I lift my head, try to pull my neck back.
‘Listen to me, Kit. You’ve always told me I’m clever. Remember?’ This is what I have to do: I have to talk. There can’t be silence, or space for him to think. Space for him to act.
‘You’re not as clever as Jackie,’ he says flatly.
I want to scream at him that I’m cleverer than Jackie, that she’s lying lifeless in someone else’s congealed blood and I’m still alive.
I’m clever enough to find a key labelled ‘No. 12’ in a mug with a red feather design, and remember about 17 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane. 11 Bentley Grove, 12 Bentley Grove.
If only I’d been clever enough to stay away – to be satisfied with knowing, instead of having to prove it to myself.
How can Jackie Napier have wanted me dead? She didn’t know me.
‘Please listen,’ I say evenly. ‘There’s no way out of this, you’re right, but there is a way through. If we face up to what’s happened, take responsibility . . .’
Kit laughs. ‘Did you know there are no prisons in Cambridge? I Googled it yesterday. There’s one in March, one in a place called Stradishall, near Newmarket. Postcode’s CB8 – sounds like Cambridge, but it’s not.’
I open my mouth, but no words come. It’s not what I was expecting him to say. He searched for prisons in Cambridge. On the internet. Why?
‘We were idiots – we shouldn’t have wasted our time on the villages,’ he mumbles. ‘Should have stuck to the city. Those tiny hick places – Horningsea, Harston – they’re not Cambridge, they’re not civilisation. Might as well stagnate in Little Holling. Reach, Burwell, Chippenham – you might as well be in Newmarket, once you’ve gone that far.’
My teeth are chattering. Is it still hot outside? It can’t be; I’m freezing. Kit’s body feels cold too. Freezing each other to death.
‘We wasted so much time,’ he says sadly. He’s talking about 2003, our house search.
Seven years ago. Gone, finished. There’s no past and no future, no point talking about either. There’s nothing but now, and scared of dying, and silence piling up around me, suffocating, spreading like blood.
Blood that disappeared when Kit sat down to look.
I breathe in sharply. Knowledge rushes at me, before I have time to doubt it. The blood wasn’t the only thing that disappeared.
I try to push my fear aside and think in an ordered way, but I can’t think – all I can do is see what’s no longer in front of me, like a film playing in my head: Kit sitting at my desk, staring at the laptop. Me standing behind him, scared I’ll see the horrific picture again, even though he’s saying it isn’t there; Nulli’s certificate of incorporation lying on the floor in its smashed frame . . .
‘I know how you did it,’ I say. ‘Everyone kept asking me why you didn’t see the woman’s body, when you looked at the same virtual tour that I looked at, the one I started. I kept having to explain what I thought must have happened.’
Kit makes a noise, a small exhalation. Somehow, I can tell that he’s smiling.
I can feel the expression on his face without seeing him: does that mean I know him?
‘It was a good theory,’ he says. ‘A virtual tour with a variable that comes up only once in every hundred or thousand loops.’
‘I was wrong, though, wasn’t I? You were looking at a different tour. When you first went into the room, I stayed outside.’
Shaking on the landing. Kit on the other side of the closed door, complaining. Great. I’ve always wanted to look at a stranger’s dishwasher in the middle of the night.
‘You closed down the lot,’ I say. ‘The tour, the internet, everything. One click and it was gone. On the desktop, you had the other tour ready to go – the original one.’ You got it from her, from Jackie. ‘Another click and it started playing. There was the lounge, with no woman’s body in it.’
Kit says nothing. I don’t think he’s smiling any more.
‘When I came back into the room, there was no Roundthehouses screen behind the virtual tour box, only the desktop screen. Before I woke you up, when I was watching the tour on my own, the screen behind it was the Roundthehouses screen. The address was there – 11 Bentley Grove – and the Roundthehouses logo.’
Why has it taken my memory so long to produce this detail?
Because you can’t see