Page 75 of The Soulmate

I look beyond the fence towards the bushes and the moonah trees. Towards The Drop . . .

I see the man first – the giant man from the car park. He’s bent over, talking to my little girls. As he stands upright, my stomach lurches. The size of him next to the tiny girls makes my blood run cold. They’re so close to the cliff edge. He could pick one up in each hand and in a heartbeat they’d be gone.

‘Gabe,’ I say in a strangled voice.

And then I run faster than I ever have in my life.

72

AMANDA

BEFORE

It’s funny how bad things sneak up on you when you least expect it. It’s almost as if the universe wants to maximise the utter shock and despair. For a year, Max and I had been happy. Gabe and Pippa had moved away, and the drama with Arthur Spriggs had settled. Max was still working, but he was winding back – handing over more things to the executives and coming home earlier and earlier. We’d started to talk about retirement.

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Max said. ‘It’s time for a life change. I think we should move overseas. Maybe to Europe. We can sell the business and start over.’

‘But how can we sell the business without exposing the investment from A.S. Holdings?’

‘I don’t know yet, but I’m going to set up a meeting with the accountants to see what’s possible.’

It was on that day – the day the accountant came to our house – that I found Max’s secret laptop on the floor of the walk-in wardrobe, next to the open safe. I hadn’t seen it in a while; I’d almost forgotten it existed. Max had probably come in to check something and then forgotten to put it away.

For over a minute, I just stared at it. After years of coveting this computer, or at least its contents, I suddenly felt reluctant to touch it. Max and I had been so settled. What if I discovered something I didn’t want to know? What would I do then?

Still, I found myself closing the door of the wardrobe and kneeling on the floor. I gently turned the screen to face me. A spreadsheet was open, one I couldn’t make heads nor tails of – but then spreadsheets were always like gibberish to me. I minimised it and opened the email inbox. That was where the interesting stuff would be found – or it was in the movies, at least.

But this wasn’t the movies. Most of the messages were years old and appeared technical – about servers and systems. There were a few from Arthur Spriggs which caught my eye, though the contents of these messages was disappointingly dull. More recently, I found emails from Baz and other members of the security detail.

To my relief, all the names in the inbox were male. I was about to pack it in when I noticed an email from someone by the name of Stef.

I clicked on it.

Consider it done.

An innocuous enough message, but I scrolled down anyway. It turned out Stef’s full name was Stefan, and he was the head of security at NewZ. Now I thought of it, I might have met Stef the day Arthur Spriggs’s men broke into our house – a stocky, intense little man, who Max insisted was very good at his job.

Evidently Stef was the type never to start a new email thread; he just replied to the message he’d received last, even if it was about an entirely different matter. Annoying trait, I imagined. As I scrolled down, I came across quotes for security systems, information about alarms, policies for security passes. Most of the messages originated from Stef, and Max’s replies were brief, along the lines of ‘sounds good’, ‘well done’, ‘great job’.

I was about close the computer when I came across a message from Max to Stef.

Hi Stef,

Need a quick chat about CCTV footage from my office last night.

Max

I scrolled up and saw that Stef had replied a few minutes later.

Sure. Call me anytime.

Then an hour and a half after that:

As per our discussion, please confirm that the attached is the section you would like deleted.

One minute later, a message from Max to Stef.

That’s it. Cheers.