Jess nods slowly and lets out a deep breath. ‘Okay, good. That’s a long flight. He won’t have been able to track your movements today if he was on a plane himself. If you turn it off now, the last time your location will have reported back to him will have been before he switched his own phone off to get on the plane. I mean…’

‘What?’ I ask.

Jess’s face has changed.

‘That’s if he did get on the plane.’

42

‘Let’s think this through,’ Jess says. ‘Talk me through it. When did he leave? When did you see the email?’

‘I saw it as soon as it came through,’ I said. ‘Tom had already gone. He left for the airport last night. We had a bit of an argument.’

‘Can I ask what about?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t even know myself. I was blind drunk. We were at my best friend’s wedding. I marked the email as unread as soon as I’d read it, so I wouldn’t miss it in the morning. As far as he’s aware, I passed out drunk and never saw it.’

‘Okay, good. That’s good. If he thinks he’s got there before you, we should be safe.’

‘He’s going to know something’s wrong when he can’t get hold of me, though. If my phone’s off, he’ll twig.’

‘He’ll know your phone’s off, yeah. But if you two had a bust up last night, that’ll explain it. Especially if he’s expecting you to be sleeping off a raging hangover today. In any case, there’s not a whole lot he can do from Japan.’

I see what she’s saying, but there’s something telling me I shouldn’t be so sure.

‘Christ, I wish I knew where to start,’ Jess says. ‘Basically, Tom and I met on a dating app. He knew what I did for a living, but I think he saw that as a challenge. People like Tom get a kick out of things like that. The problem for him was that I’ve got quite a strong personality, so he didn’t get away with it. He tried to get me to come off social media, told me it wasn’t a good idea with my job. But we’re trained on things like that. He gave me the sob story about Erin and tried to weasel his way into moving in with me. Told me he was sofa surfing and living in some place his boss had put him up in. But I wasn’t falling for any of it.’

As Jess speaks, I feel so foolish. It’s the exact same story, except I fell for every single piece of it.

‘Then one day he tried getting physical. He’d asked me again about moving in with me and I said I didn’t want to. He flew into a rage and I told him to fuck off out of my house. I said I’d warned colleagues about him and if anything happened he’d be banged up. He hadn’t done anything illegal, but I told him if I ever saw his face or heard from him again I’d make sure he went down. He did get back in touch a few days later. He was waiting for me when I came out of the supermarket. But by then I’d done some digging at work and found out a few things about him. When I told him what I’d discovered, he went as white as a sheet. I told him to fuck off out of Bodmin, out of Cornwall and never to come back, or I’d make sure everyone knew exactly who he was and what he’d done.’