night,’ I say, thinking out loud. ‘You needed the body and the blood to appear and disappear quickly – I was supposed to be the only one who saw them.’ My mind snags on something, but I force it out of the way. ‘Jackie hacked into the website and put the new tour up just before one. You gave her step-by-step instructions how to do it. She wouldn’t have needed to hack in, except it had to look as if an outsider had done it. At one o’clock, you pretended to fall asleep, knowing exactly what I’d do and exactly what I’d see.’ Rage flares up inside me, breaks through the fear. ‘How did it feel, to know so much when I knew nothing?’
The knife swerves towards me, nicks the skin on my neck. I feel a trickle – thin, like a tear.
Is that the best you can do?
If he wants to silence me, he’ll have to kill me. ‘Did you lie in bed waiting for my scream?’ I can’t remember, now, whether I screamed or not. I hope I didn’t, if that was what Kit was waiting for. I hope I disappointed him. ‘You knew I’d wake you up as soon as I’d seen it. I wouldn’t want to be alone with . . . that, in the middle of the night – of course I’d wake you. Must have been a fairly safe bet for you that I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near my computer afterwards, that I’d send you in there on your own to look, so that I didn’t have to see it again.’
‘I knew only you . . . that you’d only come in once I’d told you there was nothing there,’ Kit whispers. He stumbles over the words, struggling with what must feel like a second language to him and not his mother tongue: the language of rationality.
‘You went in, closed down my tour, clicked on yours on the desktop screen and started it playing,’ I say, numb inside. ‘You called out to me that you were looking at the picture of the lounge and there was no dead woman in it.’
‘Stop,’ says Kit. There’s a hollow tiredness in his voice. ‘None of this is my fault,’ he says. ‘Or yours, or Jackie’s.’
If I tried to struggle free, would I stand a chance? No. Not yet. Kit’s arm is still pinning me against him. Maybe later, when he’s held the position for even longer and his muscles are aching. If I try and fail now, I might not get another chance – Kit might decide to hurry things along.
How long was he here with Jackie before he killed her?
‘Why have the original tour waiting on the desktop? Why not just text Jackie and tell her to change it back?’ I’m asking myself, not Kit. I’m asking the person I trust. When the answer presents itself, I feel as if I’ve cheated and it must be the wrong one. How can I know, if I didn’t know before?
I hear Alice’s voice in my head: Usually what we’re seeking comes to us. It’s just a matter of how long it takes to reach us.
‘You did text Jackie,’ I say. ‘You heard me scream, or you heard the sound of glass smashing when I knocked Nulli’s certificate off the wall – either way, you knew I’d seen what I was supposed to see and you texted her then. But you couldn’t bank on her being able to change the tour back to the original quickly enough, could you? And you couldn’t risk me seeing the woman’s body more than once.’
‘Stop, Con.’
I recognise begging when I hear it. But there’s no need for Kit to beg. He’s the one with the power, the one with the knife. I ignore him. ‘Any more than once and it wouldn’t have been so easy to make everyone believe that I imagined it: a split-second visual delusion, gone in the blink of an eye. That’s what you wanted them all to think – the police, my family, Alice. You wanted me to feel that the whole world was against me, that no one believed me . . . but . . .’ I stop, aware of the flaw in what I’m saying. ‘Jackie. She came forward. She said she’d seen it too. Ian Grint only took my story seriously because of her.’ It makes no sense. If Kit and Jackie wanted me not to be believed . . .
‘Stop!’ Kit shouts,