Page 77 of Don't Let Him In

“Where…,” Ash begins gently. “Where is she?”

“No idea,” says Sam. “She did a disappearing act. About four years ago? She started acting very strangely. I mean, she was already kind of delicate, you know? She always had been, since my dad died.”

Ash shakes her head slightly and says, “Sorry, you say your father died? When was this?”

“Oh, a very long time ago, when I was about seven? He died in a diving accident in the Philippines. Left my mum in loads of debt. Apparently, he took out lots of loans in her name, in her company’s name. She couldn’t pay them off and that’s why her business went under. She had to sell the place in Chelsea, move us here, and she never really got over it. Never got over any of it. But she was doing OK, you know? She was active in our lives, she had her job at the shop, she was OK. And then, yeah, about four years ago she started acting very strangely. She didn’t reply to messages, didn’t call, she forgot my birthday, she lost weight—and my mum couldn’t afford to lose weight, you know? Behaved quite erratically. Then she became quite reclusive, stopped going to work.We tried everything to help her, tried to get her to the GP for a referral for mental health issues, for therapy, you know, for anything. And then one day after this had been going on for a few weeks, she messaged us both, me and my brother, and said she was leaving. She couldn’t cope with London life, she couldn’t cope with responsibilities, she needed to get away. She said she’d met a man, he lived in the Algarve, she was going to live with him, some sort of hippie retreat up in the hills. I dunno, the whole thing sounded so bizarre. But also—quite Mum? You know? Hippie retreats? So we didn’t really question it at the time, but then her birthday came and went, Christmas came and went, my birthday, my brother’s birthday, no cards, no messages, nothing. And then my brother wrote to tell her he’d got engaged and there was no reply. And I dunno, we started getting a bad feeling, thought maybe this guy in the Algarve, whoever he was, maybe he’d trafficked her? Killed her, even.” Sam flinches as he utters these words. “So we got in touch with the police and filed her as a missing person and they told us”—he pauses and licks his lips, takes a sip of water and then puts the glass down again—“they told us the craziest thing. Apparently, a year earlier, a woman had come to my mum’s flat and then left twenty-four hours later and disappeared. It was nothing to do with my mum, or at least I don’t think it was. But it did coincide with the time that she started acting weird.”

“Did the police tell you anything else about this woman? The one who came here?”

“Oh, only that she was looking for her husband. That she thought he was with my mum. Apparently she’d had a guy staying, according to the neighbors. God knows what happened there or who she’d got mixed up with, but, yeah, this woman was reported missing by her daughter about a month or two later, and when they started to investigate, they got CCTV footage of this woman arriving at my mum’s flat and then leaving the next day. Never to be seen again. No idea what happened to the guy either. Case closed. And yeah… that was a bit of a shocker. We didn’t push it. Didn’t ask too many questions, just in case my mum had,you know, got mixed up in something. Anyway, the police dropped the case eventually, although the woman is still on file as a missing person. And I wondered just now, when you said you were here to see my mum, maybe you knew something? Had something?”

Ash’s heart constricts with the knowledge that she is about to upend this guy’s life even more than it already has been. “Your dad,” she says. “Did he look like you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, my mum always said I was the image of him. My brother looks like my mum, but yeah. Look.” He jumps to his feet and pulls a photo album from the shelves behind him. He peels through the pages and then turns the album toward them. “Look,” he says, pointing at a handsome young man, clean-shaven, with thick dark hair, holding a toddler on his knee. “That’s my dad.”

Ash hears Jane draw in her breath. “What was his name, your dad?”

“Damian. Damian Law.”

“And you say he died, what, twenty years ago?”

“Yeah, round about that?”

Ash and Jane exchange looks and then Ash reaches into her bag and pulls out the printout of Nick Radcliffe’s LinkedIn photo, the photo from his obsolete life-coaching page, and a photo from her camera roll of him at their house on Boxing Day, looking hale and hearty in the back of the shot with a large glass of red wine in his hand. She passes them to Sam and watches him anxiously, her stomach churning with the enormity of what she is doing to this human being whom she has only known for ten minutes. She watches a symphony of emotions pass across his face, confusion, amusement, confusion again, then hurt, then anger, and finally he looks up from the photo and says to Ash, “What is this? Who is this?”

“This is a man called Nick Radcliffe who has lied his way into my mother’s life by pretending he knew my dead father. He also pretended to be single and child-free, but is in fact married to another woman, called Martha, with whom he has a young child. He has been with Marthafor four years and before that he was married to a woman called Tara, who is the woman who was reported missing after leaving this flat four years ago. He was also married to a woman called Laura, and they had two daughters he abandoned when they were very young and who are now teenagers. He also…” Ash takes a huge gulp of air before speaking, to stop her voice from cracking. “He also paid someone to kill my dad. And I’m really sorry, Sam, but I believe this man is… your father.”

Ash sees Sam gulp heavily as his eyes drop back to the pictures. “His hair, though. It’s white. I don’t…” Finally, he nods. “I mean, he got older. Yeah. He looks older—but how? I don’t understand.”

“You know,” Jane says thoughtfully, “I read somewhere that you can pay people in the Philippines to fake your death for you. Apparently, it’s a… thing? I mean, is it possible that that’s what your father did? That he faked his death. And then, for whatever reason, he came back into your mother’s life four years ago? That he was the man your mum’s neighbors say they saw here, staying with your mother at that time. What did they say he looked like?”

Sam looks up at Jane with cloudy eyes. “They said…” He pauses, then starts again. “They said he was tall, with white hair and a short beard, about midfifties.” He gulps drily. Then he says, “Fuck.”

“I’m so sorry,” says Ash. “I just can’t… I mean, my father was murdered just over a year ago. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. And I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you, growing up without your dad. And to know that—”

Sam shakes his head and puts up a hand to ward off the rest of Ash’s sentence. Then suddenly he is on his feet, sprinting, hurtling out of the room, feet heavy against the wooden floorboards, followed by the sound of a door opening, knees falling to the floor, and Sam vomiting thunderously into a toilet bowl.

Ash and Jane sit silently as he vomits three times in succession. Ash has her eyes closed, Jane leans into the sofa and lets her head roll back. This is awful, thinks Ash, just the most awful, awful thing. To be here,to be present for it, to witness it, to be, however tangentially, a part of it. It is overwhelming and terrible and too, too much.

“Oh God,” Ash whispers into the silence. She rocks forward and then back again. “Oh God.”

Jane reaches for her hand and holds it softly but firmly in hers.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Ash whispers.

“You mean Amanda? Dead?” Jane replies in a matching whisper.

Ash nods. “And killed by…?”

“Nick?” Jane mouths silently.

Ash nods again.

Then Sam appears, sallow, tear streaked, clammy. Jane passes him his water, helps him to his seat.

“Are you OK?” Ash asks.

He nods and then he clears his throat and says, “Where is he now? My father? Where is he?”

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