Perfect People

104

Naomi’s Diary

I’m just lying wide awake here on the fourth floor of the Thistle Hotel. Listening to the rumble of traffic down in the street below, and the sound of the sea just beyond the promenade wall. I can’t sleep a wink. Just waiting, waiting, waiting for the phone to ring. Got up twice already to check my mobile is switched on and that the hotel phone isn’t off the hook.

I keep hearing a phone that keeps ringing in another room. I’ve phoned down to the front desk, just to make sure the night staff know which room we’re in.

Several times today I’ve wanted to die. I felt like this when Halley was losing his fight. I just wanted to slip my moorings and drift off into death with him.

I just keep thinking about where L and P might be, what’s happened to them. I know I’ve been finding them difficult, but that’s all gone from my head now. I love them to death. I know in some ways they may be strong, but they are still infants, tiny, little people. What we’ve done, John and I, very stupidly, is to make them too smart for their own good (or Dettore did, or whatever). They’ve been made smart enough to communicate with the adult world, but not to understand its dangers. That’s how this has come about.

That image, that video footage of the children trotting into the arms of these strangers, that is what really gets to me. After three years of doing all we could for Luke and Phoebe, they’ve run off willingly with strangers. That’s the worst thing of all.

That they may have been groomed by paedophiles over the internet, is one of the police lines of enquiry, although they haven’t found any evidence of that on their computer, so far. They think it’s possible that the dead man was part of a rival paedophile group and they had a falling out.

Great.

My children are in the hands of some paedophile monsters who shot a man in the back of the head. And no one has any clue where they are.