in block letters. Kate didn’t remember putting it in her pocket. When had she done it? Earlier, when she first looked in the drawer, or since then? She rapidly shook her head, trying to wake herself, trying to force herself to remember.
She walked to the kitchen, the air around her seeming to part at a slower rate than it normally did. God, she was knackered. It had been years since she’d traveled to a different time zone and experienced jet lag. She placed the key on the counter and began to make coffee. When it started to brew, she picked up the key again, and knew, suddenly, that she needed to find out if this key opened Audrey Marshall’s apartment. I’ll just turn it, and find out, and then I can let the police know, she told herself. It probably wasn’t the right key. AM could mean many things.
Not even putting shoes on, Kate left her apartment and went to Audrey Marshall’s door. Crime scene tape had been plastered in an X pattern from side to side. She slid the key into the lock, turned it, and pushed. The room yawned open before her. Knowing she shouldn’t do it, but knowing that she had to, Kate ducked under the tape and entered the apartment. The tiredness and the fear made her feel as though she was watching herself, observing, not doing. She shut the door behind her, using her elbow, then stood still, her arms down by her sides, allowing her eyes to adjust. She was looking from a short foyer into a living room, much smaller than the living room in her end apartment, but just as elegant. Kate scanned the floor for any sign of where the body of Audrey Marshall had been found, but saw nothing. Was she in the right place? She took three careful steps into the interior of the apartment. There was an almost chemical smell in the air. It was dark, but the curtains were open, and the faint glow from the dawn sky allowed her to see the outlines of furniture, a coffee table cluttered with books and wine bottles.
There hasn’t been a murder here, she thought. Where’s the blood, the overturned chair, the smell of death? Was she dreaming now, or had she been dreaming before?
Even with these thoughts, she was strangely calm. One of the paradoxes of her anxious life was that in the midst of doing something slightly reckless, Kate often felt the most normal. It was as though her anxiety, always with her, was given a reason for existing. Standing in a murdered woman’s apartment the morning after the body had been found, she thought the quickness of her heart and the coldness of her limbs made sense. She was about to turn back, but instead took a few more steps forward so that she could get a better look out of the large picture window. The window faced the courtyard, and Kate could make out pale orange light over the flat roof of the opposite wing. The windows on the other wing of the building were all dark, but Kate sensed motion in the window directly across from where she was looking. She instinctively took a step backward into the deeper shadows of the apartment.
She watched as a light came on and a figure passed in front of the window, then stopped and looked across. There was just enough light for Kate to know for sure that the figure was Alan Cherney, the man she’d met in the courtyard. The hair was right, and the angularity of the features, the slope of the shoulders. Kate stopped breathing, worried that any movement would mean that he could see her. They stood like that for a long, terrible moment, Kate unable to move. He kept staring across the way. At one point, he raised a hand and rubbed at one of his eyes. Then the dawn light that had been building in the western sky edged over the roof, and Kate suddenly realized that Alan might be able to see her. She moved backward, tracing her steps, like someone trying not to make tracks in the snow.
He kept watching, and Kate pressed her back to the door, frightened of being seen and frightened to take her eyes off him.
Chapter 6
Alan stared through his window into Audrey Marshall’s dark apartment. For one moment, he could have sworn there was someone there, staring back at him. He’d barely slept in twenty-four