No. This is not what death would feel like,she muses, her thoughts as fluid and strangely calm as the water around her.There must be a way out of this,she tells herself.
And yet, she realizes, whoever did this would not have left her like this if there was a way out. Unless he is still here, and hasn’t quite finished with her.
Her eyes roll to the door. The lock lever is pushed down, the door locked from the inside.Strange,she thinks. She stares at it for a long while, then blinks. He has locked her in, and made it look as if she has done it herself.
Her eyes wander the rest of the room, looking for more.
And then she sees it. Her missing sleeping-pill container is positioned prominently on the sink. Through the clear, brown plastic bottle, she can make out only one pill remaining inside.
Horror, cold and sticky, fills her gut: the bottle was half-full when she got it four days ago.
Her numb body, her evaporating thoughts, now make sense.
She has woken during her own staged death.
But that is good,she tells herself, before the building terror threatens to blind her with panic. It’s good that I’m awake, because if I am awake, there has to be a way out,she hollers back at the sickening reality screaming inside her head.
The tap drips, she looks at the ripples on the water, and she blinks—her mind now blank.What was I just thinking about? It was important, wasn’t it?She cannot recall.
If only she could focus her thoughts.
A skittering noise from above suddenly draws her eyes upward, to the small, open window.
She catches a glimpse of gray fur beyond the mottled bathroom window’s glass, the skittering beginning to have meaning; it is the sound of claws on guttering, guttering that runs the length of the roof’s edge.
Someone has been out all night and is hungry. Someone is always hungry and always needs feeding.
Blue squeezes his thick-set, fluffy body through the thin gap in the bathroom window above, and balances precariously on the thin window ledge before half tumbling, half leaping down into the room.
He lands with an undignified, uncharacteristically panicked, scramble into the sink basin, sending the almost-empty pill bottle clattering to the floor.
Blue catches himself and rearranges his position and leaps from the basin edge down to the floor where he begins to nonchalantly lick his paws. After a moment, his fall forgotten, he looks up at Frankie and meows resolutely. He wants her to get out of the bath, go downstairs, and feed him.
Frankie does not move. Blue stands, circles, and leaps back up onto the sink edge to get a better view of her.
Frankie feels emotion explode up inside her, her vision blurring, as her eyes fill and overflow. She cannot feel the warm tears that slide down her cheeks and mix with the cold bathwater.
She blinks away the blur of it, eyes stinging, and, as her vision clears, she sees it: dangling from the fur around Blue’s neck is the gaping black aperture of the camera she put on him hours ago.
In Frankie’s mind, the mist clears enough to allow in a wisp of clarity: the memories of what she set in motion before she left home for Matt’s house. The new camera collar, the time-sensitive email—it all comes flooding back to her with such force her pulse spikes and her eyes blur once more. Therewasa plan.
Blue is filming her. The camera sees her. And if the camera sees her, thensomeone elsecan see her, too.
A noise catches in her throat, low and animal, as Frankie realizes that she isn’t going to die here like the couple who perished in this house before her.
Blue looks up from his paws at the unfamiliar sound. He looks at her, sniffs, and lets out a burbling meow of acknowledgment.
Someone will come,she tells herself. Someone will come.
Chapter 50
DI Cobham
6:45 a.m.
Lee Cobham lies in bed, clinging to the brief moments he gets between waking and forcing himself out of the warm, soft cocoon of his bed and into the shower to begin the exhausting, and only sometimes rewarding, process of living his life.
He takes a moment to scroll through his Monday-morning work emails.
