There is a bright, airy kitchen that leads out to a garden rockery.
I stare at the photos on my screen, the living room around me dark.
There is no basement.
I remind myself that it was never going to be that easy.
Eric must, of course, live somewhere else.
He could be holding Anna at his house.
But what about Greg or Richard or Malcolm? Or Matt. What do I really know about him?
I grab a pad from the hall table and jot down each of their house numbers, then painstakingly search the internet, one by one, for old sales shots of each house’s basement.
The only basement I cannot find is Richard’s, as the sales agent seems to have, annoyingly, only listed stylized shots of the primary rooms.
And then I remember Matt’s second home—but when I go to look it up, I realize I have no idea what number it is.
I bring up the cat camera website on my phone and sign in. I tap on the footage of Anna. I need to track back through Blue’s journey again and try to work out what street she is on, at least.
I watch it through again, scrawling anything of note onto the pad. I watch and rewatch until my eyes blur. And when I check the time, it is almost 5 a.m.
I admit defeat. I need more to go on than this.
In the kitchen, I notice Blue is meowing for food.
I grab his food container and he darts past me to his bowl, while I set about refilling it with his breakfast.
As he eats, I look out at the pre-dawn garden, the glow of the backs of houses, people waking up already, living their lives.
I think of Anna somewhere out there watching her window, her door, praying for the cavalry to arrive, knowing in her heart that it might not.
It is only when I shift in the moonlit kitchen that it catches the light—my keys illuminated in the moon’s silver glow—and the idea forms. They told me not to film, but they didn’t say anything about tracking Blue.
Dangling from my keychain, the thin metallic disc winks at me, once, twice: the AirTag on my bunch of keys, wedged tight in its carabiner, stares back at me, offers itself up as the answer to everything.
Buoyed, I double-check all the doors, set the alarm, and haul myself and Blue upstairs, flop onto my bed, pop half a pill, and root Blue’s vandalized collar out of the bin bag still in my room. I attach the carabiner to it and fasten it around Blue’s neck. We lie there for a moment—and without meaning to I fall asleep in my clothes.
We’ll need all the rest we can get before the day starts.
Chapter 30
Anna—12 Months Ago
Anna started to look upthe things Simon said in his sleep.
At first none of it made any sense: random words, mumbled apologies, which obviously meant something to Simon but translated into nothing meaningful in the light of day.
When she finally told him about his dreams, he was shocked to hear he lived a second life while he slept. Seemingly as baffled as she was, he would ask her endless questions about it, as if there might be more to what had happened than she was telling him. But she told him everything. At first.
Sometimes when she woke, he would be looming over her in the darkness, still caught in the urgency of a dream, as she lay helpless beneath him, caught in that momentary paralysis that comes before full waking.
She’d screamed, the first time, and he’d woken, seemingly shocked by the violence of her cries, completely unaware of what had come before to cause them.
Simon always found it hard to go back to sleep on the nights of these dreams, Anna knew. She would feel him lying there beside her, awake but silent and unmoving. She could almost feel his thoughts looping over and over.
But on the days after the bad nights, she was ashamed to admit he was wonderful, softer, more available, more loving.
