The Passengers(73)

Curious, Heidi clicked on his name and a handful of thumbnail videos appeared. They had been uploaded by a Josie Cole, and each with Sam’s name attached. Heidi couldn’t recall a family member with that name, at least not one whom she had met. The first video featured her husband along with a boy and girl she didn’t recognise. They giggled as they threw cups of water at him before caking him in flour. ‘I’m a sticky snowman and I nominate Andrew Webber and Darren O’Sullivan,’ Sam spluttered.

‘Do you want a towel, Daddy?’ the girl interrupted. ‘Yes, please,’ Sam replied.

Heidi froze – she must have misheard. She rewound and watched it again. ‘Daddy,’ the girl said. She played it again. And again. And again. Heidi repeated the word at the same time as the child. ‘Daddy.’

It didn’t make sense. The man on the screen can’t be Sam, she thought. She played the video at half speed, her eyes dissecting each part of his physicality. But his face, frame, slight paunch, pattern of chest hair, mannerisms and voice were all identical to Sam’s. How could it be him? If he’d had a family before they met, she’d have discovered it before now. However, this video was recent because he had the Sam of now’s appearance. Has he got an identical twin he doesn’t know about? No, that’s ridiculous. But so was her thinking the man on her screen was her husband.

The camera angle made it difficult to see the tattoo of Beccy and James’s names on Sam’s left arm. Nervously, she turned to the other videos he’d also been tagged in. They featured the same two children in a garden, although this time, a woman accompanied them. And in the penultimate clip, her arm was wrapped around his waist before she kissed him on the lips. Heidi was struck by their similar appearances from hairstyles to their smiles. Then in the final clip, the family were holidaying in a caravan park she immediately identified as the one in which she and Sam had first met in Aldeburgh.

And when he stretched out his arm to steady himself as he walked across the pebbled beach, her greatest fears were realised. His arm featured the tattoo. There could be no other explanation – Sam had a second family.

Heidi’s tablet fell to the floor. Her police career had trained her to examine all the evidence before reaching a conclusion and never to let emotion get the better of her. She took a deep breath – she must treat Sam like any other suspect.

Anxiously, she played each Facebook video again, desperate to learn more about Josie Cole. She compared the dates the clips were uploaded to the digital family calendar on the kitchen wall. Each time one appeared on Facebook, Sam had been working away from home. He spent three to four nights a week in an inexpensive bed and breakfast in Halifax, close to his office. At least that was what he’d told her and Heidi had no reason to question it until now. She ordered her online virtual assistant to call each B&B listed and find out if they had a record of him. None had. Sam must have been playing happy families with Josie Cole instead.

But why was she using Sam’s surname? Heidi visited Josie’s Facebook page but the rest of her settings were set to private. She had to expand her search and called for a taxi.

‘I thought you were off with the kids today?’ asked DS Bev Saxon when Heidi brushed past her in CID.

‘I have some admin I want to get a head start on,’ Heidi replied coolly. She waited until the office was empty before trawling the National Identity Card and Police National Computer databases to learn more about Josie.

She discovered that she was a full-time mother, a year younger than Heidi and she worked part-time at her local Baptist church’s admin department. Hesitantly, Heidi’s finger pressed the marital status icon – Josie Harmon had wed Samuel Cole ten months after he and Heidi had tied the knot. His name was also on both children’s birth certificates – he had even replicated his and Heidi’s kids’ names.

Breaking more rules governing the use of police data for her own means, Heidi picked a terrorism protocol as an excuse to access Sam’s business accounts. There, she discovered he was paying dividends from it into a joint mortgage taken out in his and Josie’s names. They also had joint credit cards and two bank accounts. A search of his business revealed it was based in Sheffield and not Halifax like he had claimed.

Heidi hunched forward in her chair, trying to absorb what she had learned. All at once, so many aspects of her marriage were becoming clear. There was Sam’s mistrust of social media and his reluctance to take more than a handful of holiday days at a time; his Christmas visits to his mother’s home in the Algarve were always alone. Sometimes on his return from Halifax, he’d be wearing clothes she hadn’t seen him in before. Most nights when he was at home, he would disappear behind the closed bedroom door to answer ‘work’ telephone calls. All this time, you were talking to them. You were talking to your other family under our roof.

Heidi alternated between fury and confusion, but she was too angry to waste a tear on Sam. Many times over the next few days, she had come within a hair’s breadth of telephoning him and screaming at him for the truth. But a man who could hide a second family from his wife was a man skilled in the art of deception. She could not expect his honesty and he didn’t deserve hers. When Sam returned home from Halifax later that week, she said nothing about her discovery.

Trying to contain how she felt and prevent it from revealing itself in words, moods or behaviour was close to impossible. Heidi was yearning to hurt her husband like he had hurt her. And this contempt spawned an idea.