Don't Come Looking by AJ Campbell (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

He rolls his eyes. ‘You’ve never got time for me anymore.’

‘I need to sort some stuff out with Eva.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Please, Harry, leave it. I’ll be with you soon. That’s fine about picking you up tomorrow night.’

‘Whatever.’

He storms off, and Sasha stares at me with desperation, the strain on her face bulging her eyes. ‘What has happened to my life?’

‘Let’s take a look at what else is on here.’ I reopen the laptop.

She reaches forward and slams it shut. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’

‘You need to involve the police now. At least get them to look into it.’

‘I can’t let anyone see this. It’ll kill the kids. Their dad is having an affair with the neighbour’s son. Harry’s best friend.’ She shakes her head, totally bewildered. ‘How can this have happened and me not have a clue?’ She perches on the side of the desk, grinding her knuckles together. ‘I can’t believe it.’ Her breathing quickens.

‘We need to take this down to the station.’

‘No way. I don’t want this out in the open. No one else must ever find out about this except us. It’s going to destroy me. I can’t have it destroying what’s left of my family too. Promise me you’ll never to say a word about this to anyone. Not even Jim. Promise me.’

‘Sasha, listen to me. Something isn’t right here. Your husband has disappeared without a trace, and his laptop has been found in your neighbour’s son’s bedroom with a photo of the two of them on it. Did Luke take the laptop from here before or after Marc left?’

She shrugs.

I point to the computer on the desk. ‘And what about this being wiped? Was Luke in here after Marc disappeared?’

‘I can’t remember.’

I think for a moment. ‘Well, I can. Luke was with Harry, Hannah and George after school the day Marc disappeared. Luke was discussing climate change with Hannah. Thinking about it, I’ve seen that boy here a lot. How often does he come over?’

‘He’s spent loads of time with Marc and Harry over the years on the computer. Marc was teaching them to code, or something like that. We used to tease them, call them geeky nerds.’ Her head shakes from side to side. ‘But Harry’s attention span for the stuff they’ve been looking at recently has been that of a gnat. He lost interest and used to leave them to it. Harry did start to get the hump, though. I could tell. He used to say Marc treated Luke more like his son than him.’ Her upper body crumbles into a ball as she whispers she wants to be alone.

I pat her shoulder twice before leaving her to go and call Rob. He really needs to know about JJ Harper and Art. Damn, he’s not there. I leave another message, telling him to call me urgently. I return to the kitchen, planning my next move. Under the sink, I find an old sponge and a bottle of anti-bacterial spray and attempt to clean the rancid smell from my trainers.

Hannah’s voice startles me. ‘Is Mum OK, Eva?’

I walk over to her. She is flopped on a beanbag. Her feet are elevated on the sofa, her phone resting in the dip between her hip bones, and she is staring out of the patio doors into the garden. The angle of the light from the hallway accentuates the hollowness of her tear-stained cheeks. Marc’s disappearance has signed its initials across the face of every member of this family. She’s still in her school uniform, her hair in two plaits, looking far too young to bear the grief her family is suffering. I sit on the sofa and ask her how she is. We chat for a while. She reveals her anger about no one believing she saw Marc at school the other day.

‘I believe you,’ I say, truthfully.

‘Do you really?’ she asks.

I nod.

‘Do you think Dad will come back?’

I consider my reply. ‘I wish I could give you a definite answer to that.’

‘He will,’ she says with the innocence of optimistic youth. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. We have to believe, otherwise what’s the point?’ She folds her arms, dismissing me in true teenage fashion.

I slip outside to try Rob again. ‘That was a quick call back,’ he says sarcastically. There’s a pause. ‘You OK?’

I drop down on the doorstep. ‘Sorry, something came up. I did try and call you again.’

‘Your friend whose husband walked out? I have to tell you something.’

‘What about?’

‘Their neighbour’s son. You know him?’

‘Luke? Why?’

‘He’s been accused of blackmail.’

‘By whom?’

‘A schoolteacher, a bloke called Timothy Robbins.’

I try to marry his words to my thoughts but can’t quite make a connection.

‘He walked into the station earlier. There was no one else free, so I saw to him. He reported that a Luke Walker has been blackmailing him. It’s only when he relayed Luke’s home address, I realised he was talking about someone who lives in that development we’ve stopped at.’

‘Blackmailing him for what?’

‘An affair with a pupil. Caught them shagging in a school store cupboard, apparently.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

Chelsea? Is that what Luke was threatening her with on Saturday night? ‘Male or female?’

‘Who?’

‘The pupil the teacher was caught with.’

‘Female, why?’

‘Never mind, carry on.’ I need to hear this.

‘Luke got video footage of the teacher and the girl. Threatened them both to pay him ten grand each. Pay or show. He told them he’d circulate the videos across social media if they didn’t cough up. They both paid. The girl is from some rich family and had the money from her eighteenth. We tried to get hold of this Luke, but he wasn’t there when we called at his house earlier. His mother said he was out but would be back later. His phone is switched off.’

Thoughts buzz around my mind like wasps in a jar – confused and unable to make sense of the situation. Has Luke been blackmailing Marc as well, with that image on his laptop? Is