around her bedroom, fingering her bed linen. I thought I heard a noise . . . I practiced the excuse in my head, but I knew it was no longer true. I had been looking for an excuse.
There was a pair of earrings on the bedside table closest to the door. This must be Sandra’s side. Which meant that Bill slept . . .
I tiptoed around the bed, keeping to the shadows as far as I could. I knew from peering at Maddie and Ellie’s bedroom monitor that the resolution of the images in darkness was not good. It was very hard to make out anything beyond the little pool of warm light cast by the night-light, and in here the contrast between the squares of sunset and the deep shadow in the rest of the room was even greater.
Very, very quietly, I slid open Bill’s bedside table drawer, and looked down at the tumble of personal possessions inside. A watch with a broken strap. A slew of loose change. A few tickets, a hay-fever spray, a comb. I’m not sure what I had been hoping for—but if it was to get a sense of the person who lived here, slept here, laid his head on the crisp white pillow, I was disappointed. It was strikingly impersonal.
I thought of that meeting in the kitchen, of his denimed leg slipping between my thighs with a confident intrusiveness born of long practice, and I felt sick. Who are you?
Suddenly I had to get out, and I hurried across the checkered carpet, no longer caring about keeping to the shadows, or whether Sandra or Bill saw me. Let them see. Both of them.
Up in my room, I closed the door with a feeling of barricading myself away from the rest of the house. As the curtains drew themselves robotically over the windowpane, my last glimpse of the outside world was of the bloody streaks of sunset fading behind the far-off peaks of the Cairngorms, and of a light in Jack’s window shining steadfastly across the darkening courtyard.
I thought of him, as I let my head sink into the goose-feather softness of the pillow. I thought of his hands that morning, the ease with which he restrained the two excited dogs, the way he dominated them, keeping them at heel. And I thought of the key, and how he had gone unerringly to the place where it had been hidden, a place I had already checked.
But then I remembered other things—his kindness that first night, in coming to check on me. And his voice over the baby monitor, putting Petra to sleep, crooning to her with a gentleness that made my stomach clench in a strange way I could not pin down. There had been no deception there. No pretense. That gentleness was real, I was certain of it.
And I wondered, if it had been him in the kitchen that night, instead of Bill, would I have lurched queasily from the room with panicked disgust? Or would I have reacted very differently? Opened my legs to his, perhaps. Leaned forward. Blushed.
But even as the thought came to me, making my cheeks flush in the darkness, I remembered again, kneeling on the floor of the utility room, sweeping my phone torch beneath that washing machine. That key had not been there. The intervening hours had not made me doubt that fact anymore—quite the reverse. I was totally sure now.
Which meant . . .
I rubbed my hands over my face, resisting the urge to scratch the fading itch left by the creeper. I was being absurd. There was no earthly reason why he would steal that key simply to unnerve me. He had his own set, after all, and his thumbprint was authorized for use on the front door. (Though . . . there was probably a record every time someone used that lock, my subconscious whispered. A record that wouldn’t exist with an old-fashioned lock and key.)
But no. No. It made no sense. Why would he go to the trouble of making a key disappear for a few hours? What would he gain from it? Nothing, except to put me on my guard. And there was my necklace too—my necklace, which I had still not found, though I’d not had time to look properly. That could not have been Jack, surely. This was paranoia, all of it. Things get lost all the time. Keys fall down. Necklaces get tidied away into pockets and drawers, and