to me now, when we’re all discussing the possibility in great detail?’
Grint rises to his feet. ‘Why don’t I tell you why you’re here?’ he says.
I hear a long sigh. I’m not sure if it came from Kit or Sam.
‘I’ve got a woman called Jackie Napier in an interview room one floor down. That name mean anything to either of you?’
‘No,’ I say. Kit shakes his head. Maybe making him hate me is the way forward; when he no longer cares that he might destroy me, perhaps he’ll tell me the truth.
‘Jackie logged onto the Roundthehouses website at almost exactly the same time you did, early hours of Saturday morning.’ Grint watches me, waits for a reaction. I try to keep up, to process what he’s saying. As far as I’m concerned, there are only four people in my nightmare: me, Kit, Selina Gane and the dead woman. There’s no Jackie. ‘She brought up the page for 11 Bentley Grove,’ Grint goes on. ‘Like you, she clicked on the virtual tour button. Guess what she saw?’
Bile fills my throat. I press my mouth shut, afraid I’m going to be sick.
‘She saw what you saw, Connie,’ says Sam. He sounds relieved, as if he’s been wanting to tell me this for a long time.
‘Her description was interchangeable with yours,’ Grint says. ‘Copious amounts of blood on the carpet, dark woman in a patterned dress, face down, hair fanned out around her head, as if she’d fallen. But d’you know what struck me most? She said – and so did you, from what Sam here tells me – that the blood was darkest next to the woman’s stomach.’
I close my eyes and see it all again. ‘You should have told us straight away,’ I manage to say.
‘D’you think?’ says Grint. ‘I disagree. If I’d told you when you first walked in here, I’d have been telling strangers.’
What’s that supposed to mean?
‘Jackie couldn’t stand to look at it, she said. She shut down the tour, went to pour herself a large G&T. She thought about phoning her best mate, but didn’t want to wake her up. Ten minutes later, once she’d calmed down a bit, she went and looked again. Second time round, there was no woman’s body.’
‘So . . .’ Kit’s sitting up straight now. ‘If this Jackie woman saw what Connie saw . . .’
‘There’s more.’ Grint walks over to the window, loops his fingers around the wire grid. ‘I spoke to someone at Roundthehouses. The virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove’s nothing to do with them – it’s the agent selling the property that provides all the material – photos, tours, room dimensions, everything.’
‘Lorraine Turner,’ I say, remembering her name from Sam’s story about the previous owners and their Christmas tree, the stain on the carpet.
‘Right.’ Grint smiles. He looks inappropriately happy. I hope it’s only his power over us all that he’s enjoying, not the prospect of a woman dead from a stomach wound. ‘Lorraine Turner’s the agent selling 11 Bentley Grove, but she has nothing to do with the IT side of things. How much do you know about computer hacking?’
‘There’s nothing about computers that Kit doesn’t know,’ I say.
‘I’m not a hacker.’
‘But you understand how hacking works.’ It’s not so much a rhetorical question as a statement of fact. Grint turns to me. ‘Do you?’
‘Not a clue.’
‘Then I’ll ditch the technical waffle and keep it simple. One of the estate agent’s IT guys rang me back about half an hour before you got here. Someone hacked into their website just before 1 a.m. on Saturday. Looks like they substituted one virtual tour for another – the one with the woman’s body for the official version.’
‘That makes no sense,’ says Kit, grey-faced. ‘When I looked, there was no dead body, no blood.’
‘At 1.23 a.m., the hacker did his stuff again,’ says Grint. ‘Or her stuff, I suppose I should say, since it could have been either. The original tour was reinstated.’
‘It wasn’t as late as 1.23 when I looked,’ says Kit. ‘I remember seeing the time on the computer, thinking “What the fuck am I doing up so late?” It was 1.20, exactly. And I didn’t hit the virtual tour button again – I looked at Connie’s tour, the one she’d started. It was on a repeating loop. Why didn’t I see what she saw?’ Kit’s eyes dart round the room, not settling on anything or anyone.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘In the hacker’s version, he arranged