Chapter 53

Darya and Sophie giggled as they went through their lines.

“Daddy is so weird to make us do this haha.”

“Sophie, don’t call him daddy when he’s not around, he’s that man, or something, he’s not daddy.”

“All right then, I still ... hate him, you know.”

“Do you?” asked Darya. Her Arabic accent had now gone, and she had almost fully adopted Sophie’s accent and vocabulary.

“Of course. And anyway, he will still punish us if we don’t get this right, so come on, let’s try again...”

Pembroke’s latest wheeze had been to get his girls to act in a play for him. It was an obscene adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, matched for two lesbians. Pembroke had rewritten it, in the way of a horny 13-year-old boy. It was nothing but love scenes, with updated language, and after some lines in which they acted, the directions stated “now kiss, take clothes off, get naked, and sixty nine for about five minutes, then go and get changed into the netball costume for next scene”

Darya thought this was awful, but Sophie secretly found it kind of cute. The plot was romantic if corny and she didn’t mind changing and acting and learning lines. It felt fun and different, and she certainly did not mind acting out the numerous different sex scenes with Darya.

“Sophie, why do I have to lick your feet after you rescue me from pirates and tell me my father is dead?”

“I don’t know, the same reason I have to suck on your nipples before the battle.”

The two girls collapsed in fits of giggles. Pembroke had been drunk when he wrote it, he just wanted to see the girls make out and have lesbian sex while acting. He had two girls who had to do everything and anything he wanted, so who cares if this was weird?

“Oh Sophie. He is such a loser. He really is. I cannot believe I am a slave of a loser.”

“He is not a loser, I mean he is an asshole, but, well, he should get some respect, that’s all.” She spoke with a defensive tone, as if she didn’t want to be defending him but felt compelled to acknowledge some level of respect.

Darya shot her a glance. “OK don’t start, right well he can still shock us, so let’s go through this again...

Pembroke enjoyed the performance, which was nonsensical, and acted terribly. He gently shocked the girls several times when they forgot their lines or did not do what he thought they were supposed to do.

“But Daddy, I am supposed to have no knickers in this scene!” Sophie had bawled.

“Sorry my darling, that was my fault, carry on!”

The trio laughed at the farce. It was a bizarre scene as the director sat shocking the two teenage girls, forcing them to have sex, all the while in a seemingly jovial atmosphere.

The girls did not mind the gentle shocks and spent most of the time snogging and kissing in front of him, exploring their bodies for the thousandth time. He envied their deep love for each other. They were not acting on that part. Now he just saw two young girls in love.

He spent more time spying on the girls in the webcam monitor than in the basement now. He enjoyed listening in on their conversations. He did not mind the abuse he got from Darya, but was always heartened when Sophie somewhat stuck up for him.

It was January 2019, when Inspector Gerald Murphy met up with Afshan Bharwani. Afshan had been assigned the case of Sophie Yildiz, the tragic case of a girl driven to suicide. She had spent months in the office poring over the details of the case and trying to find more clues. It had been a cause celebre and Murphy was sure there was more to it.

Afshan began her presentation to Murphy and some other junior detectives. “I first looked into the investigation that was initially carried out in 2013. It seemed we spent a lot of time examining the phone number that had been calling Sophie in the weeks before her disappearance and the websites where her material was uploaded. Unfortunately, whoever did this covered their tracks too well. They wouldn’t be able to do that today, especially with those horrible dark web sites, but I don’t think there’s any mileage in going over that, especially since her laptop and phone were never recovered.”

“Damn shame. Her mother ordered her to bring it with her, she said, so she wasn’t even supposed to have the laptop.” Gerald Murphy said, drinking his tea.

“Yes, well, the mother doesn’t seem to have been winning any Mother of the Year contests. She was out of the picture for over 36 hours since Sophie disappeared because she was with another man. She was also working as a sex worker afterwards, but I think the original investigation blamed her too much. There was no reason to suspect her.”

“God, that woman. What about Jackson then?”

“I’ll come to him. It seems clear he was innocent; his alibi was checked out. The main thing was that he almost certainly met Sophie on the road out to the motorway past the Blue Lotus Resort. I’ll come to that later. Poor guy. Yes, Teresa did not help anyone.”

Afshan paused for effect. “The one thing the investigation didn’t seem to consider seriously was that her phone’s last location was in Liverpool Street, London. We seem to have assumed this was a mistake or that it simply hadn’t updated to its last location, presumably Rosevale-on-Sea. But phones are very accurate like this. If it was turned on during her train journey and while she walked through Rosevale, the location would be recorded there. So it means she left her phone at Liverpool Street.”

“But witnesses all said they saw her on her phone, and we see her on her phone on CCTV.”

“Well, what I think happened is similar to the Rosemary Jenkins case I shared with you. Remember the case of the burner phone, which can only be used to call the person controlling the phone? Not only do I think this happened here, but I also believe it was orchestrated by the same person.”

“Why wasn’t this flagged?” Murphy was genuinely curious why the Rosemary Jenkins case in Liverpool was not more well-known.

“Because at the time, it wasn’t suspected as an attempted kidnapping. Attempted kidnappings rarely make the news. It was thought that this person only wanted to blackmail Rosemary into having sex with him. A crime, but not a kidnapping.”

“So this person was blackmailing Sophie, not to meet him, but to be a kidnapping victim, you think?”

“Yes, and in fact, I think there is a chance that the note that Teresa ‘found’ on Sir Stanley Bridgerton was genuine. I think Teresa found it in her coat; it was October, and Sophie went missing in July. Maybe Sophie put the note there, and it took Teresa three months to check the pocket, then she put two and two together and made seventy?”

“But that said Liverpool Street.”

“Rosemary was the same, ‘meet me here, no, now come here instead.’ Lead them on a chase, making it harder to follow. I think he called her on her phone when she was at Liverpool Street and said, ‘take the train to Rosevale,’ and she took it.”

“But ... he kept in touch through the burner phone? How did she get that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he posted it to her, or maybe he left it somewhere for her to find. Maybe in Liverpool Street itself. But it seems clear she ditched her own phone in Liverpool Street for whatever reason, or turned it off and never turned it on again.”

“But we interviewed dozens of people. There was nobody following her on the train, and nobody met her at the station. There was no meeting place. She just vanished.”

“I read the statements, and I think some were mistaken. It seems much more likely she left the station and was directed out on the road towards the Blue Lotus, which seemed like a plausible meeting point, but she never reached there.”

“You sure she never reached there?”

“I looked at the CCTV footage, hours of it. But most people agree they passed her on the road to the motorway. Some people likely got confused, like Rodney, but he had no reason to be on the road to the sea. Crucially though, I saw one thing that no one seemed to have noticed. A witness said they had noticed a white van parked on the country road near the Blue Lotus, and they had to overtake it, which they said was unusual.”