I watched her for a moment, the smooth movement of her limbs hardly rippling the surface of the water.

She had switched to backstroke when my eye was drawn to a flicker of movement in a shady corner under the stone staircase that ran up to the balcony. At first I thought it was a little statue, a stone figure of a cat, but then the head swivelled slightly to look up in my direction. It was a small ginger-and-white cat, more of a big kitten really, yellow eyes blinking slowly at me as I stared back from my vantage point. The cat was as calm and casual as you like, untroubled by the world. Just hanging out by the pool. It must be a stray, or perhaps from one of the neighbouring farms. After a long moment it broke eye contact and dropped its gaze. I followed to see where it was looking now, putting my forehead right up against the vertical bars of the balcony.

Alistair. He was directly below me, stretched out on a sunlounger in what seemed to be his standard poolside attire: Speedos and a vest top, black socks and sandals. Plus mobile phone, of course. I squinted through the bars of the balcony again, straight down at him. What exactly was he doing? I looked closer, holding my breath in case he should hear. As I watched, he shifted the position of the phone in his lap, angling it up slightly and zooming in on something.

He held it up and snapped a picture. Then another. And another.

Chapter 29

29

Alistair

Alistair had started the bogus social media accounts for a totally legitimate reason: so he could follow his sons’ activity on Instagram and Snapchat, keep an eye on what they were doing from a respectful distance. Particularly after Jake had his spell of illness, with Jennifer always worrying about what they were getting up to. Initially, Alistair had tried to follow them under his real name – rookie mistake – and the boys had simply denied they had accounts on there. When he tracked down their usernames, they’d just ignored his friend requests.

A subtler approach was called for.

So he made up a couple of fake accounts – username SkyBlueLad99 – using a generic teenage boy profile image downloaded from a picture-sharing website, started populating it with more generic images of cars, food, football players and celebrity tittle-tattle, and sure enough they’d accepted his friend request and followed him back. Jake and Ethan had hundreds of friends on the sites, most of whom they barely knew in real life. It was pretty easy to blend into the background.