hidden presence, like a dark shape that’s slipped off the edge and out of sight.
‘What happened when you saw the body on your laptop?’ Sam K asks. ‘What did you do, after you’d examined yourself to check you weren’t bleeding?’
‘I woke Kit and made him go and look.’
‘When I went in, there was a rotating kitchen on the screen,’ Kit says. ‘Then the lounge came on, and there was no woman’s body in it, and no blood. I told Connie, and she came in to look.’
‘The body had gone,’ I say.
‘I didn’t reload the tour,’ says Kit. ‘It was still running when I walked into the room, the same one Connie had started, on a repeating loop. I’m not saying changes can’t be made to a virtual tour of a house – of course they can – but they wouldn’t affect a tour already playing. It’s just not possible—’
‘Of course it’s possible,’ I cut him off. ‘You’re telling me someone can’t arrange a virtual tour so that once in every hundred or thousand times, a different picture of the lounge comes up?’ Come on, Kit. Aren’t you proud of your pupil? It’s thanks to you that I no longer underestimate what’s technically possible. A computer, instructed by the right person, can do almost anything.
‘Well?’ I demand. ‘Isn’t it possible?’
Grudgingly, Kit concedes that it is. ‘Please tell me you’re not going to spend the rest of the day sitting through the tour a thousand times,’ he says. ‘Please.’
‘Can I have a look at the laptop?’ Sam K asks.
While Kit takes him upstairs, I pace up and down, picturing 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge, trying to uncover the missing detail. The woman disappeared. The blood disappeared. And something else . . .
I’m so wrapped up in my thoughts that I don’t notice Kit has returned, and I jump when he says, ‘I know everyone hates estate agents, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level. What you haven’t done is considered the why. Why would some evil genius estate agent, sitting in his office in Cambridge, want to include an elusive dead woman complete with own pool of blood on the virtual tour of a house he’s trying to sell? Is it, what, a daring new marketing technique? Maybe you should see which agent the house is on with, ring up and ask them.’
‘No,’ I say, feeling calmer as he loses his cool. ‘It’s the police who ought to do that.’ I won’t let him turn this into something to be laughed at.
‘You say she was murdered. Most murderers want to cover up what they’ve done, not broadcast it via one of the country’s most popular websites.’
‘I’m aware of that, Kit. I also know what I saw.’ I need to ask him something, but every question I ask is another opportunity for him to lie. ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’
‘Tell him?’
‘Sam. That I was obsessed with 11 Bentley Grove long before last night. The whole story.’
Kit looks caught out. ‘Why didn’t you tell him? I assumed you didn’t want him to know, because . . .’ He stops himself, looks away.
‘Because?’
‘You know damn well why! If I’d told him what’s been going on since January, he wouldn’t have given your dead woman the time of day – he’d have assumed the vanishing body was a figment of your imagination, just like the rest of it’s a figment of your imagination!’
‘Would he? Mightn’t he have assumed the opposite – that something must be going on, something involving 11 Bentley Grove and you?’ I wasn’t willing to take the risk; perhaps Kit wasn’t either.
His eyes fill with tears. ‘I can’t take much more of this, Con. I keep telling you, and you don’t listen.’ He falls into a chair, rubs his temples with his fingers. He looks so much older than he did six months ago. His face has new lines; there’s more grey in his hair; his eyes are duller. Have I done that to him? The alternatives are too horrible to contemplate: either he’s the kind, funny, loyal, honourable man I fell in love with and I’m slowly but surely destroying him, or he’s a stranger who has been wearing a disguise for months, maybe years – a stranger who will eventually destroy me.
‘I love you, Con,’ he says in a hollow voice. I start to cry. His love for me is his most effective weapon. ‘I always will, even if you succeed in driving me out of this house and out