The Christmas Promise Page 18

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Her gaze was filled with pain. ‘The photos were consensual.’

  He took her hand. ‘You were having fun and you were OK with your boyfriend taking intimate photos. You trusted him. It’s Harvey who’s to blame. He’s acted reprehensibly.’

  ‘But if I hadn’t let him take the photos he couldn’t threaten me with them.’

  ‘You couldn’t know what was going to happen.’ He stroked her fingers. ‘Is he stupid enough to make his threat real by sending the images to your dad? An ex-cop? It would be an offence, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes! But would he do it when he was drunk? Yes! The idea of Dad opening a text message and seeing …!’ Her voice broke on a sob, mouth squaring off in her anguish. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

  Ava struggled to get her breathing under control as Sam gazed at her, saying, slowly, ‘If that’s your major fear, I think you should ring your dad. Tell him the situation. Call Harvey’s bluff.’

  Consternation twisted her stomach. ‘I couldn’t,’ she whispered.

  Sam actually laughed, albeit grimly. ‘But think about it. The diamond-edged point to Harvey’s weapon is the shock value of your dad opening a message, all unsuspecting. But if you warn your dad, he’ll have the option of deleting the messages unread. Or blocking Harvey’s number.’

  Ava weighed the idea for several seconds, her mental scales tipping wildly between hope and hopelessness. ‘But that won’t stop Harvey putting those images on Facebook or sending them to other friends.’

  Sam frowned in thought. ‘The images probably wouldn’t be up on Facebook for long. There are pretty tough policies on nudity and harassment. Have you ever read their community standards page?’

  Hope crashed. ‘But a photo like that only needs to be up a few seconds and people will copy it! Then it could appear anywhere. And Twitter would be worse. Tweets are retweeted in seconds!’ She realised she was gripping Sam’s hand, and that her voice was rising but she didn’t seem capable of bringing it down. ‘And if Harvey’s threat is empty then I’ll have upset my parents for nothing.’

  In contrast, his voice was slow and reassuring. ‘And if he does carry out his threat? How will that be for your dad? Whether Harvey sends the images to your parents is outside of your control. But how they find out about the existence of those images is within it.’

  They sat in silence, hands clasped. Ava felt as if sadness and fear were pressing down on her with suffocating weight. Graeme and Katherine were living their dream in leafy Alsace. That could be shattered by being confronted with such an ugly truth in the worst possible way.

  Slowly, sadly, she freed her hand, took out her phone and went to her contacts list.

  ‘Do you want privacy?’ Sam’s voice was soft.

  ‘No, I need you to stay here in case I chicken out, please.’ She knew that she sounded pathetic but she felt that he was all that was keeping her from descending once again into panic.

  Rrriiing. ‘Oh shit,’ she groaned, clenching her free hand into a fist.

  Rrriiing. She whimpered.

  Rrrii—‘This is a nice surprise.’ Her father’s voice travelled the hundreds of miles from the outskirts of Strasbourg and straight to Ava’s heart. ‘We have neighbours here. Just hang on while I go into another room so I can hear you.’ Background voices receded, a door opened and shut. ‘That’s better,’ said Graeme. ‘How’s everything?’

  Ava swallowed, heart racing. She inhaled, as if she could breathe in all Sam’s support and positivity. ‘Dad, I’ve got to tell you something. It’s not very nice and you’re not going to like it but it’s better if you hear it from me.’ She screwed up her eyes and screwed up her courage and poured out the whole horrible, disgusting story.

  Graeme remained quiet during the miserable confession, only indicating with the occasional grunt that he was listening. It was once Ava finally tailed away, her voice tiny with tears, that he really spoke. ‘This kind of thing makes me so angry.’ Fury vibrated in every word.

  Ava gulped. ‘I’m sorry! You don’t have to tell me how stupid I’ve been.’

  ‘I’m not angry at you!’ Graeme snapped. ‘It’s that little turd Snaith. I’d like to stuff his phone up his idiotic arse.’ He breathed like a bull while Ava sniffed and tried to absorb the fact that she wasn’t listening to a hail of recriminations.

  When Graeme spoke again he was still gruff but he’d obviously got himself together. ‘I can’t help but feel that some of this is my fault.’

  ‘Yours?’

  Graeme swore. ‘I never liked that man when you were going out with him. I had a mate who worked on his patch and I put out a few feelers. Snaith’s known to him.’

  ‘Harvey’s known to the police?’ repeated Ava blankly. She actually took the phone from her ear to stare at it incredulously.

  ‘Not for anything serious or I would have had no choice but to talk to you. It was all alcohol-related stuff – he’s one of the local Hoorays that have been picked up for drunk and disorderly and getting into fights. Spent a couple of nights in the cells, got two warnings and a reprimand.’

  Ava felt like pinching herself. ‘He never got in trouble with the police when he was with me.’

  ‘Common behaviour pattern.’ Graeme snorted. ‘It’s a form of pack instinct. Young men out with their mates, acting like idiots, all bravado and aggression, letting their testosterone talk for them. Completely different with their girlfriends.’ His voice softened and he sighed. ‘I had quite a debate with myself about whether or not to tell you but you were being very independent, leaving your job with Ceri and striking out alone. I felt as if you were pushing us away and I wasn’t sure you’d welcome my interference.’

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Ava, hardly able to credit this version of history. ‘I didn’t know I was pushing you away. It’s just that you were retiring to France and I wanted you to feel free to go. You were always so keen on me standing on my own two feet.’

  ‘Well, perhaps. But if you’d have known the truth you might have dumped Harvey earlier and have been saved all this stress. Anyway,’ he went on, suddenly businesslike, ‘the important thing now is to look at our options for giving young Snaith a wake-up call. I’ll update myself on the relevant laws, for a start.’

  When Ava eventually ended the call her head was spinning. Sam waited patiently beside her. She summarised her father’s side of the conversation. ‘He said to leave it with him for a day or so and he’d think about what can be done.’

  Sam’s expression relaxed into a smile. ‘He sounds like a great bloke.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ava rubbed the sweat from her palms ‘He’s always hated injustice, of course, which is what made him a career police officer. If there was a duty to be volunteered for, Dad was usually the one with his hand in the air. He worked hard to be the kind of policeman that everybody wants to believe in, and to help people in trouble. I’ve never been the one that needed his help so I wasn’t really aware … well, how great he can be.’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ Sam returned absently.

  When Ava turned to glance at him he wasn’t even looking in her direction. He was frowning at the lights studding the dark cityscape outside his window.

  Ava’s momentary euphoria gurgled swiftly away. Sam’s scowl reminded her that this thing was a long way from over. She let her head fall back against the squashy sofa. ‘How many photos did Harvey send you?’ She had to take a new breath before she could force out, ‘Were they very … bad?’

  ‘What? Oh. Yes. No.’ He shook his head and turned a smile on her. ‘Sorry. I was thinking. He sent two photos. One was explicit but the other was kind of cute.’

  She groaned, boiling with fresh mortification. ‘Cute?’

  ‘Really.’ His frown returned as he retook her hand, lacing their fingers together. ‘Listen, I’ve got an idea. Or the beginnings of one. I need time to work on it but have you ever heard that saying “success is the best revenge”? It’s based on that.’ He breat
hed in slowly. ‘It’s going to need a lot of trust on your part though. Because my idea’s based on one of those pictures.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A pretty cheeky idea

  Ava’s eyes were bigger than Sam had ever seen them as she treated him to a silent stare.

  ‘Also,’ he continued, because she might as well have all the bad news at once, ‘it’s going to mean me giving at least a superficial version of events to other people. And one of them is Patrick.’

  She frowned. ‘Why Patrick?’

  He glanced down at their entwined fingers. Crap. He supposed he ought not to have been holding hands with Ava because his guy code was better than that. His heart shifted in his chest as he studied the way that her fingers curled neatly around his. ‘Because he’d be involved in my idea as the writer on the Ruby Glennister campaign. I can see that when you’re first dating someone you probably don’t relish the idea of having to tell them about bedroom photos taken by your ex but he would have to be involved for my idea to work out.’

  ‘Dating Patrick?’

  His gaze flew to hers. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. Then she laughed disbelievingly and repeated, ‘No!’

  ‘Ah.’ He took a moment to reorganise his thoughts. ‘He mentioned that you’d been out together last night.’

  ‘I had breakfast with you at Gaz’s Caff, but it wasn’t a date.’

  ‘So I recall,’ he agreed drily. ‘So I’m not sure why I made such an assumption about Patrick.’ He tried to rerun the morning’s conversation in his head. Had Patrick actually said it was a date? He seized on a detail he had definitely taken on board. ‘It sounded as if he’d bought you dinner, so—’

  ‘Hadn’t we agreed that deciding it’s a date if the man pays is old fashioned?’ But a small smile softened the reproof in her voice. ‘He turned up at my gym last night and said he was thinking of joining, asked for my views on the place over a cup of coffee and somehow baguettes and wine got included. I only had a tenner with me so he paid and I returned my share via Izz today. To be honest …’ Ava rolled her eyes. ‘I think he pumped Izz about my interests and contrived to turn up just as my class ended.’

  ‘Right.’ So Patrick probably had made it sound like a date deliberately.

  She coughed delicately. ‘I don’t want to seem self-absorbed or anything but could we get back to what the hell you want to use one of those images for, and why other people have to know?’

  Sam jumped his mind back into the moment, conscious of Ava waiting with thumb-twiddling impatience. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up but if my glimmer of an idea were to work it’d kill more than one bird with one stone.’ He turned to gaze out at the night again as he returned to rounding up the thoughts that had come galloping into his brain a few minutes ago.

  A slow smile began to take charge of his face. ‘It could work. But we’re going to have to work like crazy and Mum and Aunt Van arrive tomorrow so I’d have to get them to take a cab from Euston. Ruby Glennister would have to give her OK, but once the premise is agreed it’s the others who will pick the idea up and run with it.’ He fell to watching the flickering of Christmas lights in emergency-service blue. There was something about watching the nightscape, the white lights, the coloured lights, the still and the moving lights, that freed his imagination to flip around.

  ‘But what?’ demanded Ava, shaking his hand as if to jerk him awake. ‘What idea? And what’s it got to do with Ruby?’

  He blinked. ‘For you, I see two major issues. One is Harvey’s threats; the other’s lack of income. I think I can use one to generate the other. So far as Ruby’s concerned I see her as a huge opportunity for reciprocity. Huge. It’ll work for her, too, but we need her fully engaged because it’s a pretty cheeky idea. Hopefully she’ll love it and the others won’t mind me charging into their campaign. It’s not as if they’ve come up with anything smoking so far.’

  He threw up a hand to ward off her next question, hovering so obviously on her parted lips. ‘But I need space to do some ideas storming. Can you get a cab home? I’ll call you tomorrow. Will you keep yourself free? You’re going to need to be involved. But I can’t tell you any more yet because I need to grab the idea while it’s hot and if I explain it to you too soon I’m frightened it’ll fade away.’

  She hesitated. ‘OK but … well, which photo do you need to use?’

  He read the fear in her face and renewed compassion reared up in him. ‘The cute one! Obviously the cute one.’ He fumbled his phone out of his pocket in his haste to prove to her that she had nothing to fear from him. ‘Here. They’ll be the last two images in my photos so you can delete the other one yourself. The cute one will have to be recreated anyway for quality and copyright reasons but leave it there for now as a reference.’

  Ava slowly picked up his phone. He watched her as she located the images. Her bottom lip quivered for an instant before she deleted the offending image with a savage little stab.

  ‘Check my settings and make sure my photos aren’t automatically set to sync to another device. I’m pretty sure they’re not because I like to keep different folders in different places and move stuff manually when it’s needed.’

  ‘I don’t need to.’ She made to return the handset.

  Gently, he blocked her. ‘Check it out. Then you’ll know you can trust me. Because I’m going to need you to.’

  He watched as she did it, her movements calmer now. Then she returned to the image, the one she hadn’t deleted. He watched her examine it. ‘This is what you call cute?’

  ‘I think it qualifies.’ He gazed out of the window again so that she’d know he wasn’t ogling. The image was branded into his memory, anyway – Ava from the waist up, a tall black-feathered fascinator in her hair, holding hats over each breast; red on one and blue on the other. Fun and mischief glowed out of her.

  He wished he’d seen that Ava more. The happy one.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Hats off to Ava Bliss

  Friday 21 December

  At nine-thirty on Friday morning, Ava received a brief call from Sam. ‘Can you come in at about one? Working lunch and think tank.’

  ‘I can,’ she agreed cautiously. She mentally reviewed what she knew about a working lunch in a comms agency. Zippo. Izz had already left for work, so she couldn’t consult her. ‘Will I have much to offer?’

  He sounded surprised. ‘We can’t do much without you agreeing stuff – or not – can we? See you later.’ Then he was gone.

  Do much? Ava tried to keep herself occupied and tried not to think about Sam seeing those images while the morning crawled by in the quiet house. At least Harvey had stopped short of sending one of the ‘action shots’. The thought of Sam seeing her engaged in a sex act was a universe beyond any level of mortification she’d felt so far.

  This evening would see Wendy’s second fitting and the unembellished hat was waiting on the stand but, as she was in completely the wrong state of mind to do any useful work, she tidied her studio and cleaned the sitting room, arranging recently arrived Christmas cards in a row.

  She put up her hair in a subdued knot and was almost ready to leave, anxiety making her clumsy to the point of violently swearing at uncooperative coat buttons, when somebody clattered the knocker on the front door.

  Impatiently, she threw it open. And stared. ‘Dad?’

  The grooves either side of Graeme’s mouth moved as he smiled at her. ‘Do I get invited in?’

  ‘Oh Dad!’ Ava threw herself into the safety and warmth of her father’s arms. ‘I have missed you! I’m sorry I’ve been so stupid. But how fantastic that you’re here.’

  Graeme hugged her tightly. ‘We miss you, too, sweetheart. We both thought I should pop over and help you out, so I got the first plane out of Strasbourg.’

  Hot tears leaked from under Ava’s eyelids onto the wool of her father’s coat. ‘That’s amazing. Oh—’ She pulled away. ‘I’ve got to get over to Brick Lan
e.’ Quickly, she explained as much as she understood – which didn’t seem that much when she was running it in front of her father’s perceptive gaze – about her summons from Sam.

  Graeme nodded briskly. ‘Good, especially the lunch part. I’ve come straight from Gatwick and haven’t eaten since croissants in the airport. I’ll come with you.’

  During the walk to Camden Town tube station under a hurrying grey sky, then riding the underground trains, they talked about France, Christmas, hats and everything but Harvey and explicit photos. It wasn’t until after they’d arrived at Aldgate station and emerged into misty daylight that Graeme took out his phone. ‘Just give me Snaith’s phone number and email address, will you?’

  Ava took out her own phone and opened her contacts. ‘What are you going to do with them?’ She located Harvey’s details and tapped ‘share’.

  ‘Got a little idea.’

  Hunching her shoulders against the drizzle, Ava shoved her hands into her pockets. ‘I hope it’s an idea that will make him go away. I feel sick every time I get a message in case it’s him. The texts are so nasty, Dad. You don’t want to see them, believe me.’

  Graeme halted suddenly. ‘The texts themselves are threatening or abusive? Show me immediately!’

  Her stomach dropped to the pavement. ‘You’ll have to see the pictures!’

  He paused. ‘I understand. But if the messages themselves are threatening, you need to read me some.’ He pulled her over into an alcove between two shops while Ava mumbled her way through a few texts, cringing with mortification.

  ‘Gold dust!’ Graeme grinned in triumph. ‘Don’t delete those, whatever you do. That prat has never heard of the Communications Act, and malicious communications offences, obviously. I thought he’d had the good sense to keep his threats verbal, when he thought no one was listening. You do know that you could go to the police with this evidence, don’t you? It’s real and tangible.’