# Normal: The Most Original Thriller Of The Year

Graeme Cameron

Hypnotic and chilling — you won't forget this in a hurry. – Lee Child NOMINATED FOR THE STRAND CRITICS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL OF 2015He lives on your street, in a nice house with a tidy garden. He shops at your local supermarket. He drives beside you, waving to let you into the lane ahead of him. He’s the perfect neighbour. But he also has an elaborate cage in a secret basement under his garage.And he thinks it’s perfectly normal to kidnap young women and keep them captive.This is how it’s been for a long time. It’s normal…and it works. Perfectly.But this time it’s differentPraise for Normal'Creepy yet genuinely funny, I didn't like NORMAL, I loved it.'- Michael Robotham

“The truth is I hurt people. It’s what I do. It’s all I do. It’s all I’ve ever done.”

He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him.

What you don’t know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he’s carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he’s holding there against her will—one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.

This is how it’s been for a long time. It’s normal…and it works. Perfectly.

Then he meets the checkout girl from the 24-hour grocery. And now the plan, the hunts, the room…the others. He doesn’t need any of them anymore. He needs only her. But just as he decides to go straight, the police start to close in. He might be able to cover his tracks, except for one small problem—he still has someone trapped in his garage.

Discovering his humanity couldn’t have come at a worse time.


Graeme Cameron


For Oscar, Lewis, Sophie, Eve and Tracie

and

To Jamie Mason, for everything.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Acknowledgments

A Conversation with Graeme Cameron

End Pages

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

I’d learned some interesting things about Sarah. She was eighteen years old and had finished school back in July with grade-A passes in biology, chemistry, physics and English. Her certificate stood in a plain silver frame on a corner table in the living room, alongside her acceptance letter from Oxford University. She was expected to attend St John’s College in the coming September to commence her degree in experimental psychology. She was currently taking a year out, doing voluntary work for the Dogs Trust.

In her spare time, Sarah enjoyed drawing celebrity caricatures, playing with the Wensum volleyball team and collecting teddy bears. She was also an avid reader of fantasy novels and was currently bookmarking chapter 2, part 8 of Clive Barker’s Weaveworld. She’d been seeing a boy named Paul, though she considered him a giant wanker. He refused to separate from “almighty slut” Hannah, who was evidently endowed with a well-developed bosom and a high gag threshold. This caused Sarah considerable consternation, but she could not confide in her mother because “she wouldn’t understand” and would “just freak out again like last time.” She instead turned to her friend Erica, who was a year or two older and thus possessed of worldliness and abundant wisdom. Erica’s advice, apparently in line with her general problem-solving ethos, was to “cut off his dick and feed it to him.” Sarah didn’t talk to her mother about Erica, either.

All four walls of Sarah’s bedroom were painted a delicate shade of lilac, through which traces of old, patterned wallpaper were still visible. She had a single bed with a plain white buttoned cotton cover. She also had a habit of leaving clothes and wet towels on the floor. Her stuffed animals commanded every available inch of shelf and dresser space. The collection consisted of plush bears manufactured in the traditional method, and all had tags intact. It was too vast to waste time counting. But there were sixty-seven.

That morning, Sarah had spent just under half an hour in the bath and just over five minutes cleaning her teeth. She had no fillings or cavities, but the enamel on her upper front teeth was wearing thin from overbrushing. She also applied toothpaste to the index and middle finger of her left hand in a vain attempt at stain removal. There were no ashtrays in the house, and her cigarettes and lighter were hidden inside a balled-up pair of tights in the middle drawer of her dresser.

The following day was Sarah’s birthday. Many cards had already arrived and stood in a uniform row on the living-room mantelpiece. Someone had tidied in there early in the morning, but there was already an empty mug and a heat magazine on the coffee table. Sarah had a habit of leaving the TV on, whether she was watching it or not.

I’d discovered, too, that she plucked her bikini line. Most of her clothes were green. She dreamed of visiting Australia. She had a license but no car. The last DVD she watched was Buffy The Vampire Slayer—the feature film, not the more popular television series—and coincidentally, or rather perhaps not, Buffy was also the name of her cat.

Oh, and I knew three more things. I knew that her last hot meal was lasagna, her cause of death was a ruptured aorta and her tongue tasted of sugar and spice.

* * *

Fortunately, the kitchen floor was laid with terracotta tiles, and I easily located the cleaning cupboard, which held a mop and bucket, bleach, cloths, a roll of black bin liners and numerous antibacterial sprays. I hadn’t planned on doing this here, since I had a thousand and one other things to do and not enough time to do them, so my accidental severing of the artery was inconvenient, to say the least. Happily, I’d reacted quickly to deflect most of the blood and keep it off the walls.

I’d used a fourteen-inch hacksaw to remove the limbs, halving each one for portability. The arms and lower legs fitted easily inside a bin bag with the head and the hair lost in the struggle to escape. Using a separate bag for the buttocks and thighs, I’d placed these parts by the back door, away from the puddle of blood. The torso was unusually heavy despite Sarah’s small frame, and required a heavy-duty rubble sack to prevent tearing and seepage. Thoughtfully, I’d brought one with me.

The cleaning operation was relatively easy. My clothes went into a carrier bag, and I washed my face over the sink. Warm water followed by Dettol spray was adequate for removing the spatter from the cupboard doors and for disinfecting the worktops and the dining table once I’d swiped most of the blood onto the floor. Mopping the floor took three buckets of diluted bleach, which went down the drain in the backyard. The waste disposal in the sink dealt with stray slivers of flesh; the basin was stainless steel and simply needed a cursory wipe afterward.

The only concern was a couple of small nicks in the breakfast table, courtesy of my clumsiness with the carving knife. One or two spots of blood had worked their way into the wood, but these were barely visible and since the table was far from new, it was unlikely they’d be noticed by chance. Altogether, you’d never have known I was there.

In fact, the only thing out of place, once I’d moved the bin bags to the yard and returned each of Mum’s implements to its rightful home, was me. Fortunately, Sarah’s father was about my size, and I’d already dug out a pair of fawn slacks and an old olive fleece from the back of his wardrobe. The fleece was frayed at the elbows and smelled a little musty, but more importantly it was dry and unstained.

Satisfied, I slipped into my jacket and shoes, stepped outside and closed the door gently behind me.

In keeping with modern town-planning philosophy, the Abbotts’ house was separated from those to either side by the width of the garden path. In a token effort at providing some privacy from the neighbors, each garden had been bordered on both sides with high, oppressive panel fencing, secured at the bottom of the plot to a common brick wall. This wall was a good six inches taller than I was and, mindful of the difficulty in bundling Sarah over unseen, I elected to fetch the van and come back for her.

I took a lengthy run-up and hauled myself over, dropping down onto a carpet of twigs and soft brown leaves. The tree line was a matter of feet from the edge of the plot, at the foot of a steep incline. It was from here that I’d seen the upstairs window mist over and heard the bath running, watched Sarah in silhouette pulling off her clothes, waited until she closed the door and her ears were full of the roar of running water before I let myself in.

It was an altogether different scene now, as I picked my way back between the rows of pines toward the road. All that had made the dawn so perfect was gone—the dusting of snow on the rooftops, the faint crackling of twigs under muntjac hooves, the rustling of leaves disturbed by inquisitive foxes. In their place, the clatter of diesel engines and the grating thrum of cement mixers, the white noise of breakfast radio and the tap-tap-tap of trowel on brick. It had started soon after my arrival and, whilst the development would be blissfully quiet and neighborly once complete, for now the inescapable din of suburban sprawl rendered it a living hell. Although, on the other hand, it had at least allowed me the luxury of not having to tiptoe.

Thinking about it, there was something else missing, too—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Some weighty comfort I was accustomed to feeling against my leg as I walked, and which just wasn’t there anymore.

It wasn’t until I reached the van that I realized I’d locked the bastard keys in it.

* * *

I was loath to break a window, but the Transit was fitted with reinforced double deadlocks, and I specified the optional full-perimeter alarm system when ordering. Consequently, just as anyone else would have trouble breaking in, so did I. Having weighed up this option, considering my various time constraints against that of taking a cab home for the spare key, it didn’t take me long to find a brick. I was back in business, albeit at the mercy of the heater.

I’d left Sarah just behind the side gate, and I backed right up onto the two-car driveway to minimize my exposure. I took a moment to double-check the small toilet window at the back of the house; I’d chipped some of the paint away, and there were obvious indentations in the wood, but it was shut, and the glass was intact. Judging by the number of boxes and blankets piled up inside, and the concentration of long-abandoned cobwebs, the damage wouldn’t be discovered this side of summer. Good.

I was happy to find that Sarah hadn’t leaked out of any of the bags, and it took seconds to load the lighter ones into the van. But as I turned to collect the rubble sack, I happened to glance toward the doorstep, and my heart dropped. The face staring inquisitively back at me was a familiar one; I’d studied it briefly, in a tiny photograph from one of those instant booths you find in malls, fallen from Sarah’s diary as I lay on her bed. But it was unmistakable.

Erica’s hesitation was such that I could almost hear the whirring of her brain as she stood there, finger poised over the doorbell, eyebrows cocked, mouth agape. I knew all too well where her train of thought was carrying her, and so diverted it with a smile and a friendly wave.

“Hello, there,” I called. “Don’t panic, I’m not a burglar.”

Her expression turned instantly to one of apology. “Oh, no, no, I wasn’t thinking that.” She laughed, letting a few ringlets fall down to hide her eyes.

“Age Concern,” I explained. “Just collecting some old bags.” Ha ha. “I mean bags of old clothes. Are you looking for the young lady?”

She was walking toward me now. Dark curls bouncing, woollen scarf swaying to the rhythm of her hips. Breasts struggling to work the top button of her jacket loose with each confident stride. The blood began to race through my veins, the noise of the mechanical diggers and pneumatic drills fading to a low hum. “Yeah, do you know where she is? She’s not answering the door.” Close enough now that I could hear the rub of the denim between her thighs. I could take this one of two ways, probably avoid a scene by way of swift, decisive action, but as so often happens in the face of outstanding natural beauty, my honesty beat me to the punch.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s in the garden.”

CHAPTER TWO

My insurance company impressed me. First, they managed to answer the phone without dumping me in a queue and torturing me with a scratchy looped recording of “Greensleeves,” or whatever it is they play nowadays. Second, the operator, who spoke with an Indian accent but insisted his name was Bruce Jackson, was sympathetic to the plight of the freezing man and directed me to the local branch of Auto Windscreens, who not only had my window in stock but also fitted it while I waited. They even gave me a cup of tea, although I have to say that’s a loose description. Tea should not be served in a plastic cup from a sticky push-button machine, and should never contain coffee whitener. But since I wasn’t offered an alternative, and it was at least warm, I feigned gratitude and drank it.

Repairs completed and schedule abandoned, I stopped off at B&Q for a pack of saw blades and some lye, and somehow also left with a cordless electric sander. Might come in handy. Next I popped into CarpetRight and was able to pick up half a dozen large offcuts, which matched almost perfectly the sample I carry in my glovebox. You can never have too much carpet, believe me.

Hypnotized by the siren call of beef on the breeze, I then drove over to the adjacent McDonald’s where a pretty blonde girl with four gold stars but no name provided me with what she claimed was a cheeseburger, but which upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a cheap imitation of one. Eating it was only marginally more fulfilling than getting stuck in the pitifully narrow drive-thru lane. This was a disappointment, since Miss Gold Stars looked as though she had the potential to make great burgers.

The snow had returned by the time I was back on the road. It came down in a dense flurry, blanketing the ground in minutes and forming a bright, focus-bothering tunnel as I drove.

The road through the forest was unusually quiet, even accounting for the weather; I was making my own tracks and hadn’t passed another vehicle since leaving town. At times like this, unlikely as it seems, it’s perfectly possible to feel at one with nature from inside a heated van.

Two miles after the trees moved in to hug the road, I pulled onto the unmade Forestry Commission trail that follows the main railway line. It’s used in fair weather by dog walkers and cyclists and is inaccessible to motor vehicles, thanks to a steel pole secured to its trestles by a chain and padlock. Fortunately, I have a key.

I locked the gate behind me and, swallowing my regret at disturbing the virgin snow, guided the van along the rutted track for the half mile that would take me out of sight of the main road.

This is what winters were like when I was a child. The snow shin-deep on the ground. Soft, delicate flakes falling around me in their thousands, settling in my hair and gently tickling my face. The air so crisp and still as to dull the cold. Breath rising in front of my eyes, floating up toward a pure, white sky. The soft crunching underfoot with each deliberate step. The blissful, unbreakable silence.

Back then, winters were long and filled with all kinds of mystery. There were the treacherous road trips with my father to far-flung outposts in rented cars. The old stables along the driveway became an arctic shipwreck; discarded junk on high shelves was pirate treasure. And then there was the birch wood beyond the garden, where the ground stayed dry enough to sit and read under a canopy of blankets, and where the shouts and screams from the house could never reach.

Today, though, I had little time to reflect. I’d parked the van where the track meets a swathe of open heathland cut through the forest. From here the ground slopes away toward the railway line, beyond which is a steep drop into a wooded marsh, which lies alongside the river. Where I was standing, the ground falls sharply into a tree-lined crater, about a hundred yards across; at the bottom is a shallow pond fed by a tributary of the river, which winds its way through the marsh and under the railway. Down here the line is supported by a brick tunnel, built when the railway was laid in the 1840s to allow the passage of boats into what was then a working flint pit. Repeatedly pinned and reinforced over the years in a valiant yet inevitably vain struggle against gravity and decay, it shudders and wails with the passing of every train.

Reaching this place requires care even in ideal conditions. In deep snow, carrying a dead weight, it’s a pain in the arse. I had to make two trips, leaving the heavy rubble sack beneath the bridge and returning for the smaller bags and shovel. This time of year, unfortunately, calls for something of a compromise. There’s plenty of good ground out here, firm enough not to be turned over by the occasional trampling; after all, what’s accessible to me is accessible to you, too. However, in these temperatures it’s impossible to dig a hole in it. Any ground soft enough to dig in the depths of winter will be all but impassable in the summer, and therefore, almost inevitably remote and overgrown and generally no place to be carrying luggage.

The error giving rise to the term “shallow grave” is a classic one made time and again by panicked first-timers. It’s common for them to underestimate the time and effort involved in digging up a forest floor; the net result of this is, generally, a very small hole. In order to adequately cover the body, they are forced to build up a sizeable mound of earth from the surrounding area. Since this looks just like a shallow grave, they will then attempt to disguise it with a layer of bracken and moss. And of course, at the first sign of a stiff breeze, the toes are poking out.

Today, I’d be going five feet deep. This could take all winter.

CHAPTER THREE

In death, my father finally smiled. He was still warm when I left him the first time, his skin still soft, cheeks flushed. The blood pooled in the sawdust under his neck, tiny woodchips floating, dancing with one another, drawn together into little snowflake patterns that mimicked the ones still melting into my coat.

I knelt over him, searching his eyes for a flicker of life. The first and only time this strong, proud man would look up at me—his last chance to look at me at all—and yet still unable to truly look at me.

In those few moments, I saw the full range of his emotions pass across his face. The pain of betrayal. The regret of self-inflicted failure. Perplexity at the fascinations of a small boy. Frustration at the demands for attention. Disappointment, anger and loathing. Fear.

After breakfast, I returned and sat beside him, shivering for hours on end, watching the blood congeal and his face wax over. Around midday, the snow on the roof became top-heavy and slid to the ground, startling me. Every now and then a curious vulpine nose snuffled along the gap beneath the door. Otherwise, I had only the silence and the cold for company.

By nightfall he was cool to the touch, his fingers curled into rigid claws, and my hunger got the better of me.

I stumbled back through the garden to the warmth of the house, praying all the way that I’d find my dinner in the oven, my mother there to make sure I ate my vegetables before she tucked me into bed with the promise that tomorrow, everything would be just fine. But I’d seen the look in her eyes when she’d kissed me goodbye that morning, a life and sparkle that I’d never seen there before. Deep down, as I’d watched her grab her bags and sail out of the house, leaving me alone with my porridge, I’d known this exit was different from all the others. This one felt final.

I did the only thing I knew how. I gorged myself on shoo-fly pie and waited for someone to find me. Funny thing is, they never really did.

* * *

Preheat the oven to 260 degrees centigrade.

Juice six oranges; zest two of the rinds and roughly chop the rest. Take two medium-size fillets from the bird of your choosing and make an incision in each. Insert equal measures of the chopped rind and place the whole ensemble in a baking tray with half an inch of water. Bake in the oven until the skin is golden brown and lightly crisped, then turn it down to 150. It’s going to take about an hour.

While that’s cooking, take your zest and the freshly squeezed juice and pop them in a pan along with two-thirds of a cup of sugar. Place the mixture over a medium-to-high heat and reduce it until you’re left with about a quarter of the volume. Throw in a tablespoon of bitters, and set the pan aside.

Boil two cups of chicken stock in a separate pan, then add the orange mixture and simmer it for ten more minutes.

When the meat is done, drain the fat from the baking tray and place the tray on the stove. Pour a cup of Grand Marnier into the tray and cook off the alcohol. Make sure you’ve got a wooden spoon to hand as you will need to scrape the bottom of the tray almost continuously. Next, pour a cup of the orange sauce you made earlier into the tray and cook it for a minute or so.

Finally, remove the orange rinds from the steaks and combine the orange sauce with the remaining juices from the baking tray. Serve with a simple accompaniment of new potatoes and runner beans, et voilà. Sarà l’orange.

I built my garage large enough to comfortably accommodate a full-size van and three cars. An automatic climate-control system maintains a constant temperature of sixty degrees Fahrenheit and minimizes humidity. Twin reinforced canopy doors are operated by remote control, which utilizes a double rolling-code system to ensure maximum peace of mind. I have three transmitters; I keep one on my keychain, and the spares are in a locked box in one of the kitchen cupboards, along with a collection of souvenir door keys amassed over time. The key to the box is on my keychain. Note to self.

The stairs leading down to the basement are accessed via a cupboard, or more specifically the false back thereof, which is lined with lipped shelves containing half-empty paint cans and other objects disinclined to topple when disturbed, and which opens at the flick of a concealed catch into the void between the outer and false inner walls to the rear of the garage. The steps are covered with a heavy-duty nylon cut-pile carpet, mulberry in color with a crisp multipoint stipple-effect pattern, perfect for camouflaging a vast range of dark stains. It’s certificated to all European flammability and antistatic standards for office applications, and is Scotchgard-protected to prevent ingraining. There isn’t an awful lot you can’t drag across a carpet like that.

Twenty-two feet down at the foot of the stairs is a door; galvanized steel featuring twin-cylinder mortise locks with drill-resistant casings and a seventeen-bolt backup. The internal bracings are separated by layers of sound-deadening thermal insulation, and the door is finished with attractive natural beech panels.

Beyond this door is what I described to my builder as a games room. Forty-five feet by thirty and of concrete construction, it’s lit by an octet of spotlights, one pair at each corner of the ceiling, and furnished with an integrated antenna loop connected to a cellular repeater for reliable mobile phone reception. The walls are plastered and painted a delicate eggshell-blue. The floor is covered with three-inch-thick rubber matting. The builder, sadly, was confused by my explanation and now resides four feet above the ceiling, under eight feet of earth.

In the center of the room is a twenty-by-twenty security cage, built from ten-gauge steel wire with a two-and-a-half-inch diamond mesh and one-and-a-quarter-inch channel frame. The cage has a five-by-seven door with twin cylinder locks and a reinforced titanium padlock.

Inside the cage is an iron-framed single bed, anchored to the floor with seven-inch bolts. It has a pocket sprung mattress, white cotton sheets and a cozy lambswool blanket. At each corner of the bed, bolted to the floor through the rubber mat, is a steel ring, six inches in diameter. In the far corner of the cage are a toilet and sink with mains plumbing.

And finally, on this day at least, there was one other item in the cage. It was located in the middle of the floor, rolled into a tight ball. It was sensitive to light, to the sound of slamming doors and to the smell of home cooking. Covered in layers of brown wool and dark blue denim, it started as I entered the cage and stared at me silently through wide, hateful eyes. It was tired, disoriented and hungry. And its name was Erica Shaw.

CHAPTER FOUR

The self-confident bounce was long gone. Erica didn’t move as I balanced the dinner tray in one hand and removed the padlock with the other. The sound of the key in the door, however, had her bolt upright and scrabbling backward across the rubber floor until her back thumped hard against the far side of the cage. She pulled her knees to her chin and glared up at me, wide eyes blazing with venom and fear, the tight, glowing curls of her hair now a matted, lifeless mess that covered her face and clung to the tears as they streamed across her cheeks. Silently, she trembled.

“Erica,” I said softly. “It’s dinnertime.” I placed the tray carefully on the edge of the bed. A wooden tray, decorated with piglets and ducklings, with a built-in knee cushion filled with tiny beans. A plastic plate, dishwasher friendly, with a daisy-chain print around the rim. A matching tumbler filled with ice-cold Highland Spring. Still, not sparkling. Plastic knife and fork.

She neither moved nor spoke; just stared, knees shuddering, shoulders heaving with each shallow breath.

I joined her on the floor, sat facing her. “Come on, you need to eat something besides cereal. You’re looking thin.” No response. “It’s tasty. Try a bit, see if you like it?” Nothing. “Erica, listen to me. I’m not going to let you starve to death here.”

I could sense a change in her then, though she gave no visible sign. I felt her desire to answer me back, to demand to know exactly what she would be dying of. But she still said nothing.

“Okay.” I sighed. “I’ll leave you alone. Do your best.” I pulled myself back up, turned to leave the cage. “Oh, and the sheets on that bed are brand-new.” I swung the door shut, turned the key on both bolts, reached down by my feet for the padlock. “You don’t have to keep sleeping on the floor.”

And then I took a full serving of orange sauce and green beans square in the face.

“I’m not eating fucking meat, you psycho freak!” Erica screamed, grabbing handfuls of steel mesh as the offending fillet plopped to the floor. The plate rolled the length of the cage and clattered against the toilet. Potatoes bounced in all directions. Sauce ran from my hair. I kicked myself.

“Good shot,” I conceded, “but honestly, you’re not in a position to pick and choose.”

“No, you’re right,” she spat, gripping the mesh, her knuckles white, eyes flashing like those of a cornered tiger. “Which reminds me, how long are you going to keep me in this fucking dungeon?”

A reasonable question, and one to which I wished I knew the answer. The simple fact is that time, tendency and tourism are fickle bedfellows, and one can rarely predict when they might deign to coincide. Probably best not to tell her that, though, so I tried to look halfway confident as I asked, “How long’s a piece of string?”

She pushed herself from the door, backed away with a half skip. “Well,” she said, smiling, “you’re hardly going to keep me here for the next eighty years, and you already said I’m not allowed to starve to death, so either you’re holding me to ransom or you’re just going to kill me. Either way, I guess you’ll want to get it over with fairly soon.”

I returned her mocking grin. “Well,” I said, “I’m certainly not intending to sell you.” Her spark retreated. “And I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but I simply haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with you yet. At some point, I’ll take you out, and we’ll play some games, and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to go home. But if you’re too weak to run, you won’t stand a chance, and if you starve, it won’t be any fun for either of us.”

Silence revisited her forthwith. The defiance, the loathing, even the fear vanished from her eyes, leaving only great dark pools of sorrow.

“So, you’ll get what you’re given, and it’ll be good for you, and you’ll eat it, so perhaps you’d like to salvage what you can while I go and find you a mop.”

Fucking vegetarians.

* * *

I didn’t really know what I needed, but I figured I’d make a run for the supermarket on the near side of town. February’s snow was gone, but the onset of spring had been lazy and as darkness fell, the temperature dropped below freezing, the remains of a misty evening turning the roads to ice.

Had the gritters laid any grit, this would have been an easy five-minute drive. As it was, however, I faced an invigorating struggle against the renegade forces of physics. With friction an early casualty, the van slithered maniacally about the rink, seemingly intent on meeting its fate belly-up in a frozen trench. The rush hour had barely ended, but I didn’t pass a single car; no one else was stupid enough to take on the elements out here. I couldn’t help thinking that were I to come to grief, spring would arrive before help did. I liked it.

After twenty-three minutes of sheer exhilarating uncertainty, I reached the motorway. Coated with a layer of brine, and bustling with weary souls packed into grubby tin cans, it brought me crashing back down to the dreariness of everyday life. I felt like a tuna.

Quietly wondering whether vegetarians ate tuna, I followed the usual shopping routine. In the magazine section, I browsed gawky uniformed schoolgirls with braces on their teeth. A petite brunette in a pinstriped suit leafed through the local paper, the familiar headline barely raising an eyebrow. Missing Girls Almost Certainly Abducted. The greeting card aisle was brimming with fat-bottomed mothers ignoring their bored, fidgeting offspring in favor of tired punchlines and nauseating sentiment. Women’s Clothing: deserted but for the fragile, gray-haired fitting room attendant, fixing the floor with the sorrowful gaze of the undervalued, desperate to believe that there might—nay, must be more to life.

In Fruit & Veg I selected a peach. Small, rosy and perfectly rounded, she set my mouth watering the moment she caught my eye. Her burly, bruised companion, however, swiftly killed my appetite. Or rather, his uniform did.

There were no sweet cupcakes to be found in the bakery aisle, just an abundance of greasy doughnuts. In fact, I was struck by how few of those loading up on golden syrup cakes and Danish pastries looked like they could really be trusted with them. Unlike the redhead in the pet-food aisle with the wide hips and the skinny arms, none of these creatures could claim to be big-boned. Considering all implications, I moved on.

Pasta and Sauces: a towering blonde with a hook nose and bandy legs which, under cursory inspection, seemed too thin to support the weight of her body or offer any stability in the face of prevailing winds. She walked in a disjointed manner, which made it difficult to judge between prosthetic and anorexic; either way, I prefer a little meat with my spaghetti.

Things began to look up in the frozen food section: another redhead, younger and narrower this time and more auburn than ginger, in tight jeans that showed off the delicious curve of her slender thighs and rounded hips. I leaned past her to peer into the chiller, barely brushing her ponytail with my cheek. Tea tree and mint and an underlying hint of vanilla. All at once invigorating and relaxing. “Excuse me,” I said, gently laying an apologetic hand on her arm as I reached around to grab a tub of coconut Carte D’Or. She glanced at me and offered a polite smile, made no attempt to move away. Not wishing to push my luck, however, I returned the smile and backed off. I lingered over the frozen vegetables, waited for her to close the chiller and pass by before following at a half-aisle distance, carefully matching my pace to hers.

She was pushing a trolley-for-one, but this was clearly a weekly shop; meal-wise she had the makings of seven single servings and was now selecting an eight-pot pack of fromage frais. She clearly let her hair down one night a week.

She’d already covered most of the store: baked beans, tuna, sweetcorn, tinned cat food, Fairy Liquid, pasta and rice and couscous and a couple of cook-in sauces. The items seemed largely to follow a pattern. Perhaps these were things vegetarians ate.

Her allure all but overshadowed by the sudden wisdom she’d bestowed upon me, and knowing now what needed to be done, I released the redhead from the clutches of my intent and set off on a vital quest to reclaim the moral high ground and secure my reputation as an impeccable host.

I made it as far as the fish counter.

It’s a rare and fortunate man who can pinpoint precisely the moment his life began to unravel. Most can only guess, grasping at distant memories of wealth and security and happiness and wondering just where the hell it all went while they scrape their attempts at independence off the bottom of the oven. Yesterday it was a detached cottage with creeping ivy, a pretty and talented wife who was never too tired and kids who tidied their rooms and kept their elbows off the table. A retriever. A study. A Volvo. Today, a rented one-bed cesspit with grease stains on the ceiling. A portable TV. A Metro. Fleas. The decline, though outwardly long and tortuous, passes in the blink of an eye.

For these people there is no time stamp; their fall from grace occurred over months and years, but still they search the depths of their souls for a date and time in the vain belief that a single moment revisited might serve to reverse their fortunes. Often, they search for the rest of their lives.

I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones. I know exactly when it all started to go wrong for me. It was April 5 at 19:23:17, and it started with a pair of eyes.

Most of the eyes I see stare right through me. Some linger on the pavement, desperate to avoid meeting other eyes. Others gaze into the middle distance, vacant and expressionless, betraying a desire to be somewhere, anywhere other than here and now. Some eyes flicker and glaze over and roll back and just stare at nothing at all. But most eyes stare through me as if I’m simply not here.

These eyes, though, these eyes were different. They met my own, bored through them, stared right into me. They carried a charge of some intangible recognition, a magnetic déjà vu trailing its spidery fingers down my spine, throwing sparks of invitation and longing tinged with fear and denial, rendering me at once both intoxicated and drained. My train of thought derailed; my empty head floated free of my shoulders, legs threatening to buckle under the weight of my directionless body. I don’t know how long this electrifying gaze held my own, nor how these eyes came to be mere inches from mine, but sometime later, they blinked and released me from their spell.

My head snapped back into sharp focus. The rancid stench of cockles and mussels headed straight for the back of my throat, giving me the insufferable task of appearing not to gag. Arched eyebrows and a flickering smile told me I’d failed and, for the first time since childhood, I felt the onset of a blush. Frankly, I didn’t know where to look—but I settled on her chest, where I found comfort and understanding in four neatly printed words.

Her name, apparently, was Caroline. And she was Here To Help.

CHAPTER FIVE

At night, through a motorway spray, it’s impossible to see the faces of those who pass by in the next lane. Scores, hundreds even, of nameless, faceless drones, nothing more than hazards to be avoided, reminders to check your stopping distance. Even when unfettered and unobscured, in the supermarket or in a busy shopping street on a weekday afternoon, they serve only to delay your progress, bumbling around in front of you when they should surely all be at work. In short, strangers seem altogether less than human. They’re just something that gets in the way.

Anyone who’s stood on a crowded corner wondering where so many people are in such a hurry to go has, then, unwittingly uncovered the perplexing irony of human existence. As you stand in idle surveyance, taking a break from the million and one stresses coursing continuously through your mind, it occurs to you that the withered old lady holding up that increasingly irate bus queue has a life not far removed from your own. She has a family who don’t call her often enough, a home she can’t afford to maintain, a pet she feeds before feeding herself. She has a birth certificate and a shoe size. She sees the same sky, the same pavement, the same faceless drones that you see. If you tickle her, she’ll laugh. Sometimes she’s happy; sometimes she’s sad. Mostly, she’s resigned. She has thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears. Eighty-eight years of vivid memories.

Her name is Ivy, and she’s been a widow for almost a decade. Right now she has somewhere to go. You don’t know where that is; only she does. Later, when Ivy gets home, she’s going to feed her cat a tin of store-brand chunks-in-jelly before she unpacks the shopping. The cat, a long-haired tabby named Foggy, will then watch her collapse to the kitchen floor with a breathless gasp, clawing at the center of her chest. In exactly a week, Gemma, Ivy’s granddaughter, makes a rare and unannounced visit to show off her ultrasound photos. There’s no answer at the door; the lights are on, the curtains closed, and the cat screeching to be let out. Through the frosted glass she can make out an untidy pile of letters and bills on the doormat. Naturally concerned, she fetches a spare key from the car and lets herself in. The cat bolts.

For eighty-eight years, the world revolved around Ivy. That which she could see and touch was real to her, everything else a mere figment. Departing visitors, setting off back to their own lives, were swiftly dispatched from her conscious thoughts, taking with them all tangible evidence of their existence. She would lock her doors to the outside world and settle down with a cup of tea, but for Foggy entirely alone in her world. And yet conversely, whilst the conversation in that departing car might revolve around Ivy for a handful of miles, the reality of her existence would soon be forgotten in favor of the more immediate stresses and strains pervading the lives of Peter and Janet. Out of sight, out of mind.

Every human being occupies a space at the dead center of his or her own universe. When Ivy’s universe imploded, when she made the transition from leading lady to cat food, the myriad separate worlds occupied by her family and friends were fleetingly altered. Gemma’s world was naturally rocked the most; the sight that greeted her that morning changed her flippant outlook on life permanently. At Ivy’s funeral, thirty-two universes were briefly united in mourning, both for Ivy and for Gemma’s unborn baby.

Right now universes are being created, thrown together and destroyed the world over. Seven billion souls, each preoccupied with their own unique reality, each with a head full of memories, plans, learned knowledge and accumulated trivia; birthdays, telephone numbers, bus routes, passwords. Each one with somewhere to go, something they need to get done. They all have birth certificates and shoe sizes. Every single one has a story.

I wondered what this girl’s story was—not Caroline, though her face was still beaconing through my brain like the terrain warning on a stricken aircraft, but rather the one sitting alone at the bar, fidgeting with her mobile phone and trying to buy a drink. She was hard to read from this angle, being, as she was, so remarkably unremarkable. Average height. Average face. Average bust. Mousy, nondescript hair of average length. Ten-a-penny jeans and a plain black shirt. Even the barman didn’t notice her.

I sat in the corner with a glass of house red and a week-old Telegraph, ostensibly ogling the revealingly attired blonde at the next table. The center of almost universal male attention in the bar, her smirk cruised from admirer to admirer as she feigned interest in her companions’ conversation. Having no desire to distinguish myself, I allowed her to see me looking.

By eleven-thirty, Annie Average was one of a mere handful of stragglers left clinging to the bar, stubbornly ignoring all requests to drink up and leave. Seemingly tired of continuously checking her inbox, she had taken to scrutinizing the small print on the back of a train ticket she’d pulled from her purse. Neither her expression nor her posture had altered throughout the evening, save for a gentle swaying that started around ten. Finally, she stood and wrapped herself in the ankle-length black woolen coat she’d been warming all night with her average-size bottom. I drained the last few dregs from my wineglass; I’d dispatched a whole bottle of the wretched stuff, though most of it went in among the shrubbery on the windowsill, conveniently located just beside my left knee. As such, I affected a vacant gaze and a John Wayne swagger as I headed for the door.

Stood up and fed up, Annie did exactly as I’d expected and headed for the railway station. She set a moderate pace, allowing me to match my footsteps to her smaller strides without tripping over my own feet. We joined the flow of drunken teenagers migrating to the clubs across the river, a steady bustle despite the bitter cold. Once over the bridge, we would meet head-on the tide of out-of-towners pouring into clubland from the railway station. And since this dimly lit center of jostling confusion headed down the side street in which I’d parked the van, I was anticipating a swift conclusion to an easy hunt. At least until her phone rang.

Her “hello” carried a tone of mock disapproval that belied her grave demeanor, and she met the offered excuses with expressions of humor and sympathy. She clearly wasn’t one for confrontation. I hung back as she slowed to an idle stroll on the bridge, running her free hand along the icy railings and cracking frozen puddles with the toe of her boot. An occasional husky laugh drifted back to me above the passing stream of profane taunts and leering catcalls. Her lovelorn dawdling pleased me somewhat, since I was both optimistic that her improved mood would make my job easier and anxious that she should be finished on the phone when it did so.

In the event it didn’t matter. Lost in flirtation, Annie found the stone stairs leading to the towpath beside the river. One dreamy step at a time, she giggled her way down into the darkness beneath the bridge. I watched her from above as she paced in a circle, distractedly kicking small stones into the water, head tilted over to hold the phone in the crook of her neck, hands thrust snugly in her pockets. At length, I watched her drift ever farther from the bridge. And when she was all but out of sight, I followed.

In the shadows beside the water, the air was heavy and still. The towpath is bordered by a high stone wall, at the top of which is the busy station approach. Most of the traffic noise wafts overhead, making the path a relative sea of calm. The bridges along this stretch of the river are too low for a sail mast but passable by small pleasure cruisers which, at night, occupy every available inch of mooring space. The sounds here are of water lapping against fiberglass, fiberglass rubbing against wood. The only light is that which drifts across from the carvery on the far bank, or down from the streetlights on the road above.

The path was deserted but for Annie and me; the lights of the restaurant faded behind us, the riverbank widened and the horse-chestnuts thickened, and all was impeccably dark and serene. Beyond the far shore, the cathedral spire rose proudly above a blackened tree line, a glowing beacon of humanity against a soulless gray-orange sky.

Annie finally stopped wandering to rest against a life-buoy station; the orange float was long gone, an easy and attractive target for small-minded vandals. I melted into the trees, listening silently to a conversation winding down: can’t-waits and won’t-be-longs, okay-I-promises and hold-that-thoughts. I wondered what Caroline was doing just then. I heard Annie say her goodbyes, waited while she wallowed in the misty-eyed afterglow. I watched her dawning realization of having strayed farther than she’d intended; she spun around and around, taking in the darkness, the silence, her solitude. Her unremarkable eyes flashed disorientation and frustration, and weariness at the prospect of the long walk back.

And then, movement. In the shrubbery not twenty feet away, a dark form, hunched, creeping. Annie sensed it, too; she snapped her head around, peering into the blackness behind her. The dark shape turned statue. I could all but smell the adrenaline coursing through it as it crouched, barely breathing until, after what surely felt like hours, Annie released a long breath of her own and turned back to the path. I remained rigid, upright; I let her pass me, glancing nervously behind her as the figure moved almost silently through the brush. It was among the trees now, virtually on top of me as Annie quickened her pace, and then in a blink it was out on the path and running.

She certainly heard it then. She turned, eyes wide, to face it as it bore down on her, let out a half gasp as it knocked her off her feet. Before I could react, she was in the undergrowth, cursing and spitting, coat ripped open. Her assailant hunched over her, alternately swatting away her flailing limbs and working on her belt.

Incensed, I broke free of my incredulous trance and the cover of the trees and, snatching up a fallen branch from the ground, stepped into the open mere feet from the struggle. A clearing of my throat was enough to gain the predator’s attention. He looked up at me sharply and froze, mouth agape, eyebrows hitched up almost to his hairline. A kid, no more than twenty-one, dressed from head to toe in black synthetic fibers, his blazing orange eyebrows a fair giveaway as to the identifying feature hidden beneath his beanie hat. Annie had stopped struggling and stared up at me, her eyes undecided between panic and relief. The kid, small but solidly built, had straddled her, pinning her wrists to the frozen earth with his spidery hands, her ankles with his own. Eyes fixed on the hefty limb I held before me, he didn’t move a muscle.

“Leave,” I said. “Now.”

The kid, to his credit, didn’t need telling twice; he was off, vanishing into the darkness from whence he came minus his wallet and one of his shoes.

“You okay?”

“Oh, my God.” Annie lay there, coat spread, shirt hitched up, belt unbuckled. “How stupid am I?”

“Not your fault,” I lied, tossing the branch back among the trees. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, reached up to take my outstretched hand. “No, I’m a mess, though.” I helped her to her feet, and she straightened out her clothes, fastened her belt, shook out her hair. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” she mused. “Christ, if you hadn’t come along—”

“Yeah, I did, though, so don’t think about it.” I gave her space to gather the few contents of her bag from where they’d exploded across the path. “Do you want me to take you to the police?” I offered. “I’m just parked up at the train station.”

“God, I don’t know whether I can go through all that tonight.” She slung her bag over her shoulder, gave her pockets one last check. “I do need to find a train, though, so if you’re walking that way...” She finally looked up at me, puppy eyes at the ready. She seemed remarkably untraumatized.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “I just want to get home.”

I conceded. She turned off her phone and dropped it into her bag, and I spitefully kicked the kid’s shoe into the river as we set off briskly back toward the lights and the noise. “So,” I asked her, “what’s your name?”

“Annie,” she said.

What were the odds on that?

CHAPTER SIX

Annie made a hell of a mess.

I’d convinced her that the last train had probably gone and that even if it hadn’t, I was going her way and could get her home sooner and in greater comfort. On the basis that I’d saved her from an unpleasant mauling and was therefore to be trusted, she happily accepted a ride.

To be quite honest, when she invited me in for tea, I fully intended to just drink it and leave. In spite of my earlier intentions, I found Annie’s company pleasant and her conversation lively and interesting—sufficiently so to distract me from looking out for deserted lanes and vacant lots along the route. I also felt an unexpected pang of protectiveness, and by the time we reached the coast, my only urge was to see her home safely.

However, one cup of tea became several, and Annie matched every one I drank with a tumbler of vodka. As we talked, it quickly became apparent that this was no one-off, that the dismissive actions of the man in her life drove her most nights into the arms of a bottle.

His name was Jeremy and by two in the morning, when I finally removed the last of the stains from the carpet, I’d grown to dislike him intensely. He seemed to me grossly egotistical and of low moral standing.

“He wouldn’t tell me where he lived,” Annie recounted as she filled her glass for the third time, halfway with vodka and topped with a splash of cranberry juice. “Said he had nosy neighbors and they were friendly with his ex-wife, and that she’d make life difficult for him if she knew he was seeing anyone. I know, I didn’t buy it, either. So I followed him one night.” She took a long gulp of her drink, one that took her three attempts to swallow. “I did that thing, you know, ‘follow that taxi!,’ and I followed him right to his front door. I was expecting to see... Well, I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it was just this crappy little two-up-two-down, nothing like as posh as he said it was.”

Contrary to the impression her flowery telephone manner had given me, she wasn’t painting an endearing picture of Jeremy. She told me that he’d lied about his home, his job, his background. Christ, she wasn’t even sure Jeremy was his real name. “He stands me up all the bloody time,” she continued. “Usually when I complain, he tells me he was stuck in the office finishing a report or his Jag wouldn’t start, which is bullshit because he hasn’t even got a car—he gets buses everywhere because they’re free because he’s a bloody bus driver, not a regional transport coordinator, which is what he said he was. And the stupid thing is, I’ve never let on that I know that because I don’t want to look like a psycho. Why, I don’t know. It’s only been six weeks, and half the time I actually resent the fact that I even bother.” Gulp. “But hey, it keeps me on my toes, right? And to be honest, when he’s not being a lying toerag, he’s quite a nice guy. And I’m grateful for the distraction—I mean come on, my life is just so...so...”

“Average?” I suggested.

She nodded and emptied her glass. “That’s right,” she said. “Annie fucking Average.”

As much as I admired the simplicity of her explanation, she was clearly deluding herself. We both knew that she put up with it because she was drunk.

By 1:47, it was all over for Annie. She’d pulled a spicy beef pizza from the oven and promptly dropped it facedown on her cream sofa. Recoiling in horror, she’d then knocked the open cranberry juice carton from the coffee table.

Overcome with exasperation, she rushed to the kitchen sink and, without first removing the dirty dishes, liberally threw up.

So it was, then, that I came quite literally to undress Annie and tuck her into bed. She was asleep before she hit the pillow.

I liked Annie a lot for some reason, and so on my way back through the city, acting on information copied from her address book, I stopped by to pay the weasel Jeremy a visit. She was right; the house was crappy—paint peeling from the doors and window frames, guttering cracked and loose, garden overrun with weeds and nettles.

Getting in was easy; the kitchen extension at the back had a flat roof, above which a boxroom window had been left open—presumably on the assumption that the fresh air would combat the condensation running down the walls. Helpfully, I closed it.

Jeremy’s bedroom was at the front of the house. The thin curtains were no match for the streetlight right outside the window, which made the ceiling and the flock wallpaper glow fluorescent orange. The dresser, a mahogany-look junk-shop special, was strewn with hair gels and torn envelopes and half-empty coffee cups, some of which showed signs of life. In the opposite corner, the matching wardrobe sagged under the weight of bulging black sacks and sports bags, piled so high that the shirts didn’t hang straight and the doors wouldn’t close.

The bed, on the other hand, looked new. A full six feet wide, with an antique-brass-effect frame in an overdone neo-Gothic style. The bedspread was patterned counter-contextually with meaningless stylized Chinese characters and, I was less than surprised to note, concealed two distinct forms in repose.

I chose to let Jeremy sleep, not out of consideration but simply because I hadn’t thought to ask what he looked like. This would not normally have been an issue, since the majority of couples are distinguishable by clear, simple and universal gender-specific identifiers. Put simply, the clue is in the cock. This couple, however, quite obviously had two.

Judging by the collection of photographs on the mantelpiece downstairs, Jeremy’s predilection was clearly not a recent discovery. The hairstyles on display dated right back to a New Romantic flick and were unerring in their attachment to one hirsute, muscular torso or another. This was a man who knew his own mind.

In the void beneath the stairs, opposite the mantelpiece and the tasteless log-effect gas fire it so shamefully highlighted, was a computer. The desk it sat on was strewn with scraps of paper carrying scribbled tidbits of personal information: email addresses, first names, hometowns, occupations, pets and vital statistics. Aliases like “Hunnybunny” and “Lucyluvsit.” Some had telephone numbers. A handful noted dates and times, names of pubs and restaurants. One, sadly, said “Burger King.”

Tacked to the small triangle of wall above the desk were a dozen photographs printed on copy paper. A dozen women sat at a dozen corner tables, alone, staring into their drinks and fingering their mobile phones.

I was glad I’d taken the time to stop by. That Jeremy should devote his leisure time to stalking straight girls seemed like a new twist on something I’d encountered a hundred times before and couldn’t be bothered to try to understand. In any case, his motivation was none of my business, but that he might have a photographic record of the recent movements of every desperate, lonely woman in the county most certainly was. God alone knew how many of them I might be in.

Affirmative, proportionate action was therefore the order of the night, and so by the time Jeremy awoke in the morning, his hard drive and memory cards were blank, his printer was out of ink and the only photograph above his desk was of himself, naked and asleep, with a pair of pinking shears artfully arranged about his under-endowment.

* * *

To those of us startled into forgetting what we went shopping for, and perhaps hoping, subliminally or otherwise, for a second attempt at a first impression, the 24-hour supermarket must surely rank alongside tea bags and ambiguous social-network privacy tools as one of modern mankind’s most useful inventions.

In the early hours there are no screaming children to contend with, no half-hour queues at the checkout. There are hundreds of empty parking spaces, and you can always find a trolley.

For the most part, the only activity you’re likely to encounter is the gaggle of fellow insomniacs charged with the unenviable task of restocking the shelves. These people are paid a reasonable wage and are therefore usually polite and unobstructive. They’ve always got what you’re looking for, and it’s always fresh.

Unfortunately, however, the fish counter was closed, and the acute sense of disappointment this brought about came as something of a shock. I was distracted and listless as I pushed my express trolley from aisle to aisle, supplementing my earlier haul of melted coconut ice cream and two defrosted salmon by randomly tipping in anything and everything purporting to be free of meat. Carrots, olives and limes. Carnaroli rice and a can of lima beans. All sense of direction and purpose again fled to the outer reaches of my mind, beaten away by the horde of metal roll cages obstructing every aisle. A blanket of frustration fell over me then, obscuring my vision and blocking my ears. The back of my neck bristled with the distinct sense that I was being watched, and I felt an overwhelming desire to be somewhere else.

I left the trolley and wandered to the entertainment aisle, where bored husbands congregate to inspect cheap laptops and watch football. It was blissfully empty, quiet but for the bank of televisions, each one tuned to a different channel, muttering to me as I passed:...according to Inca lore, once rail operators pledge to iron lace while damp, a real icon like Elvis Presley is likely to command the council to loan Eric an electric wheelchair. Detective Chief Inspector Lowry made the following statement. “Whilst we will never give up hope of finding Sarah and Erica alive, we have to face the reality that with every passing week, our chances of doing so continue to fade. I am, therefore, again appealing to anyone in the local community who thinks they may have any information, no matter how trivial you might think it is, to pick up the phone and call us, either directly to my team here in the incident room, or anonymously via Crimestoppers. Somebody out there knows something, and only with your help can we hope to bring Sarah and Erica home, or to track down the person or persons responsible for their disappearance.”

This wasn’t any better.

At night, the checkouts are deserted. In the absence of queueing customers, there is no sense in paying the staff to chew gum and stare into space. I was alone as I loaded the conveyor; the echo of cage doors, dropped boxes and idle chatter was disembodied and distant. I nudged the trolley to the end of the belt, folded my arms and turned around to rest against the counter, idly reading the covers of the leaflets on the stand opposite. Car insurance. Home insurance. Pet, travel and life insurance. Broadband internet and pay-as-you-go mobile phones. Banking and credit cards. I thought back to a time when supermarkets simply sold groceries; when a loaf of bread was a loaf of bread, and beans really did mean Heinz. A time when, on a Friday afternoon, I’d obediently follow my mother through a fluorescent maze of checkered tiles and bright white freezers in the hope of being rewarded with a Crunchie bar and a—

“Hi. Are you all right with your packing?”

There was something in the voice, something so barely there that the question of what it was kept me from turning even after the effect had passed.

“Hey!” Masked now by a broad smile, a teasing melody: “Hello! Wake up! I’m over here!”

I could feel those eyes playing on the back of my neck and spiking my hair before I turned clumsily to face them.

Blue and green and aquamarine, like pools of sunlit gasoline. The kind of eyes that make men like me walk into doors and spill our tea.

The base of my spine wound itself into a twitching, tingling knot. “Hello,” I croaked. “Yes, thank you, I’m well versed in the art of packing my bags.”

Caroline pursed her lips, narrowed her startling eyes at me. Studied me for a split second with the intensity of a prowling panther before her face softened to a bemused smile. “Nope,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to ask.”

“Sorry, long night. Very tired.” Dry, oilless fingers were making hard work of separating the slippery plastic bags. I could feel the frustration welling again inside me as I grasped and fumbled vainly at the neck of each in turn.

“I know, me, too.” She gathered up the fine cascade of dirty-blond hair from her shoulders and threw it into a careless ponytail, held in place with a simple black band from around her wrist. As she did so, her name badge rode up under her chin. “Rachel,” it said. “Here to help.” She caught me looking, and a fragment of a smile told me she knew I’d been reading “Caroline” in taillights all night.

I hoped, then, as she set about swiping my pitiful collection of rabbit food through the scanner, that she’d blindly pass each item in front of her without pausing to read the labels; that she had no interest in judging me by my shopping list. Sadly, though, I had her full attention. “Tell you what,” she remarked. “It’s a nice change to meet a herbivore who hasn’t got that pale, scrawny thing going on.”

I smiled, absurdly willing myself to believe it a greater compliment than it really was. Maddeningly, the food was coming thick and fast and I still had nothing to put it in. “Actually, I think I do need some help here.”

“Here...” She slid gracefully from her chair and reached over the counter, her plain white blouse tightening across a modest bust, sleeves riding up to reveal the faint specter of symmetrical scars adorning the underside of each wrist. Her approach to the separation and opening of carrier bags was swift and effective, though I unfortunately failed to note her precise method before she melted back into her seat, distracted as I was by the lithe twist of her hips.

“You can’t learn by watching,” she said, presumably just to let me know that she could read my fucking mind, though which part of it I wasn’t quite sure. “You’re not a conscientious objector, are you?” she noted, eyebrows raised behind an upheld fillet of cod. “Clearly, you can’t get enough white meat.”

“No,” I agreed. “I lapse just about every other day.”

“Ah, well, we all need at least one vice. Nobody’s perfect.”

My eyes fell to the loose, flowing cuffs of her blouse as she passed tuna steaks and potato bakes from hand to hand. “I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe the perfection is in the flaws.”

Her hands trembled then, barely perceptibly and for the merest sliver of a moment as she overrode the impulse to tug at her sleeves. She reddened half a shade, and her eyes drilled into mine, luring them away from the door to her self-consciousness. “Meaning?” she pressed, with a challenging smile.

“Well,” I said, “look at it this way. Some collectors are only interested in things that are like new, factory fresh, mint in the box. If something looks like it’s had a life before they got their hands on it, it loses its value. But then, other people believe that an object’s worth more if it’s been used for whatever it was designed for, so a stamp should have been stuck to an envelope and posted to somewhere a long way away, and a comic book is meant to be read and enjoyed, not sealed in a protective case and never opened, and an old racing car should be scuffed and grimy and—” with no particular emphasis “—scarred. And it’s the same with people. How much time do you think you’d want to spend with Barbie and Ken? Anodyne, by definition, is not entertaining.”

She gave a tight nod and handed me my plums. “So,” she said, slapping her totalizer and twisting the display for me to survey the damage, “what exactly is it that you collect? I mean, apart from frozen fish.”

I shan’t repeat what I said. Suffice it to say the ensuing silence was awkward enough that I might as well have just told her the truth.

It was on the dot of 6:00 a.m. that I wearily slammed the door of the Transit, remote-locked the garage and hauled my half-dozen bags of flora and fish into the house. The melodic, almost hypnotic sound of Caroline/Rachel’s voice still rang in my ears, our conversation looping over and over in my head. I knew nothing of her, and yet somehow I knew everything I needed to know. I knew the conversation wasn’t over.

An unprecedented calm enveloped me as I made space in the pantry freezer, between the joints of topside beef and the waitress from the Hungry Horse.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I cooked a late breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, picturing Caroline-or-possibly-Rachel passing me each ingredient and implement as I needed it. I presented the result to Erica with a steaming cup of fresh coffee. She threw it at me.

Having chained her to the floor and cleaned up the mess, I brought her a sealed box of Rice Krispies and an unopened carton of milk. She threw those at me, too. Since no contents were spilled, however, I chose to leave them where they fell. I laid a plastic bowl and spoon beside them on the mat and left her to it.

I gave her an hour to sort herself out, then returned to the garage to fetch the hooker from the van. Naturally, she’d remained where I’d left her, slung hammock-like from the roof; secured with four-inch nylon webbing and suspended, spreadeagled, five feet from the floor, there was little chance of her wriggling free. What did surprise me, though, was that she’d managed to fall asleep. She didn’t even stir as I blindfolded her, and it wasn’t until I’d released her extremities and stood her upright that she began to flail and scratch like a cat in a bath. Needless to say, she no longer wanted to go anywhere quiet with me, and I literally had to throw her down the stairs.

Erica regarded her new cellmate with a mixture of elation and disdain. Whilst a problem shared is a problem halved, she clearly wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of sharing hers with a bleeding, screeching harridan.

The hooker had told me that her name was Kerry. Then again, she’d told me that she was clean in every respect, where both her profession and her trackmarks suggested otherwise.

I’d picked her up a mile from Jeremy’s house on a foolish and immediately regrettable impulse fueled by raw adrenaline and the sheer bloody-minded need to catch something, so to speak. She’d directed me to a remote riverside picnic area on the south side of the city, and had been only too eager to jump into the back of the van, the false promise of mattresses and pillows offering a welcome relief from the repeated prod of a gear lever in the sternum.

Until that point, this, in a nutshell, was the reason I never interfere with ladies of the night: it’s just too damn easy. It’s a game for impotents and bed-wetters. These women queue up to get in the car with you, for Christ’s sake. They actually expect you to take them somewhere dark. That they exercise free will in putting themselves in harm’s way only makes obligingly slaughtering them all the more cowardly.

And as if that wasn’t reason enough to rue my lack of self-control, Kerry was about to give me a couple more to think about.

In her first few minutes in the cage, Kerry, despite the removal of her blindfold, seemed unaware of Erica’s presence. She flung herself at the door, screaming unintelligibly as she clawed at the mesh. As she ran simultaneously out of breath and fingernails, she began wailing that her children were home alone and that the electricity meter was empty. I suggested that had Kerry considered her parental responsibilities the night before, rather than offering to fellate me in a car park, their collective predicament might have been avoided.

Erica, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. She sat cross-legged on the bed watching this leather-skirted animal, knees skinned and blood dripping from its fingertips, howling and spitting at its captor just inches away on the other side of the door. “You bastard,” she said, simply.

Kerry whirled around then, threw herself off balance. She scrabbled on all fours to the corner of the cage and curled herself into a tight ball, fixing Erica with a petrified stare.

“What are you, starting a fucking zoo?” Erica’s face was a picture of self-righteous indignation as she jabbed an angry thumb toward the sobbing, fetal prostitute. “You can’t be fucking serious, surely?”

Not fully understanding the question, I chose not to answer.

At 6:00 p.m. I returned to the basement with two plates of tuna and pasta bake. The hooker appeared not to have moved from her corner; she merely continued to tremble and heave.

Erica had returned to the bed, where she lay silently gazing at the cage roof as I laid her dinner on the floor beside her.

“I’m not eating that,” she said.

This did not surprise me. “What’s the matter now, you don’t eat fish?”

“Of course I eat fish. I’m just not eating anything you’ve made.”

“Great, so now it’s no meat and nothing cooked, is that it?”

“Who said anything about meat?”

“You did, yesterday.”

“No.” She sighed. “What I meant was, I’m not eating any meat you’ve given me. And, yeah, I do prefer my dinner cooked. I just don’t want it cooked by you. I know your sort.”

Charming, debonair, handsome? Probably not what she meant. “Have you got any idea of the effort I went to last night to make sure you were catered for? And now what, you want me to hire you a chef? What do you think this is, the Savoy?”

“You could always just let me starve,” she said. “And yes, I can clearly see the kind of effort you went to last night, and I’m far from fucking impressed.” Her eyes never left the ceiling.

Erica hadn’t thrown her pasta bake at me, but by the following morning she hadn’t eaten it, either. To all appearances, she hadn’t moved from the bed.

Kerry was a different picture. She’d managed to piss herself three feet from the toilet, and had clearly stood in the resultant puddle. She was still pacing back and forth, leaving dirty wet footprints, when I got there. It took the threat of severed fingers to persuade her to mop.

In the evening, with Erica having eaten nothing more substantial than Rice Krispies since her arrival, I took the microwave oven from my kitchen and delivered it to her downstairs. Since I’d used the thing only twice in the three years I’d owned it, this seemed the simplest option if I wasn’t to be stuck with a weak and starving Erica.

I found them huddled together this time; Erica draped protectively over the hooker, shushing and stroking her hair as she lay curled on the mat, shuddering from head to toe. Kerry’s babbling was only barely coherent and preoccupied with her need for some “stuff.” Her domestic situation seemed all but forgotten.

Not wishing to interrupt such a tender moment, I left them a pair of microwave mushroom stroganoffs and went to run a bath.

By Monday evening, there were clear signs of disharmony.

The junkie still had not stopped wailing, and had taken to writhing on the rubber floor like a snake with an ache. The perspiration poured from her, and she wiped it across the mat with her arms and legs, leaving an impression that could only be described as a sweat angel.

Erica had taken to pacing now, teeth clenched, arms wrapped tightly around herself as she circled the cage. She turned to face me as I entered, the hatred in her eyes replaced with a look of haunted despair. “You need to get her out of here,” she pleaded. “She’s sick, and she needs a doctor, and this noise is doing my fucking head in.” She jabbed an accusatory finger then; as a gesture from Erica this was not unremarkable, though its direction of travel raised at least one of my eyebrows. She aimed it not at me, but at the wriggling whore on the floor.

I could see her point. I only had to see Kerry for minutes at a time, and she was already getting on my nerves. It was, however, only a temporary annoyance. “She’ll be out of here by the weekend,” I promised.

“The weekend?” Erica regarded me somewhat incredulously. “Are you taking the piss? Do you think I have any idea what fucking day it is today? I don’t know whether I’ve been here a day, a week or a fucking month. I don’t even know how long she’s been here. What the fuck does the weekend mean?”

Ah, what the hell. “Well, today is fucking Monday and it’s just gone ten past six in the fucking evening. That fucking irritating creature will be out of your fucking hair by ten o’clock on Saturday fucking morning. Provided you tone down your fucking language, which is starting to wear a little bit fucking thin.”

Predictably, she told me to go fuck myself.

I’d purposely built the basement under the garage rather than the house so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to run down and check it out during every ad break. I like to keep a little distance between rest and recreation. I did, however, find the developing situation strangely fascinating, and so on Tuesday I nipped into town and purchased a closed-circuit television camera.

Erica had reverted to gently rocking the shivering hooker when I set about installing the camera above the basement door. “Why are you doing that?” she asked as I wobbled atop my stepladder, up to my elbows in power cord and co-ax.

“So I can keep an eye on you and make sure you’re all right,” I explained.

“Oh, right, like you care.” She scowled. “What, you’re not violating our human rights enough so you’ve got to watch us on the toilet now, as well, right?”

It actually hadn’t crossed my mind. “Erica, I have no interest in watching either one of you on the toilet. And if I did, I’d get a much better view if I just stood in there with you so, all things considered, I wouldn’t concern myself too much with that if I were you.”

“Where’s Kerry going at the weekend?”

“That’s none of your business. If Kerry wants to know, Kerry can ask me when she’s stopped dribbling like a baby.”

“What are you going to do to her?”

“Look...” The four screws I was holding between my inturned lips fell out, plink-plinking down each step of the ladder and scattering across the floor. “Shit, now look what you’ve done.”

“How did I do that? I’m over here, locked in this fucking cage.”

I allowed my diminishing patience to show across my face. “Erica, is there anything else I can do for you?”

She seemed to take the hint. She looked around her for a moment or two, deep in thought, before her eyes settled on the quivering wreck in her arms. “Yes,” she finally replied. “We could really do with some soap.”

It took me until just past one in the morning to install the cable, which had necessitated among other things the drilling and filling of two walls and a ceiling. By the time I’d figured out how to feed the signal into the television, it was almost two o’clock and, unsurprisingly, both subjects were asleep. Erica had not yet lowered herself to sharing the bed, and was tucked up most cozily. She had, however, managed to throw Kerry a blanket.

I tuned in over breakfast on Wednesday to find them both awake. I got the distinct impression from Erica’s demeanor that the hooker’s cold turkey had been first to rise. There was no conversation, no sound at all but for a soft, breathy whimper. After three minutes of inactivity Erica rolled off the bed and approached the toilet, whereupon she turned around and glared up into the camera. She gave it a dismissive wave, pointed at the bowl and stagily covered her eyes before taking a step back and hooking her thumbs over the top of her knickers. I flicked over to the BBC breakfast program and ate my toast.

By Wednesday evening, the cuddling and the rocking were history. After refusing a dinner of mushroom tagliatelle, Erica returned to bed to stare silently at the ceiling, while the junkie threw up and paced around the cage, clawing at her own arms with her broken nails. This made for uninspiring viewing, and I soon turned my attention to the sudoku in the newspaper. My glances at the screen became increasingly infrequent, and by ten o’clock I was reaching for the remote, rueing the time and money wasted on such a poor source of entertainment. And right then, swallowing a yawn with my finger poised over the off button, I witnessed a moment that, somehow, I sensed would come back to haunt me.

Unmoving, unblinking, she spoke so calmly and softly that mere seconds earlier, for better or worse, I would have heard only the rustling of my newspaper. “Bitch,” she said, “if you don’t sit down and shut up in the next five seconds, I will come over there and I will fucking kill you.”

Erica had begun to unravel.

* * *

On Thursday at 06:23, Erica graciously prepared her cellmate a bowl of cereal, using the fresh milk I’d provided. Kerry was lethargic and unresponsive, and at 06:46 had to be spoon-fed.

At 09:42, Kerry collapsed into a bout of uncontrollable shuddering accompanied by loud, breathless sobs. Erica wasted no time in slapping her violently across the face and demanding that she pull herself together.

At 13:39, the event was repeated, though this time one slap became two and set off a period of intense wailing. After twelve minutes, the hooker was silenced with a swift kick to the abdomen.

At 13:59, Erica sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands and silently wept for seven minutes, before letting herself down with, “Kerry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Which just made Kerry cry harder.

At 18:02, after an uneventful afternoon, I entered the basement and was greeted with the now-standard scene: Erica horizontal and staring, Kerry bunched up in a twitchy little ball. Neither spoke a word to me.

Thursday evening passed without further incident, and both Erica and Kerry were sound asleep by ten. With the dawn on Friday, however, came a perplexing turn of events. The hysterical hooker failed to wake up.

In her place come 6:00 a.m. was a quiet, still, steely-eyed bird of prey. She sat on her haunches against the side of the cage, silently watching Erica as she murmured and stirred, rolled slowly out of bed and headed straight for the toilet. I buttered my toast.

Erica regarded Kerry through sleepy eyes and paused only for a split second before shrugging to herself and snatching up the cereal packet. “Where’s your bowl?” she yawned.

“I’ve already eaten.”

The flat, aggressive tone made her pause longer this time. Finally, she moved to Kerry’s side, knelt down beside her, leaned in just a little too close. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked with what at least sounded like genuine concern. “You look a little bit...odd.”

Kerry wasn’t waiting for a slap this time. In the blink of an eye, she curled the fingers of her right hand and lashed out with her jagged, splintered nails, carving three savage gashes across the width of Erica’s cheek. “Get out of my face, bitch,” she snarled as she rose to her feet.

Erica fell back, the box slipping from her hand, Rice Krispies spraying out across the floor. “Jesus!” she gasped, kicking out at the rubber matting, propelling herself backward until she could reach to pull herself up on the metal bed frame. “What the fuck was that?”

“You’re a selfish, patronizing bully, and I’m sick of the fucking sight of you.” Kerry was circling now, her eyes burning into Erica’s like red-hot needles.

“Oh, that’s rich.” Erica pressed her hand to the side of her face; blood trickled between her fingers and dripped onto her bare toes. “You’re lucky you’re still breathing, girl.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hackles truly up now, eyes wide, cheeks flushed. Here we go. “I’ll fucking—” She was on Erica in an instant, knocking her off balance and coming down heavily on top of her. Erica, flailing, grabbed a handful of hair; she jerked Kerry’s face back and pulled it down violently against her own forehead. Claws and teeth flashed.

I was there inside a minute. “Enough!” I shouted, throwing open the cage door and pulling Erica by the scruff of her neck from atop the now-prone hooker. And then, without hesitation, I took her by the arm and hauled her from the cage.

Erica made no attempt to struggle as I led her in her underwear across the frost-slick gravel of the driveway. She stepped obediently inside the house, looked to me for directions, followed me silently up the stairs to the bathroom.

She sat still on the side of the bath while I soaked a wad of cotton wool in TCP. She made no sound, beside a sharp intake of breath as I pressed it to her cheek. She was patient while I mopped the blood and applied a gauze, secured it in place with a cotton swab and an Elastoplast. And after a fleeting, longing glance at the gleaming bathtub, she followed me willingly back to the basement. She even carried the etorphine.

Kerry caught Erica’s defiant stare as I reunited them in the cage. She stopped pacing.

“Of course, you know you’re a day early, right?” Erica handed me the miniature bottle and accompanying syringe and took to her perch on the edge of the bed.

Kerry edged away toward the far corner of the cell, her impending fate slowly dawning across her bloodied face. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She laughed, strangely.

I didn’t have to say a word. Erica tossed her hair, crossed her knees and smiled at the doomed whore. “Looks like it’s your lucky day, Kerry,” she taunted. “I think you’re going to go and play a little game.” She fixed me with a look then, one so commanding that it stopped me in my tracks. “And you,” she said, “when you’re done with her you can go and buy me some clean fucking knickers. I’m filthy.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I wasn’t expecting a knock at the door so early in the morning. And if I had been, I certainly wouldn’t have expected a pair of thirtysomething strangers in polyester suits. I don’t get too many visitors.

She stood a step behind him; both had their hands folded behind their backs. Their suits were identical—navy, double-breasted, showing signs of bobbling—though his didn’t feature a pencil skirt. Hers reached just below the knee, affording a view of sporty calves clad in sheer black nylon running directly into sensible lace-up shoes that swallowed her ankles. Her face was dusky and exotic-looking, her hair jet-black and tidied into a businesslike knot. Turkish? Iranian, maybe.

Her colleague stood within inches of the doorstep, implausibly large feet firmly together, all five-o’clock shadow and a dutiful half smile.

I almost had them pegged as Jehovah’s Witnesses until I spotted the big Ford on the drive, poverty blue with a whip antenna and cable-tied wheel trims. And then I was confirming my name to a black leather wallet, flipped open right in front of my nose and snatched away too fast to allow me to focus. Not that I really needed to.

“I’m Detective Inspector Fairey, CID.”

Shit. No, really—shit. Shit shit shit. Don’t flinch. Whatever you do, don’t narrow your eyes. Keep your hands still. Look him in the eye. Smile. Not like that—smile nicely.

“This is Detective Sergeant Green.” He shot her a nondescript glance; her expression didn’t change. Her name didn’t sound very Turkish, either. I smiled at her, anyway. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

As a matter of fact, I do mind. “Of course.” That’s enough, stop smiling now. It’s not reaching your eyes. “What can I help you with?”

He took one of his ridiculous clown feet and placed it firmly inside the door. “Okay if we come in?”

You already fucking did. “I guess so.” I stood stock-still in the doorway. “This isn’t going to take long, is it? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

It was his turn with the false smile. “I’m sure it’ll only take a minute.” He nodded. And just stood there. Staring. Nodding. I wondered how long he’d stand there, head bobbing up and down like a plastic dog on a parcel shelf, smile turning to a grimace, waiting politely for me to step aside. A minute? Two? Five maybe? Place your bets now.

Actually, no, I haven’t got time for that. I told him okay and waved him into the hall; he held me in a defiant stare as he passed. The one called Green bowed her head and followed silently. I left the door open.

“Nice house,” Fairey remarked as he scanned the blank walls of the entrance hall. Obviously highly skilled in the art of small talk.

I led him through to the kitchen and pointed to a chair at the breakfast table. Green fared a little better; I pulled one out for her. “So, Mr. Fairey—sit down, make yourself comfortable. What is it exactly that you’d like to ask me?”

“I’ll stand,” he said bluntly. He considered me for a moment; a lingering leer I found vaguely suggestive. I hoped he was merely waiting for me to offer him a cup of tea, though whatever he wanted, he’d have a long wait. And then, finally, he spoke. “We’re here,” he said, “because we’re investigating the disappearance of Kerry Farrow.”

The ceiling fell down. Crockery jumped from the racks, shattering across the floor. The boards undulated beneath my feet, pitching me off balance. Blood pounded through my temples, spots of white light dancing around my eyes to the staccato beat in my head. I felt my palms moisten and my pupils dilate. Every hair on my body stood on end. The windows rattled. The door flew off its hinges. I reached out to steady myself but my fingers just grasped at thin air, the same air that was whistling out of me like I’d taken a kick to the stomach.

This is the other reason I stay away from hookers: there’s always some knitworn do-right from the Prostitutes’ Collective taking down numbers. Decades without a glitch, and then I’m undone by a needless whim in a moment of weakness. It’s an age-old story, and one of those things that always happens to someone else. Fuck me, I’m an idiot.

Gun. I can get to the gun, no problem. In the time it takes this Fairey to cross the kitchen, I’ll have torn open the cupboard and swiped aside the oven cleaner and the bin bags and he’ll be staring down a twelve-gauge barrel, eyes widening, trying to shake his head, trying to form the word no with his cotton-wool tongue and his cracked lips while his mind clouds with terror and despair and thoughts of his plump wife and gurgling babies and everything he didn’t tell them before he left for work today. And his accomplice will make it to her feet in time to take a faceful of blood and skull and brain, and she’ll raise her hands to shield her eyes and let out a shriek of fear and surprise, and she’ll trip on the chair as she runs for the door, and I’ll stand on her neck as she sprawls on the floor, and she’ll look up at me like a stunned rabbit, and her breathing will turn shallow and frantic and she’ll whimper, “Please, no,” and I’ll think about the floor and what it’ll cost to repair and I might let her get to her feet. I might haul her up and escort her out to the fields behind the house where the topsoil’s loose and the stains won’t show. I may even let her run for the car, see if her comfortable shoes offer any practical advantage. Or to hell with the floor, I can be in Belgrade by nightfall.

Okay, breathe. Slow down. Think it through. They’re only a pair, and drones to boot. Whatever they suspect, they only suspect. There’s no mob with machine guns abseiling from the roof. No one’s kicking down doors or crashing through the windows. They’ve got nothing to go on. It’s just a man with a cheap suit and fucking great feet asking a single, simple question. For Christ’s sake, he hasn’t even asked it yet. And if the question’s that hard to answer, well, there’s room for them both under the barn.

Keep calm. Keep smiling. Eye contact. No sudden movement. Maybe raise an eyebrow, as though listening intently. Which one? The right. No, the other one. All right, then, Ronald McFuckingdonald. I’m ready for you.

“And we think you’re potentially an important witness,” he said.

Oh?

* * *

“You own a white Ford Transit,” he informed me, a statement with which I could only reasonably agree. “Showed up on cctv on Queen Street at 3:11 a.m. That’s about two hundred yards and fifteen minutes from where Kerry was last seen,” which certainly made me Idiot of the Week, but was far from a smoking gun. Fairey flipped a seven-by-five print from his jacket pocket: a six-month-old mugshot, Kerry sullen and bedraggled and black-eyed, eight inches of dark roots chasing the tail of a home peroxide. “The blond’s gone,” Fairey continued, “but the expression hasn’t changed. Maybe you remember seeing her? Talking to someone, getting into a car?”

I took a moment to think, considering the farthest distance to which I could remove Kerry in the shortest possible time. Finally, I shook my head. “I wish I could help,” I said. “I just don’t recognize her at all,” which was actually not all that far from the truth. Even after a week of cold turkey and cage fighting, she looked nothing like the harridan in the photograph.

“You’re quite sure?” Green asked. Something in her eyes told me my acting was flawed. Before I could reassure her, however, Fairey shot her a look that told her he’d be asking the fucking questions, thank you very much, all but striking hers from the record.

“You Batman?” he said, returning the mugshot to his pocket and flipping out a notebook in its place.

“I’m sorry?” I replied.

“Insomniac?”

Green rolled her eyes. “Get to the point,” I said, forcing her to hide a smirk.

Fairey smiled graciously. “What were you doing driving around the red-light district at three in the morning?”

Finally, a question I could answer truthfully. “I was on my way back from the seaside,” I told him. “I spent the evening with...” With what? “A friend?” Accurate description or not, I’d said it aloud and it was in Fairey’s book.

“Name?”

“Annie.”

“Annie...?” He stopped scribbling, looked up at me expectantly.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Surname?”

“Almost certainly.”

“Address?” He laughed.

I recited it as well as I could remember.

“I take it you only recently met?”

“Yes, that night,” I confessed. “We...you know. Just talked.”

Green’s hand fell away from her mouth, and she stared at me in undisguised bemusement. Like her, I had no idea why I’d said that.

Whatever, Fairey seemed unconcerned. “I understand,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Listen, how about we take a quick look at that Transit, and then we’ll let you get on with your day?”

I liked the sound of the latter, at least.

The van was empty but for the load straps and a large, plain cardboard box. On the top of the box was a folded woolen blanket. “Box of blankets,” I said.

“May I?” Green preemptively ignored her superior’s silent admonition and stepped up onto the load bed.

“Be my guest.” I smiled, mentally locating the garden fork hung on the wall three feet behind me.

“Thank you,” she said, rubber soles squeaking against the steel floor as she strolled over to the box, squared her jaw and carefully lifted one corner of the blanket. Finding another beneath it, she lifted the second blanket to reveal a third. “Box of blankets.” She nodded.

“What’s under those blankets?” Fairey asked, indicating what was quite plainly a sheet-draped car occupying the opposite side of the garage.

I heard Green nudge the box with her foot as I turned. “My car,” I said, sounding rather unnecessarily uncooperative even to myself.

“Looks like an Interceptor,” he decided, unperturbed.

“Good guess,” I conceded.

“Mind if I look?”

I don’t know why he bothered asking; he was already across the garage and peeling back the covers before I could utter, “Knock yourself out.”

Green hopped down from the back of the van. “We’ll be here all bloody day now,” she remarked, nevertheless casting an appraising eye over the Jensen’s scruffy gray flank as she swept past. Quite rightly, she was unimpressed.

I followed her to the threshold, where she gazed out beyond the house to the barn midway across the field. “Nice place you’ve got,” she noted. “What’s in the barn?”

“Flatbed trailer, workbench, assorted lumps of wood, a fiberglass speedboat without an engine,” I informed her. “Tours are free if you want one.” Maybe not Belgrade. Maybe somewhere warm, like Las Palmas or Santo Domingo.

She stared a moment longer, then shook her head. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, reaching into her jacket pocket and pulling out a pack of Juicy Fruit. “If he’s off the clock, so am I.”

Fairey had found the bonnet unlatched and was staring aghast at the jumble of disconnected wiring within. “Oh, bloody hell,” he said.

Green and I made a show of checking our watches. Clearly, we both wished I were alone.

“If you do happen to think of anything that might help us—”

“I’ll be sure you’re the first to know.” I shook Fairey’s hand as I walked him out of the garage; his grip was decidedly limp and more than a little clammy.

He nodded. “And get that engine fixed.”

I gave him a weary salute as he and Green walked back to their car. Waited until Fairey had one leg inside before calling after him. “Actually, there is one thing,” I said.

Green slumped into her seat and slammed the door behind her. Fairey, after a brief hesitation, withdrew his leg and strolled back into my personal space, leaning in close, offering his confidence. “Sure,” he replied. “What is it?”

“Save me a walk and shut the gate on your way out, would you?” I gave him my brightest smile. “Helps keep the undesirables out.”

Fairey laughed. “No worries, bud,” he said, and returned to his muddy Mondeo.

Under the fourth blanket, Kerry was none the wiser.

CHAPTER NINE

She awoke to the creak of lush green pines swaying gently against a beautiful, clear blue sky. She lay on her back in the grass, surrounded by bluebells and lingering frost, eyelids fluttering against the morning sun, wet hair splayed out like the shadow of a halo. She looked almost serene as she took in the ice water dripping from the trees, the soft cooing of wood pigeons. She watched her breath rising into the crisp, cold air with a dreamy fascination. And when her eyes settled on me, standing patiently over her with a welcoming smile, the recognition seemed anything but startling. She simply smiled back and took a long, luxurious stretch, looking for all the world like the contented lover she might once have been, woken from a sensual dream to the thrill of a blossoming romance, her loneliness, for now at least, behind her.

“Where are we?” she murmured, shivering a little. She rubbed her bare knees together and tucked her hands into the opposite sleeves of her coat.

I flicked the dregs of tea from my cup and screwed it back onto the thermos, tossed it into the van and locked the door.

Kerry’s expression grew quizzical and she craned her neck to peer off into the depths of the wood. “Did you kill me?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“I don’t understand. Where are we?”

“We’re in the forest, in a place called Emily’s Wood.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “Why is it called that?”

“I don’t know.” Never occurred to me to find out.

She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, lips poised for further questioning, but something had already distracted her; a far-off noise, rasping and mechanical. It rose to a crescendo, dropped off, peaked again; a distant, eerie echo stalking through the trees. It faded to unmask a different sound, fainter still, not unlike that of the breeze in the branches and yet somehow flat and unnatural. Pushing herself up onto her elbows, listening intently, she asked, “What is that?”

I stood, took in the distant murmur. “It’s traffic,” I said.

Realization dawned across her face. She sat bolt upright, eyes darting around her from tree to tree and to the dark places in between. She surveyed the narrow strip of grass on which she sat; twenty yards wide and arrow-straight for an eighth of a mile, the forest crowding in on all sides to consume it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she gasped.