The Catch Page 4

  ‘I feel like I should take that off you for starters.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I was going to use the axe anyway. Much scarier.’

  Her husband was smiling again.

  And Claire was almost certain he was still joking.

  7

  I angled the screen of my laptop away from where Abbie and Claire were sitting on the sofa. We had been out all day, visited three wedding dress shops – discovering that none of them could make a dress in five weeks – and spent two hours in a coffee shop in the city centre with wedding magazines being passed around. It had been exhausting faking my excitement for Abbie and I had a horrible feeling she’d known something wasn’t right. Since we had dropped Joyce back at her flat and driven home, I had been pretending to catch up on work while they watched a quiz show on the television.

  Checking they weren’t watching me, I minimised my emails and opened up a new browser window, typing two words into the Google search box: Ryan Wilson. More than 360,000,000 results. Christ. Could he not have had a more uncommon surname? Most of the first few pages were taken up with results about a former captain of the Glasgow Warriors rugby union team. Page after page of results, with nothing that looked like it might be related to the Ryan Wilson who had been here last night. I scrolled through the first ten pages in case anything appeared, then with a twinge of guilt I switched to the images tab. It felt risky but my need to know was stronger than any vague sense of remorse. I scrolled down further and further, until the results seemed to be totally random.

  No good. I needed to narrow the search. What else did I know about Ryan? Not much. I tried typing in a few more word combinations, combing through the results each time: Ryan Wilson Manchester followed by Ryan Wilson Nottingham, then Ryan Wilson Royal Anglians and Ryan Wilson recruitment. The last search yielded a series of hits on the very first page: a company web page, a Twitter and Facebook account.

  Result.

  My eyes flicked up to Abbie again and sensing me, she turned and smiled. I gave her a thumbs up and then pretended to frown at something I was reading. Rolling her eyes, she went back to watching the television.

  I clicked on the company website link for Eden Gillespie International, recognising Ryan immediately. A full page biography with a tasteful headshot of Ryan in a conservative suit and dark tie, looking confidently into the camera.

  Ryan Wilson is a partner with extensive search experience including Chief Executive, Board, and Senior appointments in the technology, IT, aerospace and defence sectors. He currently leads Eden Gillespie’s Midlands Division (UK). Ryan has a first class BSc in Psychology from the University of Manchester; before joining Eden Gillespie he served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Anglian Regiment, British Army.

  Army officer. First-class degree. Partner at thirty-three. Police volunteer. Model good looks.

  Joyce’s excited words came back to me. A catch.

  He certainly ticked a lot of boxes. He had a lot going for him.

  And yet . . .

  And yet my first impression kept nagging at me.

  I clicked on the headshot, blowing it up in the centre of the screen. A decent business picture, professionally shot, well lit, not smiling but not too over-the-top serious either. The face of a man you could talk to, a man good with people, a man you could trust. A man you should be happy to welcome into your home.

  But those eyes. Filled with a dark, knowing confidence.

  It wasn’t the same as meeting him close-up, face-to-face – the effect was diminished by distance – but I still felt the same shiver from last night. A feeling of recognition. Of knowing what I was looking at. I stared at the screen, with the feeling that if I stared long enough I could discern the secrets hidden there. Every detail hidden behind those perfect cheekbones and strong jaw, that confident smile.

  Who are you? What have you done?

  ‘Dad?’

  I looked up abruptly, one hand going to the laptop lid in case I needed to shut it quickly. The cat, who had been asleep with her chin on my thigh, woke with a start.

  ‘What?’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Abbie gave me a curious look. ‘What’s the answer to this one? And no googling!’

  I looked at the question on the TV screen. What does the letter A stand for in the acronym of the British military unit the SAS? The answers on screen were: Army, Agency, Air and Action.

  ‘Air,’ I said.

  ‘A hundred per cent?’

  ‘A hundred per cent, Special Air Service.’ I smiled, feeling a sudden pang of longing and regret that was almost a physical pain in my chest. I’m going to miss this. All of us together, Abbie asking for my advice, just watching quiz shows on a Saturday night.

  On the screen, the contestant – a balding birdwatcher from County Durham – also chose ‘Air’ and was rewarded with the flashing green bar that indicated a correct answer.

  ‘Yes!’ Abbie said, with a clenched fist. ‘How come you know so much random stuff, Dad?’

  ‘I guess I’m just a fount of useless information,’ I said with a shrug.

  ‘And that is why you’ll always be one of my phone-a-friends. You and Mum. Dad can cover history, sport, books and military stuff, Mum you’ll cover science, food, geography, arts and culture, films, tennis and ice hockey.’

  Claire said, ‘What about Ryan? Won’t he be one of your phone-a-friends?’

  ‘He’ll be in the audience, clapping and cheering me on.’

  I went back to my laptop, bookmarked the page on the Eden Gillespie website and searched through the site for a few minutes. The company had UK offices in London, Nottingham, Manchester and Glasgow, plus overseas hubs in Paris, Frankfurt, Turin, Geneva and New York. All the consultants and project managers had that same shiny, smiley professional look and business was good, it seemed.

  On the previous Google results page, I clicked on the first Facebook result but there were about a million Ryan Wilsons. I went to Abbie’s Facebook page instead, scrolling through her list of friends until I found Ryan. In this picture Ryan was smiling into the camera in a white open-necked shirt, maybe on a beach or a boat, with blue skies behind him. His profile was open: 396 friends. Lives in: Nottingham, UK. From: Manchester, UK. Works at: Eden Gillespie International. In a relationship. No birthday – not even a year – and no school or university education listed either.

  I clicked on it and began scrolling through his posts.

  They were of barbecues, weddings, Ryan competing in various Iron Man events and marathons to raise money for Cancer Research, or in hiking gear on moorland that could have been the Lake District or maybe the Derbyshire Peaks. A few posts about Man Utd Football Club and the occasional funny meme shared by millions of others. Nothing political, nothing too controversial, all fairly bland.

  Everything was perfect. There was nothing whatsoever to alarm or disturb anyone who viewed his public profiles, not a hint of any kind of controversy. Literally nothing. At all.

  It was a bit too perfect.

  On Twitter, more of the same. Much of it work-related, or football-related with the occasional funny retweet thrown in. No politics, no swearing, nothing anyone could find particularly offensive. He had 496 followers and followed 652 accounts. Both accounts dated back to summer 2013. Did that mean anything? Why was there nothing before that?

  He was thirty-three now, so in 2013 he would have been twenty-six. Maybe that was the year he came out of the army – an officer commission straight out of university. Five-year commission? That seemed to ring a bell. Maybe they discouraged use of social media in the forces.

  Both his Facebook and Twitter accounts used the same smiley picture of Ryan in pale blue jacket and open-necked white shirt. There was no Instagram account I could find with an obvious username, so I made a mental note to check through Abbie’s account to see who she followed. Unless of course he had a completely separate account under a different username. And that was the shortcoming of this kind of �
��research’, of course – it could be that the social media accounts under his own name told only part of the story. He could easily have other accounts under other names that would be harder to find.

  Scrolling down the page, I found Ryan’s LinkedIn profile and paused to open another browser window. I needed to log out of my own account first, to stay anonymous. The last thing I needed was Ryan seeing that Edward Collier had been poking around his profile page. No need for him to know his fiancé’s dad had been checking him out.

  Ryan’s LinkedIn picture was the same as on his Eden Gillespie web page. Smart, capable, trustworthy. He had worked there for three years, with a couple of years each at two previous employers, both of which were in executive-level recruitment. Associate, then consultant, senior consultant, making partner earlier this year. He’d obviously risen fast through the ranks but he still seemed young to be a partner. The entry before that was ‘Lieutenant, British Army.’ Infantry platoon commander in the Royal Anglian Regiment. Deployed to Afghanistan on active service. Skills developed in leadership and command, close team-working, delegation, decision-making under intense pressure while responsible for thirty soldiers.

  According to LinkedIn, he had studied psychology at Manchester, graduating with a first-class degree. At least we had that in common: I’d studied there a decade and a half before Ryan. I made another mental note to ask him about his time in Manchester. There was no secondary school listed.

  I created a new bookmark folder in the browser named ‘Admin/templates/forms’, added all the accounts I’d found, and went back to the headshot of Ryan on the Eden Gillespie website. I clicked on it, and the thumbnail blew up to cover half the screen. Still sharp, still clean, no pixelation as the image size expanded. I studied the picture again, staring at it until my eyes blurred, the TV just background noise. Thinking back to Joyce’s comment last night. She had remarked that Ryan reminded her of her own late husband, my father-in-law who passed away five years ago.

  But that wasn’t what I saw. I saw something else when I looked into Ryan’s brown eyes.

  Darkness.

  8

  SUNDAY

  Thirty-six days until the wedding

  My lungs burned. As I pounded the deserted Sunday morning streets of West Bridgford, my heart felt as if it might burst right out of my chest, my legs as heavy as oak beams. I was a late convert to jogging and sometimes – not always, but often enough – it took me away to a place in my head where everything was clean and simple again. Where everything was straight lines. Run, breathe, look forward and let your mind clear of everything else.

  Today, it wasn’t working.

  Ryan. Ryan. Ryan. His name thudding in my head with every step. I had to look into his background more deeply. The web searches I had done last night were OK as a starting point but they were all superficial, the public face that he wanted to present to the world. I would have to dig harder to find the truth. I knew there was something there waiting to be found. I didn’t know what it was, not yet. But I would find out.

  As I got back to the house I slowed to a stop, leaning on Abbie’s little Fiesta to catch my breath. Nodded a hello to Sam next door as she passed with her chocolate Labrador, Lola. I kicked my trainers off in the porch and found Abbie in the kitchen humming along to a Justin Timberlake song on the radio, pouring orange juice into a glass.

  ‘Morning, favourite daughter.’ I gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘Sleep all right?’

  ‘Like a baby,’ she said, chucking under my chin with her thumb. ‘You need a shave, Papa.’

  I waved a hand vaguely. ‘Sunday. No shaving on the Sabbath.’

  ‘The Sabbath is Saturday, Dad.’

  ‘Mere details, Abs.’ I poured a cup of coffee from the filter machine and perched on one of the stools at the breakfast bar. ‘Want a cup?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m trying to cut out caffeine.’ She took a sip of her juice. ‘Ryan doesn’t drink any tea or coffee.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘How was your run?’

  ‘Good. Reckon I can still make the 2024 Olympics squad if I keep it up.’

  She shook her head, giving me the small smile she reserved for my stupid jokes.

  I registered her Lycra running gear for the first time, her phone strapped to her arm. She had never had much time for organised sport growing up – she had always been keener on ice skating and pop music, seeing live bands and volunteering at a nearby animal shelter. Somewhere along the way she had convinced herself that she was not sporty, that sport didn’t suit her body shape and she wasn’t good at any of it. She had inherited the best of both of us, but most of the credit belonged to Claire. I had bequeathed our daughter my height, the dimple in my chin and a love for old movies, but Abbie had her mother’s looks, her long dark hair and her hazel eyes – sometimes greeny-blue and sometimes browny-green depending on the light – as well as her warmth and optimism.

  Abbie looked for the good in everyone, just like her mother. It was one of the reasons I had to watch her back.

  ‘You’re going for a run?’ I said. ‘I’ve converted you, at long last.’

  ‘Ryan actually got me into it, we’re going to do a 10K together in July. It’s down at the Embankment every year and we’ve each picked a charity to support, so we’re splitting what we raise half and half. Ryan’s running for Cancer Research UK and I’m doing it for Sunflowers Hospice.’

  ‘For that little lad in your class?’

  ‘Theo,’ she said, her face clouding. ‘Sunflowers have been amazing with him.’

  I felt the tightness in my calves as they started to stiffen up – as they always did after a run – and bent down to massage the muscles.

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘In remission, for the moment.’ She stared out into the garden, a sparrow pecking crumbs from the wooden table. ‘His poor mum and dad.’

  I patted her hand. ‘How did that mini-sports day go, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, he loved it, he wanted to compete in every single event. Sunflowers were brilliant too.’

  She’d told me about it a few weeks before. Theo, a terrifyingly brave six-year-old in her class, who had been distraught that he was going to miss school sports day because of treatment for an aggressive cancer. So Abbie had organised for all the other kids in her class to have a mini-sports day at the hospice, in the gardens, with Theo able to join in everything with his classmates. Abbie had thought the whole thing up herself, organised it, got the permissions and run the whole event – just so that Theo could take part.

  She pulled out the stool next to me and sat down at the breakfast bar, peeling a banana. ‘You’re going to sponsor us, aren’t you, Dad? Have you seen our JustGiving page?’

  She flipped the cover off her iPad, unlocked it and pulled up a page to show me: ‘Ryan and Abbie’s 10K Challenge’, the two of them cheek-to-cheek in running gear and sunglasses, smiling up for a selfie. The totaliser at the top of the page showed they were already halfway to their £5,000 target.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Ryan’s already got some of the other partners at his company to chip in £250 each. It means a lot to him because of what his mum went through.’

  ‘She’s been unwell, has she?’

  ‘Breast cancer. She passed away last year.’

  ‘Oh, sorry to hear that. I guess you didn’t get a chance to meet her, then?’

  ‘The doctors didn’t catch it until it was too late. It’s why he does loads of fundraising for Cancer Research UK.’

  I remembered the posts on Ryan’s Facebook page from last night, pictures of him in mud-spattered running gear, finisher’s medals around his neck.

  ‘Those Iron Man events, marathons?’

  Abbie threw me a puzzled look, taking another small bite of the banana. ‘Yeah, how do you know about them?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Iron Man. He normally doesn’t like to bang on about it too much.’

&nbs
p; Because I’ve been stalking him online.

  I groped for a plausible response, taking a gulp of coffee to buy a few seconds.

  ‘Oh, yeah, I think you mentioned it the other week?’ I said. ‘When you were saying about what he did in his spare time.’

  ‘Did I? Can’t remember. He volunteers at the hospice as well. Goes in to sit and chat with the residents, plays the guitar for them, stuff like that.’

  ‘He plays guitar?’

  ‘Used to be in a band.’

  ‘Wow, he’s a musician too.’ I tried hard to keep my voice even. ‘Another string to his bow.’

  She paused, giving me a quizzical look. ‘He had a really nice time on Friday, Ryan did.’

  ‘Good.’ I took another sip of coffee. ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘He asked me to say thanks again, for inviting him round.’

  ‘Sure. No worries.’

  Abbie put a hand on my arm. ‘Dad, are you OK with . . . you know. The wedding?’

  I forced a smile. ‘If that’s what you want. What you really want, in your heart, then yes I’m OK with it.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  No.

  ‘Is it what you want?’

  ‘Of course.’ She hesitated. ‘And what do you think of Ryan?’

  Honestly? I don’t trust him. I don’t believe him. I think there’s something wrong with him.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said into my coffee. ‘Seems like he has a lot going for him. It’ll be good to get to know him better.’

  ‘He’s so lovely, I can’t believe we’re engaged.’ She enveloped me in a hug. ‘Glad you like him too, Dad.’

  I hugged her back, basking for a moment in the clean, soft smell of her apple shampoo.

  ‘Are you here for my world-famous nut roast tonight, or are you out with Ryan?’

  ‘I can do this afternoon, before he gets back from Manchester?’

  ‘Perfect, I’ll do it for lunch instead.’

  She moved past me into the hall, tapping the screen of her phone. ‘Better get my 5K done, Dad.’

  ‘Remember to warm up.’

  I watched her heading out to the hall, my smile fading, feeling the emptiness of the kitchen without her. Waited for the front door to click shut, the silence that followed. Then I pulled Abbie’s iPad towards me on the breakfast bar and quickly unlocked it with her passcode – 1207, Tilly’s birthday – to bring the screen to life. The calendar app brought up her schedule, a busy week-to-week breakdown of all her work and social commitments, most of which involved Ryan. I switched to the monthly view and began scrolling through, slowly, so that I didn’t miss it. May, June, July and on into the summer. Scanning all the entries to find what I was looking for. My daughter was diligent and organised, a diary queen just like her mother, everything entered and noted and put in its proper place. I would have put money on it being there – and I was right.