‘So, I did. The iron was still out on the ironing board, but it was switched off, of course. As Felix had always suspected. I was just about to text Felix when I thought I heard a noise upstairs. I went up to check, not really expecting to find anything, opened the door to the master bedroom, flicked the lights on, and saw at once that there was a chair in the middle of the room beneath the smoke alarm, which had been removed, and there were wires hanging down. I walked in, thinking at first that the room was empty, then I turned around and there was Gerry standing behind the door. Trying to hide himself, only not making a very good job of it. I don’t know which of us was the most shocked to see each other, to tell the truth.
‘He was holding two smoke alarms. I asked him what on earth was going on. He tried to prevaricate, but he clearly had no explanation at all.
‘Then, well, I half remembered something I’d read, in a newspaper or maybe online, about surveillance cameras concealed in what appear to be ordinary smoke alarms, so I grabbed the ones Gerry was holding. He barely tried to stop me. Well, I am about six inches taller than him and four stone heavier. Sure enough, one of them was a surveillance camera. I could hardly believe my eyes. Little Gerry Barham was installing a hidden surveillance camera in my son’s bedroom.’
Vogel blinked rapidly behind his spectacles. He didn’t know quite what he’d expected to hear from Sam Ferguson, but certainly not this.
‘So what did you do next?’ he asked.
‘Well, I told Gerry not to move, then I reached for my phone and started to dial 999,’ Ferguson continued. ‘Then I stopped. I thought I’d talk to him first. Find out what was going on. I’ll be honest, Mr Vogel, it occurred to me very quickly, and I’m really not proud of this, that I might be able to use this situation. And that I might learn the answers to some of the questions Amelia and I had been asking for years.’
‘Sam, one of your son’s neighbours was putting a secret camera in your son’s bedroom,’ interjected Vogel, who’d decided formality could be abandoned now that he had just saved the other man’s life. ‘Didn’t you think he might merely be a voyeur?’
‘What, little Gerry?’ queried Sam. ‘No way.’
‘So what was he doing then? Why was he spying on your family, in an extremely, uh, intimate manner?’
‘He told me that he was in... well, a rather special branch of the civil service, that’s all he said, and he was suddenly given a big bonus and an early retirement deal generous enough for him to relocate to Instow and live in some luxury for the rest of his life. In return he had to keep an eye on Jane. That’s all. He said he never knew why, and he didn’t ask. Jane and Felix seemed like an ordinary happily married young couple to him. He cultivated them, and reported back periodically to his employers, and everyone was happy. There never seemed to be any cause for concern. Then Gerry had a drink with Felix, a week or so before I found him in their house, and Felix got drunk and opened his heart a bit, confessed how worried he was about Jane’s bad dreams. How she woke up screaming, quite hysterically, and how it was beginning to affect their whole lives. He told Gerry far more than he’d ever told me. Said he felt it was caused by something in her past life that she claimed to have no memory of.
‘Well, Gerry reported back. He said that afterwards he wished he hadn’t. His controllers suddenly went into overdrive. They said they wanted to know all about these dreams. That it was vital. And they sent him that smoke alarm surveillance outfit. A very sophisticated little number that linked to his phone.’
‘Did you ask Gerry how he got in to your son’s house? I presume it was all locked up when you got there.’
‘Yes. He told me he had a set of keys. He’d sneaked off and got them cut one day when he and his wife were babysitting. Just in case, he said.’
‘What did you do next?’ Vogel asked.
‘Well, I wanted to know about Jane’s past more than ever. I told Gerry I wouldn’t call the police, in fact I wouldn’t tell anyone about our meeting, I would let him carry on with his surveillance unhindered, as long as he shared any relevant material with me. I told him I wanted to see what was going on in my son’s life.’
‘And Gerry agreed to this?’
‘Yes. I suppose he didn’t have much choice. I said that if he didn’t agree, I’d blow his nasty little operation, whatever it really was, out of the water.’
‘Did you see any footage?’
‘Yes. Mostly Gerry just called me and told me what he’d seen. But I insisted on seeing at least some of it. It was pretty disturbing stuff. Jane screaming her head off. Felix trying desperately to calm her down and keep her quiet. And then... well, there was the time he woke to find Jane shaking little Joanna. We didn’t actually see that because it happened in the children’s bedroom. But there was film of them in their bedroom afterwards, when, uh... ’
‘When what, Sam?’
‘Well, Felix was clearly very frustrated. Furious actually. And he isn’t an angry man by nature. He told Jane he would never trust her with his children again. And, uh, well, I am afraid he hit her. Across the face. And his ring caught her cheek, cut it open. There was a lot of blood. It wasn’t very pleasant to see.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’
‘No. So, when Jane died, and we learned a murder investigation had been launched, well, I knew right away I should tell you about Gerry and his mysterious surveillance, but I was afraid it would lead you to suspect Felix.’
‘Do you still have any of that footage?’
‘No. Gerry showed it me, but he wouldn’t send me a copy. Not of anything. I had to meet up with him and watch on his phone. It was... uh... all a bit sordid really, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’
Vogel knew he was blinking vigorously behind his spectacles again. And his attempts to control it were not succeeding very well.
‘You were intruding on your son and daughter-in-law’s privacy, spying on them, watching them and allowing someone else, a relative stranger, to watch them in their most intimate moments, in their own bedroom,’ commented the DCI. ‘Did that not concern you at all?’
‘Of course it did. But I so wanted to know the truth about Jane, I really didn’t think it through. After the night when Felix hit Jane, I had big second thoughts about the whole thing. I asked Gerry to take his camera down. He said it was too late, I was in it with him, and there were people involved that I wouldn’t want to cross.’
‘Do you still not know who these people are?’
‘Not really, although I’m beginning to guess they are some sort of secret service, or maybe an undercover police unit. And I just knew Gerry was holding back on me about all sorts of things. Jane’s death really frightened me. I arranged to meet Gerry yesterday afternoon, on the beach at low tide, and I was much tougher with him. I felt, probably wrongly, that I had nothing to lose. I told him if he didn’t come clean with me I would destroy him. God knows how I would have done any such thing. But he seemed to be in as bad a state as I was. Worse if anything.
‘It was then that he told me I’d only seen the edited version of the night Felix hit Jane. He showed me the full footage. The camera was one of those activated by movement, of course. The stuff I’d already seen ended with Jane lying down in the bed next to Felix, who already seemed to be sleeping. But there was more. Later, Jane woke Felix up and told him that she really had to talk to him. She’d remembered something terrible from the past, from her childhood. She mentioned a psychiatrist and regression therapy, which had brought it to the front of her mind, but she hadn’t been quite able to grasp it. She said she’d remained in a kind of denial until that night when she had frightened Joanna so much, and it had all come flooding back... ’