it throb with pain. “I can’t leave the kids.”
“You’re not leaving anyone,” Jack said patiently. “You’re right across the courtyard, you can take the baby monitor. Sandra and Bill sit out in the garden all the time in the summer. It’s no different. If you hear a peep you can be back there before they even wake up.”
“Well . . .” I said slowly. Thoughts flickered through the back of my head, their edges softened and blurred by the amount of wine I’d drunk earlier. I could ask him to bring the first aid supplies back here, couldn’t I? But a little part of me . . . okay, no, a big part of me . . . that part was curious. I wanted to go with Jack. I wanted to see inside his flat.
And, to be completely truthful, Mr. Wrexham, I wanted to get out of this house.
If you really thought there was a threat, how could you leave the kids to deal with it? It was the woman police officer who asked me that, barely trying to conceal her disgust as she asked the question.
And I tried to explain. I tried to tell her how the kids had seen nothing, heard nothing. How every little bit of malevolence had seemed to be directed solely at me. I had heard the footsteps. I was the one who had read those messages. I had been kept awake, night after night, by the noises and the doorbells and the cold.
None of the others, even Jack, had seen or heard what I had.
If there was something in that house, and even now I only half believed that there could be, in spite of everything that had happened, if there was, then it was out to get me. Me and the other four nannies who had packed up and left in a hurry.
And I just wanted five minutes out from its influence. Just five minutes, with the baby monitor in my pocket and the tablet with its surveillance cameras under my arm. Was that too much to ask?
The police officer didn’t seem to buy it. She just stood, shaking her head in disbelief, her lip curled with contempt for the stupid, selfish, careless bitch sitting opposite her.
But do you buy it, Mr. Wrexham? Do you understand, how hard it was, shut up there, night after night with nothing but the sound of pacing footsteps? Do you understand why just those few yards across the courtyard seemed like both nothing at all, and everything?
I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’ve managed to convince you, to explain what it was like, what it was really like.
All I can tell you is that I picked up the monitor, and the tablet, and I followed Jack as he crossed the kitchen and held open the back door for me, shutting it behind us both. I felt the warmth of his skin, as he shepherded me across the dark, uneven cobblestoned courtyard to the stairs up to his flat. And I mounted the stairs after him, watching the flex and shift of his muscles under his T-shirt as he climbed.
At the top he pulled a key out of his pocket, twisted it in the lock, and then stood back to let me pass inside.
Inside, I expected Jack to fumble for a panel or pull out his phone, but instead he reached out, flicked something, and as the lights came on, I saw a perfectly ordinary light switch made of white plastic. The relief was so absurd, and so great, that I almost laughed.
“Don’t you have a control panel?”
“No, thank God! These were designed as staff accommodation. No point in wasting technology on the likes of us.”
“I suppose so.”
He flicked on another light, and I saw a small, bright sitting room, furnished with good basics and a faded cotton sofa. The remains of a log fire smoldered in the little stove in the corner, and I could see a kitchenette on the far side. Beyond was another door, that I supposed was his bedroom, but it didn’t seem polite to ask.
“Right, sit here,” he said, pointing at the sofa, “and I’ll be back with a proper dressing for that cut.”
I nodded, grateful for the sense of being taken care of, but mostly just content to sit there, feeling the warmth of the fire on my face and the reassuringly cheap and cheerful Ikea cushions at my back while Jack rummaged in the kitchen cupboards behind me. The sofa