Page 20 of The Woman Who Said Yes

‘Yeah, good!’ He is clutching a tall, slim can of some kind of gingery root drink. Theo never seems to have normal drinks like Coke or Sprite.

‘Hope you’re not working too hard, love. Been out and about much lately?’ Somehow, she manages to ask this without sounding as if she is addressing a person of ninety-two.

‘A bit, yeah.’ Theo nods, his gaze dropping to the open laptop from which Dom is still grinning smugly. ‘Who’s that?’

Andie’s impish smile dimples her cheeks, and she turns to Sam. ‘Shall we tell him? I mean, can he be trusted?’

Sam chuckles. ‘I reckon so.’

‘C’mon, then,’ Andie says, touching Theo’s arm. ‘Sit down with us for a minute and we’ll show you. You’re probably better at this kind of stuff than we are.’

‘What stuff?’ Theo frowns, still standing. The radio is still on but somehow it seems more palatable now that his interest is piqued.

‘Finding out stuff about a person,’ Sam says, and Andie fills him in on Eva and Dom’s hastily arranged wedding, and how she’d spotted Dom storming along on his phone yesterday.

Theo frowns accusingly at his dad. ‘You didn’t tell me any of this.’

Fucking hell, Sam thinks, I didn’t think you’d be interested! Recently, I’ve assumed I could drop dead right here and you’d step over my corpse to get the Pringles out of the cupboard. ‘There wasn’t an awful lot to tell,’ he says mildly. ‘I mean, not until yesterday.’

Theo shakes his head, as if bewildered by his father’s handling of the situation. Although he won’t deign to sit with them, he hovers from a distance.

‘We just have a bad feeling,’ Andie tells him, and he nods.

‘Yeah, I can see why.’

Remarkable, Sam thinks. So Theo can be reasonably civil when the mood takes him. Now Sam is thinking he’d only step over his dead body if the Pringles were sour cream and onion.

‘You need to do a reverse image search,’ his son remarks, edging towards the kitchen door as if primed to escape.

‘Wait,’ Sam says quickly. ‘Can you show us how to do that?’

Theo blinks at him. ‘You don’t know?’

‘Erm, I don’t think so,’ his father mutters.

With a forceful exhale, as if Sam has asked him how to switch on the TV, Theo returns grudgingly to the table where Sam and Andie part like waves to let him in at the laptop. With his arm stretched out, plank-rigid, Theo flutters his fingers over the keyboard with such speed that they are a blur to Sam. At what point did modern life leave him behind?

‘There,’ his son announces, then scurries away in case anything further is asked of him.

Sam and Andie exchange a bemused look and turn back to the screen. The grid of photographs, conjured up magically by Theo, are of similar-looking middle-aged men: all clean shaven and with the same style of neatly cut silvery hair.

‘“Visually similar images,”’ Andie reads. ‘Ew, look at them, all lined up like that. Creepy.’ She frowns, biting her lip, and leans in closer. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’ She indicates the image in the top right corner. ‘That’s Dom.’

Sam nods. ‘Yeah, it is.’

‘Hang on,’ Andie murmurs, clicking on the image. A page loads and Sam shudders involuntarily at the mishmash of ugly fonts. ‘What’s this?’ she murmurs.

‘Looks like some kind of company,’ he replies, looking up briefly as Theo reappears and throws open the fridge as if, in his absence, it might have filled itself with unimaginable treats. A chocolate mousse is extracted and a teaspoon plucked from the drawer. A decoy activity, Sam realises. He’s come back to check whether two ancient humans are capable of operating a laptop without his help. With a vague air of disappointment, Theo drifts off again and Sam and Andie fall silent as they study the site.

The man in the photo – the same photo from Dom’s Facebook profile – is smiling out at them. It occurs to Sam that Eva would not be thrilled if she could see them now, and he quickly shoves the thought away. ‘Why didn’t this come up on a Google search?’ he muses.

‘It’s a different name,’ Andie announces. ‘Look.’ She jabs at the text below his picture.

‘“Dominic Morecock”,’ Sam reads aloud.

Andie smirks, knowing what he’s getting at. ‘If you were going to go to the trouble of changing it, wouldn’t you ditch the “cock”?’

‘I think I would,’ Sam decided, and they fall into a companionable silence as they read the text. Dominic Morecock redefines the language of property through a lens of considered sophistication and contextual awareness. Our work centres on the orchestration of space as a lifestyle catalyst, balancing permanence with limitless potential.