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two years and fourteen days missing
chapter 43
alex
I’m woken by a noise downstairs. I sit up in bed, my heart pounding. The red numerals of the clock on my dresser read 4:33 a.m.
There’s another soft thud and the unmistakable sound of someone moving about in the kitchen below me.
I flip back the covers and slide quietly out of bed. I’m not so much scared as furious: sleep is my most bitter enemy and only comes to me after hours of tossing and turning every night. I already know I’ll never find the blessed relief of oblivion again tonight.
Another thump and then an odd, dull scrape of metal on metal.
I’ve been burgled three times since Lottie was taken; my unremarkable terraced house in Balham has graced newspapers often enough to make me a target for both cranks and thieves who seem to think I have bank notes from the Lottie Foundation stashed beneath my mattress. After the first robbery, I had a state-of-the-art security system installed, but technology is only as good as its human operator. I’ve got careless about setting it when I go to bed at night, especially as it has a tendency to go off if so much as a feather drifts across one of its sensors.
Grabbing my phone from my bedside table, I punch in three 9s and keep my finger over the green call button as I edge downstairs. A streetlamp outside my front door casts a rectangle of light through the stained-glass fanlight, splashing turquoise and purple abstract art across the black and white hall tiles.
The sound of footsteps in the kitchen brings me up short. I don’t have a weapon and even if I did, I’ve no idea how to use it. When I was at college, I did a six-week course in self-defence, but the last time I actually went head-to-head with anyone my opponent was my seven-year-old sister.
Fuck it.
With a yell, I fling open the kitchen door so hard it bounces off the wall and slams back against me. A shadow bolts past me into the hall.
A small, four-legged shadow.
The fox stops as it reaches the front door, cornered. I take a step towards it and it bares its teeth with a ferocious growl.
I stop, holding up the palms of my hands as if in a hostage negotiation. ‘Hey, take it easy,’ I say. ‘You scared me as much as I scared you.’
The fox growls again. I can’t get to the front door to let him out, so I go back into the kitchen and unlock the back door. The fox zips past me and into the darkness, and I shut the door behind him.
The sash window over the sink is raised; that must be how he got in. I don’t remember opening it, but my memory isn’t exactly reliable these days.
I close the window. The fox has knocked over a packet of coffee beans I’d left out on the counter and worried at some porridge oats in their cardboard cereal box, ripping the packet open.
I tidy up the mess and am just sweeping it into the binwhen my heart starts banging in my chest so loudly I can hear the blood passing through my ears. My hands tremble on the dustpan and brush, and my vision is suddenly blurry. A wave of prickly heat sweeps through my body. I strip off the T-shirt I wear to bed and splash cold water on my face. My heart pounds even faster, even harder. I take a deep breath to calm myself, but my breaths are sharp and shallow. My chest tightens until it feels like I’m choking and my vision gets darker and narrower and then becomes kaleidoscopic, like when you close your eyes and press down on your eyelids to see stars. I have to grip the counter with tingling hands just to stay upright.
I yank open the drawer nearest to me, scrabbling through pizza delivery brochures and appliance instructions and spare coffee filters for the vial of Valium I keep there. I manage to coordinate my shaking fingers long enough to prise off the child-proof lid and swallow two of them dry.
It takes twenty minutes for the medication to kick in. I sink to the floor and curl up on the cool tiles, and tell myself I can get through this.This is not too much for me. I have been through this before and it’s not too much for me.
Eventually, the panic attack abates. My anxiety starts to wind down, sweat cooling on my skin as my breathing slowly returns to normal.
I push myself into a sitting position and lean back against the nearest kitchen cupboard. I feel utterly exhausted, as if I’ve run a marathon. And in terms of my body’s panicked response, I have.
I get to my feet and finish sweeping up the rest of the spilled coffee and porridge oats, moving like an old woman. We’ve had urban foxes around here before, although this is the first time one’s been bold enough to come into the house. But it’s my own fault for leaving my windows open.
I lean over the sink, double-checking I’ve fastened the catch at the top of the casement. And then I see the lock is broken. There are clear grooves in the frame around it. Someone has jemmied the catch open, and very recently. The exposed wood is pale and new. Someone was here, in my house, while I slept.
