go private. He had the op, and then it turns out that he had it done on the NHS and just pocketed the cash my mum gave him. Always emergencies. Everything was always last-minute, and then every time my mum got close to throwing in the towel, he’d suddenly start being Mr. Perfect again. He always knew exactly how far he could push her. But eventually he pushed it too far. He was barely home, never answered his phone, my mum found some weird burner phone in his bag, he came home with a fuckingTeslathat he said someone had lent him—and then he started talking about selling the house so they could move to the Algarve, and that’s when I intervened. I just knew that he had no intention of moving to the Algarve, that he wanted her to sell the house to free up more cash. For whatever reasons. Probably to pay for the stupid fucking Tesla. To pay off debts. To pay for whatever other secret life he was living. And then a young woman reported him for street stalking. Here.” She taps the list.

Emma continues. “I saw Jade’s post on our local neighborhood app, and I immediately knew it was Jonathan, so I wrote to her and the other young woman, Tilly, who also responded, saying the same thinghappened to her, and we agreed to call the police. They paid him a visit, but pah! Nothing. Of course. He wriggled out of it. Just like he always does. But that was the final straw for Mum. She kicked him out a few days later and he came back, so we changed the locks. And then, well, you know what happened next.”

They both fall silent for a moment and then Ash says, “What do you think happened to your mum?”

A shadow passes across Emma’s face and her jaw clenches with rage. “I think he killed her,” she replies tightly.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Seriously. Remember that woman’s remains they found in the woodlands in Essex? About four years ago? I think that was her. But they couldn’t formally identify her and so there you go, another dead end.”

“Why would he have killed her?”

“Because she was onto him, I guess. She’d caught him in the act. I wish I could track down this woman, the one he was staying with in Tooting. I think she’s the missing link. I think she knows exactly what happened that day. But she seems to have disappeared too.”

Ash feels a wave of anxiety pass through her gut. The woman sitting in front of her thinks that Nick Radcliffe killed her own mother because she’d worked out his scam. What the hell does she think he might be capable of doing to her when he realizes that she knows his game? “What next?” Ash says, nervously. “What should I do?”

“Keep him home. Keep him relaxed. Don’t let anything spook him. And keep me updated.”

SIXTY-THREE

Ash.”

Nina is calling to her through the house.

“Yes,” Ash calls back from her bedroom.

“Did you see Nick today?”

Ash slips off her bed and goes to the landing. “Nope. Not since this morning. Why?”

Her mother is standing in the hallway, still in her big winter coat, her bag on the floor at her feet, a takeaway for their dinner in another bag.

“Just weird that he’s not here. He said he’d be in all day. And now he’s not answering his phone.”

A chill runs down Ash’s spine.Ah, she thinks,it’s started. “Oh,” she says nonchalantly. “That’s strange. Why don’t you have a look at the Ring app? You might be able to see when he left? See if he had a bag? Or whatever?”

“That’s a good idea.”

Ash descends the stairs and follows Nina into the kitchen. At the table they sit elbow to elbow and look through the clips on Nina’s phone. They see the postman come and go, they see a delivery driver pull up in a big gray van and shove something through their letter box, then, in the next clip, they see something strange. At about half ten a car pulls up and a petite woman gets out. She looks about forty-five, with lots ofthick, curly blond hair. As she moves closer to the front door and her face comes into full focus in the camera, they see that she has wide blue eyes framed by mascaraed eyelashes, and that she looks wildly anxious.

---