“Sorry—I need to go,” I tell her. “Can I collect my laptop tomorrow?”
She looks momentarily mortified. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I thought you’d gone already. It’s all done. I’ll go get it.”
I feel my soul plummet even farther. If they can’t find me in an empty waiting room, what chance does Anna—do any of us—have?
Chapter 29
Any One of These Houses
I walk back home fast, thestreets empty and still in the predawn darkness. I check behind myself as I go, my heart racing at the shadows just beyond the pools of the streetlights. My mood is now so low and my anxiety so high, it’s all I can do not to break into arun.
The same thoughts circle and knot themselves back through my mind. What’s happening now is what has happened all my life. Things get out of my control. I lose a baby, two, three, I lose a husband, a job—it all slips from me the harder I grasp it. But if I let go, it goes even quicker.
People say,What is for you will find you. But that isn’t true. It won’t, and if you wait for the world to do its thing, you’ll end up alone a lot sooner than I did.
What is for you will not find you. No one will find you. No one is coming to find you.
There is a woman in a basement. I saw her, I filmed her, she spoke to me. And the police won’t help her, or me. Now that I know about Anna Derwent, I could be in as much danger as she is.
My fury twists and burns inside me, because I know this scenario would be the same if it were me trapped down there, too.
No one would even look for me. No one would even know to look; I don’t even have a mother. Maybe Pam across the road would look, eventually?
I need to find out where that room is. I just need an address to give them so that they will take this seriously.
I turn the corner onto my street, nearly home, nearly safe. Suddenly, so close to home, I am scared. The street is silent.
And I realize how much of a target I have made myself.
I do not want to end up in that basement room.
It occurs to me that I could just post the video of Anna onto the group, or put it on TikTok. If it is in the public domain, and has enough people behind it, we could force the police to do something.
I’d be sued, or worse, I’m guessing, but they’d have to do something for Anna. The end would justify the means.
People might think it was a prank, or AI—but they would have to check, surely. Wouldn’t they?
And then I think,If Simon knows she’s found a way to ask for help, what will he do to her?
A fox shrieks a street away, and I jump at the sound. There are no revelers this late in the residential sections of North London; it is only me.
The windows of the houses stretch out ahead, dark, unseeing eyes.
If I post the video, Simon will kill her and destroy the evidence in the basement. I’ve seen enough true-crime shows to know how these things work. In the time it would take to find her, she might be moved, or gotten rid of.
If I were him, I’d make sure my basement looked nothing like the one on that video.
I need a location to give to the police.
It has to be one of these basements. She could be in any one of them, right now. They flash past me at ankle height as I stride along.
Several houses ahead of me a front door opens, a fizzle of adrenaline zipping through me as the flash of reflected streetlight on its glass momentarily blinds me.
It’s well after 3 a.m. People should be where they need to be by now.
It’s a man, bundled up in a black coat, a baseball cap on, hefting a large holdall.
A wave of lightheadedness rolls up through me.There is no body in the bag,I tell myself.
