“I know. They’ve got my phone, too. That’s why I couldn’t call you when I came out. And then…” He blinks, like a boxer who’s been hit in the face. “I walked most of the way home. I needed to think.”

“Do you know when you’ll get them back?”

“Soon, they said.” He runs his hand over his head. “They offered me a choice. Give us your PIN and passwords, so we can download everything immediately, or don’t give them to us and we’ll keep the laptop and phone until our technical people get around to opening them. And since not giving the passwords would look like I had something to hide…” He shakes his head.

   “Pete, I’ve got more bad news,” I begin, just as he says, “Maddie…”

We both stop. “You go first,” he says.

“The CAFCASS woman phoned. Lyn. They’re claiming that because you’re now the subject of a child abduction investigation, Theo isn’t safe. I’m so sorry, Pete. She wants you to stay somewhere else until the hearing. And you can’t be alone with Theo.”

“Jesus. Jesus.” He closes his eyes.

“I thought maybe you could go to Greg and Kate’s.”

“I guess.” He looks around our downstairs room, as if for the last time. “Jesus.”

“What did you want to say?”

He takes a deep breath. When he starts speaking I know immediately this is something he’s prepared, that he’s been rehearsing it on the long walk home. “There’s something I need to tell you. About my laptop. When the police look at it, they’re going to know…” He stops, then continues. “They’ll be able to tell I’ve been looking at porn.”

I stare at him.

“Not illegal porn, obviously,” he adds quickly. “But Mark—the solicitor—said if they interview you, it’s something they might raise. To try to catch you off guard.”

“When?” I say.

“When will they interview you? It’s not even certain—”

“When do you look at porn?”

He makes a small, defeated gesture. “I don’t know. Does it matter? When Theo was at nursery, I guess.”

That nursery cost nearly two hundred pounds a week, paid for from my salary. But it was worth it, we’d agreed, if it allowed Pete some time to pitch and write articles. “How long has this been going on?”

   He only shrugs. “A while.”

I’d had no idea. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given the other problems in our relationship, but it never even occurred to me. It’s so contrary to my image of him—to Pete’s image of himself, for that matter. Generally, he’s so respectful to women, so principled. I think of some of the images I’ve stumbled across online, and wince. Is that who he is, deep down? And, if I’d never known that about him, what else might I not know?

Who is he, really?

He’s always said he needed to password-protect his laptop to prevent Theo from playing with it—“No screen time at all until he’s two, and no more than thirty minutes a day fully supervised after that. I read an article—in Silicon Valley, the people who really know about this stuff don’t even let their five-year-olds play with iPads unsupervised.” But had it actually been to protect Theo from coming across his browsing history? Or indeed, to stop me from doing the same?

If he could lie about that so easily, what other lies has he told? Could he even have lied about the most important thing of all?

“I’ll go and pack a suitcase,” he says when I don’t respond. He waits for me to say something. But I can’t.

Only as he starts trudging up the stairs do I manage to add, “What else happened at the interview?”

“Oh…” He shrugs wearily. “I said ‘no comment’ to every question. And I could see the detective getting more and more convinced I must have something to hide. So now it’s a trade-off—has he gotten so frustrated he’ll decide to investigate anyway, or will he think it’s a waste of resources when they have so little to go on?”

It seems inevitable to me now that there’ll be a full investigation, not least because so far, everything that possibly could go wrong for us has. And because, behind it all, guiding events with a push here and a nod there, I can feel the invisible, irresistible force of Miles Lambert, who’ll stop at nothing to get his son.

   Perhaps if we’d handled it better, he’d have had less to work with. But now the tiny lie Pete told about seeing the security tag on Theo’s leg is the hairline crack that, when more pressure is applied, could shatter our family apart. Theo could be taken away. Pete could go to prison. And what will happen to me in that situation? If they decide I knew all along, my leave to remain in the UK could be revoked as well.

An abyss has opened up, and we’re teetering right on the edge.

“I’ll call Greg,” Pete says. Automatically, his hand reaches into his pocket for his phone. It comes out empty. “Shit,” he says, furious at his own stupidity. “Shit.” He takes a deep breath, and I know he’s trying to hold himself together.

“I’ll do it,” I say. “You go and pack.”

“Tell him…” He stops, then continues. “Tell Greg I’ll come late. When Theo’s asleep. I want to do bedtime. It could be the last one for a while.”

72

   PETE

   AS I UNDRESSED BEFORE lying down on Greg’s sofa, something fell out of my pocket. It was a card the police had given me. Headed Your Release from Custody, it explained that Inappropriate contact with anyone linked to your case, either directly or indirectly, through a third party or social media, may constitute a criminal offense. If found guilty, you could face up to life imprisonment.

Life imprisonment. Could this really get any worse? And what constituted “inappropriate contact,” anyway?

When we got to the police station my lawyer, Mark Cooper, had gone to speak to the police on his own. He’d told me to expect that—it was part of the process, apparently, the “disclosure.” He came back somber but encouraging.

“Well, they’re not obliged to tell me everything, but even so I’d say they’ve got very little. My advice is, we stick to ‘no comment.’ ”

   “Do we have to? It just feels wrong, somehow. When I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Let me explain something.” Mark Cooper was no older than me, but he had the pale, flabby look of someone who’d spent too much time sitting in these grubby rooms with their flickering strip lights and discarded paper cups. “In this country, the criminal law is based on an adversarial system. That means it’s the police’s goal to get a suspect arrested, charged, and brought to trial, not to worry about whether he’s actually guilty—that’s someone else’s job. On top of that, they face intense pressure to improve their conviction rates. The police are trained in interviewing techniques, and they’re often very good at getting suspects to say something that, however innocent, will help to convict them later. Or, even worse, getting them to tell a small lie that will undermine all the rest of their evidence when it comes out in court. Right now, if they had enough evidence to charge you, they’d have done it. So our objective is to leave here today with that situation unchanged, and the surest way to do that is to answer ‘no comment.’ ”